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Join us for another episode of Attributed. We’ll be talking about the ever-evolving role that B2B creators play in driving revenue.
LinkedIn was not built for creators in the first place, but now a lot of people have a voice on this platform that people enjoy listening to!
During this conversation, we will meet with David Walsh, co-founder of Limelight and a prominent LinkedIn Insights & Analytics Leader, who will share his perspective on how B2B creators are shaping the future of thought leadership and how they’re directly contributing to revenue. He'll break down why an authentic, multi-touch strategy is a powerful tool for building trust.
But that's not all! David will be bringing a special guest from a leading B2B organization, Justin Levy, Director of Content & Social Media at ZoomInfo, to share real-world examples of how they are successfully integrating creators into their marketing playbook.
Follow David Walsh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dw1232/
Follow Justin Levy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinlevy/
Follow Steffen Hedebrandt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffenhedebrandt/
Thanks for tuning in to the Attributed Dreamdata Podcast! We hope you enjoyed this episode as much as we enjoyed creating it.
To stay updated on all things Dreamdata and B2B go-to-market:
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🔗 Visit Dreamdata's Website to see how we can help you connect your marketing to revenue: Dreamdata.io
Creators and Guests
Host
What is Attributed - A podcast by Dreamdata?
Welcome to the Attributed Podcast by Dreamdata where every week we host inspiring guests from across the B2B go-to-market space. Together we explore the biggest challenges facing Marketing, Sales, and Ops teams and discuss innovative ways to optimise growth and fire up revenue.
Hi. I'm Laura.
Speaker 2:Hey. I'm Stefan. And you're listening to Attributed, a podcast library by Dream Data.
Speaker 1:The purpose of it is to store and share all the knowledge that we have gathered across Dream Data employees through our LinkedIn lives, podcasts, and webinars.
Speaker 2:The typical topics you'll find here can be stuff like marketing Sales.
Speaker 3:B to b ads
Speaker 1:Operations.
Speaker 2:Social selling, maybe.
Speaker 1:Hello. Hello, everybody. I'm so excited today to welcome two guests. To start with, well, I was very excited to add David to the team and it's like, let's speak about the creators and how you work at Limelight. Said, wait, wait, wait, wait, Can I come with a client?
Speaker 1:We've never done this before, but if you prefer that the client speaks about you, I think this is the strategy we got to test it out. So next time, if we ask you to come on a panel, well, bring in a client. Maybe somebody speaks about you even higher than you can speak about yourself, which I absolutely love. And with great honor, I would like to introduce David Walsh, CEO of Limelight, and Justin Levy, director of content and social media at ZoomInfo. Hello, team.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having us, Laura.
Speaker 1:Very, very I'm
Speaker 4:super excited for this.
Speaker 1:Us too. If you guys could give, like, one minute word about yourselves, introducing yourselves to the audience before we kick off this exciting topic, we'd love to hear from you. We can start with Justin.
Speaker 3:Hey. So I've been involved in social media for about seventeen or eighteen years now, really before it was a thing back in the day when you had to text replies, to Twitter because they didn't have a mobile app. I've worked in various Fortune five hundreds, lead in social media globally, and, and lead in in starting up influencer marketing programs. Now at ZoomInfo, I oversee our content, social media, and influencer marketing programs.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I'm so excited. See, Laurie, you
Speaker 4:see why I brought him in? He's a big deal.
Speaker 1:I do. I do. Thank you for that.
Speaker 4:If you're ever if you're on LinkedIn at all and you see Zoom in forever, this is the genius behind it all, Justin. So I had to bring him in, and I'm excited that we got the opportunity to get on your calendar, Justin. I know that you were on PTO sailing the the seashells at some point, which I'm super jealous about. And also, gonna copy your PTO email response. It was it was incredible.
Speaker 1:What does it say?
Speaker 4:You have I'll I'll screenshot and send it to you. It was, like, very detailed of what I'm not doing and not working. So nice to meet everyone. I'm David. I'm CEO and founder of Limelight.
Speaker 4:I've been in B2B software for now fourteen years roughly. Started by launching a job board in college back in Ireland and then immigrated to The US ten years ago. It's my third startup. I spent most of my career selling to people leaders and HR tech. And I think my first company was a watch company.
Speaker 4:So I manufactured a watch from scratch and built an ecommerce business and growth hacked Instagram back in 02/2017. Ended up having the Dallas cowboys cheerleaders wearing my watches at one point, which is my claim to fame. So I knew a bit about how to grow brands on the consumer side using creators and influencers. And then I started a HR software company, scaled it to two fifty customers. And about eighteen months ago, I basically decided to launch Limelight with this idea of me creating content on LinkedIn, and that's how I got to meet Laura.
Speaker 4:I realized there was just so much power in this, and the simple thesis was, are you better spending a $100,000 on digital ads to compete on keywords at all your competitors or get a team of fifteen, twenty creators to create compelling content consistently and tell stories. So we built a marketplace, which we can talk more about as we go through this, but super excited to be here. Passionate about this, as you know, Laura and Justin, and excited to chat with
Speaker 1:you all. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:And I actually feel bad because David knows this. About a year ago, he pinged me on LinkedIn, and I didn't see it because we had just posted two job roles. And so at the same time so my InMail had gotten hammered. And then when we were ready to go demo the product, earlier this year, I pinged I went to go ping him and I was like, oh, I missed your your message from a year ago. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:This is the life of a salesperson. Usually,
Speaker 3:He can say within twenty four hours we committed to the purchase.
Speaker 1:Wow, let's talk about that. So to start with, David, now you've been building products for B2Bs and B2Cs. So walk us a little bit through of what does define an effective B2B creator today comparing to B2Cs? Because we see a lot of people of B2Cs, Instagrams and TikToks, but what does a good B2B creator do?
Speaker 4:On mute. Nice. I'm gonna be super biased, and I'm gonna tell you that, like, in consumer, you're influencing the purchase of a product, which is usually a lot less. Right? So you need a lot more followers and a higher conversion to show value.
Speaker 4:So if you take a picture yourself and you have a million followers on Instagram and you're wearing sunglasses on a beach and you get a conversion rate of point 5%, the company is gonna be happy. Right? In b to b, you're influencing the purchase of a product could be 25 k, 50 k, a 100 k, maybe even a couple of 100 k in lifetime value. So what that means for brands is that it's often not the largest creators that have the most influence. Right?
Speaker 4:It's actually smaller creators who have more trust and have a smaller audience and can speak authentically. Well, if you partner with them and you get them doing it and do it consistently, then I think you can drive a lot of value. So with B2B, I think there's a couple of things. And Laura, you're the expert here. You know, I reached out to you a year and a half ago being like, please respond to me.
Speaker 4:I need you to advise my company on what I'm going to get into here. But in theory, like, in b to b, you're a subject matter expert in a certain field. You create compelling, consistent content that engages audiences. You can be super authentic and be yourself. And then there's different themes of content.
Speaker 4:Right? There's humorous, there's educational, there's entertaining. So we see it across so many different sectors, and we did some deep analysis into b to b influencers in general. And we just said there are an enormous amount of people creating more content consistently than ever before. And brands will wanna partner with them, and they'll have a huge amount of return on investment if they do it correctly.
Speaker 4:So b to b influencers and creators come in all different shapes and sizes, Laura, as you know. And I would just say, like, anyone that creates compelling content and that can capture attention and that can be authentic is a potential person to partner with.
Speaker 1:Right. Justin, if you could add a little bit to that. When you started to look into the B2B influencer marketing, did you look up to B2Cs? How did you set up the guardrails, what it is that you're looking for?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So and I I agree with what David's comment is, right, about b two c versus b two b. If you consider b two c, you're usually trying to influence a single buyer or maybe two buyers. Right? Whether that you know, I did a a program with Sony Electronics probably close to fifteen years ago, and they wanted to sell their, you know, new TVs and their new DVD players and whatnot.
Speaker 3:And when we worked with them, you considered who was the most likely to purchase the largest TV possible. And it's the husband or the male significant other or father. Right? They're the ones that are gonna go look and say measure and say, I think I can get one more inch in this on the diagonal to get that 59 inch TV as opposed to the 55 inch. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, I know I've done it. You know, I'm sure others have as well, but that's trying to influence one person or maybe two, right? You have to convince your significant other that you can go spend that money. But when you look at B2B, typically you're dealing with a larger buying committee, right? So even when we went to purchase Limelight, I did the demo, but also I had someone else on my team part of it.
Speaker 3:I had to build a business case to take to my VP and to my CMO. So there's that larger buying community, even when the product is, you know, something SaaS based that you can push a button and buy like a demo or something monthly. But if you consider something like our product, ZoomInfo or others at a similar scale, that buying committee can be much larger. And so those layers of influence can come from various directions. So you might have SDRs or AEs that you're trying to influence using B2B creators that speak to them.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Because if you influence that group, they're likely to tell their manager that they need said tool to make their jobs better. Or sometimes even at an executive level, those executives or customers are following those creators because of the size of their audience or their level of impact in the organization. Right? So, for example, there's one creator that we work with who prior to working with her, and she's someone that I had known and and she's very well known, I had SDRs and people throughout our organization sending me DMs of TikToks that she posted or LinkedIn posts that she posted simply because when she was at her former company, our ZI logo would show up somewheres.
Speaker 3:Right? Because she was a customer. We weren't paying her. She was not engaged with us or anything. We just knew her as a customer.
Speaker 3:That she was already driving influence without being one of our creators. Right? So because enough people were following her within the company on the sales side and that's where she had driven her influence.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I actually know who you're speaking about. This is amazing. She's amazing. Okay.
Speaker 1:So if we speak about that type of influence, to start with, David, you often speak about like moving away from single click attribution because this is what we know b to c creators would be working towards. Let's push the conversion. Let's push the link with a specific UTM so we can measure the influencer accordingly. And in B2Bs it's a different, totally different world. So how does that type of influence and general multi touch attribution play into the role of influencers?
Speaker 1:Where do they have the play?
Speaker 4:You're giving me the tough question first. Yeah. I mean, firstly, I just say revenue attribution is really complicated and the B2B buying journey has changed dramatically in terms of where people are learning about a product. They're learning about it in their news feeds, on newsletters and consuming content in different areas that they didn't do before. And and so the brand's goal is to get into those news feeds, to get into those those channels, those new learning moments, and influence the sale.
Speaker 4:The process is quite complicated. Right? You can have your simple UTM link. You can have your self reported data on the demo sign up of where did you hear about us. You can have you can track website traffic.
Speaker 4:There's lots of different touch points. You can even track the people engaging on the content that your creators are creating. That's also super powerful and helpful. And all of that is designed to create this kind of story. And I would say the number one thing, Laura, that we, like, challenge brands on is not to think this through as transactional, do one post, and then hope that you influence the purchase of a product and, you know, you get 10 demo requests that day.
Speaker 4:That's just not how this works. Right? So you have to invest for the longer term and take a broader approach to this. But it doesn't just need to be brand based. In fact, when we look at our customer base, a lot of our stakeholders are both on the social and brand side, but also on the performance marketing side because they're trying to bring some science and some analytics to this.
Speaker 4:Now it just requires a lot of data. It requires some time to give it breathing room, and then it requires enough work to put the pieces of the puzzle together, you know, in two to three months from now to look back and say, okay, this is the amount of impact we had on our pipeline. And some of that will be directly attributable and some of it will be weighted and scored. And I think that's why I wanted to bring Justin on the call. He's the one that, you know, I tell told him, hey.
Speaker 4:I'm building this product. Tell me what I need to do and tell me what I need to do more of. And he says, is anyone else using this? And I'm like, a few people, but they're quite lazy. So you're not lazy and you're doing the work.
Speaker 4:And so we're trying to make this more automated and more simplified, but it is quite complicated. I think, you know, in summary, b to b bind journey has changed. I think we can get much more data than we could ever get before to be able to prove the value of these partnerships and this and this ad spend because, ultimately, we want the head of demand gen, the head of social to be spending 50,000, a $100,000 with creators, and then be able to report back to their higher ups and their executive team, hey. This is the impact that we actually really had. And I think that's starting to be the case now, which we're really excited about.
Speaker 1:Nice. Justin, how do you measure this and unpack it for leadership to believe in it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I think that there is both the brand awareness side and the the revenue generation, demand generation side of it. Right? On the brand awareness side, most companies will measure that the basic reach and followers and engagements, impressions, things like that, maybe clicks if you're if you're trying to drive to a page to your point. Those are are good, but they're not the best metrics, right?
Speaker 3:Because you can look at what is the impact on overall brand perception through brand awareness surveys that, yes, those cover a broad range of activities that a brand is doing in the market, hopefully with ad buys and other touch points. But if you're selecting the right creators and you're consistently working with them to drive the message that you care about, right? You know, something that's core to us right now is, helping to evolve being known as a contact database or only known as only a contact database and being known for go to market and being the go to market intelligence platform. So we have briefed every creator that we work with. We review all of their content and work with them to ensure that this stays in their authentic voice, but that maybe we tweak a word here or there to help integrate our messaging with their authentic voice, right?
Speaker 3:Where they need that help. So that's the brand awareness side. You do have those core metrics that everyone's used to pulling on, but then you have these other metrics that are typically core to a brand team or creative team. The other thing that I don't think a lot of people look at on the brand side or the brand awareness side is saves or bookmarks, right? We'd go, oh, we got 25 likes and we got three reposts and we got 10 comments and we got some clicks back to the website and a 100,000,000 impressions.
Speaker 3:But saves and bookmarks to myself and my team mean something because if someone takes, say, Laura, you see a post from David and you bookmark it, it means that there's something, a compelling enough message there that you wanna be able to reference it later, right? You're saving that piece of content to go back to. So that's the brand awareness side. On the demand side, I think that that becomes critical, to be able to report out on leads and MQLs and demos and whatever come whatever you consider as conversion metrics, right, in your ACV closed one, however you you measure that. And then what the segment is that you're going after.
Speaker 3:So for ZoomInfo right now, we are prioritizing the upmarket. So which is mid market and enterprise. So we look at, you know, I pull reports on, yep, how is our program doing overall against all those demand metrics, but also how are we impacting up markets specifically? Because naturally, the more that you invest into a program, the more impact the return has to have. Right?
Speaker 3:So you spend maybe $10,000 on creators. Maybe there's not a a lot of ask going on there. Spend 500,000, 700, a million dollars on the program. You have to be able to report back to the executive team that you're having an impact on both awareness and demand, that you're bringing in actual revenue for the program.
Speaker 1:I've got a couple of very detailed questions. To start with, can you measure saves and bookmarks on LinkedIn, or is it another platform you're talking about?
Speaker 3:Typically, you have to I mean, you can ask, obviously, you know, some people to report on it. But, typically, it's, you know, if you're using TikTok creators or or some of that. Right? It it's public information, so you can go look. But it is an impactful metric, I believe.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 3:Because, again, I like, a lot of people, I think, you know, I'm on TikTok and I see something and I wanna be able reference it and go back to it. I say, you know, I bookmark it. Yeah. That is an important metric with our creators that are on TikTok.
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 3:And that's how we identify some of them. Sometimes, if you have a a high number of saves, that means that you are creating content that people care about.
Speaker 1:Nice. Is yeah. A Go ahead, David.
Speaker 4:Can I react to one thing that Justin said, which I think applies to almost every customer that we work with at Pinelight, which is what do they use creators for? Right? One of the things you use creators for is to obviously get into those news feeds to influence the buyer. Another one is positioning the product. We see this more and more and more frequently.
Speaker 4:Company comes to us and says, hey. We wanna use creators. We wanna hammer home this new positioning and this new strategy. And that is a really effective way to use creators. Almost every campaign with that we work with because companies change their strategies and change their positioning and each quarter, there's a new kind of goal and objective.
Speaker 4:Well, getting your creators to consistently create compelling content and and tell your message is incredibly powerful for positioning your product and brand. Like, we've had companies, I won't mention their names, but they've just said, hey. We wanna go from instead of selling to agencies, we wanna go to selling to brands. And they used creators to make sure that the the market was aware that this is something they're doing. So for Justin and and his team, I know intelligence and and the strategy that they're working on at the moment is working really, really well because guess what?
Speaker 4:The more you hear that messaging, the more you relate that brand to that product and and to that problem that you're trying to solve. And so using creators for messaging, I just wanna I didn't wanna skip over that. That was, like, an enormous amount of knowledge that Justin just dropped on us. Yeah. But that one piece of is really important for a lot of people pay potentially on this call to think about how to how to work with creators and what what's the value that they bring.
Speaker 1:And it's a very good job. Go ahead, Justin.
Speaker 3:Yes. I would also add in a metric that I forgot to mention. I know in conversations with David, he you know, his team talks to other brands, about this too is actually measuring if you are performing across CPM and CPL better than your other paid areas. Right? So if you are able to drive more impressions and leads at a better cost than maybe your ad buys or your digital spend, it only makes sense to change how you're spending that money.
Speaker 3:Right? You know, why would you spend money because you're told that you should it as opposed to invest it in something that's gonna have a better return?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Can I can I also react to that? Me and Justin created a shared Slack channel, and it's one of the best things he ever did and one of the worst things he ever did because he DMs me almost every single day being like, hey. I've got this data that's really powerful and important. By the way, I'm gonna share this with you, and now I've got three product tasks.
Speaker 4:I'm like, okay. I'll try it. I'll try I'll try prioritize them. But he's been super helpful to help us craft what we're trying to build. Maybe, Justin, if you're okay with it, like, there's one percentage point that you shared with me that is important, which is, like, what the the conversion rate from other social channels was in comparison to this channel.
Speaker 4:And I think there was, like, pretty large jump. If you remember that, it was a Slack probably, I don't know, six six weeks ago now, but it was really compelling.
Speaker 3:I mean, so I can I can share one thing? And after being in the middle of the Indian Ocean for two weeks, I some of my brain is burned. But if you look at we ran a virtual event earlier this year that was really around positioning, the go to market intelligence platform and announcing our new product go to market studio. Right? And so we had three roadshow events, in New York, Boston, and London, but the virtual event, we ended up the creator, program ended up driving a third of all registrations for the event.
Speaker 3:And that was in addition to, you know, email sends, sales doing their outreach, other buys with companies to do lead gen and things of that nature. And some of those, you know, are sending hundreds of thousands of emails or, you know, several other touch points. And we did that with, you know, 20 to 30 creators. Wow. Drove that that many and, you know, say with each one posting once a month or kind of whatever that was, we we were responsible for a third of all registrations.
Speaker 3:In total reg was 5,000, I believe, if I'm correct. So, you know, those are the types of metrics beyond the demand gen, which naturally flows from that, that, we're able to hang our hat on and and are proud of when the program, is able to show those impacts.
Speaker 4:See see, Laura, this is why I wanted to bring Justin on because I I asked him for this data and not in and and and he says, can't share this, but now that you've shared that, I I can see a case study on the website now in a couple of weeks from now.
Speaker 1:You've got this on video. Like a lot of
Speaker 4:No. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Share that. He has one piece on video.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Oh, wait. He'll take it to other ones. But, Justin, when did you start working with creators at ZoomInfo?
Speaker 3:So at ZoomInfo, I started last January, so January 2024. And I had done it previously at my former company, and I've consulted with companies and whatnot. But when I started at ZoomInfo, one of the agreements was to launch a formalized program.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And last year, the focus was really on, we were launching our first AI product and it was Copilot. And that's really to help every seller be the best seller they could be, right? Because all the AI functionality built into it and bringing together multiple tools. So really last year it was focused on working with those frontline sellers. SDRs, AEs, frontline managers, AMs, people like that.
Speaker 3:That's evolved now as we've come into this year and have decided to scale our program and work at a higher level, individuals that have an impact across all of go to market. But that's kind of really where the program started nacently was last January.
Speaker 1:Okay. And when you were about to be hired, was it already a program that the ZoomInfo team wanted to do or was it something that you had to get some buy in in order to get the project started?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a great question. So prior to me joining, they had worked with a couple people on and off. There was no formal program. It was just, hey, we you know, this person is influential on Twitter.
Speaker 3:So, you know, and and talks about us. So, like, let's go work with that one person. They knew that they had they had a budget line, for creators, when I was brought in. And so coming in, that's was one of the reasons why I started in addition to social and some of the other responsibilities that I have, was to formalize and stand up the program.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And for people starting this off, walk us through a bit about the budgets, the first steps that you do before it becomes a big and complex measurable program.
Speaker 3:I think you need to identify who your ICP is as a company, if you don't already know, and what's your goal going to be of the program. Right? So are you trying to drive brand awareness and that's all you care about? That might be yes, especially if it's a smaller budget. Are you Do you want demos of your product?
Speaker 3:And if so, then you have to identify people that are creators that that's what their audience expects from them, right? There is a creator that we work with. That's what he does. He drives demos of products, and that's what his audience engages with, and hence why we've engaged with him now for over a year. So I think you need to, you know, understand or figure out your ICP if you don't already know.
Speaker 3:You have to identify what type of content you want, on what channels, and then you need to research usually a larger number of creators that then you can potentially you know, you can decide on pricing or what you want out of it. Right? Because if your ask is two posts per month on LinkedIn and one of those should be video as an example, that's gonna potentially be a higher price than, hey, let's partner over, you know, in one post per month or something like that. So you have to start to decide what's going to have the most impact for your company and how do you want to set up that program? Because to David's earlier point, it can't be transact like a one off transaction.
Speaker 3:It can't be, hey, David, I'm gonna spend I'm gonna give you $500 and, you know, this one d, LinkedIn post is gonna change our world measurably.
Speaker 4:Well, you never know, Justin. You you need to send me that $500.
Speaker 3:We already gave you enough money.
Speaker 4:Laura, just to piggyback off what Justin said and maybe for the companies out there that don't have the size of brand that ZoomInfo has. Right? The question is, what do companies need to do to stand up successful programs, and how do they do it effectively? And I think, like, the first thing is, okay. Let's think about, like, how do you get and this is coming up more regularly than ever now because a lot of creators are getting inbound from brands.
Speaker 4:It's how do we stand out from the crowd? You know, how do we actually show that we're really interested in creators for the long term? Not just this transactional, I'm just gonna send you $200 and do a post for me. Right? So we actually educate brands a lot of the time on the messaging when they're messaging creators to get them to respond.
Speaker 4:Because guess what? The best creators are getting inbounds all the time from lots of brands. So how do you stand out from the crowd with maybe not the same level of brand recognition as a ZoomInfo? It's let's get smart about the messaging. Let's show that we're in it for the long term.
Speaker 4:And then also, like, creators wanna be creative. So, like, give them the opportunity to tell their story and and make sure at the same time that you're you're matching with the right creators. So, like, a big focus for us is what does the brand do? What is the problem that they solve? What does the product what makes it unique and different?
Speaker 4:And then how do we go out and find the types of creators who are gonna respond to that and be compelled to respond because you're speaking to the problems that they talk about every single day. So part of it is matching with the right creators, and I think that's where our system can help. But the other one is, like, how do you stand out for the crowd? Like, it's it's it's a sales mechanism. Right?
Speaker 4:You're trying to influence the per the the influencers to actually respond to you. You're trying to get them excited about joining your creator program. And I think a lot of companies overlook that. Right? They come and we have a self serve option.
Speaker 4:We're actually thinking of sunsetting it because we just have so many companies come on, type a message that's like AI generated and just like send it to a bunch of creators. And I'm like, how is that gonna get a response, especially with the creators that have a 100,000 followers? Like so it's just about doing it the right way and being thoughtful and smart. Like like with anything, it takes a little bit of time to get going. But once you've got it going and once you've got it set up, it's an incredibly powerful compounding content flywheel that can drive a lot of growth in revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And if we were to compare SMBs spend on influencers and then for companies like ZoomInfo, What is the balance that people should start thriving for, at least when I want to start? And where is it that does it tank anywhere? Can it just go infinitely if you get more budget?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, that question is like how long is a piece of string. Right? Because everyone comes at it with a different strategy and a different plan and a different, like, reason that they're coming to us. I'll start with, like, number one, think about this long term.
Speaker 4:We're gonna reject you if you're just thinking about this of I need to just do this in the next four weeks to prove to this, you know, boss that I've done my job and check the box. That's not a good strategy. It needs to be longer term. Part of that is because the buying journey is longer in b two b. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, you're not gonna we already talked about that. So think about longer term is is number one. I think, like, if to give you numbers, I think it's a good starting point is 10 k a month on influencers. Like, that's probably a low end of where I would start out with. And the question is when you have a budget in place, where where do you wanna spend it and how do you wanna spend it?
Speaker 4:Right? I always tell brands you can go wide, you can go high, or you can go deep. Wide is work with as many creators as you can. High is work with the biggest creators, which I don't recommend unless you're in a Zoom info of the world, or deep, go with, like, long term partnerships, multichannel partnerships. When a creator has multiple channels, like a newsletter, a podcast, or anything else other than a LinkedIn, always, always, always take them up on the opportunity to do multichannel.
Speaker 4:It's you get a better return investment. So I think, like, a 10 k a month budget is, like, a good starting point. And then goal is, like, okay. Let's set a three month target. What are you trying to accomplish?
Speaker 4:Let's get very clear on the measurable KPIs so that you can report back to your team that, hey. We spent 30 k, and we got x. What does that x need to be? And, you know, let's make sure that we get you that. Because the a goal is not to dip your toe into influencer marketing, spend a ton of money, then decide, I didn't work for us.
Speaker 4:You know what? Like, we're not gonna do it anymore. And I think companies have had that experience two, three, four years ago in the past. And now that we're collecting an enormous amount of data and we're getting smarter with matching and creators are getting more influential, we can actually show the the impact that they're having through data. There's an opportunity to step into this with a much more stronger strategy and a much more data oriented approach.
Speaker 1:Agree. Very interesting. And, Justin, you've spoken about a bit more complex reporting of what it is that you're reporting further to the management, which might sound like a lot of work to put it off. And to start with, so walk me through a bit of what you start with when setting up goals for any types of campaigns and it also has compound effects in all that long customer journey. How do you measure and what are those actuals that you do?
Speaker 1:Feel free to get into the details of campaigns.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, so, you know, when we set up our program, not only do we have long term goals for the program, right, what we want our returns to be for the quarter for the campaign overall, for the quarter, for the second half, for the year, whatever that is, because we have to show justification kind of at David's point in the quarter and and to prove outspend for for future quarters, future years. But also on on the at the campaign level. Right? So, you know, what are we driving for brand awareness?
Speaker 3:And and some of these can are done or influenced at different periods of time, right? So when you do think about reach and impressions and engagements and some of that data, you can get that nearly immediately, right? You wanna wait some period of time, but if someone posts today, there's nothing saying, you know, you can look at some metrics over the next seven, fourteen days to see how that post is performing for them. You can choose to put some boosted spend behind it as the brand to help elevate that creator's post, on LinkedIn and on TikTok specifically. But in the long term, some of that you have to wait some time for, right?
Speaker 3:The, you know, if you do a quarterly brand survey, you have to have your program in place for prob for at least a quarter, if not two quarters. So that because that's gonna be a a lagging indicator. When you think about demand metrics, right, you know, it takes if you have a longer sales cycle, you may see the total pipeline that that you're able to have in the quarter, maybe the total leads, but you might not see the closed one of that for another quarter or two to see the true impact. You know, when we look at our data, one of the metrics that's important to us across sales, not just to our program, is the amount of closed one we have or ACV that we have within thirty days of being open, right? So we're able to look in our Tableau dashboards and see, you know, okay.
Speaker 3:If a $100,000 deal, you know, or a $100,000 in pipeline was open, let's say that 10 thousand of it was closed, you know, within the month, then, you know, that that metric is $10,000. That other $90,000 might carry over to other quarters. But you some of that you can't report on in the same quarter. You will report that you have driven, you know, you have open pipeline or you have contributed leads and things of that nature, but that might be a quarter or two out before you're seeing the results of this campaign that you ran in q two, for So there are some front loaded metrics that you can get, and then there's gonna always be lagging indicators.
Speaker 4:Laura, can I just react to something that Justin said or just share something another data point? So we heard this actually very recently from a brand, which is why I'm bringing it up now. And we work with the likes of bill.com, ZoomInfo, obviously, ActiveCampaign, pretty large enterprises that are publicly traded. And a customer came to us and said, hey, we're actually seeing a lot of success right now with our sales team referencing that their prospect interacted with the piece of content from a creator as a way to get a response. So think about this.
Speaker 4:Like, if we're giving you a lot of data, you can actually arm and give this ammunition to your sales team to stand out from the crowd and actually show show some level of, like, we've been I saw that your interest interacted piece of content this creator created about us. We'd love to hear what you thought about it. And it's just a very interesting adaption to the sales mechanisms that we're seeing right now. And companies are doing this more regularly and more frequently. And I think that's the the opportunity to stand out from the crowd is actually when you work with these creators, there's lots of downstream impacts.
Speaker 4:It's not just the okay. They created great content. They drove brand awareness, and they created leads. It's they helped reposition the brand. It's they actually helped give ammunition to our sales team to reach out to those prospects with a more compelling message.
Speaker 4:And there's just so many opportunities. The one last thing I would say is, like, employee advocacy. Like, I know, Laura, you're, like, a huge advocate for this, but we're seeing it happen more and more, which is brands coming to us saying, like, hey. We want our internal stakeholders and our internal team members to become subject matter experts. Well, guess what?
Speaker 4:If you have an employee advocacy program today and it's not really working, which let's be honest, that's the case for a lot of people because they don't wanna create content. Not all employees wanna create content. If you work with a group of creators, ten, twenty, 30, guess what? A downstream impact of that is they interact with your employee content and it helps them grow. So we actually see this as a content flywheel.
Speaker 4:If your executive team, your management team, your junior level staff are creating content, add ten, twenty creators to the mix to create content, guess what? Your employee advocacy team are gonna love you. They're gonna be like, hey. This huge creator interacted with my piece of content. This is amazing.
Speaker 4:And guess what? Your audience grows. And I we could speak for days about that, but maybe, Laurie, you can talk a little bit about it too.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting. I never thought about this. It does create that type of effect for the internal creators to be excited about somebody else liking or commenting on their posts. But also the effect that I see as well is people internally get more excited to post about the company because somebody else is also speaking positively about the company. So I'm not the only one advocating because I work here so kind of people would expect this, but you see different creative ways that people start to approach the topic even though they work at the company.
Speaker 1:I love this. I never thought about that. That's great.
Speaker 4:Also, it's like a softer approach to marketing. For the first time ever, it's an indicator to big organizations and brands that you can be yourself, and you can talk about your brand and your company without it being like a sales pitch. Right? It can be just like, here's the problem I'm solving with this piece of product. Guess what?
Speaker 4:When you see creators do that, it influences the employees to do it, and that becomes a flywheel.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. And I also think I also think on that too, and it is kinda what I was mentioning about the the creator that you said you know who I'm talking about, Laura. But when employees see the people that they follow and are influenced by and turn to for their advice and kind of professional development and growth, actually speaking about your brand and being a partner with your brand, you know, say we have 4,000 employees here. Not everyone is the vast majority of people do not know all of the creators that we're working with.
Speaker 3:Right? But they see someone mention Zoom info in a post and that's someone that they have been influenced by. They're more likely to engage on their on that creator's post and, to David's point, create more content themselves that may be outside of the formal employee advocacy program that the company actually has.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Justin, how do you put this into operation to push the leads further to sales? Because this is where you'd start generating the actual revenue, not just awareness. Because awareness is nice, beautiful campaigns, kind of fluffy, but as soon as sales get access to that type of data, that's where we can measure it better. How do you do this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's a couple of different ways. So one, and I think that this is probably the easiest way for most companies, right? Especially if you're just starting your kind of journey or even maybe some more mature companies, is that you have your creators drive to a piece of impactful content or an impactful event, right? Because those are going to naturally, for the most part, be gated in some sort, right?
Speaker 3:Virtual events going to be kind of email, lead forms gonna be the same or a gated content for a webinar, ebook or what have you. So that UTM, you know, kind of all that stuff and then you can measure it and whatever your measurement dashboard is, if it's Tableau or something you have within another tool in your tech stack, that's going to be much easier because it's based on UTM more than likely, and then you can pull that all the way through the funnel. If you go that route, and generally speaking overall, you need to make sure that it's not just drive to this landing page. Right? Go say, oh, ZoomInfo has an upcoming webinar.
Speaker 3:You're gonna want to watch it because these three reasons, like a marketing email might. You wanna make it something compelling. Maybe give them an asset that they can use, whether that's a video clip that's gonna be really interesting or a carousel that they can use if it's on LinkedIn or something of that nature or work with them to create something if they like to create video themselves. That's what we did with our virtual event. Right?
Speaker 3:You know, we worked with them to create content that was, you know, natural for themselves and creative, but at the end of the day drove to our virtual event. It drove excitement with their audiences to register for the virtual event. That on the back end obviously then goes to sales. It's tagged with the creator program. Sales understands or has been briefed on how these are coming into them.
Speaker 3:And then they work those leads accordingly, right? The same way that an email campaign or paid media or something like that might come. The next step is a bit more difficult and we rely on on the front end. The first step is we rely on on David and on Limelight to give us this initial dataset. And then we need our tool being ZoomInfoam is not a product pitch, but it's just how we do it, of David and his team helps us to get the, in their system, what they call leads, kinda warm leads from people that are engaging on this content and, you know, comments and likes and reposts and things of that nature.
Speaker 3:And we're able to take that data and then enrich it with our program with our with our software, right? So we know that David Walsh is the CEO at Limelight, but we don't know the rest of his data. All of the other data points that we have within our system, whether that's contact info, that's company info about Limelight, that's locations, things of that nature. So we're able to enrich the information that we get from LinkedIn in this case and then provide that to sales. And if it's scored in a proper way, right, because it does have to go through a lead scoring model, so the percentage that gets to sales, we've worked with sales so that they understand that these are warm leads.
Speaker 3:These are not meant to, these are not hot leads that are coming in where someone has shown direct intent, like if they filled out a lead form on the website, right? Some of them might be cold at the same time. They might've never engaged with us through any of our other touch points. So they have to, in our lead scoring model, get to a certain point that then they will be sent to sales. That's the more difficult one because if you don't have a way to enrich that data that's coming out of, if you're a customer of Winelight, if you don't have a way to enrich that data, there's going to be that gap because you won't know their contact information outside their name and whatever's provided.
Speaker 3:That doesn't mean that you can't do outreach within the product itself, but that's where it becomes more difficult. I think the easier one is naturally a gated asset that then Yeah. Flows into sales.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I I would also just add, like, you're also able to cross reference your pipeline, which is what we're seeing a lot of our customers do. Right? They collect all of this data, and then they say, okay, let's cross reference our sales pipeline and show who was influenced in the purchasing and buying decision over the last three to six months and what different touch points of what pieces of content really influenced them.
Speaker 4:That is an enormous amount of data that they've never had access to before, and it's called, like, look back data, and you can then show, okay, well, the content did influence the purchase. Even though the person signed up through a Google ad, they actually touched these different points. I know Laura and the team at their Dream Data are smiling right now because that's a huge part of your own revenue attribution system, which I'm super excited about too. Potentially, we're gonna start using you guys soon, by the way. The other thing I would just say is, like, I have a funny story to tell too, which is a customer of ours, HubSpot, like, they're big on gated content.
Speaker 4:Okay? They've been doing this for years. Right? And when they launched the the campaign with us, I actually went to one of the pieces of content. They gave 10 different options to the creators, and the creators can come in and to select a piece of content.
Speaker 4:And it was a resource that was valuable to the creator's audience, which got them excited about it. So I decided, okay. Well, let's actually test this. I went to the resource. I inputted my personal email address, and I clicked download resource.
Speaker 4:Guess what? Twenty four hours later, I got an email. Three days later, I got a sales call. Six days later, I got another sales call. And it was HubSpot's team saying, hey, we saw you download this piece of content, maybe you're interested.
Speaker 4:And I actually sent it straight to my point of contact. And I said, you guys are doing it right. Like you actually are doing it right. You've created the systems which will nurture in the right way. Now, I think it was a little bit aggressive and I think HubSpot naturally leans into being a little bit aggressive.
Speaker 4:When I touch anything on HubSpot, I hope there's nobody from HubSpot here. But when I touch anything on HubSpot, I get a call from my sales rep saying, hey, do you want to upgrade? I'm like, no, I just by accident touched this button. So they're super interested in like intent. And I think that's where this system goes.
Speaker 4:That's actually the product that we're building at the moment. You talked about enrichment, Justin, that's going to be coming in September. Not meant to tell anyone that my engineer is going to kill me, but we're going to be very focused on intent and yeah, it's super exciting time to continue to build this.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. David, before we wrap up, tell us about the problem. When you started Limelight, what was the problem that you were trying to solve and where did it evolve? Because I can hear that it's evolving so much into revenue generation and helping people to finally hit the numbers that they're looking into with the spend done. Tell me about how did it start?
Speaker 4:You know, could go all the way back to when I had this idea for a revenue attribution platform and partnership platform and then another idea for all these other systems. I'll just start with, like, when we launched Limelight, what do we hear from brands and what do we hear from creators? And from creators, we actually interviewed a 120. Laura, you were one of them. You were one of the first people I reached out to, and I was like, speak with me.
Speaker 4:I need to learn about why you create content. So I did a 120 interviews with creators, and then I did about 25 to 30 with brands that I had known, heads of marketing, heads of demand gen. And I asked some questions like, why haven't you done this? And the things that themes that came up, like the problems that we're trying to solve is number one, finding the people is really hard. We just don't know how to find them.
Speaker 4:Number two, it's really time intensive to set up these programs because you're dealing with human beings, content schedules, egos a lot of the time, pricing, negotiations. There's just all these inefficiencies even when you do reach out to them. So we said, okay. Let's solve that. Solve the finding piece and let's solve the efficiency piece and let's systematize it and make it much more streamlined.
Speaker 4:And then the big one that we focused on for the last, let's call it six months is measurement because we realized we've got tons of brands. Some of our customers are spending and want to spend up to a million dollars a month with creators, just to give you context. I know I said 10 a month is like an entry point. The goal is to scale this up because we're proving that this is working and you can reallocate ad spend from other channels to these creator channels. Like, it's a big opportunity.
Speaker 4:Right? So we're very focused on the data. We realized, like, for the last six months, if we can just prove this works and give people a lot more data, they'll end up spending a lot more money and realize, you know, they they can take ad spend from other channels. So those are the challenges. Finding the people, you know, activating them, and and then measuring them is kind of the the core focus for us, and that was a problem we wanted to solve.
Speaker 4:And the other thing is, like, education. Like, this is new. A lot of companies know no idea how to start it. They've never done it before, so they're just like, how do I get going? We were like, okay.
Speaker 4:Let's create resources that allow and even, like, case studies and even examples of companies doing it well. And here's what we recommend you do, and you should replicate that. Like, for example, Clay was our first customer. Everyone knows Clay. Right?
Speaker 4:They worked with us hand in hand and built a product alongside them. They're very compelling with creators and they're very like, they let creators be very creative, and a lot of companies wanna replicate that that campaign. So, yeah, it's an exciting space to be in. It's still new. It's still nascent.
Speaker 4:If you're listening to this and you haven't started this, like, it's a huge opportunity to stand out from the crowd and and to to to do something different. And I'm sure that you're gonna see the impact, not just in the revenue uptick, but also in your employee advocacy and your your your your internal team get very excited about this. I find like last point and I know I'm going on for a bit here, but last point is like one of the things we hear a lot, Laura, is when you sign up these creator programs, everyone gets really excited internally. And I know I talked about just the people who create content. I'm talking about your board of directors.
Speaker 4:Like, board of directors a big channel for us right now is VC partnerships because they come to us and they say, hey. We gave this company a load of money. We want people talking about them. Use Limelight. Like, get creators talking about them.
Speaker 4:You will never guess the amount of value that comes from people talking in a positive light about you on social. It just goes, it transcends. And I think that's the direction that marketing is going. And I think all companies will have a team of creators and a team of internal influencers that are creating content consistently.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Justin, how many creators do you currently work with?
Speaker 3:We are at around 30 to 35
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:For the second half of this year, which we've significantly scaled. They are across different sizes of audience. Right? Everyone from kind of what David started off with, like, niche audiences, a few thousand people or something like that on, say, a LinkedIn up to folks that have 400,000 followers on LinkedIn. We also, really care, and I think that this is something that's important is to be kind of diversified across the channels.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Right? So we have people on David had made this point before that if one creator if you're talking to a creator and they have multiple platforms, you know, try to work with them across those platforms. But we also specifically looked for people that had influence on those certain platforms. So, you know, some people have multiple platforms and certainly we've taken advantage of that, but we're working with people that only drive influence on YouTube or have influence via their sub stack or a newsletter, LinkedIn, TikTok.
Speaker 3:They might only do video, as I mentioned before, video kind of demos and not really long form content, things like that. So try to diversify because when you do think about it, yes, right now over the past two to three years, you've had the kind of rise of the LinkedIn influencer because of B2B. But there are people that gain their influence through, or are influenced through other channels, right? Some people only subscribe to a certain newsletter or certain newsletters because they prefer to read via email, they're not as engaged on LinkedIn. So, we, you know, I think that that's always important too, is sure within different levels of of influence, but also the channels that have influence.
Speaker 4:Laura, can I just add one thing as well that we hear quite a bit for maybe for the audience too, which is we hear companies say, well, influencer marketing isn't for us? Our brand isn't influencer marketing. It's just not like, there's not enough creators. I am telling you right now, there are creators out there with a trusted audience who will tell your story. The amount of variants of types of companies that we work with is incredible.
Speaker 4:When I went into this, I thought sales, marketing, customer success, let's focus on that. We now have 40 different industries and niches, and it can go as deep as, like, cybersecurity to, like, really technical things. So just know that, like, if you're if you're a brand and in be and selling b to b, like, there is an audience. There is creators that have an audience that you can tap into. And then finally, like, we started with LinkedIn, but as Justin mentioned, like, we actually expanded it to newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter.
Speaker 4:So there's just, an enormous amount of different channels that you can can partner with creators on. And it's much more broad than you think, so definitely consider getting started.
Speaker 1:Nice. And the final question to both of you, David, what are you most excited about in the upcoming two months? Months? Well,
Speaker 4:you know, this is not public knowledge, but it will be public knowledge soon is that we finally got in some new resources and some new investment and some new funding, which means I can hire more engineers, which means, Justin, you're going to get those features you are asking for faster. And I promise you we're gonna move even quicker than we have before. So truthfully, Laura, like, I'm excited about getting a bit more resources, but I'm also excited about more and more companies trying this and experimenting and seeing success and just helping grow the industry. Just for example, like one last thing is like shout out to all the influencer agencies out there. I'm a huge advocate for them.
Speaker 4:I know quite a few of them. I think humans in the loop is important. I think we want them to use our product eventually. We don't see them as competitive. And so they help grow this industry, and this industry is growing rapidly more than ever.
Speaker 4:So I'm always open to collaborate with anyone that's on the call about just helping grow this industry. And, also, I just wanna take the opportunity to thank Justin. He's a super busy guy And, you know, obviously, helped me tell this story in a much more compelling way. Justin was sailing, as I mentioned last week, and I'm very impressed that he's already got a picture of himself in the background. Say it
Speaker 3:on this wall.
Speaker 1:Framed in.
Speaker 3:I wish. I wish. No. You know, I would say that, you know, David, that as I get more features, I'm gonna come up with more problems and more asks. And but I I will say, like, to to that point, you know, and anyone that's considering a platform or, you know, getting started or things like that, you know, why I I'm a huge fan of of David's and his team.
Speaker 3:I've literally asked them for features and had them turn around within a few hours into our our instance. Those are the, in theory, simpler kind of asks for them to mock up and build, but even some of the more difficult ones, they've worked with us to build out and some of those are the most impactful features that we utilize the platform for. Sounds great.
Speaker 1:And Justin,
Speaker 3:Even how about if his engineer doesn't sleep.
Speaker 1:Oh, we've got to get some more engineers. So all of them could get enough of sleep. But Justin, what are you mostly excited about in the upcoming two months?
Speaker 3:You know, I think that we will continue to see the evolution of b to b creators. It is certainly something it's it's a weird it's a weird industry in the sense that we have been saying that, you know, influencer marketing is net new for fifteen years now. Every year we say, this is the year of creators. This is the year of influencers. This is the year that LinkedIn influencers are are a big deal.
Speaker 3:And I think that we're, we're evolving on how we see that in the formalities of these programs and how they are stood up. So I love to see case studies and and talk to other people as I do all the time at other companies of how they are using creators. You know, I didn't really think of, you know, measuring against CPM, CPL until Dave and I were talking about what some of his clients are doing sort of thing. You know what I mean? And so coming up with more creative metrics outside the kind of normal ones, I think is super exciting.
Speaker 3:Starting to work with creators in other, ways, you know, we are coming up, it's mid August right now. We have four, I think, four or five activations in September at big events, big industry events. So those are gonna be net new for us. We haven't done some of those, in previous years. So certainly for us, there'll be a a lot of learnings, coming out of those.
Speaker 3:So that's that's probably what's exciting for me kind of personally within within the industry.
Speaker 1:We're very exciting excited to watch that from the sides as well. Whatever comes out of the creatives, we're all going to enjoy the creatives and like them and get inspiration for doing better by ourselves. Justin, thank you so much for coming over and joining David to this live. And David, thank you so much for attending and bringing in a fantastic guest. Everybody go ahead and follow Justin and David on LinkedIn or whichever platform you're watching this from and if you've got follow-up questions, well their DMs are open unless David is hiring or Justin is hiring.
Speaker 1:That will happen one or the other time and some of DMs can get lost.
Speaker 3:Sometimes for a year.
Speaker 4:You know, people ignore you for a long time and then eventually when they come and they get to work with you, you're going see a lot of value from this. So I'm just excited, and it and it gives me it encourages me to continue to cold message people about this and and and and not get a response for a year because you never know.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having us. That was amazing.
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Speaker 2:And if you have any feedback for us, just do let us know. And should there be a guest that you think we should be talking to, then, like, pitch us.
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