Upside Saving

Taking the lead with Influence(r) Marketing for B2B

  • Context

    Can Influence(r) Marketing drive results for B2B? What makes a strong B2B IM program? What are B2B Influencers like and how do you get them on board? These and many more questions were posed to us by Upside Saving, a fast-moving FinTech provider in the #openbanking space.

  • Objective

    Andries Smit, Upside’s CEO and Founder, had a narrow window to officially launch their platform in the market and gain not just visibility to Retail Merchant executives, but also drive actual lead generation into Upside’s sales funnel. Could it work? In a word, yes. Yes it worked - brilliantly.

  • Ongoing Impact

    • 5x growth in Share of Voice

    • 20% MoM growth in organic traffic

    • 263 downloads

    • 131 MQLs (API and Distributor prospects)

    • 18x program ROI

 “Open Banking has been going for a few years but our use case - loyalty data - is completely new to the market. Endorsements by experts is critical because in these early days of breaking into a new market, there is a lot of education to be done. People tend to look to influencers and trusted experts to give their thumbs up and say, ‘you really should be looking at this, this is the trend, this is where we're all going.’ Therefore, it made perfect strategic sense for us to try Influence Marketing.”

Influence(r) Marketing has seen significant growth as a marketing channel for B2C and consumer sector engagement, but the core strategies behind IM are entirely applicable - in fact, somewhat more so - for use by B2B marketers. Since the early days of “word of mouth” marketing, when social networks were first gaining traction, one premise has continued to ring true: less than 3% of people involved in any specific conversation generate 90% of the impact. The online conversations that surround any specific topic, particularly true for B2B ecosystems, are led by known, trusted and active thought leaders. These are Influencers and they are the key to gaining exposure and depth of engagement for a B2B company’s brand and proposition.

For Upside Saving, Inpulsus led their team through an accelerated workplan to uncover the right conversations in a crowded space of Open Banking - revealing the most active and potentially relevant Influencers - in order to create and execute a detailed Influence(r) marketing program.

 

Andries Smit
Founder & CEO, Upside

“Inpulsus helped us look at the market and the existing conversations: which ones we could join in and bring value to? Which were the networks we wanted to break into? And then who were the people behind those? Where do they communicate? For me, that was actually something I experienced for the first time and those concrete examples of individual influencers was literally when this whole thing became real for me.“

Initially, Upside was trying to engage across too many conversations and needed a more focused approach to have a successful launch to its highly targeted B2B buyer segment. Through social listening and a data-driven spotlight on the best-fit conversations, we revealed a variety of potential Influencers across different channels; prioritized them based on not only thematic fit, but also detailed analyses of their audiences (were Upside’s senior buyers represented?) and then activated each Influencer with valuable content opportunities via co-creation and co-authorship.

“In terms of content, Inpulsus were very good at giving us options, different things that we could do, and because of the wealth of data that we as a company have, we found that the right medium for us was a rich Whitepaper that would be co-authored with Influencers. We engaged 40 influencers with direct outreach and then narrowed to 12 key Influencers to work with us on the Whitepaper. They gave us opinions, article inserts, contributed and wrote longer chapter pieces. Most importantly, they all agreed, and in fact were very excited, to also promote and distribute the final report to their communities.”

Influence(r) Marketing needs a content strategy. We call it Confluence, a critical marriage of content and Influence. To anchor an Influencer’s activity, we led Upside through a focused series of workshops which mapped existing, planned and new content marketing to each unique Influencer archetype, resulting in a clear combination of win-win value to drive Influencer relationship management.

As Andries noted, we turned the idea of a “Whitepaper” on its head by engaging key Influencers to be a part of its creation, editing and publishing. Co-authorship is a nuanced process, but well worth the effort as it raises the level of both commitment and authenticity between the brand and the Influencer. In our broader activation calendar for Upside, we then mapped different content assets as well as joint events and community actions across the next twelve months.

 

“When we approached the influencers, we knew them backwards and inside-out. This is not a few minutes scanning a Linkedin profile. Inpulsus was very detailed: each influencer was defined, researched and we knew exactly what they talk about, who follows them, what is the latest thing they're interested in and so forth.“

Strong Influencer relationship management starts with a deep understanding of who each Influencer is: their work, social and community histories need to be mined for just the right ways to approach them. What do they want to say? What are they after? We see many IM programs that simply sputter along, where marketing can’t defend the value because they don’t realize that successful Influence(r) Marketing is an “always-on” practice that starts with research and insight.

Attracting the right Influencers with compelling reasons to engage is one dynamic - keeping them engaged is yet another. This can be both a problem of not having an appropriate strategy, but also underestimating the tactical needs of an IM program. Strong relationship management skills are critical, but you also need the campaign coordination chops that successful digital marketing demands.

“We did not pay any of the influencers. In our case, these targets are the independent consultants who are category commentators within our industry. We really wanted people to raise real opinions about our perspective via the Whitepaper. So as a startup, we really tried to be very relevant to the individuals and it worked.”

A common conception about Influence(r) Marketing is that you must compensate your influencers, whether through direct payments or other methods, such as gifting, etc. For B2B, giving Infuencers access to unique data or exclusive insights, while providing critical exposure to their thought-leadership, is a wonderful win-win for both the Influencer and the B2B brand. 

The advantage to seeking win-win relationships that are not initially “bought” allows for better targeted of subsequent paid media, PR as example, to boost conversations, themes and content that really starts to trend from Influencer engagement. In this case, Influence(r) Marketing is a great first step to making better decisions about ad budgets for digital media, PR and sponsorships.

 

“Putting influence at the center of our strategy didn't just happen overnight. When we mapped our next 12 months, we understood which markets and networks we needed to get into, but the next obvious question was how - was it through digital media, ad campaigns, conferences, sponsorships? If we really wanted to scale fast, influence marketing was a sort of turbo boost for those follow-on endeavors.”

No matter where in the lifecycle a company happens to be, start-up, scale-up, enterprise growth, Influence(r) Marketing can be integrated to sit at the center of marketing. What does this mean? Influence(r) Marketing isn’t just a tactical channel, in fact its ability to help inform and optimize other marketing channels, such as Paid Media or SEO, makes its impact as a strategic lever all the more valuable.

Another big component of our work at Inpulsus is to create an operational plan for our clients as they grow their marketing organization. For Upside, who had no formal marketing leadership, Inpulsus designed an integrated launch plan across all channels - with Influence at the center providing core messaging and content.