Scaling Influence inside B2B networks
Robbie Vann-Adibé, CEO of Inpulsus, hosted a conversation at the recent Like Minds’ B2B Influencer Marketing Summit with Andries Smit - Founder and CEO of Upside Saving.
Who is Upside Saving?
Upside Saving is one of our premier UK clients where Inpulsus was engaged to officially launch - via Influence(r) Marketing - the company’s B2B efforts to enable Retail Merchants with their data solution. Andries Smit, Upside’s CEO and Founder, describes Upside as, “...a marketing platform designed to help marketers reach customers on the basis of their spend data using #openbanking. And at the same time, Upside also puts money into the pockets of those retailer’s end consumers through a cashback loyalty programme.”
Here are the eight key takeaways and some of the best excerpts from the session.
Key takeaways
Influence is key to build trust around a new product or service
AS. Upside Saving is a B2B2C business that can be thought of as a marketplace with both end users and corporate clients that need to be reached. It's quite a complicated go-to-market endeavor and marketing challenge, and one that requires creating a level of trust around the product, which is also new.
Open banking and the use case in which we’re doing it, is completely new to the market. There is a lot of education to be done in these early days of breaking into a new market and endorsements by experts is critical. People tend to look to people in the know to 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 put influence marketing at the center of our plans.
RVA. Indeed, when you are creating a category, there really isn't much out there like what you do, so influence has to be a key part of the strategy. In earlier days, influence was achieved differently than it is today but companies had evangelists, advocates and people running these programs had very similar roles and impact. The fundamental difference nowadays is that much of what they do is measurable. The tools, the technology exist to allow you to zero in and see: who has influence, how they influence and who they influence.
Place Influence at the center of your strategy as a turbo-boost to scale fast
AS. Putting influence at the center of our strategy didn't just happen overnight. When we mapped out our next twelve months and understood which markets and networks we needed to break into, the next obvious question was how. Since we aren’t leading with a large paid media budget, we could have gone for simple LinkedIn ads, running social campaigns on our own or the old school model of going to endless number of conferences and so forth. While these are still part of our overall strategy, we realized that influence could be a turbo boost for all marketing and would help us to scale fast.
The process did cause us to take almost a two-month break, as we literally had to stop our tactical marketing before we got going again. It was a hard thing to do and the decision point for us as a leadership team whether we were prepared to do this, especially as a young and growing business. But today having gone through it, I'm very happy that we did.
RVA. It is maybe one of the benefits of working with an organization like ours. If you had been doing this with a traditional agency and said you wanted to pause the “campaign” while you got your acts together, that would have caused pain on both sides. This notion that we are teaching you how to “fish” instead of doing the fishing for you allowed us collaboratively to get all these things straight so the activities that follow will be effective.
Influence is a process that begins and keeps going…
AS. We are four months into the process and never saw this as a campaign. Influence marketing is not something you turn on and off like PPC, it just doesn't work that way. That would mean burning your bridges with those individuals instead of the real deep appreciation of each other's businesses we are developing. That’s the other thing that we have learned: it's a constant back-and-forth, almost like an inner circle.
During the first phase, the Inpulsus team brought us back to basics in terms of brand strategy looking at our market through the existing online conversations. We identified those themes that we could join and bring value to; the networks we wanted to break into; the people behind those, their types and archetypes, where they live, operate and communicate.
Influencer marketing can be very conceptual but when we talked about concrete examples of individual influencers that we hope will talk about us, it became very specific and real. The second phase was really about understanding how to do this, why they would do that, what interests them and their audience… the logistics of it all. Focused on the three things that we want to be known for, we went from a list of over hundred influencers to a shortlist of forty that really hit those sweet spots, help us talk about specific topics and most importantly truly reach the audiences and end clients that we wanted to reach.
Engaging influencers with the right opportunity is critical
AS. Amongst the different options discussed and because of the wealth of data we have as a company, we decided that a whitepaper would be the right medium to start a conversation and engage with our influencers. In the end, twelve of those initial forty influencers contributed to the whitepaper. They gave us opinions, article inserts and some of them even wrote specific chapters. Having those influencers to co-own some of the content means that they've been super responsive when I reached out to them. I thought these things would drag on for months before they get back to you, but having them co-own or being invested in that influence strategy has been surreal. It's made a big difference for us.
Influencers engagement doesn't necessarily require monetary compensation
AS. We did not pay any of the influencers. Out of the forty that we approached, only three said they only do them as paid engagements. In our case, these targets are the independent consultants who are category commentators: they go to retailer boards and give comments over the industry. Therefore, it is understandable but that's a model we were not prepared to go for. We really wanted people to raise real opinions about our perspective via the whitepaper.
The whole process led us to forty very influential people who are very busy - everybody wants a piece of their time. So as a startup, we really tried to be very relevant to the individuals and it worked.
Know your influencers inside-out and ensure to provide value
AS. When we approached the influencers, we knew them backwards and inside-out. This is not a few minutes scanning a Linkedin profile. They were 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. Each of my messages was completely tailored.
By the time we did this, our Chief Data Scientist, who is a former BCG and extremely expert in what we're doing, spent months preparing the data for the whitepaper. When we approached these influencers and invited them in, the data was ready and I literally shared my screen and quickly showed them a little bit so they could get a sense for this. We were ready, the whole process was structured.
Part of that cohort that contributed, we had the CMO of a high street pharmaceutical retailer, one from a large grocery chain, people on the boards of some of the largest retailers, a customer experience expert who normally goes to those boards to coach them. These are phenomenal people with extensive networks and really well respected within the industry. To speak with somebody like that, you need to have your act together. We packaged the data into key insights to ensure we could show or say in the first few mins something that would generate interest.
Influence marketing requires time investment and an internal leader
AS. Skewed with traditional marketing mechanisms, in my head it was all about numbers through the sales funnel and getting as many as possible at the top. Actually, this was the complete opposite and a massive mind shift. My experience is that it was about building deep relationships with these key influencers. They grilled me, and be under no illusion, it's a pretty uncomfortable place when you're telling C-level executives that you understand their customers better than them. But if you understand the value, you also understand that you need to invest the time.
RVA. What you are describing is the way we believe that it should be done. There is tons of work that the team needs to prepare to make you look smart in the moment and in the early days at least and for a company your size, it is not something that can easily be delegated to the team. You leading the show was part of the hook and why they were happy to talk. Sometimes people look at influence marketing and think this is cheap, quick and easy. It is not. But what comes out of the practice are relationships and content that will feed the rest of your marketing activities - whether it is PPC with very targeted spends or a highly focused webinar informed by influence activity.
Influence marketing is unavoidable. Get a trusted partner to get it right.
AS. Last two thoughts. One: if you are not doing influence marketing, you should. We live in a world of influence, humans are moving in cohort trends like never before so influence marketing, I have come to really appreciate, is unavoidable. Two: get a trusted partner that can help - it is not as simple as you think. It is very different from any other marketing strategies and techniques and I had to unlearn a lot of biases and habits but these relationships are too important to mess it up.
RVA. Obviously, we are a big believer and proponent of this one and particularly for a business like Upside Saving. It is new, you're almost a category creator and there is not enough money to be raised in the world to cut through the noise through paid media. Influence marketing can. Invest the time and energy to do it right and what comes out of it sets the stage for so much that can and should follow.