At the Social Pulse Summit: ROI Edition event that I hosted in March, I asked attendees of the influencer marketing panel what their biggest challenges were. 31.8% reported that measuring and proving ROI was their greatest challenge, while 22.7% said finding and working with the right B2B influencers was their Achilles heel.
Does that resonate with you?
Perhaps you, too, have struggled to find great influencers to work with, the kinds of influencers whom you can rely on to follow-through on campaigns and drive real revenue.
That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
As I mentioned at the outset, brands today that want to take advantage of how successful influencer marketing can be have a couple of challenges – namely, where to find influencers, and how to measure the success of their efforts.
I know that’s something I’ve struggled with!
That’s exactly what our guest today, Justin Levy, is going to talk to us about.
Justin Levy is currently head of influencer marketing and community for Demandbase. As part of his role, he leads a private community, Revenue Circle, that’s designed for senior executives in sales and marketing roles. Previously, he led social marketing at ServiceNow, global social media for Citrix, and assisted in the launch of a social media agency that worked with Fortune 500 brands.
Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Justin Levy about:
♉️ Where to find B2B influencers
♉️ How to engage B2B influencers strategically
♉️ What today’s influencer marketing leaders need to keep in mind
Learn more about Justin Levy
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- Demandbase
- Why So Many Brands Fail At B2B Influencer Marketing w/ Lee Odden
- B2B Influencer Marketing From The Influencer’s POV w/ Goldie Chan
- Subscribe to the show calendar: agorapulse.com/calendar
- Learn more about Agorapulse with a free demo
Full Notes & Transcript:
(Lightly edited)
How SaaS Companies Find and Leverage B2B Influencers with Justin Levy
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: At the Social Pulse Summit ROI edition event that I hosted in March, I asked attendees at the influencer marketing panel what their biggest challenges were. 31.8% reported that measuring and proving ROI was their greatest challenge. While 22.7% said finding and working with the right B2B influencers was their Achilles heel.Does that resonate with you? Perhaps you too have struggled to find great B2B influencers to work with the kinds of influencers whom you can rely on to follow through on campaigns and drive real revenue. Well, that’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
This is partnership unpacked your go-to guide to growing your business. Through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, and each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply your own business to grow exponentially.
And now the rest. Of today’s episode, welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly used this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn, too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway.
Every episode from partnership experts. In the industry now, as I mentioned at the outset, brains today that want to take advantage of how successful influencer marketing can be. Have a couple of challenges, namely where to find B2B influencers and how to measure the success of their efforts. I know that’s something I’ve struggled with.
Well, that’s exactly what our guest today Justin Levy is gonna talk to us about. Justin Levy is currently head of influencer marketing and Community for Demand base, and as part of his role, he leads a private community revenue circle that’s designed for senior executives in sales and marketing roles.
Previously, he led social marketing and ServiceNow global social media for Citrix and assisted in the launch of a social media agency that worked with Fortune 500 brands. Justin, welcome to the show. How are you doing buddy?
[00:02:12] Justin Levy: I am doing well today as we record. This is our first day in the seventies here, so I’m very happy about that. [00:02:20] Mike Allton: I can completely relate here in St. Louis. I think this is day two in the seventies, so we’re just, uh, 24 hours ahead of you. Great weather all week. This is fantastic. Let’s start by sharing more about the role that you’re in today. Tell us about demand based in that role and the kind of influencer marketing that you do there. [00:02:38] Justin Levy: Sure. So Demand Base is a company that is focused on how to help transform B2B companies with their markets, right? So using tools role is lead influencer marketing as well as community on our behalf, influencer marketing campaigns. As appropriate for launch of products or just ones to help bring about name and keep it front and center. [00:03:20] Mike Allton: Cool. So now as I mentioned at the outset, A lot of brands are struggling with just how do we find influencers, particularly B2B influencers. I mean, b2c, let’s admit it’s a lot easier. Most of us know who the B2C influencers are. We see the people in our feeds, you know, touting, wears, and, and, and building great fan bases, and, and that’s fine.But when it comes to b2b, It’s a little harder. So at demand based, how do you identify and reach out to new potential B2B influencers?
[00:03:47] Justin Levy: I think it’s in multiple phases, right? So when we go to start a campaign, we decide persona is. If what we’re going to target as an organization is, say for example, the sales persona right now, or multiple personas under sales, SDRs, AE sales leaders, sales ops, rev ops, for example.We’ll then use LinkedIn as the primary platform, primary social network to research folks that are within those positions and or roles to understand. Is really influential and when we look at that, we don’t just look at followers. So it doesn’t matter if you have followers or. It’s really what is your role within that conversation?
So do you have engagement on your content when you publish something? Are you engaged in other content, other conversations that are happening on that topic? So for example, we use as a topic, are you a thought leader in sales? So that when you share sales related content, You have a lot of engagement on it and not just likes and things of that nature, but are people commenting?
Are you engaged with them? But also one step further, are you commenting on other profiles, on other status updates that are part of that sales conversation as well? So we’ll gather those individuals and then we go through more fine tuning and pruning of that list to get it down to whatever that target size for that campaign is.
[00:05:34] Mike Allton: I just wanna underline two things that you mentioned that I think are so important for everybody listening today. If you are in the B2B space and you wanna work with B2B influencers, number one, your first and foremost platform should be LinkedIn. And number two, don’t worry about follower account. Look at the engagement.Something we’ve talked about in previous episodes with Leo and, and, and Goldie Chan and, and Gordon Glenister, where we’re saying, look at the brand fit. Look at the engagement. Look at the style. Look at how people are commenting with their own audience and how they’re interacting with other B2B influencers and brands in the space.
That’s how you’re gonna know whether or not an influencer is a. Good potential fit. Thank you for bringing that up. So once you’ve got some great B2B influencers, Justin, what are some examples of the kinds of marketing campaigns that you guys run with influencers?
[00:06:22] Justin Levy: Sure. So I think that there’s really two different versions, right?Something has been really successful for us is top lists. So we just ran one, the top 20 revenue marketers who kick gas in. And with the top list, a lot of people that are involved in this space, in B2B tech or what have you, you’ll see them not think highly of listicles, right? Oh, it’s just some lists. You can be top 25 or top 50 anywhere, but if you apply a methodology to it, kind of similar to what we were just talking about, looking at engagement, ensure reach does come into effect and some of these other.
Metrics, but then you couple that with how you can reach out to them, how you can develop broader brand awareness, create integrated content, co-created content with them, and other ways to bring value to that relationship that is not only valuable to the brand, but also valuable to that influencer. A list doesn’t just become a list, right?
So we’re not publishing a list and just putting it out there. And then moving on, we’ll publish a list, for example, and create social cards to recognize each one of those individuals. And I’ll send private emails, one to one, emails to each one of those thought leaders. So say with that 20, sent out, 20 emails individually, we’ll then publish that list.
We’ll engage on every piece of content that we see be published, both myself and our brand. We’ll then go back to them, for example, to publish an ebook. So I’ll pose a question to them that’s relevant to that campaign, take all their responses. We’ll develop an ebook. I’ll then have quote cards created for them.
I’ll go back out to. And give them their social card that has their quote or a truncated version of their quote, the ebook. They’ll help generate awareness around that now and then we’ll usually find other opportunities to create content with them, whether that’s blog posts or our podcast on, invite them into revenue circle depending on what level within their company they’re, and so it just forms this deeper bond.
And at the same time, It gives them the opportunity to, you know, showcase their expertise and tell their audience why they’re being recognized. So that’s one thing we do if you wanna call that kinda a, the digital touch. But then we try to come up with more unique campaigns that help us stand out. So last year and the beginning of 22.
We relaunched our brand and as part of that, we knew that we wanted to do something different for the brand launch. We didn’t just wanna come out with a new logo and some new colors and a new website and all the different activities and activations that typically would happen. So we developed a superhero comic, and the idea behind that was we were just developing and launching a.
These superheroes to fight against spam because we are coming out with this concept of un spam, your brand, and you know, the underlying message of that. We help with that. So we had this interactive infographic as you scrolled it. Different B2B influencers flew in literally and had their quotes and had content that they then developed to help launch it.
We’re right in the middle now of something that I’m calling the Unicorn Pinata campaign, where people are actually receiving unicorn pinatas from message. Our ad solution is like a unicorn. So we tried to come up with something that help us participate in that advertising launch for our product, but do it in a unique and differentiated way so that it drives conversations about the man base publicly.
[00:10:37] Mike Allton: That’s so cool. First of all, that superhero campaign is amazing, and I wanna circle back to that too, but I also love the first part where you outlined. The importance of creating a listicle that isn’t just someone’s opinion. You know, they’re basically not just going out and finding the biggest names in the industry and tagging them to try and get some favor from them.You’ve put some effort into them. There’s a reason why each individual is highlighted, and you’ve gone above and beyond to make them look fantastic. So that helps broaden that relationship. I love that approach. But talk to me for a second about this superhero campaign. Was that time consuming? Did you have to go to an outside agency to create this kind of an interactive graphic?
As I’m imagining. Okay. I can’t do that in Canva, so I don’t know how it would done. How did you guys pull that off?
[00:11:22] Justin Levy: Yeah, so for that one, we did work with an outside agency and the platform that ended up being, uh, built on wass, which is interactive platform, you can build a lot of kinda very dynamic content on it.But we did work with an outside agency just because it was such a large project that they helped us work with the B2B influencers and streamline all the content creation and. All the graphics that had to be designed and all the related stuff, they actually had someone wrote.
[00:12:08] Mike Allton: I’m just envisioning, you know, these classic Batman, you know, comic things where it’s just bam pow and that’s, that’s the comic writing. Obviously you needed more than that. So you’re building out intense comic book. You’re creating listicles and working with B2B influencers on eBooks and blog posts and other kinds of campaigns.You’re sending out pinatas. How do you figure out the r o ROI on all this crazy activity? I think
[00:12:33] Justin Levy: it’s a few different ways, right? So one of the easiest to understand is certainly brand awareness. That’s basic. You can measure, reach and engagement in some of those, uh, measurements that you can either do manually, very time consuming, but you could do it.Or if you use, uh, tool, certainly they’ll help you with that. But you can also look at things like, Are you driving downloads of an ebook or of another piece of content registrations tool webinar, you know, areas where youre get lead contact info, which then obviously can see
with influencer. It’s not just a pure organic campaign. I do believe in something called cpe, and that’s called cost per engagement. And it’s the only way that I know that you can standardize the engagement across all B2B influencers that you work with. Because right now there isn’t some standardization out there.
You have X thousands of followers and you know you have X engagement, therefore, your stated. Price is this, right? It’s not a SAS tool where if you need zero to 10 seats, this is what it’s gonna cost you. And if you need more, it’s. So that becomes really hard. C p E kind of normalizes that. So it’s how much did you pay this influencer in?
How much engagement did you get? So you might pay 50 and get 10 engagements. You may pay other person $5,000 and engagements. So it helps you to normalize that and see that across all the influencers that you worked with in campaign.
[00:14:28] Mike Allton: That is so interesting. I’ve actually not heard that approach before and we’ve had a lot of conversations just in this podcast alone about B2B influencers and measuring influencer marketing at a Agora Pulse.Uh, I just had a meeting with our data team this morning cuz what we wanna see is how much revenue are we driving? From our different partners. Now, for US partners mean a lot of different things. It could be influencers like this. It could be affiliate partners, it could be brand partners, it could be sales partners.
But we’re trying to come up with our own internal reporting that shows, Hey, this is what we’re doing now. It helps that at a Agora Pulse, our tool actually does a lot of this for you. So I’m gonna share with you a message from our cmo. Ol so you can at least get a sense for how you can improve your social media measurement of roi.
It’s the Arc de Triumph. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels? Wow, there’s. The arc of Triumph. There’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louv. Those are your channels you’re gonna use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the cmmo of Paris.
In fact, you’re the CMO of your company product service. So what are your main channels? So I’m gonna guess there are things like pay per click, maybe trade shows, events. Maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment.
HubSpot and Gartner say social media is the number one channel to invest in this year. Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it. Because you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the mentality, and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tool word pulse tracks all the ROI for you.
One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success. Treat social media as a channel one CMO to another. My name is Darryl. I’m with Agorapulse. I’ll talk to you soon.
All right, so Justin, we’re talking influencer marketing and I know. A campaign like unicorn, pinatas can’t, you just can’t go wrong with that. But I also suspect that some of the campaigns you’ve run in the past maybe haven’t gone quite so well. What are a couple challenges, or maybe like I said, some campaigns or initiatives that just didn’t work out that well?
[00:16:54] Justin Levy: I think natural challenges for people are misaligned values to either what they’re going out for or to what the brand was looking for. So if the brand is looking to, for example, drive demand of a product or a webinar or something of that nature, and the influencer campaign is just to drive awareness, and that awareness might just be of the brand not driving traffic back to the website or something of that nature.Well, those are misaligned values in misaligned direction, so no matter how successful that influencer campaign might be, it’s not going to translate into success based on what the business was looking for. I think another area too that can usually hem people up is in pain. Or not paying influencers. So looking at the influencers that a lot of people know in B2B and, and look up to and subscribe to their content, go to conferences that they’re speaking at.
Several people will try to get them to do something for free or for significantly reduced cost because they think that. They need the brand more than the brand needs them, as opposed to approaching it as a dynamic two-way relationship. So brands tend to look at something in influence marketing as only a one way relationship.
So they pull from that relationship as much as they can, as opposed to how can we. You know, create something that helps benefit both of us and how can we build an ongoing relationship that we’re not just calling on when we as a brand need something, but that can benefit both of us at the same time on an ongoing basis.
That will always come out to be better for the brand at the end of the day. And it also helps frankly, be influencer not to feel like they’re being taken advantage. Because they’re aligned with a brand that shares similar values as they do. And I’ve seen that go very wrong at times, and I’ve seen go extremely well for other brands.
And it’s something
relationships. And then we can build our campaigns off of those relationships, but never to take advantage of them, to always have something of co-created value.
[00:19:42] Mike Allton: Those are two such incredibly important points. Having that brand alignment, first and foremost, you understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and you’ve communicated that with the influencer and they’re on the exact same page.And then to have that importance set from the very outset that this is going to be a relationship a two way. Beneficial relationship. I’m really pleased that that’s exactly been our approach at Agorapulse. So the B2B influencers and the ambassadors that we work with, they love us, we love them, and we can see the benefits of that.
I often use, one of my favorite examples is there’s, you know, there’s countless Facebook groups and communities about social media marketing, just countless. And every day in one of those groups somewhere, somebody asks, Hey, what social media management tool should I use? And five or six years ago, you would’ve seen this mixed marsh bbl of responses.
But today it’s Gore Pulse, Goul Goul, and it’s our friends. It’s our ambassadors, our influencers that are just piling on authentically. Genuinely. I’m not paying them to go into groups and say a Agora Paulson response, but they do it naturally because. There’s that relationship there. And so I’m curious for you, for demand base, who would you say your best influencers are and what makes them such a treat to work with?
[00:21:00] Justin Levy: I think that best B2B influencers are the ones that we’ve worked with to understand their audiences and. Create content with them on an ongoing basis, like we talked about, that co-created content. I love to do things for people that are either surprising delight campaigns or that are unexpected. So for example, with this unicorn pinata campaign, one, the business was surprised by it.So that’s always a good thing. But the folks that are getting these unicorns right now, you’re seeing things fill up. There’s a sense of FOMO on LinkedIn right now for people that haven’t gotten more, they are talking about how their kids, you know, destroyed immediately. One person said that her husband, you know, broke open the pinata cause he wanted the candy inside of it.
And then we’re following up with these people and sending them sprinkle cookies on top of everything from the company is driving on LinkedIn, right?
So.
So out of 65 people, if 30% convert and do something with it, there’s 20 people and we’ll send out 20, you know, sets of cookies and hopefully, you know, 10 more of those people will share the cookies. So we’ve gotten a kind of a double whammy outta that. Right. But the goal isn’t to sell people on that. The goal is, yeah, we obviously want them to come download the ebook and read it and gain something of value from it.
If that turns into a sale, that’s always a good thing. But the goal of this is to create something fun, to create that sense of fomo, to have those people say, this is a really cool thing that demand base is doing. This is something that’s out of the box marketing. This is something that we would’ve never thought of.
Because that generates a positive brand awareness for the company. It shows that B2B isn’t born, doesn’t need to be, and it humanizes the company, right? So to send a pinata to someone that has kids to man base has now had a positive impact on that person’s day, or made their week a little more fun. That is better to me than, you know, doing some born campaign just to try to sell our wares.
You know, we certainly have to do things that obviously sell our product just like all of us do. But you can do it in creative ways that aren’t just going, finding the biggest names in the space and throwing money at them cause they don’t even wanna do that. So even with the kind quote unquote big names that we work with, we work with them to come up with something fun.
So I’ll give you a brief example. Jay Bear, who’s a really good friend of mine, you know, usually have to on some keynote stage or you know, whatnot within Revenue Circle. Our private community, like you mentioned at the top, He has a a show there and you can only get it if you’re a member of Revenue Circle.
And he shoots a video asking a question about sales and marketing to cause it’s for a community, for sales and marketing executives. And he chooses the best answer on a weekly basis and he sends them a bottle tequila of all things. This isn’t like, Hey, you know, I’ll send you a copy of my autograph book or whatever, or just nothing.
But Jay is the number two tequila influencer in the world. Cause he’s a tequila Sam, his house is full tequila. Brands wanna work with him. He’s doing all sorts of cool stuff, integrated it into his keynotes and his private consultations and things of that nature. But we are able to take advantage of that in a way for the community.
But it was something that Jay cared about. Jay is an expert on both sales and market and customer experience, but tequila. And so what we’ve seen within the community and on LinkedIn is that when people receive this tequila, they’re promoting Jay and thinking Jay, For the bottle and a lot of times they’re shooting a photo with it or, or something of that nature.
It only helps our relationship with Jay. It helps the fact that we’re friends has, you know, always is a good thing, but it was something that was done in a more unique way. I’m part of a lot of communities. One, most of them don’t hire thought leaders, but two, certainly none of them give out bottles of tequila.
So it was something different that we came up with and Jay said, Hey, I’d love to do this. I’ll take it from my private stash and I’ll send it coming up with those creative things that push the envelope but make people laugh and make people, you know, gain something out of it. Cause they still are. You know, the pinata campaign, they’re getting fun pinatas, but it still has a call to action.
Go download our ebook and I’m calling it our absolution of unicorn. And then you’ll get sprinkle cookies, which are multicolored just like the unicorn is. So, you know, it’s like just trying to make it fun for everyone involved, including those that we’re reaching out to, all of which in this campaign aren’t big names.
You know, recognizable names that we’re paying. Hey, I’ll send you this pinata. As long as you take a photo of it, you’re a big time influencer. This campaign is hundred percent organic. Love it.
[00:27:07] Mike Allton: These are fantastic ideas, and Jay is terrific. I just saw him. Two months ago at the Bime Marketing Expo. And yeah, for those of you who don’t know Jay, follow him.But most importantly follow Tequila J on Instagram. Yes. And you can keep up with his tequila recommendations, his blind taste tests and all kinds of fun content over there. I’m trying to get him to come over to the mezcal side of the world, but he’s firmly entrenched. But these are great campaigns, cuz like you said, they’re putting.
A human face on the brand. That’s one of the classic marketing struggles, particularly in b2b. How do we humanize our brand? Well be human, connect with people in a way that’s super interesting to them. I got an invitation from another brand called Domo a couple months ago to participate in influencer event where they sent me a French grilled cheese and champagne kit and joined a Zoom call where they had a couple of chefs.
Showing us how to make French grilled cheese and onions. I think it was, I mean there was the whole kit, you know, and a bottle of champagne. And then Drew Ser, who runs the CMO huddle, he and I both won additional bottles of champagnes during the Zoom call. Uh, so it was really interesting. Jason Falls tells stories the same way about bourbon tasting.
It doesn’t always have to be alcohol. I dunno why that’s a theme. But the point is you’re having these great personal human connections and you’re not just shipping out another. Report or an ebook, so that’s fantastic. Love that. What other advice would you give influencer marketing leaders, particularly for other B2B brands like Demand Base?
[00:28:42] Justin Levy: Certainly try to come up with campaigns that you haven’t seen before in your. Niche area, right? If that’s just B2B generally that’s fine, but if you’re in B2B tech or you know, I dunno, FinTech or something of that nature, you know, try to look around and see what other brands maybe in other industries have done and see how you can put your own spin on it.A lot of campaigns don’t have to be expensive. We’re not spending tens of thousands of dollars on this campaign that we keep reference and Right, the unicorn pinata campaign, but it’s creative with every campaign that I come up with or that our team works on. I try to think of, would this be CaseWorthy?
Would I take this and submit this for an award at the end of the day, content marketing, you know, industry award, or you know, something of that nature. If you can’t answer that question, you probably shouldn’t run that campaign because you’re not going to position the company in a positive light besides like, like you said, just, you know, sharing another ebook, white paper webinar, what have you.
And you certainly, as we’ve talked about, have to have alignment. So before we’ve run any of these campaigns, We’ve briefed those that are involved, they’re aware, so that it is an integrated campaign. Our teams take the content that we’re creating, have created what have you, and they include it in the other campaigns that they are communicating out or the content that they’re created so that it is integrated across everything that our marketing team is doing.
And. We get others involved, right? So whether that’s through surprise and delight campaigns or it’s just keeping our ear to the ground and building that relationship. So something really easy is I saw someone make a comment, an influencer in the sense of the word for us as VP or SVP somewheres, and she had made a comment about.
The fact that she would do anything for truffles, I think is how she, she had positioned something like that. It was nothing to do with demand base. It had nothing to do with anything. She was commenting on something, so I sent her truffles, right? Or macrons or something of that nature. I forget what it was.
It was a surprise and delight. I had no. Expectation out of it. It was to do something nice for someone and we had the capabilities to do that. And I think that a lot of people have an expectation when they run a campaign. I hope that we have about a 30% conversion on the projects that we do. If we don’t, we don’t.
And it was a fun campaign to run. We do a postmortem, see how we could tweak something and move on. I do think that you have to run fund campaigns and you have to help the business understand why they. Does the business need to invest in influence or marketing? That’s
[00:32:15] Mike Allton: so important. And one thing I wanna stress, because you didn’t state this, you implied it, but the fact is you were listening, you were monitoring and paying attention to the point where you were able to see a comment.From one of your B2B influencers, and then act upon that, which is, I think another mistake that many brands are making. They’re not paying any attention at all. They’re not following, they’re not engaging with their influencers. So they would have no idea that somebody said something like that. Or even more importantly, if they’d said something about the industry or the brand, which might be actionable, positive or negative, it doesn’t matter, but you gotta be listening.
So thanks. Well in for making that.
[00:32:51] Justin Levy: Some of those people that you might engage with, Aren’t your influencers yet, they’re someone that might be in your target, your company’s, you know, ICP or on your kind hit list, or you know, they just fit that persona that you work with currently, or at some point the future.That random act of kindness is something that could do that because they’ll remember you as the brand that did this as opposed to. Company that spammed your inbox, they’ll remember the fact that they got macrons simply because someone was reading what they had to say on LinkedIn one day. And in that example, that person never posted anything.
That’s fine. But we’ve since engaged on a number of things.
[00:33:40] Mike Allton: Yeah. And that engagement ends up being so much easier now because now they are positively inclined. To pay attention to and listen to the brand. Absolutely. And how much does a box of Macaronis cost, particularly again, when we’re in the B2B space and you know, some of you listening today, you might be looking at average deal size and you know, five or six figures.You know, you can afford to invest a little upfront in building those relationships. So that, just a perfect segue into my last question. I ask this of every guest and I don’t always know exactly what they’re gonna say. We’ve already touched on this, so I have a really good sense for how you’re gonna answer my last question.
How important have relationships been in your work and in your communities?
[00:34:20] Justin Levy: I think that they’re, everything that we do, certainly we couldn’t build the community that we have as of right now, over 600 members. We average over a thousand engagements per month. Whether that’s, you know, emojis or comments or what have you, uh, within that community, if.There weren’t relationships that were built both from the brand with the community members, but then also between the community members. And that’s what the community has helped to do, helped to foster those relationships and drive those relationships. And then on the influencer side, you never want to be.
Just this logo that’s reaching out to people. Right. And it goes back to the whole B2B versus B2C people. It’s easy to understand that there’s a human on the other side in b2c, and people think that b2b, it’s two logos. That somehow talked to one another, and that’s not the truth, right? There’s a, on either side, just the committee sizes are larger, right?
B2,
buy a bigger. It might be one person in the household and that person is appealing to their significant other that they need two more inches of TV in their house and the reasons why. But b2b, you just have a bigger buyer committee and that doesn’t mean it has to be though. So have fun with it. Like don’t take all of this stuff seriously.
Certainly you have to have alignment strategy. You have to measure your execution, but build relationships. Don’t take advantage of them. The second that you send them something to not be like every other freaking company in the world and think that that’s your opportunity to then go your product next email.
Cause that’s not on, on building relationships, everything else becomes easier.
[00:36:29] Mike Allton: Could not agree more. Thank you, Justin. This has been amazing and it’s been such an important and informative interview. Thank you. Can you tell folks where to connect with you and where to learn more? [00:36:41] Justin Levy: Yeah, absolutely. The easiest places to find me on LinkedIn, that’s where I hang out most of the time these days.So just Justin Levy, LinkedIn. I’m active on Instagram. That’s more personal, you know, personal photos and. I technically have an account on Twitter, but that’s a dumpster fire, so I don’t really go over there anymore and might not exist by the time this episode is published. So LinkedIn is by far the easiest place and most stable place to find me.
[00:37:12] Mike Allton: Fantastic. We’ll have links to all of Justin’s social networks to demand base to some of these campaigns to. You unicorn pinatas. We’ll have all that in the show notes and that’s all we’ve got for today folks. So thank you so much. Be sure to go and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Let us know what you think, cuz we’d love to know what you think.Until next time, see you.
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