Joe Sinkwitz - Advanced Search Summit Napa 2019

INFLUENCERS FOR ENTERPRISES,
BEYOND THE KARDASHIANS
JOE SINKWITZ
FOUNDER & CEO, INTELLIFLUENCE

WHO AM I?
 Involved in search industry since 1997
 Have managed thousands of clients
 I’ve been fortunate enough to play in all
facets of online marketing, providing a
broad perspective
2
Joe Sinkwitz
CEO, Intellifluence
#AdvancedSearchSummit #NoDrinkTickets
@CygnusSEO

DO I NEED TO EXPLAIN INFLUENCER
MARKETING?
3
Probably not, but I will briefly to the one
person in the room that may not have
been spammed by me yet.
Influencer marketing’s rapid ascension has
led to a decent amount of confusion as to
where the concept fits in best for B2B and
B2C enterprises alike.

4
 Which social channels make the most sense?
 What influencer type is ideal? [Aspirational,
Authority, or Peer]
 What's the KPI you're measuring them against?
 How does an enterprise go about creating and
managing an effective influencer marketing
campaign?
WHERE DO INFLUENCERS FIT IN
FOR B2B ENTERPRISES?

5
The best way to get to answers to those questions
is to build out some case studies.
Jim and TJ made a mistake letting me have access
to the attendance data... So let's walk through a
couple very different B2B enterprises in the room
and build some assumptive studies to highlight
how they might use influencer marketing to
augment existing sales efforts.
EVERY ENTERPRISE IS DIFFERENT

7
Affiliate networks are a B2B marketplace of sorts;
there are essentially advertisers and publishers --
for the first study, let's focus on publishers.
CASE STUDY #1: CJ AFFILIATE
Step 1: Pick which product in the marketplace you're fixating on

8
 Look at sales cohorts to determine which group
of a few hundred people best exemplifies what
you're looking for. Usually these are users that
have made the transition from new status to
active user, based on whatever active metric you
might use (DAU in terms of traffic sent, MAU in
terms of logging in and finding new offers, etc)
(CONTINUED)
Step 2: Pick a buyer persona

9
 Grab their emails and if you don't their social accounts yet, run the emails
through Clearbit so you can dissect how they are using social as a whole.
 For each customer, run a thought experiment. Who do these publishers
aspire to be? What motivates them? Do they have heroes in the industry?
Who do they read/listen to when it comes meeting their aspirations? Who
are their peers?
(CONTINUED)

10
Aspiration: To become a super affiliate, a famously
rich affiliate holding up a Shoemoney check
showing affiliate earnings
What motivates them: Aside from money, trust that
it won't disappear by relying on a scammer
(CONTINUED)

11
Industry heroes they might follow: The super affiliates that have come
before them. It varies by niche, but in old school terms Jeremy
Schoemaker, Shawn Hogan (before the whole getting arrested thing),
Markus Frind, Missy Ward, Kris Jones, etc.
Who are their peers: Other affiliates that can be found online lurking in
digital marketing communities and attending conferences like Affiliate
Summit.
(CONTINUED)

12
Lots of iteration can take place depending on how
deep of a campaign you're going to run, by trying
to gather the peer level social data for a rinse and
repeat process. Go as deep as you need to.
(CONTINUED)

13
Start with the aspirational influence piece of the campaign; if we've done
our homework correctly we know that there is a some common
intersection on which individuals can act as those quasi-celebrity
aspirational influencers in the affiliate market for publishers.
Aspirational influence can be straight up acquired; it's just a matter of how
much money. In this example, let's use our friend Jeremy Schoemaker --
he'd probably do it.
(CONTINUED)

14
What social network and media type are you going to use? Go back to the
sales cohorts and see what social channels you were able to gleam. Since I
know this industry I'm going to cheat:
 Start with a video testimonial on
how much money he's made with
CJ over the years, in an interview
format to share excitement of his
stories.
(CONTINUED)

15
 After sharing out the sliced video as a
campaign across YouTube, Facebook stories,
and Instagram stories (amplified w/ Twitter
shares), dissect the videos further into still
images to share on a much more extended
campaign.
 Embed the images and videos of the course of
a follow-up campaign on Shoemoney + CJ
blogs.
(CONTINUED)

16
Are there any additional
authoritative influencers that
could be injected into the
campaign?
The easiest way to use them at
this point would be to pay them
to create short format reaction
videos/blog posts, to effectively
pile on.
(CONTINUED)

17
Finally layer on the peers. All you need to do to
make the overall campaign a success at this
point is to pay them to RT/share the
aspirational/authoritative work [and more blog
posts...I love blog posts].
At the end of the campaign, loop back around to
the initial KPIs. Were they met? Were they
missed? Don't forget to perform a post mortem.
(CONTINUED)

19
I have used CJ as an affiliate, but I'm also a SendGrid customer at
Intellifluence, so I can once again cheat during the setup.
CASE STUDY #2: SENDGRID
Step 1: What's the product?
Thankfully SendGrid makes
that easy -- it's email!

20
 Look at sales cohorts to determine which group of
a few hundred people best exemplifies what
you're looking for. The higher value clients are
probably the API + Marketing Campaign clients
(that's what we use...so we would be a peer later
one).
(CONTINUED)

21
 Grab their emails and if you don't their social accounts yet, run the
emails through Clearbit so you can dissect how they are using
social as a whole.
 For each customer, run a thought experiment. Who do these users
aspire to be? What motivates them? Do they have heroes in the
industry? Who do they read/listen to when it comes meeting their
aspirations? Who are their peers?
(CONTINUED)

22
Aspiration: To run a more successful SaaS company
What motivates them: Aside from money, prestige of having had
success...to become a similar thought leader as their aspirational
heroes.
Industry heroes they might follow: SaaS companies operating at a
greater scale, but which were at the target buyers scale not so long
ago. Co-founders and marketing execs that have raised A or B rounds
might make sense. Noah Kagan, Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Jason
Lemkin, Brad Feld, etc.
(CONTINUED)

23
Who are their peers: SaaStr, SaaStock, and other
SaaS communities are littered with such
individuals. Early phase startups that have a bit of
funding or extended bootstrapping and are just
now getting serious about email.
(CONTINUED)

24
Start with the aspirational influence piece of the campaign; if we've
done our homework correctly we know that there is a some common
intersection on which individuals can act as those quasi-celebrity
aspirational influencers for other SaaS marketing founders.
Aspirational influence can be straight up acquired; it's just a matter of
how much money or ego tradeoff. In this example, let's use Brad Feld
since his Foundry Group was an investor.
(CONTINUED)

25
What social network and media type are you
going to use? Go back to the sales cohorts
and see what social channels you were able to
gleam.
Since I'm assuming an ego play for an already
wealthy individual, you need to pigeonhole
process back into their chosen medium, which
is video and blog first.
(CONTINUED)

26
 Start with a video testimonial why Brad decided to invest in
SendGrid and use it for their portfolio companies, how much it has
helped out the SaaS ecosystem to evolve to where it currently is.
 The video is going to be primarily embedded on SendGrid, Foundry,
and Brad's personal blog. Certain snippets of the interview and
testimonials can be dripped out as images over Twitter, where he
was also active.
 Have Brad share on his personal account to Hacker News and
Growth Hackers.
(CONTINUED)

27
Are there any additional authoritative influencers that could be injected
into the campaign? Yes, absolutely. Other startups that were backed by
Foundry and use SendGrid can be recruited to pile on.
The easiest way to use them at this point would be to pay them to
create short format reaction videos/blog posts, and push into Reddit,
more on Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and the smaller early startup
communities.
(CONTINUED)

28
This is the easiest piece because there are soooo many peers that have had
good SendGrid experiences. All you need to do is email the sales cohort
you selected and ask them to amplify via some simple sharing scripts on
their company or personal co-founder social accounts, in exchange for a
promotional email credit. I know we'd probably do it as we are happy with
SendGrid and have no qualms about sharing our experience.
At the end of the campaign, loop back around to the initial KPIs. Were they
met? Were they missed? Oh, they'd be met. Do a post mortem anyhow
though.
(CONTINUED)

30
 Finally, a B2B product in the
room I don't have any personal
experience with.
CASE STUDY #3: SAP CONCUR
Step 1: What's the product? For
the purposes of this particular
case study (and it looks like we
could quite a few), we're selecting
SMB Expense management

31
 Look at sales cohorts to determine which group of a few hundred
people best exemplifies what you're looking for. Since we specifically
chose a SMB focused product, the based of potential users is going to
be a lot higher.
 Grab their emails and if you don't their social accounts yet, run the
emails through Clearbit so you can dissect how they are using social as
a whole.
(CONTINUED)

32
 For each customer, run a thought experiment. Who do these publishers
aspire to be? What motivates them? Do they have heroes in the
industry? Who do they read/listen to when it comes meeting their
aspirations? Who are their peers? Since this is the last case study of the
presentation I want to point out that this happens -- chances are the
cohort is going to be exceptionally noisy. It may be necessary to narrow
even further, on geography or some specific behavior within the
product (weekly active user is the one that comes to mind).
(CONTINUED)

33
 Aspiration: To run a successful business, or
maybe to expand into a chain of businesses if
not multi-location. Perhaps it is simply
reduce the amount of stress in their life from
administrative duties.
(CONTINUED)

34
 What motivates them: I'm going to assume it's more a pain point
reduction, so the motivation is to de-stress and remove focus required on
non-core business functions.
 Industry heroes they might follow: This is the most difficult because of the
expected noisiness of the initial cohort, so we need to look more at general
operational SMB thought leaders and see which have a celebrity-like
status. The ones I found are perpetual speakers at Small Business Expo,
Shoptalk, and geographic-centric conferences such as New York Business
Expo and Conference. A few of the names include Chris Gronkowski,
Amanda Kuclo, and Patrick McCarthy.
(CONTINUED)

35
 Who are their peers: Open a Yellow Pages and
match the category; it is not hard to find the
generalized industry level cohorts, but is a bit
more difficult to get them to take an action than
it was on SendGrid since those users are natural
marketers.
(CONTINUED)

36
Start with the aspirational influence piece of the campaign; this is
trickier because there are no clear rock stars that I could find, so
instead we'd want to run an elevation campaign focused on the
competence of authoritative influences such as Patrick McCarthy
(he was with SAP at one point, so the alumni network could be
leveraged to get him on board).
(CONTINUED)

37
Aspirational influence can be straight up acquired; What is Patrick's standard
speaking fee? That can probably be captured in a short video series that
bridges his core competence of SMB sales and into SMB expense tracking and
other administrative headaches that SMB businesses encounter and need to
alleviate.
Since we moving more to authority only instead of relying on celebs, we can
then extend the video series by pulling in other local SMB experts such as
Andrew Shotland (Hi Andrew!) to discuss alleviating the headache of bad local
listings, Max Levchin to discuss cashflow management, etc.
(CONTINUED)

38
What social network and media type are you going to use? Go back to the
sales cohorts and see what social channels you were able to gleam. The older
social networks are going to rise to the top of my list, since they are the most
generalized: Facebook and Twitter.
 Once again we're going to start with the video series geared towards SMBs
and how to improve multiple facets of their business. What's great about
SAP running such a series in tandem with authoritative influencers is they
have a product for each core functionality, even though we're focusing on
Concur.
(CONTINUED)

39
 The video content can be natively placed in Facebook
and some lookalike audiences can be targeted for the
influencer shared version of the URL; content
advertised via the creators has a stronger
engagement rate than branded content.
 Similarly promote via Twitter Advertising the
influencer shared version of the videos to lookalike
audiences and targeted phrases associated with
expense tracking.
(CONTINUED)

40
We already skipped too general of aspirational
influencers in favor of authoritative influencers
so the pile-on effect can be accomplished by
simply using more of them and having them
share out their versions of the videos and
subsequent personal/corporate blog posts on
the channels where they themselves have the
biggest audiences.
(CONTINUED)

41
Finally, some peers. I have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn, but it is
here that SAP Concur can do the most damage. Using a tool such as
Duxsoup or Skrapp, they can engage in a SMB outreach campaign via their
existing (and gigantic) sales engine, but instead of starting by attempting
to push for a demo/signup, they can push to educate and offer a free trial
in exchange for a simple RT/share of one of the list of authoritative URLs
that exist from the previous level of influencers.
(CONTINUED)

42
The post mortem would then be critical to
ensure the right cohorts were hit via the right
channels and from there to adjust advertising
of existing content to better match which
yielded the best sales.
(CONTINUED)

43
THANK YOU
A special thank you to the three brands that had no idea I was going to be
using them in my assumptive case studies. For their patience, go use their
products.
Need help with influencer marketing on your own? Hit me up:
joe@intellifluence.com

CREDITS
Icons courtesy of flaticon.com (Smashicons, Freepik, Kiranshastry,
Icon Pond, Icon Monk). All product names, logos, and brands are
property of their respective owners.

Joe Sinkwitz - Advanced Search Summit Napa 2019

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