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Welcome to the second edition of the B2B influencer marketing chat series. Today, we have a great guest in our podcast.

Who is Tim Williams

Tim Williams is the CEO of Onalytica, an Influencer Marketing company that provides Influencer Relationship Management software and supporting professional services. Onalytica provides influence marketing software, the company focuses on advocacy. They love to be able to integrate employer advocacy and influencer advocacy for brands. Their mission as a software provider and a vendor in this space is to connect brands with influencer communities. Company loves the development of community around certain topics, they focus on B2B globally.

Have you missed the live episode with Tim?

In case you missed our live session with Tim Williams, listen to our conversation on your favorite podcast channel. We uploaded the whole interview to the following podcast channels:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Radio Public

Do you prefer reading over listening? You can read most of our conversation with Tim Williams below. Enjoy listening and reading.

The current state and future of B2B influencer marketing

Mariska: I’m really happy that we have the ability to speak. We would like to discuss the report The current state and future of B2B influencer marketing, especially from an influencer perspective. Before we dive into the outcome of the report, can you share why have you done this report?

Tim: So we always love carrying out research, it just enables us to build so many relationships within the industry. And you find out so many wonderful things about the state of the industry. We have previously done a state of the industry report for B2B marketing around marketers and communications professionals.

And since Top Rank marketing did a great report a couple of months back on that, we thought well, why don’t we ask the influencers, because the influencers of the marketing gold that brands are leveraging to get their messages out there. And the industry is maturing, as you very well know, there are wonderful successes, there’s also mixed results within the industry as the industry is evolving and maturing.

So part of the success is how brands connect with the influencers, and the influencers have strong opinions about how they should be reached out to, how they want to work with brands, whether their opinion gets listened as part of the brief and how they work on an ongoing basis and the payment, how the payment works and all of the sort of a ministerial and sort of transaction part of the process, like, matter as well.

So we just thought, we can deliver most value by showing brands, what influencers really care about and how they want to show up. Then you’ve got both, the brands and the influencers coming together to achieve what the best results are going forward.

Mariska: It was really interesting also that you really want to focus on influencers part which, I think, is really really important. Also to bring influencer marketing, I would say, to the next level. Can you share three important outcomes and three remarkable outcomes that you said ‘okay, this is, perhaps, something that we already knew, but it confirms. Or something that, really, would surprise you with the outcome of the report.

Influencer marketing as a collaborative process

Tim: Always keep in mind that the ‘always on’ mentality rather than ‘one off’ campaigns, so we, there’s a stat in there that 89% of influencers who work for brands on a retainer basis, deem their campaigns to be very successful. So obviously, the influencers, when brands invest in them on a longer term basis, they give a lot more to brands. And so that was very, it was what we already believed, but it was just really, really strong to come through from the influencer research report.

The other thing that was interesting is the quality of outreach and research, there’s still a lot of brands that are not doing their research, and just treating influencers like promotional mouthpieces, and saying, Can you amplify this piece of content? Or I know you’re influential in this area? Could you share this report? And that’s really something that we’re trying to stamp out as the industry.

So 93% of influencers who think brands do a lot of research, right, that outreach is good, or very good. As a brand, you need to put in the effort to get to know someone before asking them to do a favor or was trying to build a relationship as part of a like a paid engagement. That was really interesting.

The other part was looking at influencer marketing as a collaborative process. So it’s not a brief that brands just hand to the influencers except or not. It’s about helping influencers to shape the brief and relaxing a bit of control as a brand to be able to integrate influencers beliefs, and ideas on how you can create the most inspiring content for your target audience. I think those are the three interesting points.

Mariska: A lot of people see influencers not as humans is it not also about creating a human relationship between the influencer and the brand. Also the mutual respect and mutual interest and expertise? Because I see there is a huge gap between what the brand wants and what the influencer wants. And despite it, we also send out a brief it’s, you see, there’s still a huge gap to bridge between the influencer marketing and the brands. And I think if brands would approach influencers more in a human way if they would work with with employees, I think there is, from my perspective, there is still a lot of work to do.

Tim: I think the the human centered approach goes a long way. And I think the when you’re in big organisations, and you’re in a marketing department, and you have strict targets to hit, and you’re not really, you’re seeing influencers, like a paid media opportunity, then obviously the mindset is wrong. And, and that’s one of the things I think is interesting going to the trends of influencer marketing, that I see that the early adoption phase is over.

I know a lot of people that have influencer marketing, their job title, they have global roles, and you know, they’ve honed their industry and, and their skills extremely well. And they’re working with influencers. But now this approach has become mainstream there a lot of people that have never done this before that it might be 5% of their roles.

And they don’t feel that they have the time to research influencers or to and and maybe the human approach gets lost a bit because they find it very time consuming to manage these influencer relationships. So I think we’re at that tipping point where it becomes a mainstream tactic. And organizations will then recruit differently and job roles in the future, you know marketing director would have influencer marketing maybe as 25% of their remit. So I think it’s just as a result of the evolution of the industry, but I completely agree with you.

Influencer`s audience size is becoming less and less important

Mariska: I hope that B2B influencer marketing will become more mature in the upcoming years. And I would love to have your vision on that. And anything else that you would like to share about the outcome of the report that you have done or even from, also, from your colleagues, because I know also, this is, of course, a team effort that you’ve done. Quite a lot of people have worked on the report. Any other outcomes that you would like to share from from the report?

Tim: First of all, I should say that Alicia Russell (VP for Global Marketing at Onalytica) was behind the influencer research report, assisted by Alistair Wheate (Senior Solutions Strategist at Brandwatch), who helped out with a lot of the influencer relations, and Joe Fields (Head of Influencer Marketing at Onalytica) as well in the team. So all credit to them for getting the report out.

I think the one of the other interesting things is that the influencers, audience size is becoming less and less important. I think a lot of brands have chased the same influencers who have maybe 150-200 thousand followers in the B2B world. And you know, when you have 50 brands chasing after the same 30 people in tech, for example, that bubble is always going to burst. And so I think a lot of the more savvy marketers are looking for people with expertise. And they’re looking for industry experts that don’t call themselves influencers.

So I think that the how we describe influencers is really, really important. We talk about your professional influencers or social media amplifiers as those people that do it for a living, but we also talk about industry experts, industry key opinion leaders, content creators, independent analysts, different type of people that are influential, influential experts, but they’re just not describing themselves as influencers. And I think that’s a really important trend.

Everyone is an influencer

Mariska: Really important the way you say the word influencer because we also have a hate-love relationship with the word influencer, if I can say, but if I don’t mention that word influencer marketing that people don’t understand what I do, so I mentioned it for people to give them a direction, but still the word, industry expert, content creator, thought leader, I think we still have to come up with a name, which resonates with the job that they do. Because influencer, everyone is an influencer, if you have social connections or not. So I think, therefore we need to be careful perhaps even go away from the word influencer marketing and be on a B2B level.

Tim: Exactly I couldn’t agree more, we feel that Onalytica as a technology vendor in the space, we feel we have a responsibility to help that evolution. So we’ve got the persona classification, like a content creator or an independent analyst. But then there’s also the roles they could be an academic researcher, or they could be a data scientist, they could be a developer, they could be an entrepreneur. And then they’ve got location, they’ve got like quantitative data, qualitative data, and that all forms part of a person of who they are.

The category is influencers but we don’t like the word ‘influencer’ by itself. But it’s useful to have a term for the industry that everyone references, we also call an influencer as an internal influencer, it could be an employee, a brand employee. So they’re just people. But they are influential experts for us. So that’s probably our best generic term for all the people that we hold in our database.

Mariska: Yeah, indeed. But I think, like you said, I also feel that it’s a duty and our role and our responsibility to also to get more recognition for influencers in general. And again, together with a human approach to get more awareness for what is actually B2B influencer marketing, because a lot of people and if I speak with clients, it was especially in the beginning, I noticed now that perception of influencers, luckily is changing. But a lot of people don’t see them as humans, they just want to see them as a sort of selling machine. And they don’t always see the long term perspective. Luckily, that has changed also, I think also with a pandemic. But also before I saw a change of perception in general for influencers.

Tim: Exactly. Well, I think it’s testament to some of the work that you do at Word of MICE as well. I mean, you’re very vocal about that and I think there’s a community of B2B influencer marketing practitioners that are helping change this. So I think it’ll take a couple of years. But I think we’re well on the way.

The impact of B2B influencer marketing

Mariska: It’s interesting also to share your vision about the future of B2B influencer marketing and also talking about the impact of B2B influencer marketing. Because, I think, still a lot of people underestimate what you can get out of the campaign on a B2B level. So can you share some insights outside of the report, in general, the impact of B2B influencer marketing, because I think that’s a huge underestimated value part of the campaign.

Tim: From working with lots of global enterprise brands, the results that we see from influencer marketing is, if we look at brand awareness first and then demand generation, as the main two goals, we see up to 30 times awareness and engagement on social content when influencers have generated the content versus brand generated content.

So we see a massive increase in awareness engagement, we also qualitatively see an increase in the quality of content and they inspire conversations, there’s a very different flavor to the content. So that’s on the awareness, engagement front, on the demand generation, if you have a webinar with an external influencer, and we’re seeing up to five times demand generation, so five times generation of leads, for example. Sometimes it’s 50% more, sometimes it’s twice as much, three times, but it’s up to five times that we see with the external influencer voice. So wonderful results. You’re compared to the benchmarks that the brands have. And obviously, there’s lots of factors in determining how successful those particular campaigns are.

New roles for influencers

Mariska:  I think still a lot of people underestimate the impact of a B2B influencer marketing campaign and getting them. After you’ve done the report, what is your personal also seeing, of course, the pandemic, which had a huge impact on our personal and professional lives, how is now, have your visions have changed about B2B influencer marketing for the future?

Tim: It’s a good question. From our research, it showed that there was, the influencers are saying that they’ve got the same amount of work, or more. I mean, a few of them who were speaking at lots of events obviously, had to adapt their offering very, very quickly. And that was important. So I know people that have really upskilled themselves on the lighting on the recording on being MC (emcee) at events. And you know, people like Brian Fanzo, for example, have made a business out of like showing their journey and how they’ve adapted and they’ve had to make some big changes.

But overall, the influencer work has increased. I mean, the brands have no physical events, no way in which they can network or drive leads, they have, you know, everything is digital selling. And, you know, this is, I think, just accelerated the trend that we were already seeing. So, our strategy in Onalytica hasn’t changed. I think we’ve just been, I mean, from a personal strategy, we’ve just been working more with tech firms because they were the ones that were trying to capitalize on this opportunity. Whereas maybe some other firms in travel or hospitality or something like that, were really just trying to survive as businesses so they just shut down a lot of spending around advertising and marketing. So I think that they will come back.

But I think in the B2B areas of tech, finance, healthcare, the areas that are really booming and haven’t really seen much, much of a hit in terms of their revenues, it’s been increasing if anything.

New opportunities for influencers in the MICE industry

Mariska: Okay, well interesting to see of course, we coming from the hospitality mixing events industry, we see that the industry of course, has been hugely hit. And 2021 is not looking very bright, unfortunately. Despite that our strategy has slightly changed and we see there’s a huge support and I’m focusing also on social media but despite there is still a demand for B2B influencer marketing because like you said, we are the ones creating the events and you don’t have the possibility to meet, or to have that face to face interactions with your clients. So therefore, I think B2B influencer marketing is a great way to do webinars to do interviews, podcasts, online panel discussions, online events, I mean, or Instagram stories, LinkedIn live, we have so many opportunities to stay in touch with your audience. And that using influencers, I think it’s only a great value. And I think some ways epidemic has pushed forward some companies to think differently than it would have thought before. So I see there is also positive change for the future for B2B.

Tim:  I would agree with that. And a lot of the marquee events that didn’t happen or just couldn’t deliver the same results. I think we are seeing virtual content series with influencers being something like a thought leadership plane, which might be across two or three months, where they have 10 different video series with one influencer per video series, or using the same influencer for multiple ones and integrating their subject matter experts internally as a good way of driving the attention and awareness and just creating really good content.

Let`s talk about data and metrics

Mariska: We think that data still plays a huge underestimated role in many, many industries. How do you think that we can improve the role of data? And also in combination with the current situation with the pandemic?

Tim: Data is at the heart of everything that we do. I think it’s a really difficult and challenging area for companies, because marketers and communications professionals really struggle with measurement. And I think there’s a number of different ways to look at this. I think it’s, if we start with the influencers, the influencers need to be able to measure their impact on things that brands care about. So if you have a few posts, and you get 50 likes or 60 likes, then they need to translate that into something that the brand can make a business case for internally. So the influencers need to improve their own measurement. And they also need to do a better job at showing how well they perform compared to their competitors.

Measure the impact of influencers on social media

That could be other influencers in the community that people could choose to work with. So we’re trying to help the influencers, measure their impact on LinkedIn, and Twitter to take two channels, but also tried to have some proxy for offline influence as well, which is really difficult, but there are some solutions there. So I think that’s how the influencers can understand their own value and bring that as their kind of profile showcase or media kit, then there’s having a passion for ensuring that they deliver for the brand.

So once they’ve created the content, if that’s what the brief is to ask whether the brand is happy that they’ve hit their targets, from working with them, I think the feedback from brands is that not many influencers, asked those questions, and to be able to like make sure they deliver that return, and the ones that do, stand out. So I think that’s from the influencers standpoint.

I think from the marketers standpoint, then they need to have a benchmark to understand how well they’re doing, you know, on day one, and what good looks like and then to be able to measure the uplift when they’re working with influencers. So they can start translating that into what senior management really care about. And quite often, the benchmark is not done before. So there’s some really good results. But senior management don’t really know what good looks like. And it can’t just be social media metrics. So I think the benchmark is important, I think then be able to get influencer marketing onto the CMO scorecard.

So there’s one metric that can really define the value of influencer marketing, whether that’s reach engagement, brand, share voice, a combination of those, like an influencer index, I think that needs a lot of thought. And I suppose my last point on measurement is it’s really important to connect all of the metrics together.

Challengers in B2B influencer marketing

I know that Christopher Penn talks a lot about this. He’s an analytics expert in the US, I respect hugely in this domain. And I think he’s right that you need to connect a number of metrics together. So you have the initial metrics on social media to show how well the content might have landed. But then you need to connect the metrics, it could be referral site traffic, it could be leads, it could be, then the conversion of those compared to other demand Gen tactics that you have. And to be able to integrate this as a strategy, it has to be connected to the other ways in which you measure things.

So I think that area has a long way to go, I think it’s getting better. But the more results influencer marketing gets, the more visibility, it’ll get on the senior management, the more that the spotlight will shine upon it, the more the return on the campaigns will be asked for by people’s managers, and the more measurement will improve as a result of those questions. So I think it will just take the next years to really enable data and analytics to be at the forefront of this. And, yeah, I am very passionate about data and analytics. So I think there’s multiple different angles. So the people that do influence marketing are not necessarily measurement specialists. I think it’s really challenging area.

Do you measure results?

Mariska: Yeah, this is what I want to say, because we sometimes also struggle that industry experts, as we talked about, are excellent in their job, and they can create excellent content, but they’re not always good in then delivering that data. So it’s also for us sometimes a challenge to push the industry experts to the next level and say, okay, but we need to prove the clients paying for you. So we need to prove that. And that return on investment, what is important for the brand, so, and also for the brand sometimes other perspective, it’s not always easy that we get. And so if you ask: ‘Where do you want to go? When are you satisfied with the outcome? Can you really define it?’.

There also are challenges because what are our referral points? For example, where can we start? So we see there is still also on that point of the ‘bridge to gap’, some brand companies are way ahead, then of course others and also within the industry experts, some people are more better with data. But I think we still say we trying to push our community and industry experts also to put data on the forefront. And to put it also in our brief that, for example, and how can you prove the return on investment of the campaign. So we also added already in the brief. So we know that we asked for the data as soon as possible.

Tim: I think it’s great, just asking for that and and trying to connect it up. I think that’s a great thing to ask. And a lot of people miss it out. I guess it depends if the influencers are getting a ton of business from loads of brands, then the pressure is not on them to always measure those results. If the business is drying up, and they need to prove more of their impact, then it’ll be the first thing that they do. So I think it’ll be a natural shake out of the industry.

But if you don’t measure the results, if your audience is not what the brand is looking for you’ll get found out at some point, it’s not just about you’re having 100 likes from random community, it’s got to drive something valuable for the brand. So yeah, maybe there’s been some social media amplifiers, if you can call some people out there that have pushed around content on the internet, but not too much more. And I think brands are looking beyond that now.

Mariska: Yes, that’s true. We can see in the MICE industry and we used to be a live business and face to face, we push them all into the digital aspect. So, I think, digital marketing in general influencer marketing is now much more on the agenda than ever before

The second season of B2B Influencer Marketing Chat Series

Welcome to the B2B Influencer Marketing Chat Series where we talk about influencer marketing in the world of MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events). We speak with people from all around the globe about the role, the meaning, impact and possibilities of B2B influencer marketing. You can listen to us and our guests on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts.

We launched the next season of our talks in November 2020. Follow us on Eventbrite and sign up for coming chats with influencers, CVB`s representatives and many other interesting guests from the MICE industry and Social Media world.

 World of MICE  – events on Eventbrite registration.