Josh wants to start an influencer program

Hey, Jess, you know that demo that we're friends with at that one company? - Yeah, the one with Stripe Budget. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we were at dinner the other night. We had a couple too many drinks. She showed me her entire influencer strategy. And my question for you is, like, why aren't we doing that? (upbeat music) - Hey, Josh, remember when you did that classic CEO thing where you came to me with an idea that you got from another CEO at a totally different company at a totally different stage with a totally different budget. And you wanted me to do that same idea. - Well, first of all, I think you need to drop your attitude. (laughing) - Yeah, it's like, do you remember that? And I don't know why you said it that way because there's nothing wrong with exactly what I did, but yeah, do you remember that? - Okay. - Yeah, do you have an issue with that? - No, none. (laughing) - Yeah, this was so funny because this happened, I think, like, around or after the time we had recorded the first season of the podcast where we had a whole episode dedicated to CEOs going out on trips, meeting other CEOs and then bringing back horrible ideas. - Yes. - Do as I say, not as I do. - Exactly. (laughing) - Yeah, I was, I think in San Francisco, we're at some trips somewhere. And at the end of, like, a long event day, like, we were trying to figure out what we're gonna do for dinner and I got grouped up with this other CEO that, to your point, is that a different stage of their business and has a totally different budget. And we, like, literally had several drinks and by the end of it, she, like, whips out her phone and she's like, I have to show you the hack. And I was like, yeah, show me the hack. She's like influencers and she goes through this, like, whole thing of just, like, all of our pipeline is coming from influencers right now and you just need to follow this 27 step process. And I was like, if not 27 steps for me and I'm gonna tell Jess, she's gonna do the other 27 steps. - Uh-huh. - Yeah, no problem. - Yeah. - Yeah, that was fun. (laughing) Here's the thing. The, I wanted to do influencers too. You weren't wrong. - Of course not. - Of course not. A never. But yeah, I think it was more of, like, let's figure out how to do this the right way for us. - Yeah. - So I remember saying, let me come back to you with a plan that will work for us. - Yeah. - That was episode one where we talked about where I pitched the marketing budget for the first time. This was part of that. So the idea was in, like, a content creation bucket where we were gonna have some influencers actually come up with some thought leadership type content for us and we had, like, $12,000 earmarked for that. - Yeah. - Very different than your CEO friend's program. But that's okay because you have to start somewhere. And this was a test for us. We'd never done it before. I'd never done my, I've been paid to do post before. I've never been on the other side where I have to, like, actually create the program. - Yeah, that's interesting. In a second, I'm curious to hear how yourself being used as an influencer helped you build our own. But I will say to your point, I think the one thing that I failed, I think most CEOs failed when they bring these ideas back to their marketing leaders is context, right? Like, are we at the same stage? Do we have the same investment? Do we have the same amount of teams? 'Cause we didn't. (laughing) I think it was just you and Alex at the time, which let me count really good one too. That's not a big marketing team. - That's very small. (laughing) - The carry the one. - The carry the one. - The carry the one. - I round up, I guess it's two. So okay, so obviously I brought this great idea that you, more or less, weren't already thinking about, but because it came out of my mouth, was so much better of an idea at that point. - Right, yeah. - You're like, okay. - The man's playing it to me. - You're like, oh, make so much more sense now. - You're right boss, you should do this. (laughing) - All right, so you're like, okay, we should do this. Walk me through how you actually went about doing that. - Yeah, so realistically, we wanted to build a pilot program. That is my recommendation for anyone who's ever thought about, maybe we should try some influencers, is like, so small, start with a pilot. I was thinking we could probably have about eight influencers with the budget we had. And we ended up with seven. So kind of the mix was three customers. - Yeah. - It felt really important to have customers in the mix who have used Vector for the actual use cases we want them to, to actually be able to talk about the results. - Yeah. - And then we had four thought leaders, well-known influencers, demand-gen marketers on LinkedIn, who were not necessarily customers, but they have the ear of our ICP. And knowing if we gave them access to our tool, it would pretty quickly click for them. - Yeah. - How interesting and different and important this, this, our product was. - It's interesting that like, so when I was at this, like a super prestigious CEO dinner, when I thought about influencer marketing, I thought you just like, find somebody with like a million followers and just like tell 'em, talk about your thing. It sounds like you're like talking about like authenticity and like things like, like we actually care about. So you went after a customer. - Oh, thank you. - That sounds way less fun than that CEO made it out to be. So you went after a couple of things. You went after existing customers. - Yep. - But then you prioritize like influencers that had like the ear of our audience. It wasn't necessarily people that had millions and millions of followers, but people that had authentically built reputations where we wanted to go create awareness. - 100%. I think I took a look back at our set of influencers. We had like an average following of 13,000 people. - Yeah. - Really nice little sweet spot for building trust. - Yeah. - And these were all folks who, you know, Kaley Edmondson and Brittany Blanken, who have built careers doing the mangen, talking about best practices. And for them to talk about us was like a really big deal. There's a lot of trust built up there. So that was what I was really looking for. It was like people who had built that trust. - Yeah. - Who really knew what they were talking about, deep practitioners. - Yep. - But what they say carries a lot of weight. - What was the, did you know, because you already have a little bit of a following and you've been building a community here, did you know exactly who you were going to pick or what was the process for finding these right people? - I had a list of folks that I wanted to like try to work with. - Yeah. - They were all people I had followed for a while. So I knew the quality of their content and the types of topics that they were posting about and that aligned with what we wanted to talk about as well. - Yeah. - A big thing. - The other thing I really wanted to look for was people who had newer storytellers who could like really bring people in through the way that they craft their posts. They're not just kind of like going to take my brief that I give them and just spew it back. - Yeah. - The reason they have this trust built up is because they've lived it. They've done it. They've seen all these different scenarios. - Yeah. - And they can play that back to people in a way that is able to teach them something. - Yeah. And I think you set them up for this because what I loved is like you picked customers which meant like we actually had to have the product deliver value, right? I think there was at one point, one of our amazing influencers that's a customer is Sydney Waterfall. And she, I remember at one point, I think we actually had an issue with the product, right? And we had a brief in front of her and we needed to get that part of our product fixed, right? So there was authenticity to it. - Yeah. - And even the people that weren't customers, you gave them access to our products. - Yeah, so that was a really big thing. And this feels like a big takeaway again, if you're thinking about like starting one of these programs is you need to do it in a way that allows these folks to have access to your tool. - Yeah. - So you can't just expect an influencer to like wanna talk about what you're doing if they've never experienced it for themselves, if they've never been able to try it, get an even like get in there and like poke around a little bit. You have to, they have to feel good about what they're talking about. They have to believe in it. And so in order to do that, I gave all of the influencers full access to the product. I actually had Amy who's on our customer solutions team do a proper onboarding with every single one of them. - That's cool. - So that they could really understand what they could do in there. - Yeah. - And it would help inform the content they put out. - What was for someone that's like me that's never thought about putting together influencer program, maybe a younger marketer that hasn't had the opportunity to do this. Like how do you, okay, you pick the people, you have this brief of what you want them to write about or like directionally. Do, do, when you're picking out influencers, do you have a budget in mind, do you ask them what they cost? Like how do you actually execute getting influencers to work with you? - Yeah. So for this pilot, I knew that the budget, I calculated the budget that we had based on $500 a post, one post per month for three months. I wanted to do a quarter long pilot and see how it went. Now admittedly that is a low rate for the size of audience. Typically it's in the $752,000 a post range. That's pretty, that's pretty acceptable. So I was going into it knowing like they may say no. I did have some people say no and that's totally fine. I was, I was ready for that. What it meant to me was I wanted to build a longer term relationship and I was very upfront about like, I know that this is not probably your typical asking price. We would love to bring you a board and as this grows, so we'll have the rate. - Yeah. - And so I think what that did was it brought people on who really believed in us and were fans. - Yeah. - That felt really important too to like, not just bring somebody on because they had a bunch of followers and were cool. But like we want friendly, we want people who really believe in us and are rooting for us. Yeah, I think that was huge and I think it also proved to me that like you don't have to go for the biggest voice in the industry, right? There was a couple of people we work with that. I think maybe hadn't done paid influencership stuff before, right? And there's a cool opportunity for them to get paid for like the community they had been building, and yeah, that was that was really really cool for me to see. Yeah. I'm Josh. Yeah, you know what time it is. What time is it? It's time. I don't think it could get any more awkward than this, but it's gonna. Yeah, it's gonna because we're going to look into the camera deep deep right in the center. We're going to deliver What all the people need to hear in words in words of affirmation from our mouths to your ears Dear marketer your webinars generate leads standing ovation and Dala Dala bills just print money with those webinars money y'all That one made more sense if you watch the video version of this thing. We did the little like pushing the money of my hands. Can you hear it? Yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, your marketer you build urgency into your copy so perfectly that FOMO develops FOMO. Oh, poor FOMO. No, I can like see him. Yeah, you're missing out of missing out. No, it'd be okay. Yeah, poor guy, okay So so you picked out all these people you've kind of set what your budget is going to be some people are okay with Some people pass Now you've got these handful of folks that you're really excited about running this pilot with what do you ask them to do? What's a brief look like? Yeah, so I give them I give them like three things. I give them a timeline so One post a month You know, maybe two weeks out from when I actually wanted them to post I would send them the brief and I would tell them a range of dates that would be like here's kind of when it would be great if you could post kind of thing Yeah, it offers flexibility. I've been on Programs before where I've been the influencer, and you have to hit a specific date And sometimes it's hard because you may yourself have something launching that day and you really want to post about it Yeah, and so you kind of have to like finagle that a little bit. Yeah, so I wanted to give them a range because everyone has things going on Yeah, and just that like preference would be like Monday through Thursday, right Friday's kind of questionable in terms of Reach and impressions. So so Monday through Thursday during that week was like the preferred posting time didn't always happen like so things come up, right? Like you still have to be flexible enough with your influencers To let them be like hey, I got this thing right so that happened a couple times totally fine didn't derail a single thing. Yeah, so flexible timing is number one Number two is a really tight brief. So doesn't it have to be like any dissertation like I think most of them were a couple paragraphs of Like what is it? We want you to talk about a couple of bullets around messaging that they could either borrow or like Use as a jumping off point. Yeah some screenshots or Some graphics if it made sense. Did you theme them around sort of what was going on in our campaigning? Did you have them all kind of posts like similar things like walk me through that? I did So the first post we actually aligned with the product launch So we had a product launching called signal driven ad audiences. Yeah, and we asked them to post about that and it didn't even have to come out on the day of the launch We kind of peppered it the week after so that it would be like you know the internal team talked about the actual launch on the day Of and then the following week we've kind of see all these influencer post pop up, which was a nice little waterfall Talk to me really quickly. I'm gonna interject talk to me about like the pacing of these because I imagine if you're tying it to a specific launch You want to create a little bit more momentum around that launch versus maybe if it was around a launch You kind of what like always on influencer posting is that true or how do you think about the timing of I tried to think of it as like I wanted them to all post around the same week. Okay It helped me personally selfishly. Yeah, just keep track of everything as one person trying to run this program Yeah, it helped when I then had to reach out a week later and but can you give me your results from that post? I could do all that at once. So it really just helped me organizationally to keep them all around the same That's a good hack. I wouldn't have thought through that which is like yeah Maybe you would like to do around like all month long posts, but at the The uplift that puts on you managing that program it might not be worth it It's tough. Yeah, and I think now the LinkedIn algorithm at this moment in time At time of publication. Yeah Is still pushing like two and three week old posts? Yes, so It really wasn't like anything I was concerned with like I knew that we'd get a good group of people to see it in the first week Yeah, and then a couple weeks later we'd have kind of follow-on effect It's a good point if you're listening to this podcast on LinkedIn it probably came out four weeks ago. Yeah It's so bad. I don't know why they made that change. I don't know It's weird, but then sometimes I see really good stuff and I'm like oh, yeah, yeah, I was glad I did see that I just don't like when I like Here some like sometimes we'll talk at work I'm like, oh, did you guys see that post and then I'm like no? No, where is it? I'm like oh, there it is You guys I saw it. I saw it. It was funny. You guys are right. They were like we're done Yeah, it's not even cool. We're talking about Taylor Swift's album now Get with the program. Okay, so that first post was about that product. Yeah, the second post was actually Around the time when we got our initial survey results. Yeah, so a couple episodes ago you and I talked about how we Positioned the company. Yeah, and part of kind of figuring out the right messaging was we surveyed 80 demand-gen marketers. Yeah, those survey results came out and they were really really compelling. Yeah, and so I wanted to do my best to create content and Push those the findings like as far as we could And so I gave the report to all of our influencers I gave them a handful of like graphics that they could use to kind of show off the different Statistics that spoke to them to the most and essentially asked them to like Find the one or two pieces of data in here that like speak to you. It's cool. And do a post about it So the brief was really pretty loose beside like here's the data and here's what it told us like what is it? What are the implications to you? Well, but they enjoy that though, right? Because I feel like every every one of our influencers and even yourself as a content creator You have a vibe right something you're known for right you you made a good Name for yourself in content specifically, right? So I imagine if someone engages you as an influencer You want to try to tie it back to the things you're known for where your audience is so I'm assuming that was received a while of that flexibility Yeah, for sure and and I think they all picked vastly different statistics right because they all have different perspectives and backgrounds and like their companies are very different So it was like the thing that spoke to them in their situation. Yeah, it was a little bit different and how they how they Interpreted it was different as well, which is really interesting. What was the third one the third one was about a product We have called ad reveal. Yeah, so again, we've been going through this repositioning. We're really focused on ads I wanted that to shine through in this third post This was kind of like the last of the three and I really wanted to make it count So we have a product called ad reveal it lets you see who's clicked your ads By name even if they don't convert So it was pretty cool um and I essentially gave them like messaging points about the product itself And some questions that might spark a post so it was like How would you think differently about Reporting on ad performance if you knew who was clicking on it. That's cool How would you surface this information to your marketing leader and your exact team Like what what does that even look like to be able to tell them who you can add Um, so yeah, like and what would you do with it afterwards? What would you do with a segment of ICP Buyers who you know clicked your ads, but didn't convert like what's the next action? Okay, so um the first flexible timing Second thing was a really tight, but short a brief brief Yeah, brief brief And the third is creative freedom and I think this is really important because These folks have like been doing this a while. They know what they're doing Yeah, they clearly built an audience of people that trust them And they did that on the run without any of your help. Yeah, yep, and so to think that you could give them um So much like direction And almost dictate what they need to say is like really foolish like yeah, it's gonna come off as completely an authentic Yeah, I'm gonna turn a lot of people off. It's gonna be very clear that this is kind of an anomaly This doesn't really sound like that. Yes, and most likely they're not going to agree to that. Yeah um So I think giving them kind of the freedom to do what they do best and understand their audience best and their tone and their vibe Yeah, they're format, you know, they are they really into video or they just do text like my text post perform Outperform my video wow, I don't know five six to one wow And sometimes I'll have companies come to me like oh, we only want video and I'm like that's fine I just I know for a fact it won't perform for you. Yeah, I want it to yeah Um, and so yeah, I think just kind of let them loose like give them what they need and let them go You know how I feel or you know how I know that this worked is When I would scroll through our my LinkedIn feed and I would come across one of these like sponsor or these like influencer posts I Didn't know if when I got to the bottom of the post I would see the hashtag vector partner or not right like if you don't know whether it's an influencer post That tells you it's a really good influencer post. Yeah, on the contrary I think we've all been on LinkedIn within like the first sentence. You're like this is a sponsored partner and post um Which brings me to one more thing that I thought you did really well with the creative freedom is You know we stop doing influencers that you just given the same banner of the same product launch. Like what a waste of your budget. Like it's so easy to tell that like it's basically an ad at that point, which is kind of defeats the purpose of finding like authentic influencers that have communities that you want to authentically get into. - Absolutely, yeah. You can give them a graphic as like, hey, here's the information. Here's what our corporate page is going to be posting. Do your own thing. I think it's interesting that you brought like a diverse set of influencers, some of them executives, some of them tactical practitioners, right? And so to have some of these prompts that are open-ended where it's like, hey, how would you physically use this feature if you're a practitioner? How would you report on this, right? To your executive or if you are an executive, how would this influence like how you think about things? And I felt like as a result, especially in that third one, I remember seeing the post come through on LinkedIn, you got really diverse sort of perspectives on this thing that we had launched. - Yeah, and it was really exciting to see that. And that was actually I think our most successful of the three just across the board. - Wow. - And it's hard to tell why, right? Like it could be a mix of like the actual product is really compelling. The stories that our influencers told were really compelling. The day of the week that it was posted on, like all those things, right? You'll never know why that was the biggest hit. But yeah, and it was really exciting. I think it was a really good validation to see that our messaging is striking a chord. Speaking of that being one of the more successful of the three that we did, how, like how did you goal this? How did you measure success? It feels so like intangible sometimes. - Yeah, I did not directly track. So it wasn't like I consciously chose not to give each of them like a UTM code. And I thought I might, like in the very beginning, I was like, oh, I gotta spin up some UTM codes for these guys so they get when they actually like send someone to a blog post. I know it was Kaylee that sent them there or whatever. But it started to get really complex. It started to be more than I could track. And I was like, you know what, this is the pilot. I just wanna see directionally that this is working. I think we're gonna feel it. I don't think we need like such direct tracking this first time around. So I did not do that. What I started to see, I think it was around that same time that we started implementing. How did you hear about us in our demo request zone? - Yeah, yeah. - And that was kind of my solve for this was like, if I start to see LinkedIn or I start to see some of these influencers names pop up like, okay, there we go. That's a nice little sign. - Also can we pause? - Yes. - Vectors the only company. I think because we market to marketers, where I've seen the like, how did you hear about us? - Where majority of people fill it in and give like wild detail about where they heard of us. They're like, this is my God given duty as a marketer to give you the very specific way. - Yeah, they're like, you want that first touch attribution? I'll tell you where I saw you. - Yeah, I got you, bro. - I got you, girl. Which brings you back to like the UTM thing, which is like, yes, you can try to measure everything, but like attribution, how many people like, see the influencer post and like scroll to the comments and click that specific link, right? And like how much that attribution can throw off your scent to what is and actually isn't working for you? - Exactly. It just felt like too much, especially for a pilot. - Yeah. - So we did not do that. What we did see though was almost immediately, a pretty big influx of, how did you hear about us coming from LinkedIn? - Yeah. - Which we were getting a decent amount of, because you and I are pretty prolific posters. - Yeah. - Ali has now started really into posting a student amazing job, Nick posts really consistently. So like, we have a good group of us who post quite a bit. It was one of the top lead sources, but very quickly it became the top lead source. - Yeah. - There were even a couple times where people would say, like I saw this person's LinkedIn post. - Yes. - If they didn't put it in the, how did you hear about us? It popped up in the alert for the sales call. - Yes. - So they would be like, yeah, I saw this person's post and I was really intrigued. - Which you talked about this in season one, but I think it's important just to bring a pack up for anybody that either didn't listen or they're trying to build that one of these influencer programs now. You set up call recording software to like a gong. I think for us we're using fathom, that's cheap. And you are using that. Not as the end all of the attribution software, but it allows you to capture a little bit of this attribution that otherwise you don't get enough form. - Yeah, we set up some alerts in there. It was really simple. We have some different categories. So like if someone, when we first decided to pivot to ads use cases and ads focus, we did a whole category of ads keywords. Those started popping up way more than we were seeing before. I have one for the podcast. So I have the word podcast and this meeting could have been a podcast. YouTube is another one I have in there. So I wanted to set one up for influencers. So I think I added keywords like influencers, influencer posts. I added all their individual names. So yeah, that was what pop up everyone's in a while. And so it was just like, okay, this is something's happening because of this. So that was really exciting. After the pilot was over, I didn't really know what to expect. I didn't know what I would get out of $12,000. Like I had no idea. I didn't want to put like a number around it of like this many opportunities. 'Cause I just had no idea. So at the end of the program, I jumped into like our demo request channel and I grabbed all that information for the life of the program July to September. And I put it into cloud and I was like, tell me everything where a lead source is linked in or an influencer and tell me how many of those, what percentage came from marketing kind of gave them like the guard rails for like what an ICP demo looked like. So from July through September, we had 45 demo requests where LinkedIn was the lead source or an influencer was the lead source. And of those 45 82% were ICP. - Which is crazy. - Which is crazy. - Yeah, insane. - Yeah. - That was what I got really excited about. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Because what that tells me is if we scale this program, we can expect with the right influencers to continue to hit about that percentage. - And when you think about like the investment for the return there, right, it's like, and again, this goes back to people often asked me, like you guys are doing so great in marketing, like how do you measure it? And I'm just like, we don't, right? Like we measure things, but like we don't measure it as a whole. - And I think that's why we're doing so well. - I think so too. Because it's like, you don't have to get it down to the specific pixel to know that like $12,000 went in. Forty-some demo requests came out and at our conversion of like demo to opportunity and opportunity to close one. Like it, like not even close to there being a question on whether that's ROI positive. - It was, can I give a number? - Yeah. - It was 1.1 million in pipeline. - Wow. - Of of $12,000. - Of of $12,000. - Yeah. So that to me is like an 82% of that is ICP, right? So that to me was like, okay, we have to continue. We have to continue. - Can I call out a caveat really quickly? Because I feel like something that a lot of CEOs struggle with is you hear a number like that and you start to think like, well, why isn't that all we're doing? That's working so well. Here's the problem, right? Like you just want to double down like the things are working. And I think where this gets worrisome for marketers is they're like, well, you know, advertising is harder for us to prove out. So let's pull that back or, you know, organic content, harder for us to prove so let's pull that back. The problem is with any of these programs, like you have to have a mix, right? Because if you and I just said, like I'll screw it, you know, our next million dollars for the budget is just going to influencer marketing. Like there is a cap to like how much opportunity there is there. You have to mix it up with all these other things. So don't take Jess's ROI and stop your other marketing program. - No, I think the influencers are marketing worked really well because we also have a really cool brand. - Right. - We've been very like out and about it. All these events lately. We've made really interesting hiring decisions that made a splash in social. We have some great ads out there. We're doing some really interesting things in video. We have this podcast like all of the other things that have happened, right? So for someone to seal an influencer post and be like, well yeah, I feel like I've heard about these guys. Like I saw something else about them, right? Like it's very likely that wasn't the first time they heard of us. - Agreed. - So I think it's like it's the mix, right? Like all of the things kind of rise the tide. - Yeah. - 100% of the ducks. - All the ducks be rising. The ducks be rising. - It's gonna be rising. - And also let's use this as an opportunity to say marketing doesn't fix product market fit. - No. - Right, like if you're doing all this stuff in your product, fucking sucks. - Yeah. - You're still gonna have an issue. - Yeah, you can bring on all that pipeline and it'll go away just as quickly. - Yeah, 100%. - Absolutely. - Okay, so you went through this exercise of bringing these folks. You've used the word like experiment a lot so far. Like okay, we finished the three months. The contract with these folks are over. Like what do you do next? - Yeah. So I was saying this is a wildly successful experiment. We are absolutely going to keep this going. - Yeah. - We're gonna do a couple things differently. So since this started, we have repositioned ourselves as an ad tech platform. - Yes. - You know, as a tool you used to build your ad audiences, there were a couple of our influencers who wrote fabulous content for us. - Yep. - That at this point probably aren't the best. because we need to keep this narrative tight 'cause it's brand new, we cannot waver from it. So we are going to just change up the mix of folks a little bit so that we're making sure we're keeping that ICP in mind and our use case of ads. We're moving away from this idea of positioning ourselves as a competitor of ABM a bit. So we wanna make sure that the influencers support that. So we're just gonna do a little bit of mixing up there. We're gonna keep a handful of those folks that really fit that for us and we're gonna bring on a couple of new ones, which is exciting. - Yeah. - I would like to experiment with some video this time around where it makes sense. I think video can give you some really interesting results in terms of actually getting product led content. So maybe having some of our customers do build a segment or launch an ad campaign using a vector audience or look at campaign reporting, is that a vector could be really cool? - How do you think of, so for this next phase, I feel like there's a couple of levers you could experiment with. I'm curious if you think of experimenting one thing on time or multiple. So one thing I think of is like, seven worked really well for us. Could we do 12? Could we do 20? But I also think about the content itself, right? Video, how to, right? Like do you think in this next phase, you will both change type of content and quantity or will you pick one lever at a time to experiment with? - I think we'll probably pick one lever at a time. I'd love to give it another quarter of same size group with some different flavor to the format because I think beyond this group, I can't do it myself. It starts to get really big and complicated. And I'm gonna need like a vendor or partner, money please. - Money please? - No. - Absolutely. - Should have thought about it at the beginning of the year, would we be planning just? - We're doing it. - Are there tools, is this like a person's job, is this a demand job? - There's a couple different ways you go about it. So there, I mean, you can, there are companies that have had influence or marketing that they have such robust programs. - Yeah, come here. - They have a full time, yeah, person. I don't think we're there. - Yeah, good. - I think this is more either agency or contractor to like really figure this out for us and just control all of the details. Even just like right down to the contracts, you know, like seven different contracts being sent out all being differently red lined. - I didn't think about that. Yeah, you had a lot of like, what would you call that? Just like a back of office kind of stuff you had to do to get stuff in. - That has to get done, yeah. - Right, all the invoicing, all of those things. - Should have made you do our card. (laughing) - I do some stuff around here. - I didn't even realize you were doing all that stuff. - Yeah. - All right, cool, cool, cool. - Yeah, I just, what do you think? I just got magically done like your laundry? (laughing) - That was for you, Jenna. - Yeah, that was for Jenna, yeah. Still like that one, I'll give it that clip. (laughing) - So yeah, I think it will require some help as this grow. So I want to do one more quarter where we don't make it much bigger, but we try a couple different things. - Yeah. - And then I think we'll have learned quite a bit from that. - Yeah. - You will be able to hand off a ton of learnings to whoever we bring on. - Yeah, I love that. - One thing I do think we're gonna try that is expanding the scope of this just ever so slightly. - Yep. - Is, by the time this comes out, this will already be known. So I'm gonna spill it here. - Yeah. - But we actually signed to sponsor Task Bober and Tim Davinson's podcast, notorious B2B. - Yeah. - With that sponsorship comes a post a month from Task and Tim. - Yep. - So it's like influencer adjacent because we get their kind of content on LinkedIn. We also get the mid-roll reads and the sponsorship mentions in the podcast itself. - Yeah. - We're the umbrella of influencer marketing because of that aspect of it. - Yeah. - And so I think that'll be a really interesting thing to see too is like how does that extra little bit of like promo for us? - Yeah, I think that's smart, which is like when you're thinking about setting up the influencer program, right? Like it's natural to think influencer, individual person, big community, but there could be like literal communities. Exit five, what they've built over with notorious B2B. Like that's a really interesting way to kind of get like more bang for your buck. Like they're literally going to write for us, but we're also going to garner this community. They've built outside of their individual following. So it's cool. - I'm excited for that one. - That'll be good. So to wrap, what's your sort of like handful of takeaways? If you're standing up your first influencer program, how do you do it? - Start small. You not need a huge budget. Even if you can get three influencers to do some posts for you for a few months, like start there, start whatever works for you. What's the smallest version of this that you could create that makes sense for your brand and your company? So start small. You do not need creators with huge followings. You can find people who have built a really like loyal audience. - Yeah. - Look for trust first and foremost. - Yeah, authenticity over like quantity. - Everything else, yeah. And then third, I would say just like let them do their thing. Like give them enough information to arm them so their post is of the quality that you're looking for. But let them do the storytelling. Let them, they know their audience bass. Like let them do their thing. - I love that. Or as Jess Cook would say, let them cook. - Let them cook. - Six seven. - Six seven, let them cook. - But does this one look good? - Oh, clack it. - Clack it. - This is a new one. This means if you, if they said something and you agree with it and you do this little finger tap thing and you say, clack it. - Clack it. We need to change the name of the podcast instead of this meeting could have been a podcast. It's like how to relate to your agency shelter. - Your middle schooler. - Yeah. - We teach you all the slang. We make it not cool. - Yeah. - That's my goal. - Anyway. - Hey Jess, this was a great meeting but I do have a question for you. - Yeah, what's up? - If I were an influencer, how much do you think I could charge? - Six seven. - Six seven. (laughing) This is a great meeting, Jess. - It was a great meeting. - This meeting could have been a podcast. - It could have. - It was. - It was. - This meeting could have been a podcast as a vector production. Vector lets you build ad audiences from real people that visit your site, click your ads, and research your competitors. Imagine seeing exactly who will see your ads by name before you spend a dime. It's a great time to be a live marketers. Go give it a whirl at vector.co. See you next time.