The First Influencer Marketing Agency... for LinkedIn?

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1:58A few months ago, I got a call from a friend of mine who has been in the influencer marketing and advertising agency space for a long time. He was working on something that was very hush-hush at the time. It was the world's first influencer marketing agency that focuses on LinkedIn, which is to say he was building an agency to help brands connect with influencers on LinkedIn. At the time, he wanted to talk with me about my experience on the platform. It was part of his user research because as maybe I'm pretty active there. And as we talked, I was fascinated to hear what he had learned. He is spotting an opportunity that is really early here, catching LinkedIn in this moment where it's developed a lot of cultural resonance and an entirely new crop of quote unquote influencers have gained large followings and attention.

2:49And of course, the really interesting thing is that unlike influencers on Instagram or TikTok, these influencers on LinkedIn are not what we think of as professional influencers. They're professional professionals. They're often experienced people with real careers or entrepreneurs. So how does all this work? For someone who wants to start monetizing their following on LinkedIn, what should they do? And for brands who want to start reaching a business audience through influencers on LinkedIn, what should they do? I stayed quiet on all this until now, because now my friend's company is live. And I have a lot of questions for him.

3:27So that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to ask a lot of questions. But first, you should meet him. I'm Brendan Gann. I'm a partner, or sorry, I'm Brendan Gann. I'm a co-founder and CEO of Creator Authority. It's so new that old habits are still dying hard. And just to be clear, Creator Authority is... Creator Authority is the first ever LinkedIn influencer marketing agency. And the quick background on Brendan goes like this. So he started his career at a small advertising agency where he started doing YouTube influencer deals at the very beginning of YouTube. And we literally crashed the client's website, got millions of views.

4:04And I was like, this is awesome. So, you know, he was on to something. Then he went to a larger agency called Mechanism, where he did a lot of early branded content work. He worked at a YouTube MCN or multi-channel network. He started his own influencer marketing agency, which he then sold to his old employer mechanism and became a partner and chief social officer there. Now he sits on the VidCon advisory board, does some advising and investing in the space. And a few years ago, he started to look at LinkedIn and he saw something interesting. We're at this inflection point with LinkedIn. They've invested a lot in the creator ecosystem.

4:41system going back to 2021. They launched the creator mode, create a grant program, hired partner managers to support creators, and that's really paying dividends. The amount of public content being shared grew 24 % year over year. That was a data point that was shared in October, so I'm sure it's much higher now. It's this highly qualified affluent audience. They hit over a billion users. They're about 1.36x more affluent than a typical meta user. So they've got disposable income. In addition to that, LinkedIn has quietly been rolling out a number of tools to support brand creator partnerships.

5:20In, I believe it was June of last year, they launched a brand disclosure tool. They also launched the first iteration of Thought Leader ads, which was their version of a promoted post tool. It was initially limited to companies and employees, but you can amplify those posts. But you can see the writing on the wall. Okay, they're getting into promotion of creator content. And just recently, it was like literally two weeks after we announced the launch of Creator Authority, they made the announcement that the thought leader ads would be open up to anyone. So now they're actively pushing and providing support to do promoted posts for influencer branded content.

6:02On top of that, it's been the most trusted platform. And I think from a brand safety perspective, we're seeing a lot of noise out there with Twitter, etc. YouTube had the apocalypse. Facebook had Cambridge Analytica. LinkedIn has had none of these issues. And so I think it's a really trusted environment from both the brand standpoint and the creator standpoint. And so I think all these elements coming together creates just this right ecosystem for brands to work with creators and in a highly trusted environment. Okay. You can see how a guy like Brendan, who has the background that he does, looks at this moment at LinkedIn and says, huh, maybe there's something here.

6:47After the break, we're going to dig into exactly what is there, what he's seeing, how it works, and how maybe you, either as an influencer or as a brand who wants to reach influencers, can get involved. Do you want to put your product in front of millions of customers? I mean, who says no to that? Well, I have the answer. It is Walmart Marketplace. That's the platform for you. With more than 120 million unique monthly visitors to walmart.com, according to Comscore, Walmart Marketplace is one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms. And right now, they're running a limited time promotional officer for new sellers.

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8:31But maybe that's starting to change. 100%. So I think there's two elements of this. One is B2B is starting to very much buy into social media and influencer marketing. But it's been a bit slower. I saw some stats recently from eMarketer where it was like the most successful channels for B2B. They name social media as number one at 49 % and influencer marketing number two at 39%. I think the year before, neither of those was in the top three. And I attribute this to a little bit of TikTok. I think a lot of the B2B companies saw these like really narrow niches oftentimes b2b being discussed and people the fin talk influencers or even like the excel i'm blanking this excel yeah yeah and there are these niches that are relevant to b2b marketers and a lot of them started dipping their toes in water with with tiktok and that's been a little bit of a forcing function in addition to that But to your point, like 100%, LinkedIn, you have people who are like so deep in their careers and their knowledge and expertise, but they maybe never set out to build an audience in the way that somebody did maybe on TikTok or Twitter or YouTube.

9:54They've built one within their trusted network of peers. And the stakes are very high with these SaaS products that you're selling. They cost six plus figures pretty easily. and people tend to look at what their peers are doing and trusted voices in the space. So I think you can be an air quotes influencer without a massive audience because you don't need a massive audience when you're talking about a lot of these categories. And that's something I have been seeing in so many. Let me tell you a quick story that isn't about LinkedIn or influencing necessarily, but just to highlight what I found to be the, surprisingly lucrative power of reaching a niche business audience.

10:42So I was just talking to a guy who has a background as a CFO and now is the host of a podcast that doesn't reach very many people, reaches a thousand or 2000 people, small audience, but they're all CFOs. And he has been selling guest, like sponsored guest slots onto his podcasters. So that is where people pay to be a guest on a podcast, which has never happened here on this show, Problem Solvers. And I don't like that model. I think that it abuses the trust of the listener, but it is something that is in the podcasting space. And so let's just at least engage with it as a real thing. So this is what he's doing.

11:20I think that he's upfront that they're a sponsor. So that would certainly make it much better. Anyway, point is this small audience of CFOs, 1 ,000, 2 ,000 listeners, he is finding sponsors willing, very willing. He takes them regularly, paying$20 ,000 to be a guest on this show. And that is because you think about that, and it's crazy,$20 ,000 to reach one to 2000 people. But then you think about it and you think, okay, these are suppliers that are interested in selling their services at an enterprise level to a CFO. And if they get one client out of this, it has far more than paid for itself.

12:00And why spend a whole ton of money to blast out to a huge audience? You could spend a lot of money on an influencer who's reaching millions of people, maybe some of whom are CFOs, or you could spend$20 ,000 to reach only CFOs. And I am hearing more and more stories like that, where there is a surprisingly high value for a small audience, so long as that audience is the right concentrated audience. They're knowable, they're reachable, and they're high level, which you find on LinkedIn. Yeah, absolutely. There's every niche and expertise. And yeah, it's not necessarily about the right or like a broad audience.

12:44It's about the right audience, especially when you're considering the price points on some of these items. Yeah. So let's talk about, Brennan, what you've learned about the marketplace for paid posts, influencer collaborations, whatever the language you want to use is. Brands paying for people to post on LinkedIn. Where I ultimately want to get to in this conversation is the question that I think anyone listening to this who's active on LinkedIn right now is wondering, which is, do I have enough followers to get paid and how much can I get paid? But let's build our way there, which is to say, what's the marketplace right now?

13:23How common is it that brands are paying quote unquote influencers who it's funny to call them influencers because on LinkedIn, what we're probably talking about are just accomplished professionals who happen to have also built a following on LinkedIn. But for the purposes of the conversation, we'll just keep calling them influencers. What's the marketplace right now? How much of this is happening? And where do you predict it going in the next couple of years? I would say it's pretty nascent and there's more supply than demand. The creators that I have conversations with. It's like a lot of them, they've maybe dabbled in the space.

13:59They've done a handful of brand deals or they're hearing from their friends that brand deals are out there and they're seeing it. And so they're super eager. There are more and more brands starting to play in this space. I would say the early adopters have been a lot of the, generally speaking, been startups who are maybe a bit more, they're looking for unconventional avenues and ways to reach audiences because they've got to be a little bit more. They don't have tens of millions of dollars like a mainstream consumer brand to just blast out and do a bunch of marketing. They need to be really selective.

14:34So it's been a lot of startups, a lot of B2B, a lot of SaaS, although we are talking a lot to everyone from clothing companies to beauty to what's interesting is, and I think this is going to be an arena that grows a lot, is like healthcare because there's oftentimes at the intersection of both B2B and B2C. And, but so there's, I would say like the inventory is very much there. There are probably more brands playing in the space than you, you or I necessarily think, but there's a ton of opportunity and a ton of interest. It's just a lot of brands are just starting to play around with it, dip their toes in the water, do test budgets.

15:16And then And more though, I would say savvy and or startup brands are investing in it heavily. Let's talk some numbers. So I have 8 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. I have been approached by a bunch of brands for partnerships. Sometimes it's just one-off LinkedIn posts that they're looking for. Sometimes it's more of a bundle. Let's say that they sponsor my newsletter and then I can upsell them with a sponsored LinkedIn post as well. But the range that people are willing to pay me for an audience of 108 ,000 followers is shockingly wide. I've had people offer$100. I had one brand offer$5 ,000 for an individual post, one post.

16:05I said yes to that one. So what are you seeing in terms of ranges? Is there a calculation that you're seeing? paying X number of followers equals roughly X dollars per post. How's it working right now? I think going back to your point about that podcast, it's like a very specific audience. Most brands would not pay$20 ,000 to reach a thousand people, but because he's got the right audience, they'll gladly pay it. And I bet his pricing will increase with time and case studies. So yeah, it's definitely not as simple as, oh, here's my follower. what's my rate? There's a million caveats. It's funny, I actually just wrote this like long-winded answer to a creator who was asking me about pricing.

16:48So I'll pull that up and use it as a point of reference. But I think A, it's a very personal question. And I would say to any creator, it's don't be shy about saying no. Ultimately, at least for me personally, it's a very personal decision. But I think your credibility is more valuable long term. And whether that is in business of life or in monetizing your audience. And so I would say as somebody who's doling out these deals, I would prefer a creator just say straight up, no, this is not a good fit for me than be like, oh, I'm going to take the bag. And so it's never quite as simple, but there's a ton of factors, like how in demand your category is, your location, your audience, what your level of engagement is.

17:32Oftentimes there's just this X factor of like credibility, how well known you are. So a number of different variables go into that. In addition to one piece that I've noticed stand out the most is whether or not you're like a native LinkedIn creator, like your audience is homegrown within that ecosystem or you have an audience outside LinkedIn and people are generally aware of you or you're already doing brand deals. So creators who have built an audience totally within LinkedIn, they're probably not as well known amongst marketers yet. And so they don't seem to be able to charge as much, even if they have a much larger audience or maybe are even in the same category as a creator with a footprint outside LinkedIn.

18:18Those that have built up a big TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn is just one of many channels for them are able to charge a premium. And oftentimes they're just bundling it in, like you referenced, like with your newsletter, like an added value or, hey, ship in X amount more and I'll do a post also on LinkedIn. So that's a ton of caveats. If you're asking me for a specific range, I will give one. And it's broad because it's gonna change so much based off of like category. But I would say anywhere from one to 10 % your audience size is probably the ballpark 90 % of deals are going to be playing in.

19:01Obviously the 1 % being on the low end, but if you are an in-demand creator, you're easily charging 10%, occasionally more your audience size. So if you've got 10 ,000 followers in the right category, it's$1 ,000 is easy. And I would say it's interesting. It's almost like a reverse bell curve where it's like smaller creators generally charge a little bit more. And then that sort of as it goes up, the sort of like cost per follower gets a little bit more efficient. And then you get down to the really big folks or back up to the really big folks. And it gets a little bit more expensive again because they're just so much more in demand.

19:41When you're that, you're the top five in a specific category, 80, 90, maybe more percent of the deal flow is probably going your way. And so you can be much more selective and ramp up your pricing accordingly. When I think of influencers on other platforms, I think of people who have in one way or another built a following for the express purpose of advertising to them. When somebody builds a huge following on TikTok or YouTube or whatever, I don't know what their background is, but often they're young and they don't have other established careers or they are older, but they're doing some kind of solo work.

20:19But on LinkedIn, it's interesting because I regularly engage with people who have hundreds of thousands of followers. They're not influencers by trade. They're executives somewhere or they're an HR manager somewhere. And I don't think that there is even a playbook here for can the HR manager of this well-known brand be running sponsored programs with some other brand. It gets complicated in a way that it isn't on other platforms, or at least that's my hypothesis. Are you finding that? And how are people navigating it? I'll caveat it with this sense of, I think over the years, a lot of people have gotten into this, I don't know, air quotes, like side hustle mentality.

21:08So this idea of I'm going to be a creator and talk about stuff, sometimes it touches on my day job. Sometimes it doesn't and monetize that. I think just culturally, we've accepted a lot more. Yeah. Although we have, sorry to interrupt your thought there, but you remind me of, yes, the previous conversation was, can this person who is an employee also have a personal brand? And is that counter to the interests of their employer or not? And that was a big battle that the business world had. and I think has largely come out on the correct side, which is it is not only okay for somebody who works inside of a large brand to have their own personal brand, it is beneficial because the goodwill that they build among their own personal audience can transfer over to their employer and it is foolish to try to stop them from doing that.

22:08But it's one thing to say, okay, you can build a brand, have an audience, express your own ideas, be your own mini public figure. But if there's more and more interest in sponsorship deals with individuals on LinkedIn, we're going to get into the next part of this conversation, which is, okay, you've built the personal brand. Can you monetize the personal brand? And if so, how? So I just wanted to add the context to that because you make an interesting point that we've come a ways, but what you are engaging with here, Brendan, in building this LinkedIn influencer marketing agency is really the second phase, almost the natural next step of this conversation.

22:52But it's interesting. So by and large, those that have built an audience who have a day job, they're cool. So long as there's no like direct conflicts with kind of the company that they're working at, but that would be the case in 99 % of the instances. It is interesting though to see in a lot of the conversations and we don't play in this space but the amount of executives that have teams of people that are like ghostwriting and doing their content strategy within LinkedIn that is such a massive business in and of itself and we those come up a lot in conversations and we've got a lot of friends in the space and we'll send referrals back and forth and that kind of thing.

23:34But I think it's a testament to the engine and influence that LinkedIn is, that some of these executives, some of the numbers I'm hearing thrown around are pretty wild. I've heard as high as 30 grand a month to be managing and creating content for an execs like LinkedIn. Yeah. It's good money if you can find it. So you're saying 30 grand a month is what an executive is paying some content creator to be ghostwriter or an agency to be ghostwriting their social media content. Huh? 100%. So yeah, I would imagine in those instances, those guys probably wouldn't, nor should they probably be doing brand deals because it's like, if you're like the CEO of a big Fortune 500 company, I think you should probably be laser focused.

24:19But if you're somebody that's like a thought leader in the industry and just like out there, but you're not the working on a publicly traded company as a C-suite exec, seems pretty much like by and large, people are game. Now we're going back to imagining somebody listening to this and thinking, is there money for me to be made here? And I want to hit one other audience, which is someone listening to this right now and thinking, huh, should I be paying an influencer on LinkedIn to be raising awareness about my thing? So let's just touch briefly on both of those audiences. The first one, you are now looking at this marketplace and thinking, where is their money to be made and who can make it.

25:00I'm curious who as a good prospect, as a client for your influencer marketing agency, is there a certain level of reach? Is there a certain kind of positioning? For sure. And so our clients are the brands. We're not currently managing the talent. Okay. So you're only working with brands. Yeah. We might get into the talent part at some point, but I think in terms of somebody who's interested in getting brand deals as an individual, my advice would be first and foremost, be consistent and be focused. We're looking at data around, okay, like how you might fit the criteria in many ways, but if you're not out there actively posting and engaging in your community, it probably doesn't make sense for us because it's sporadic.

25:47And you want to be people who have cultivated real sense of community that doesn't happen from a post or two a month, It comes from probably at least three posts a week, I would imagine. Just back in the napkin map, everybody's different, but like three thoughtful posts a week. So I would say be consistent and be focused. What is your zone of expertise? What is your niche? And stick to that and cultivate your community around that and show and highlight your knowledge around that so that it's very easy to like segment you and identify whether or not you're a good fit for a specific product or category or brand.

26:24Because when it's a classic, like when you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. If you're so bright and you're just speaking about like a million different topics, it's going to be hard to get on anybody's radar. So I would just think through about the end of the day, I'd prioritize what are you actually knowledgeable about? What do you care enough to be posting about every day? And what can you do consistently? Because if you don't, the consistency piece is really key. And it's if you don't really enjoy the topic, you're probably not going to be able to keep it up. All that is really useful.

26:53But as somebody be on the radar of a brand who is looking for a sponsorship opportunity. A, you can reach out to me and our company, creatorauthority.co. That's the best way. We're building out a database of creators and basically gathering their information. What are you interested in? What sort of brands you want to work with? What's your category? What's your content type, all this information so that we know we've got this low hanging fruit of people. We know very much what they're interested in. So those listening, do that creatorauthority.co or just find me, Brennan Gann, on LinkedIn and shoot me an email or whatever.

27:32The other thing is just really going back to that other piece. It's we've got a ton of creator discovery tools. We're always backing into, okay, what does this brand need? What is their target? Developing those filters and criteria and then doing a lot of research around, okay, who are the relevant creators in this category? So that's where I think it's like having that defined voice really comes in handy because then you'll pop up on our radar based off of whatever categories you're consistently talking about. Yeah. Be consistent, be focused and hit me up. Fair enough. All right. And then finally, let's just talk about from the brand side.

28:09So I had said a moment ago, if somebody is thinking maybe I should work with a LinkedIn influencer. What's the conversation that you're having with brands and what kind of brands are you having this conversation with about whether or not this is a fit for them? Sure. Yeah. In terms of what types of conversations, it varies based off of needs. Our process is pretty much, hey, give us a brief, let us know about your objectives, target the campaign goals, challenges you're facing. And we go and do research into the category, making sure that we come back with a strategy and approach and we'll pitch it to you around, okay, how do you translate this to be native to LinkedIn?