How to Win at B2B Influencer Marketing with Vin Matano, Founder of Creatorbuzz | Ep. 332

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today's guest, Vin Matano, an ex-sales rep turned into full-time creator and founder of CreatorBuzz. We get into how B2B-influenced marketing really works, what makes a great creator brief, and how brands can actually win with creators. Excited to dive in. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up.

0:48What's up, Ben? Welcome to the Mark Millenius Podcast. Thanks for having me. This is round two. You're in a totally different spot as you were before we talked last. So you want to give people a little bit of background of your progression from sales creator to now business owner so that people know what you're doing now? For sure. Yeah. So prior to starting this business, which I guess we'll talk about in a bit, I spent the last six years at a MarTech company on the sales side. So I was doing the whole outbound cold calling, sending emails, and then went into to a closing role and saw a lot of success there all while building my personal brand, really around sales.

1:30I shared a lot of sales tips and stories about sales, deals I lost, deals I won. And that's kind of how I got into the creator economy. And then fast forward, started to notice a big trend in B2B SaaS companies working with creators like myself, which really was the antithesis of the business that I run now, which is CreatorBuzz. It's a B2B influencer marketing agency. So that's kind of how the progression went. Could you give everybody the landscape of like what B2B influencers is? I know people know what influencers are, but what is like a B2B influencer? Yeah, it's been around for a while, B2B influencer marketing, but it's definitely taking the new form with like the rise of LinkedIn and the creators on the platform.

2:09I'll say in the traditional sense, influencer marketing is when a influencer or someone that has a, you know, maybe a large following in a particular niche promotes a product or service. It's the same case with B2B, right? The traditional sense of influencer marketing is like, you know, maybe I want to promote this water bottle and you're in market for water bottle and you buy this water bottle. B2B is a little bit different. It's an individual who potentially is a knowledge based creator or a professional who has other professionals that follow them. And they're basically promoting a maybe a software is most common or a service to help another business.

2:42let's go into what does a b2b influencer marketing program what are like software companies doing to set these set up a program right now yeah well they can come in a lot of different forms i would say for our clients majority of them are running linkedin campaigns so you know i'll use that sales use case as an example or maybe a marketing use case for your audience but so for example if there's a marketing technology company that exists they obviously want to get in front of other marketers. And there's a lot of trends that are happening right now within the go-to market space that is kind of changing the way folks are buying.

3:17So, you know, marketing departments are spending more and more on digital advertising, which they're actually seeing, you know, less conversions. A lot of people want to shop anonymously. 80 % of the buyer's journey is done anonymously. So, that means they're spending more and more on ads and essentially seeing potentially less return on that. And then on top of that, sales outreach is extremely difficult right now. There's a lot of noise, especially with AI, sales reply rates are around like 1 % to 2 % industry-wide. And buyers really want to shop on their own terms and really shop and get recommendations from friends, from colleagues, from trusted advisors, influencers.

3:51And so that really kind of developed a whole trend of influencer marketing. So going back to the example, if you're a marketing technology company and you sell to other marketers, instead of maybe running an ad and trying to use LinkedIn to target these marketers, you might work with individuals who have large followings that talk about marketing all day, every day, and their followers are all marketers. And you might kind of, you know, get them onboarded to your software and let them use the tool. If they see value in the tool, they can promote the tool in a form of a sponsored post or potentially like a newsletter sponsorship or you as a, you know, podcast host, I'm sure you do a lot of brand partnerships as well to a professional audience.

4:29And that's typically the use cases that we see most. that all makes sense i want to go into like what does like good look like in b2b influence influencer marketing because i know for some brands it's hard to think about hey i need to shell out 10 of my budget to go do this i know it's going to get more and more as people realize that influencers have more influence just how b2c it's been happening for the last 10 years it's going to start doing the same thing for B2B, but what does a good creator look like? What should brands be targeting? What should they set it up as a campaign? Should they do a one-off?

5:08What does good look like in this space? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously it definitely depends on the use case and the type of product that you have, right? I think there's a, in B2B, one of the biggest differentiators for how you set up a campaign is understanding how you go to market. So if you are a sales led motion, your campaign and your influencer motion is going to look wildly different from a company that has a really large PLG motion, meaning someone can just sign up for the tool by themselves. They put their email in and they get access to the tool versus the sales led motion. They might have to talk to sales, go through a long sales cycle, meet with security procurement, might take months.

5:44And so the best campaigns that we're seeing with both in mind are really, really like niching down with the creator. So for example, if you are a, you know, revenue operation software, well, we want to be like deeply embedded into the revenue operations department. And I think companies that we work with kind of take this kind of full funnel approach where they're going back to the use case of revenue operations. Maybe you're working with those ICs who are actual rev ops individuals, and maybe they don't have really large followings, but like all their followers are rev ops folks. They're sharing really tactical, like workflows of how to maybe use the tool, tutorials that maybe don't get as much reach, but it's actually going to, you know, help with the conversions.

6:25Whereas the other group of influencers that we might want to find are more of the ones that can kind of capture attention. And maybe they're creating, you know, specific episodic content. They're creating, you know, skits or parodies or things that'll just address a larger market. And then bringing that, you know, audience to go down the funnel, finally reaching those folks that are in the RevOps roles that are actually, you know, kind of creating those workflows. So to answer your question, the best clients that I see are kind of taking that full funnel approach, finding creators that are helping with the top of the funnel and then helping those helping, uh, working with creators that are really helping with more bottom of the funnel.

6:59One thing you do really well, and you're a great creator with your video content and showing up at conferences and documenting, even this podcast, you're documenting and everything you're doing is documenting. So what are some advice you would give to a B2B creator who wants to get started doing what you're doing, wants to be seen by these brands to start getting partnerships, but they don't even know how to even get, get started. Cause there's a lot of conflicting advice out there, how to be good on LinkedIn, how to be good on Instagram. How to, so what is, how would you recommend someone get started if it was your playbook?

7:36Yeah. You know, I'll just give like my experience of how I got started. I think, you know, there's definitely not a one size fits all, but I think in most cases, most people can benefit from just sharing their own unique story. I attended a video workshop actually with LinkedIn. It was held by the LinkedIn product team that creates the video feed and a bunch of other creators that were there. And the main thing that they talked about was the videos that do the best on their platform really cover like two main things. It's going to be one lived experiences. is. So if all of, if everyone on LinkedIn has a job, you have content to share, you lived an experience of working a job.

8:11It could have been maybe a horrible job. Maybe you had a bad experience and that's okay. You share that. Or maybe you had a really good experience and you learned so much and you had a bunch of wins and like, that's cool to share too. And then the other piece that LinkedIn prioritizes in their video feed is, is value. So unlike TikTok, where maybe you can be rewarded by, you know, doing a funny trend or doing a dancing video, um, purely for entertainment purposes, LinkedIn does not prioritize that within their algorithm. They prioritize knowledge share and lived experiences. So, if you can combine the both of those in one piece of content, like you're golden.

8:48And you have really infinite pieces of content to talk about when you think about it, especially if you've been in the workforce for over a few years or so, like you have plenty of ammunition of things that you wish you knew, things you learned, big wins, any emotion that you're feeling in the day-to-day that's like that's content any anything the day-to-day that you think is just normal and everyone knows about it or that's not the case like you can share any part of your day how to structure your calendar how to respond in slack messages like the littlest things can become content yeah that is amazing and i know a lot of people will come and say like i'm starting to do video i'm not getting any scene at all um you do something i'm just going to use you as an example because you have videos and people can go back and look at your example like one things you do well i mean and that creators could should start following is like even if you're doing these episodic content and they're prioritizing value they're prioritizing lived experiences it's still a feed that's competitive so you do need to do like a good hook in your video and have something hooking someone you need to have good cuts like like good like transitions in the video you need to have emotion to storytelling to i think that's where a lot of people a lot of people come to me and ask me like how do i like get more views on social and a lot of the time it's the content and value is there is just the way they set up the content and format is not there.

10:21Like there's no hook, there's no like the values there, but the, the pieces that make a great video aren't there. Well, I think for someone like, so that advice is really, really important, but that advice also is for someone that's like already experimenting with video there, you know, the advice for, there's a lot of people on LinkedIn that are doing, you know, they grew on the platform by just doing strictly text-based posts and they've never posted a video in their life. And that's unique to LinkedIn. Whereas on TikTok, every user that uploads to TikTok is a video creator, right? And so like there's different levels of the advice.

10:57The advice I would give to a creator that is already testing video and maybe not seeing results is 100 % what you had said. Like we want to dive into the hook, the format. It all comes down to storytelling too. And maybe we can dive a little bit deeper on that, which I'm happy to talk through. But all of my videos, if anyone goes down this feed, I also am a creator and I see the most success actually doing storytelling. And it could be on the simplest topic, but it's really how you tell a story. And on short form content, you story tell much differently than you would in any other format. So, for example, like in school, we're taught how to tell a story where You set the plot or the location of the story, then you set the context, and then you have that problem resolution, and then there's the journey to solve that problem, and then there's the payoff.

11:45That's the traditional story arc. In short form content and in social media, it's completely different. You have to start with the highest point, the climax of the story first, because that's what's going to get people hooked. And then you set the stage, then you set the context, and then you set the journey, and then you set the payoff. So it's almost like you kind of started from the end essentially, and then build out the scene. And if you go through all my videos, they all start that way. There's always, I always start with the climax and then build out the scene. I love it. I also think that that advice does apply to if you're doing text-based posts, like I think you still need some sort of hook in a text-based post.

12:26I think you need some sort of storytelling you need some sort of um value add you need some sort of like way for people to engage if you want to get more people to answer some things but i do agree with you like that's why i love linkedin because i'm shy on camera so when i started five years ago i could just write a text post and not have to show my face and now it's i mean now everybody says show your face but I still think if you're a great, great writer, double down on writing on LinkedIn. Yeah. I mean, I I'm a creator like full and through, like, even though I run a business and that's how I generate most of my income, I am a creator.

13:07And I truly believe that you, as if you identify as a creator, you need to try out different formats, always try new things. Like I have a new series that I'm trying to create and it's something I've never done before. It's like a long form series. I've never, ever done that before. And if you're comfortable with text and you grew your audience on text, that is your sign to probably test out other content formats. And if you're a great writer, chances are you're actually going to be able to create a really great video because you know how to write a great script. What you can even do to get started, if you're a great writer, take your best performing written post and literally just read it on camera because that's probably a pretty good script that you wrote.

13:44That's a perfect place to start. The only difference is around the visual hooks, which is something that you don't have to really consider when doing text posts. So the thing that you really need to focus on is the different types of hooks that are involved when actually creating a video that you really don't have to consider when you're doing a text post. And there's really three types of hooks that you want to consider when creating an engaging video. The first would be the visual hook. So this is what your viewers see when they first come across your video. It should basically keep them like visually satisfied when they're scrolling on the feed.

14:13And I always like to use the best clips that I possibly have from either like an event or any B-roll that I have, like this should be the most visually appealing. That's the first part. That's a visual hook. And your mind kind of processes that visual hook first. And then what they'll see is, or then what they'll hear is the spoken hook. And this is basically what you say in the first few seconds of your video, right? So, you should like really stick to using power words to make users basically want to stay around and watch your entire video. And then the other piece of it is your text hook. And this is what they might read.

14:45and this is the text you're including on the screen to make sure that you're kind of hitting all the different points from visuals to text to spoken word. And that's something you have to consider when creating a video that you don't necessarily have when you're creating text posts. Yeah, I think, I mean, that breaks it down amazing. And I think it also something that you can dominate well as a B2B creator, because a lot of B2B creators aren't doing this very well. So if you take this format and put it into B2B, you probably could stand out where like five years ago, text would stand out. Now, I got good video could do 5x a text post.

15:25If you do a hook, do the have a visual, a visual text on the video, all the stuff that Vin just said. I want to ask you, what do you suggest as a creator and for B2B companies? What should the brief look like for a B2B creator? How could you get the best out of that creator without stifling how great of a creator they are? Because I know I've seen you do videos with this. I've seen a lot of B2B creators get sponsorships. Like what should be in the brief and what shouldn't be in the brief to make sure they get the best out of that B2B creator? Yeah, the brief is so important. And in my experience, I think the brief should also be brief, not to use that word, but like you should have brevity in mind because I'm on both sides of the business.

16:18I am also a creator. So I do brand deals. I see when brands send me briefs. But then I also produce briefs for the clients that we do work with. and I do believe it becomes a bit too much or overwhelming when the briefs are way too long. When I've done some campaigns with some really, really large brands, they send me PowerPoint decks. It's a little too much. All I need to know as the creator is, if I don't already know, I should know, but what does the company do? What am I doing in this video? Why did you reach out to me for this video? What am I promoting? I need to also know the deliverables right away.

16:52What do I need? Is it two videos I'm posting? Is it a story? What exactly am I posting? I need to know the CTA because that's probably a really important part. If there's a unique link, that should all be there in the brief. Of course, from the brand perspective, you of course need brand guidelines, right? You got to make sure that if there's sponsored posts going out on behalf of the brand, you got to make sure that they're not talking about the brand in the wrong manner. They are not using words they shouldn't be using. All that stuff, the non-sexy stuff, that definitely should be included. And then my favorite thing is also to include examples.

17:22So if you've already done influencer marketing, or maybe you haven't done an influencer marketing campaign, you should look at, see what your competitors are doing or folks in your industry in terms of their sponsored content. Do your research. There's actually a library that LinkedIn offers for sponsored content. So you can search up maybe competitors or just like, you know, players in your industry, copy the links of their posts if you like them and include them in the brief, because that really is actually going to help the creators give them some context on what they should be creating. I do agree.

17:52I think as clear and concise as possible without stifling creativity, because every creator I think needs some sort of guardrails, otherwise it will go crazy. But I do think that creators don't need a million different points. Otherwise, it's just going to turn into something that doesn't get attention for your brand. And that's not really what you You want, let the creators create and you just have your goal in mind so the creator can overachieve for that goal that you have. The next point I want to make is, could you go over like the different types of like sponsorships that usually happen in a B2B?

18:34Because I know there's, it also depends on like where that person is creating, but there are a lot of different ways you could do sponsorship from post to newsletter to in-person events. to this, that, and that? Yeah, I'll say the most obvious brand partnerships are the sponsored posts, which nowadays happens on LinkedIn. And then like traditionally in B2B, because I know you've been in this space for a while. So traditionally, when people thought of B2B influencer marketing sponsorship, it really traditionally came in the form of like a newsletter sponsorship or a podcast sponsorship. But now I mentioned with the rise of LinkedIn and the creators on the platform, now that is becoming almost one of the standards that companies are expecting.

19:17Now, there's a ton of other ways you can work with creators, right? That's just the most obvious one, right? You could also work with the creator on your own company-owned assets, your own branded assets. So, if you run a webinar series or if you are producing some sort of like big annual report or white paper or any interview series, you can have these influencers be a part of them. Or if you have any in-person events, have them speak on a panel and then have them also promote the event. And what we're seeing a lot of me firsthand as a creator, and now we're trying to push this for a lot of our brands.

19:50We've done this a handful of times. Actually, this weekend, there's a big restaurant event out in Chicago, National Restaurant Association. And we have a client in the POS space who sells point of sale systems to restaurants. We found a Chicago-based food creator. We're sending him to the event on their behalf. He's going to wear the company branded shirt. He's going to have a microphone with the branded logo on it. And he's going to go and basically do street interviews. And so we're seeing a huge trend in that. We're actually sending a lot of creators to events where they can go on behalf of the brand, capture content.

20:24They can help also drive foot traffic at booths. Like obviously, you know, like booths can run extremely expensive, specifically at those like really big events. Like I think Dreamforce is like over 300 grand for a booth or something crazy like that. And so having a familiar face or someone well-known in the industry, like maybe stand by your booth definitely will help with foot traffic. and even like you know small ancillary events like happy hours or dinners inviting the influencer there and kind of you know using their like likeness to help drive registration that's totally fine um we've seen the big trend in that i think the one thing that you said that was very interesting i think a lot of b2b are stuck with the old booth model and i think the move towards that what a lot of b2c brands do and the reason they do events is is a pure content play for them and like the reason they have aloe has their aloe like retreats is because they know influencers are going to go but they're going to capture tons of content tons of interviews tons of social assets tons of assets to put that can go to pr tons of assets and i think the one thing you said about having creators be there but also like being a face of some series you're doing or content that you're going to do that you get posted on your social own social channels get distributed is gold because one they they have like the relatability and people will recognize them and two you're getting tons of content so like the content team doesn't have to like run the circle of like losing, finding different ways to create new pieces of content.

22:06You've created, you can create like two hours worth of content that you could chop up that could be content for the whole year, basically. So I think that's very interesting. Totally. I mean, think about Coachella, right? Obviously that's in the consumer space, but like Coachella has become where consumer brands do influencer marketing, right? And that is slowly happening in B2B. I mean, there's so many conferences that are happening. I know Canva Create just had their conference, they sent a ton of creators out there. The Adobe Summit, they sent a ton of creators out there as well to capture content.

22:38So like B2B is having their own like brand trip moment. I know the CanLion Film Festival is coming up in the Creator Festival. I know so many creators going to that with software companies. So like it's happening. It's of course, I think on the highest scale and the smaller scale maybe has not caught up yet, but the largest events that are in our industry, there's a ton of creators getting flown out to these events to capture content. It's already happening. Yeah. And you're right. It always starts with big budget and then moves down the chain to smaller budget. But it's still like if you can get a creator, hire someone to do this internally, there's different scrappy ways of doing it.

23:21I just wanted to make sure I highlight that play because so many brands could benefit from doing that and they just don't do that. What does the ideal partnership look like that a creator gets excited for? Because I know there's a difference between, hey, I'm coming to you, Vin, and I'm giving you one post and I'm paying you for the one post, but I'm never going to work with you again versus, hey, I want to do this campaign with you, Vin. We're going to fly you out here or we're going to do X, Y, and Z. You're going to do, and I want you to post on your channels. What are you seeing on both? what a success is is one-off working very well where you get a lot of creators and do one-off things or finding going deep with a few creators and winning with that well i think the goal is always going deep with a few creators um you know the the truth of the matter is though i think creators have a expectation that they should be offered a long-term agreement which that's the goal you want to get there as a brand right as the brand you want to develop deep relationships with the creator.

24:31However, in most cases, there needs to be some sort of trial period or experimental period before entering into such long agreement. Like you might test, you might start with just a one-off agreement and that's okay. Like I think creators, the narrative has gone so large where it's like, no, I'll never do a one-off post. And if you really like the brand, you should like one-off posts are fine. It's okay. It's like you can experiment on both sides. You as the creator, you also don't want to jump into a long-term agreement because you don't know how that relationship is going to go. Like it's a good testing period for you to test out the product and test out to see if your audience even vibes with it.

25:06And then as the brand, they can also test to see how they're like working with this creator. So with all of our brands that we work with on the business side, we're recommending that, you know, we kind of start off on a campaign where we're offering either one to three at max posts to creators as a testing period. Then from there, we decide if we want to extend or maybe just end the relationship with that creator and that's okay all right um the goal though is to get to this point where we have like this always on campaign where creators are now partners to the brands and it just it develops more trust with the creator's audience it doesn't look like you're just jumping from creator to creator to creator what type of creators do you would you say brand should like steer away from like if they're from posting on LinkedIn?

25:52Like what makes like a non not good creator? Personally, I don't usually recommend creators that are just creating content for engagement. Now, what that means, it can come in a few different ways. There's some creators that are just doing like meme content on the platform. And to me, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that to a brand. One of our clients is because in most cases, those creators are really just saying, hey, these memes will get a lot of impressions. In some cases, they're stealing the content. It's not even their original meme, which is a whole other thing on LinkedIn that's happening.

26:27And in most cases, if they're just doing that and just relying on that, they may have not even really developed a deep relationship with their own audience to actually move product, aka drive conversions. Now, the best creators that we work with foster a really great community with their following, no matter how big it is. You can have a really small following or a large following, but you can tell if you go in the comments of someone's post, if there's conversation happening within the comments and actual, not AI comments, but like people having discussion about what you wrote in the comments, that's what we look for.

26:59That actually will be the creators that drive the most conversions regardless of their following. Yeah, I agree. I think, I mean, with everything, it depends, but I do think there's a lot more creators on the platform since I've seen from a long time ago that just chase straight um virality and clout and if you didn't set up a community or a i wouldn't say a community but a following before you started doing that a lot of that is just fake engagement coming out there and i see it all the time and obviously i'm i create memes on the market millennial so that's my brand but i i've been known for that so it's like not like i'm trying to steal memes and that so no i i don't know i'm not saying you're going against me i'm just saying i'm just saying i'm just saying i know what you mean right i mean i used to share content to like hype creators up in the beginning like tweets and then everybody stole that so then i stopped doing that because everybody started doing that so it's like you you could start a trend and then when you start seeing everybody do that you have to go somewhere else otherwise it screws and i'll be clear too like i'm not saying memes in general are bad i'm saying like we i know creators that like have applied to campaigns that like if you go down their page every single post is a meme that's not someone i'd recommend but like if you're doing memes and other content and text posts and video like that's that's that's cool like that's totally fine that will aiken is a really great example i don't know if you know will aiken he's all right he's great yeah the sales space he creates all types of great content from written posts to like 10 minute product reviews to really funny skits to memes to like training tips like he is perfect example of like someone that can kind of do it all yeah um jay schwedelson and like marketing like he posts a meme but he also posts clips from his podcast he posts like um text posts like he posts images like he does all the time but like that's pretty much what people want to work with uh lastly i wanted to ask you is like what is a marketing hill you would die on?