Several of our recent episodes have focused on business to business, or B2B influence marketing. The last couple of conversations we’ve had — one with Carter Hostelley and another with Mel Carson — talked about the concept of creating influencers from a company’s executives.
In this episode of Winfluence, we focus on building influence for a company — the company itself. Marc Meyer created a beautiful case study of such activity at one of his former companies. I loved it so much I wrote about in Winfluence, the book, which is due out in February. So you get a bit of a sneak peek of that part of the book today on the show.
But our conversation was far more than just the case study. Marc and I talk about the challenges of building content that works in B2B industries, often time one that aren’t super sexy in terms of what kind of topics are relevant. Marc discusses how he tries to separate his content as signal from the noise. And we spend a fair amount of the conversation talking about Twitter and TikTok, one that is a strong B2B channel. The other one that might be?
Dive in and give it a listen, you’ll get some fun inspiration and a great case study from Marc and a useful discussion about building B2B influence for a company.
Find Meyer on LinkedIn or Twitter, and his new company, FYIsoft Inc., on its website.
Winfluence Transcript – Marc Meyer – FYIsoft, Inc.
Jason Falls
Hello again friends thanks for listening to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast. Several of our recent episodes have focused on business to business or B2B influence marketing. The last couple of conversations we’ve had one with Carter Hostelley and another with Mel Carson talked about the concept of creating influencers from a company’s executives. Today we’re going to shift the focus and talk about building influence for a company, the company itself!
Jason Falls
My pal Marc Meyer created a beautiful case study of such activity that I wrote about in Winfluence the book, which is due out in February. So you get a bit of a sneak peek of that part of the book today on the show. But our conversation was far more than just the case study, Marc and I talk about the challenges of building content that works in B2B Industries, oftentimes ones that are not super sexy in terms of what kind of topics are relevant. Marc also discusses how he tries to separate his content as signal from the noise and we spend a fair amount of the conversation talking about Twitter and TikTok one that is a strong B2B channel the other one that might be? Dive in and give it a listen, you’ll get some fun inspiration and a great case study from Marc and a useful discussion about building B2B influence for a company. Marc Meyer is next on Winfluence.
Jason Falls
Most people default Instagrammers and YouTubers when they hear the term influencer marketing. That biases them to think that B2B influence marketing seems like an impossible or improbable thing. But the reality is, at least to me that B2B has had a firm grip on influencer marketing for, you know, the 15 years or so that social media has been prominent. I mean, who do you think that people are on SaaS webinars? And who are the authors or contributors for white papers? Marc, would you say that B2B is far more along than B2C? In terms of the practice of influence marketing?
Marc Meyer
I think it’s, I think it’s, it’s right there. We just we categorize it differently. We, we probably experience more more lows than highs. But you know, let’s let’s not forget that B2C just has this innate ability to connect with people a lot quicker, but B2B has no less impact, we just have to work a little bit harder in the B2B space.
Jason Falls
Yeah, but I wonder, though, in the B2B space, is it not more of a natural reaction to say, okay, you know, advertising is kind of trade pubs, and then you’ve got certainly events and things like that, is it I think it’s kind of more a natural reaction for a marketer in the B2B space to say, well, let’s get an expert to join us in this, let’s reach out to, you know, an academician or an industry thought leader. And it just seems like B2B has had that kind of nailed for a long time.
Marc Meyer
Yeah, they have the built in ability to to bring the experts, the the thought leaders into the space to to basically support, you know, their marketing efforts, whereas, you know, in B2C, you know, we could put up a pretty picture or a snappy jingle, and they can, you know, it has the same effect. But I think, if anything, and B2B, you know, having having a thought leader having, you know, it just, you know, it validates it, right, and that’s in our space, I always talk about value in the B2B space, I think there’s a there’s a value proposition that, that we always have always has to be there in order for, for clients and prospects to bite on. Right. And that, you know, call it the what’s in it for me? Validation equation, right. And it’s, I don’t think that in B2C, you don’t you don’t necessarily need that, that value equation, to be honest with.
Jason Falls
Yeah, that’s, that’s fair. So you’ve been a B2B content and social guy for as long as I’ve known you. And I want to get to the case study that you shared with me in the book influence in a moment, but let’s start out broadly your main focus in leading content and social for B2B companies is I assume to drive leads, how have you incorporated influencers in that effort in the past that were outside of the company and maybe how are you doing it today?
Marc Meyer
Yeah. You know, first off, you know, you look at a long lens and and, you know, it’s really okay who’s an influencer influencer in the space and, you know, if we look at it at a surface level influences, it’s based on, you know, followers reach, you know, impact and, you know, sometimes I, I’ll use this is not necessarily a good example but it’s just one in which you know, you just kind of look at it and go Oh, wow. So I was looking at this this girl on TikTok, she’s, I don’t even know if she’s out of high school yet. And she has 8 million followers, and so .. or eight, I’m sorry, she has 8 million followers, and she has billions of likes. And so I was like, I looked at some of her TikTok videos, and you know, some of them have 25 to 50 million likes. And so, you know, that’s influence and then for the B2B space, it’s kind of the same thing in which, you know, when this person posts people listen, so to speak. So, you know, I look at, you know, in the B2B space, you know, when, when an influencer gets a hold of your content, and then broadcast that to their networks, you know, the, the effect is, is huge. And so, you know, when you start to look at that, and go, okay, you know, without, and we’ll get into, and we talked about the case, but, you know, these things when you’re doing your analysis of how to have an impact in the b2b space, you can’t ignore the the impact and reach of B2B influencers.
Jason Falls
Sure, yeah. I mean, there’s there’s definitely, that awareness, you know, impact is is critical, certainly. But then I think also, too, and this is where I think B2B marketers, marketers probably get it right more often than B2C marketers. The next step is making sure that that awareness turns into conversion. And I think that’s where a lot of the B2C influencers are, like, well, I’m gonna tell people about your brand, but I can’t promise you that they’re going to actually go by it.
Marc Meyer
Mm hmm. And I think that I have, you know, one of the first questions and you know, this, whenever you work with a new client, you know, it’s, well, what do you want to do? Right, number one, and then number two, what, you know, and this really falls on us as marketers about determining the right channels for getting what they want to do accomplished. And if it’s leads, you know, then we have to, you know, and I tell people this all the time, it’s like, you know, your messaging has to change, depending on the platform. And, you know, but But still, you know, I, it’s funny, Jason, I always, you know, there’s, there’s people that don’t have reach in social but still want leads, and, you know, that changes the whole equation. So I go, Well, if you don’t have, if you don’t have the depth and breadth and the reach that some of these some of your competitors have in social, then you have to go with a pay to play game. And, you know, and some of them don’t understand that that’s a, you know, that’s a big nut, that some of them probably didn’t realize that was going to come into play. But, you know, it’s, you know, awareness versus consideration versus a lead, you know, and social man, they take on lots of different, lots of different looks and feels for sure.
Jason Falls
Sure. Now, I know you recently started at a new company, but but one in a related space to what you’ve been doing before. What’s your process of identifying the right influencers for FYIsoft? And and tell us a little bit about FYIsoft, we understand the area you’re talking about.
Marc Meyer
Right? So FYIsoft is is finance, software, finance and accounting software. And so, you know, I, I knew what I was getting into before, before I got the gig. And because I experienced it at Accenture, I worked with a group within Accenture called FSO, which is financial services. And so when I was at Accenture, you know, one of the challenges was, Alright, we’re going to create content, not only for awareness, but for lead-gen, and you want to talk about crickets. So I knew, you know, going into FYIsoft that that would that would be the challenge. And so, really, and I have a colleague that that is a good friend of mine that’s kind of in the same space and it’s really interesting to see what she’s doing from a LinkedIn standpoint, from an influencer standpoint, she’s becoming an influencer because her content is so evergreen and so just from the heart, you know, and what’s happened is, you know, her her followership her likes and whatnot, everything is just exploded, then it’s because she’s treating she’s treating the platform not as a broadcast mechanism for you know, you know, running ads about how great you know, our software is, but more about, you know, here’s the people in the space, I’m a woman in the space. And, you know, I’m trying to carve out a space that’s predominantly dominated by men. And she’s, she’s just, you know, she’s, she was, I mentor her, and she’s, like, exceeded every expectation I’ve had. And so to answer your question is, you know, marketing and selling software and using social to do it through influencers is equally as hard as doing it with within any other space. And really, it’s, it’s all it comes back to that value proposition. But it also comes back to you know, here’s why, here’s why we’re different, here’s why, you know, you should at least get give us consideration and it’s man, I’ll tell you Jays, I’ll be honest with you, it’s, it’s extremely difficult. And, and it’s no less difficult now than it was a year ago. You know, separating signal from noise and social has always been a challenge. So, you know, trying to market and sell any kind of software, let alone finance software is just extremely difficult. So it’s, it’s really about, you know, just trying to turn everything that you do from a marketing standpoint on its head and do it differently, so that you stand out.
Jason Falls
Alright, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s unveil a little bit of this big case study. Now, I don’t, I don’t want to unveil you know, everything that I wrote in the book. But I thought this was just a fascinating, you know, version of B2B influencer marketing. So, you were probably one of the first people I know, to really identify the idea that a B2B company isn’t limited to just leveraging third party influencers, but the company itself can become influential in the industry. And that’s very different than the B2B tactics we’ve talked about on previous episodes of this show that focus on making the executives of those companies the influencers, you’re talking about the company itself. So take us through how you landed on that idea.
Marc Meyer
Okay, so, and we’re talking about Twitter, and, you know, for good, bad, indifferent or worse, you know, Twitter, you know, for a number of years, you know, it’s always kind of been been considered that other platform, you know, and, and, you know, this as well, as I do when we first got on Twitter, it was full of conversations. And then, and then we, as marketers, and advertisers took it over and started driving conversations, and and we literally changed the way Twitter was being used. And so understanding that, you know, the primary channels for a lot of B2B marketers, from a social media standpoint, pretty much fall within, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter, you know, maybe some YouTube, possibly Instagram. And, you know, those are the tools that are left to our disposal. So, understanding that I, you know, one of the challenges that I had initially with Twitter was, was literally building a followership from zero. And trying to basically, you know, intimate to the people that did follow or did see our post was, no, we’re legitimate, you know, we’re here to stay, and we’re gonna make it, we’re gonna make a difference. So, you know, changing that perception was half the battle. So once I got to, you know, to a decent amount of followers, and when I say that, let’s say was 15,000. And, you know, we were still trying to use Twitter as a lead gen mechanism. And I’m like, Alright, how can I get impact? How can I make a difference here, and I started paying attention to certain hashtags, and the number of likes, shares follows and whatnot, that that followed some of these posts. And then I started to pay attention to the people that were actually posting these and so you start digging, and you’re like, wow, these are people that, you know, that we could categorize as influencers based on the fact that some of them had hundreds of 1000s of followers. And if not more, and, you know, I started looking at there was a company out there, they’re still out there to call on political and political does these, these rankings of influencers. And so I started looking at their rankings and some various fields, and we’ll use digital transformation as the primary one. So, I looked at this and they had two lists. One was 100 people that were influencers in digital transformation and the other list was 100 companies that are influential in digital transformation. And just an example, you know, the top 10 companies in digital transformation are the usual suspects the you know, the Lloyds, the Accenture’s, the IBM’s, the Oracles of the world.
Marc Meyer
I’m like, okay, let’s look at the people and and let’s look at what the type of content that’s being shared by these people. And what the one of the first things that jumped out to me was that it was very visual, it’s very visual content. And the next thing that jumped out to me was I used to scribe and I used to consult and tell people, you know, don’t use more than two to three hashtags. And so I started to notice, not only did they do, they use multiple hashtags, but they also cc their carbon copied as many people as they could. Wow, that’s, you know, I get that part. Because, you know, by seeing people that are relevant to the piece of content, then, of course, you have the ability to have having that piece of content shared, you know, 10 x. So, I said, Okay, you know, what are we doing? What are we doing internally, that’s, that’s similar to this. And I noticed, okay, nothing, because one, a, we share our own content, be, we’re posting, you know, every three hours, and see, you know, it’s, it’s fairly formulaic, and not very visual, you know, and, and I chuckled, because, you know, for example, if I’m looking for an image, if I do digital transformation, and I do a Google search, and then I type and I click on images, I see, you know, we all to a certain degree of use the same images for some of our posts, you know, it’s, it’s that typical, ethereal, you know, dark blue, there’s an image there, you see some ones and some zeros, and it looks like they’re holding something and they’re setting something free, right?
Jason Falls
Right.
Marc Meyer
So I saw, alright, so I’m thinking, Okay, let’s, let’s experiment here. And let’s, first thing we’re going to do is I’m going to, I’m going to take these pieces of content from these from these influencers, I’m going to reshare it, I’m going to give them attribution. And but I’m going to also include other influencers that are in the space, I’m going to add, because we were talking, we were focusing on digital transformation. Unfortunately, when you hashtag digital transformation, you eat up a ton of characters, which, you know, you know, in, in our world, in Twitter, you know, characters are like gold, you know, so. So it was like, I hate to use that one, but I need to, but I was able to balance it to, essentially, and here’s the, here’s the other interesting part, I wasn’t driving them to another site, I was literally just sharing images that originated from another influencer. And just and you know, the attribution would be, hey, this is a great, a great graphic, you know, on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as it pertains to digital transformation. And then I do a cc to as many influencers as I could. And then I would add hashtags like AI IoT, you know, everything that’s kind of hot and happening in the digital transformation space. So the first one that I did it, you know, I started to notice that, that impressions went up, and that the, the click through rate went up. And then, and here’s one that you know, and that we all kind of focus on as marketers was the engagement rates. And, you know, prior to doing this, our engagement rates were, you know, less than 1%, they’re, you know, one half of 1%. And then I noticed that our engagement rates were ticking towards 2%. And size. And this was an experiment, keep in mind, so I said, Alright, let’s, let’s, let’s go a little bit further all out on this. And so then I started a cadence of literally, I was probably posting anywhere from 12 to 15 pieces of content around the clock, because, you know, one thing that we as marketers need to understand is that our content is available globally. And so, you know, I used to have this, this mindset that, you know, I’m sharing between nine to five, which was, which was dumb, you know, so I, so I start doing that was this was really heavy lifting to Jason because, you know, now I have to, you know, one of the things that you have to do when you’re either pushing content out, and I learned this when I was with Accenture was, you know, I, you know, if it’s third party content, I got to make sure that, you know, this isn’t a piece of content that originated from, from Deloitte, for example, right. Yeah, I had that happen, where they’re like, Mark, why are you sharing Deloitte content on Accenture, you know, and so, not only did I have to once I identified a good piece, you know, the next thing was to, you know, find out who the, the author and the origin of the piece were. But keep in mind, I was focusing just on on visual content. So identifying the visual content And then, you know, possibly looking for the origin of that piece of content and making sure that I wasn’t stepping on any toes. And then, you know, constructing that piece of content with the right influencers that were tagged in it, and then so, you know, keep in mind two things. One, I’m tagging the image. And then I’m also tagging thought leaders in the piece and adding hashtags. And oh, by the way, trying to keep that, you know, the bounds of, of Twitter’s constraints. So I started doing that. And within a month, this is no lie.
Marc Meyer
So our monthly impressions on Twitter, were anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000. So that first month that I started going all out, they went from 100,000 to 500,000. And then every success month after that, they they were north of a million impressions, the engagement rate went up from a half a percent to anywhere from five to 10%, depending on the piece of content, the the leads, went from zero to, you know, anywhere from five to 10 per month, and the quality of the followers went up 10 X, the number of followers went up 10 x. And here’s the best part. So, after a year of doing this, I go back to Onalytica, because they pushed out another list of influencers in the digital transformation space. And we went from not being on the list of Top 100 companies to number 41.
Marc Meyer
And I was like, Oh my god, you know, and it just kind of validated a lot of things. Jason, so one of them being, you know, first off it. And this is something I think we always fight as marketers, it’s it, you know, from leadership, it’s like, don’t just like, turn something on and click a button when you know what, we’re, what’s going on here. Why aren’t you done with this? You know, number one, the heavy lifting involved was, was incredibly daunting. But the results were, you know, first off and validated. Okay, b2b marketing on Twitter still can be a viable thing. Number two, you know, Twitter still works, you know, even though there’s more noise than there ever has been, you know, but, you know, the other thing I thought was, wow, you know, it’s, you know, if you decide to really embrace the platform, and really try and understand the, the channel, the, you know, the people you’re going after, it’s it’s doable, you know, it absolutely is doable, so, you know, replicating it, I think, you know, from a B2C standpoint, it’s the sky’s the limit and B2B, you know, I think it’s, it’s still incredibly viable. And it’s, you’re only limited, I think there’s a lot of trepidation from a lot of companies being you know, we want only want to share our content. And I’m like, Well, you know, what, here’s the here’s the reality, you don’t have enough content, right? I’ve talked, I talked to companies and people all the time where, you know, depending on the amount of content, you have you, you have the potential to go back maybe a year, you know, but the reality is, is that content resets every day. And, you know, depending on the depending on the topic, you have the ability to go back six months to a year, but the reality is, is that it may not be relevant anymore. So for marketers, man, it’s every day The challenge is, okay, how can I get eyeballs? How can I get traffic? How can I get leads? What are the vehicles to do that? What is the content look like? And, and, you know, is it what does that content consist of? Is it visual Is it is it video and like, I tell people all the time, and I get pushback on it, but people don’t want to read any more. Jason, they just want to watch. They want to look at stuff.
Jason Falls
It’s so very, very true. You know, I thought it was it was interesting when I was doing research for the book and you know, you shared that case study with me for Wipro. I went back and started looking at other indicators because Onalytica, which is a software company we talk about on this show a lot. You know, those lists were there. And I knew that that was where you were validating things. It’s a great place to validate it. But I went snooping around and I actually found I want to say it was maybe all top or some other resource out there. And it was like the most influential people or resources in that space. And it would be like, you know, number one, Joe Smith, number two, Steve Thompson, and then like, number six or seven would be Wipro would be your company, like, on lists of most influential quote/unquote people, which was really high, it kind of blew my mind. I was like, Wow, that was a, you talk about transformation, talking about digital transformation, you guys went from, you know, a company in the space to one of the most influential voices in the space. That’s pretty powerful.
Marc Meyer
Yeah, it is. And it took, you know, I got a lot of pushback because of that third party angle to it. And I’m like, you guys don’t understand, you know, you’re trying to, to create and look Wipro is like, just, I mean, I think they grossed 8 billion last year, you know, and, uh, you know, trying to carve out space, in an ultra competitive market that we’re in, and, you know, it’s, we’ll say all things tech and digital. And, you know, part of it is, is establishing legitimacy. And going now we work with really great clients, and really big clients and some that you’ve heard of, or a lot of them you’ve heard of. So, you know, basically, it would be akin to, you’re getting ready to run a race with 10 other people, and you look to your left and your right, and it’s it’s nothing but world class athletes, you know, and you’re, and with the understanding that, hey, you can run with these guys, you know, you’ve you’ve done the work, you know, now just know, just let it evolve, let it happen. And so for me, it was invalidated everything, and I think it caught them by surprise. Because then I, they were like, Marc, we need you to talk to leadership about this. And, and, you know, explain what you did. And, you know, there’s still, I think it can still be done from an evergreen standpoint, Jason, but you got to have a team, you know, it’s got to be a team of designers, a team of content people. And, you know, they’re, like I said, there’s a lot of heavy, heavy lifting here, but it just kind of shows you that it can be done.
Jason Falls
Yeah, that’s true. And, and, and just so people who are listening, get the proper context here, you know, when Marc, when you said that, you know, leads went from none to, you know, five to 10 a month, or whatever it was, we’re talking about b2b software companies, here, we’re talking about average order values in the six and seven figures we’re not talking about, you made $18 this month off Twitter.
Marc Meyer
Exactly. You know, and I will add this as a, as a, an addendum to that was that, you know, one of the other things that we did was, we would target, you know, some of those pieces, right at companies that we were going after to, you know, and then the other piece to that, that I would add is that we were, you know, when we were saying influencers, were also CC-ing people within the companies that we were targeting. And, you know, unfortunately, and this goes back to my Accenture days, I remember doing a research piece for Accenture retail, and they wanted to know, how many decision makers were in the social space. And, and when I say decision makers, we’re really talking about the C suite. But it was it was surprising how bear the cupboard was at least from a Twitter standpoint. Right. And, you know, LinkedIn was a little bit better. And so the gist of that story is, is that, you know, it only takes one. And sometimes you’d be surprised, you know, the DM comes across, hey, I was really interested in that, you know, whatever it was you just sent and, you know, do you have any more information on that? And then, you know, we would we would do some legwork in the background and find out that there was a summit coming up, and that they were going to be at the summit and the next thing you know, that tweet led to a meeting at a conference which led to a you know, opportunity, which is amazing Jason when you when you look how that and just as a as a case in point, like my first like, major social media gig was I tweeted something about something Ken Burbury was working at Ernst and Young, he goes, Hey, you know, we’re looking for, you know, social media smarties, do you want you ever thought about Ernst and Young and next thing, you know, I was working there. And that came from a tweet, right? Well, you know, you just and this was kind of always been one of my my things. Whenever I talk about socialists like you guys, and this is mostly to kids. And it’s like, Hey, you guys need to understand the power of what you push out there because you just don’t know once it’s out there. You just don’t know who’s gonna see it. So it’s really incumbent on you know, marketing teams to understand, you know, that there’s power in everything that they push out and don’t underestimate, you know, who’s gonna see it and when, and so thusly. You know, that content, you know, you may not, you know, you may have impressions and not clicks, but you just don’t know who’s seeing it and what they’re gonna do with it and how they’re gonna reach out to you.
Jason Falls
Right. So Michael Brito was on the show not long ago, and he said something that was pretty incredible to me. He, he thinks that the next frontier for B2B marketers is TikTok, what’s your reaction to that?
Marc Meyer
Oh, my God, you know, I’m gonna go back to the girl that that, you know, she’s, she does TikTok dance videos. Okay. And so I kind of look at it like this. It’s, you know, how we, as marketers, and advertisers basically blew up twitter and changed how, you know, it went from conversations and conversations to, you know, one way, one way pushes a content and just, you know, not really caring, and, and I TikTok. Does that mean? Does that mean, we have to as marketers, everything’s got to have a sound bed to it? I mean,
Jason Falls
Yeah.
Marc Meyer
What did Mike … I I’m curious. And, and I apologize to the listeners. But um, you know, did Michael, say why he thought that?
Jason Falls
He just, he sees the opportunity for engagement there, he sees the opportunity for B2B companies to be really creative on how they, you know, put their messages out there and or do things to, you know, create awareness for their products. You know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a medium that forces, you know, what I would call, you know, sort of sterile corporate, you know, brands, if they’re going to use that medium, well, then they have to be more creative, they have to be more engaging. And yeah, maybe that means there’s a soundtrack or music behind you, maybe it means that you’re, you know, participating in the community means where everybody’s, you know, doing the little lip sync things, or whatever the challenges they do on on Tik Tok. But it’s, it’s creating that short, snackable content, that’s really interesting. And if you’re putting the right stuff in to TikTok. TikTok’s, the difference in the power of tic Tock is they don’t produce a feed for the user that the user curates, they force you with the the user experience to watch what they think you’re going to like, and what they think is going to be sticky. And that’s the magic of TikTok. Because they don’t allow you to really curate that default view, you have to force it, you have to force that default, you have to force your, you have to pick a hit a button to go over to your feed, they’re going to force feed you their feed. And if your B2B content is good enough to get in there for people, then it can be it can expand your awareness and your impression, and what not.
Marc Meyer
So, I’ve got two thoughts on that one, remember, Vine?
Jason Falls
Yep
Marc Meyer
There was a time where where we were creating vines at Accenture and I, you know, from a B2B standpoint, I was like, Man, it’s just not enough time. You know, it’s like seeing a billboard. And, you know, you have enough time to see the billboard, and then you’re past it. And that’s, you know, vines were six seconds. So I, you know, I almost, I equate tik tok to vine, but with sound beds, but I think that, you know, from, you know, for it to work at a on a B2B level, that, you know, your, your audience has to be there from a B2B standpoint, and I don’t know, we could pick a large, you know, what, and maybe IBM, for example, wouldn’t be a good good example, because I remember IBM had a mandate, a, you know, a number of years ago, where they wanted their, their employees to be very, very active on social. And so when we would do competitive research at Accenture, with, you know, IBM, Deloitte and a couple of others, and IBM was always head and shoulders above it, but I always remember, you know, the reason why they were was because because of their mandate of wanting their employees to be very active on social and so, you know, I think my my thinking with with TikTok is the audience has to be there, and maybe it works. And maybe, you know, maybe there’s an offshoot of tic toc that could be geared towards B2B only, you know, and, you know, if it was, because I looked at it as entertainment value versus business value, and it I’m still kind of struggling with that, you know, versus becoming extremely distracted and going, Oh, what’s this over here?
Jason Falls
Yeah, I’m a little skeptical that that that’s actually going to come to fruition, too. But I think the challenge is not necessarily that the audience isn’t there. And I don’t think the challenge is necessary, necessarily. There’s, there’s not enough time or whatnot, like on Vine, I think the challenge is, is that we just haven’t had a B2B marketer or company come forth with the type of creative content that does break through that clutter. I think it’s just a creative challenge. I think somebody’s going to Do it.
Marc Meyer
No, I agree with that. I mean, because then we could just, we could just flip back over to Instagram and go, Okay, well, then Instagram has more of a, has a has a platform where and I’ve done some stuff with actually a B2B company where they’re, they’re extremely centralized, but they have all of these, they’re centralized in their decision making it from a marketing standpoint, but they’re decentralized in that they have offices all over the world. And so I did a social media strategy for them. And the whole focus, believe it or not, was on Instagram, but with without giving away that the company name, they were one of the largest commercial real estate firms. So that’s real estate, right? So it’s visual, right? You know, so you’re, you’re selling buildings and real estate and office space. And so, you know, our thinking was, well, let’s let these, let’s let these remote offices push their content in the form of, of, you know, basically sexy images of the real estate and buildings and office space that they’re, that they’re pushing, and they’re building and whatnot, because because of the global nature of it, you know, now we were giving, we were giving free license to these satellite offices to be creative to your point about it, you know, it’s all about creative content. So, for them reaching out to their markets and reaching out to their prospects, you know, through Instagram was a was a smart move versus, you know, you know, trying to articulate, hey, we got some office space coming by it, you know, here’s it. So it was it worked from a social standpoint. So I think remember what I said, you know, you can’t push the same piece of content the same way across all social platforms, right? It has to tailor to that platform and to that audience.
Jason Falls
Nice. Alright, so I’ve got an a good idea for you for FYIsoft, your new your new stop in order to turn that company into more of an influencer in its industry for a solid month. Just post nothing but employees doing peace signs and duck lips with captions, like “Balling yo!” And then in parentheses, say they say this is how you become an influencer. There’s your strategy. You’re welcome.
Marc Meyer
I you know what, this, this is, this was what what I would say to every marketer out there is, you know, try everything. It’s like throwing pasta on the wall. And, you know, you experiment you measure. And that’s, I mean, we do that all the time. It’s all about experimentation, right? It’s, it’s about clever copy. It’s about duck lips and pceye. And something is going to resonate, and you just don’t know what it is until you try it.
Jason Falls
That’s, that’s great advice. Marc, where can people find you online to connect?
Marc Meyer
Well, you know, I’d say I post pretty frequently on on LinkedIn, you know, and I think that’s the easiest way rather than going after you know, other domains or whatever just I’m on there. You know, you’ll, you’ll see me on LinkedIn, that’s the easiest way to do it.
Jason Falls
We’ll make sure the link to your LinkedIn profiles in the show notes and we’ll link everybody to FYIsoft and all sorts of other things there too. Mark, thanks so much for taking some time with us man.
Marc Meyer
You got it, brother. Appreciate it.
Transcribed by otter.ai
The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.