The Present and Future of B2B Influence Marketing

A friend of mine reached out recently and asked me if influencer marketing was possible for B2B businesses. Keep in mind this friend isn’t in the bubble of marketing and doesn’t follow along with the same type of topics you or I do. He also probably didn’t give it much thought before asking.

When I explained to him that not only is B2B influencer marketing possible, but in my opinion, B2B brands have been deploying influencer marketing in far more sophisticated ways than B2C brands for a long time. I asked him rhetorically, “Who do B2B brands call on to be guests on their webinars or co-author reports and white papers? Industry experts, right? Who are influencers.”

My friend is a pretty bright guy. He actually responded with a “Duh” moment and thanked me for correcting his blind spot. 

It is true. Business to business brands use influence marketing all the time. I happen to host second podcast and streaming video show for CIPIO.ai called The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show. You can find that wherever you get your podcasts or at CIPIO.ai/podcast. 

Our guests on that show are influential people in the world of marketing, business, technology and community building. We’ve talked to big-shot industry thought leaders like Bruce Cleveland, author of The Traction Gap, former Hubspot marketing lead Jeanne Hopkins, and many more. The reason we’re bringing those people to the podcast is because they are influential in the space of marketing decision makers and C-level executives we hope to reach with our product. They are influencers.

Soon, we’ll be rolling out webinars featuring someone other than me to help our customers and prospects learn better techniques to build and nurture community. CIPIO.ai’s suite of applications facilitates things like community influence marketing, so leveraging influential people who are knowledgeable about the topic attracts more people to our content which drives more leads and customers.

In fact, every webinar you’ve ever attended that featured a speaker from outside the company presenting the webinar … influence marketing for that company.

I can talk about this all day, but I thought it best to bring an influencer in the B2B influencer marketing space to the show to bring far more wisdom than I can muster. Rachel Miller lead influencer marketing efforts for SAP for a long time. She’s now heading up her own agency working with other clients on influence strategy in both the B2B and B2C space. 

Rachel has long been one of the big B2B brand representatives at the various influencer marketing marketing events out there, so a lot of the world of B2B influence marketing thinkers have learned from or been inspired by her. 

Today, we’re going to mine Rachel’s experience for insights on B2B versus B2C, what issues are holding brands back in influence marketing and more.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Community Generative AI (GCI), with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/cgiapp, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Scroll Down for a Show Transcript!

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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Rachel Miller Transcript

[00:00:00] Intro: Do you want Instagrammers or TikTok ERs to post about your brand? Or do you actually wanna engage creators who influence their audience to buy your product? If you’re in the ladder of those two, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to Win Influence, the Influence Marketing Podcast.

[00:00:23] Jason: Hello again, friends. Thanks for tuning into Winfluence the Influence Marketing Podcast. Before we get into the show today, a reminder for those of you listening on the podcast, that Winfluence is now available in amazing technic color. If you’d like to see the magic as well as hear it, just pop over to the YouTube channel and subscribe.

The easy way to get there is jasonfalls.co/youtube. Of course, you can also search for Jason Falls Winfluence or just influence on YouTube and find it as well. The new video episodes by the way, will be streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter each Monday at 11:00 AM Eastern, 8:00 AM Pacific, so folks can join for lunch, brunch or breakfast viewing on the stream, or happy hour dinner, midnight snack. 

If you’re dialing in internationally, the audio podcast is still there for everybody on demand, it will also go live at the same time as the video show, 11:00 AM Eastern time on Mondays. Regardless of where you are listening or watching, thank you for being here and following along our journey to understanding more about influence and influence market.

And now onto today’s show. A friend of mine reached out recently and asked me if influencer marketing was possible for B2B businesses. Now, keep in mind, this friend isn’t in the bubble of marketing and doesn’t follow along with the same type of topics you or I do. He also probably didn’t give it much thought before asking.

When I explained to him that not only is B2B influencer marketing possible, but in my opinion, B2B brands have been deploying influencer marketing in far more sophisticated ways than B2C brands for a long time. I asked him rhetorically, who do B2B brands call on to be guests on webinars or co-author reports or white papers, industry experts, right?

Well, those are influencers. My friend’s a pretty bright guy, he actually responded with kind of a duh and thanked me for correcting his blind. It is true business to business brands use influence marketing all the time. I happen to host a second podcast in streaming video show for Cipio.ai called the Rise the Community Commerce Marketing Show.

You can find that wherever you get your podcasts or at cipio.ai/podcast. Our guests on that show are influential people in the world of marketing, business technology, and community building. We’ve talked to big shot industry thought leaders like Bruce Cleveland, author of the Traction Gap, former HubSpot Marketing Lead, Gene Hopkins, and many, many more.

The reason we’re bringing those people to the podcast is because they’re influential in the space of marketing decision makers and sea level executives that we hope to reach with our product, they are influencers. Soon we’ll be rolling out webinars featuring someone other than me to help our customers and prospects learn better techniques to build and nurture community.

CPO dot AI’s suite of applications facilitates things like community influence marketing, so leveraging influential people who are knowledgeable about the topic attracts more people to our content, which drives more leads and customer. In fact, every webinar you’ve ever attended that a featured speaker from outside the company was presenting the webinar, well, that’s influencer marketing for that company. 

I can talk about this all day, but I thought it would be best to bring an influencer in the B2B influencer marketing space to the show to bring far more wisdom than I can muster. Rachel Miller leads influencer marketing efforts for SAP has done that for a long time.

She’s now heading up her own agency, working with clients on influence strategy in the B2B space. Rachel has long been one of the big B2B brand representatives at the various influencer marketing and social media marketing events out there. So a lot of the world of B2B influence marketing thinkers have learned from or been inspired by her.

Well, today we’re going to mind Rachel’s experience for insights on B2B versus B2C. What issues are holding brands back in influence marketing and more? She’s coming up in just a moment.

This episode of Influence is presented by Cipio.ai, the community commerce marketing platform. It has a family of apps that helps you drive commerce through your own community. One of those apps is focused on helping creators and brands be more efficient with their time, and in today’s economy, we know efficiency is important.

Whether you’re a brand or content creator, you probably spend a lot of time writing and rewriting captions for social media content. , but you also have to make sure that content will perform well by keeping up with the trends across social media, previous post performance and such, right? Well, cipio.ai generative AI content app is called Community Generative AI or CGI for short.

Think of it as an AI content generator, with an extra brain for optimizing social media posts and predicting success. Tell CGI the idea of your post or even campaign. Give it a call to action, the tone of voice you prefer in the length of the word count. With the push of a button, you have a library of smart content recommendations with predictive analysis on how that post will perform.

CPO’s powerful AI engine, digs into big data of over 140 million social media users, posts, images and videos. It mines that data for deep learning insights to give you not just content, but content that will perform that makes it very different from other AI content generators out there. 

Now, I think, you know, I’m not a fan of automating content creation, but that’s not actually the point. CGI produces a ton of great content to save you writing time. You still need to review, you still need to edit, make sure it’s perfect, but it gets you 90% of the way there, which saves you. Time. If you’re at an agency or you have multiple brands, multiple social channels you’re writing for, it can save you a ton of time just to be able to quickly generate social content and then be able to sit down and review and edit, tweak it, make it ready, then put it into your publishing calendar.

cipio.ai wants to give you that power for a two week free trial. I’ll give you a link in just a second, so get out a pen and paper if you’re able to, if you’re driving, then just come back and watch this later. There’s no credit card required for you to sign up for this free trial. Either go to jasonfalls.co/cgi and start creating all the captions and content you need with the click of a button.

It’s free for two weeks, just see if you like it. I bet you will, jasonfalls.co/cgi. This really will change the game for you. If you write a lot of social content or have a lot of clients that you need to write captions for every month or whatever, check this out, Jasonfalls.co/cgi. 

Let’s all get smart about B2B influence marketing and a lot more, rachel Miller from Suede is next on Winfluence.

Rachel, I find it hard to believe that as long as we’ve been around the business, I don’t know that we’ve ever met or had a conversation, and I realize not long ago that had to change. I’ve known of you for a long time and as I’ve leaned more and more into influences my wheelhouse, I’ve certainly read a lot of your content and seen or heard you on podcasts and such. So I’m tickled you here, thank you for coming on the show.

[00:07:57] Rachel: Absolutely, it’s remarkable that we haven’t crossed paths, cause I’ve been doing this for like 12, 15 years now. And I know so much about you and I so respected. So thank you, I’m honored to be on your podcast. 

[00:08:08] Jason: Thank you. So I wanna get into Suede in a moment, but I think many people in the marketing thoughtly are talking head segment know you as leading influence marketing for SAP for quite some time. Tell us how that evolved, how that opportunity presented itself? 

[00:08:22] Rachel: I feel so fortunate. I’ve been with SAP as a contractor for four years now. My key stakeholder, Ursula Ring, we crossed paths many moons ago when I was at actually Brian Kramer’s agency Pure Matter way back in the day. we had IBSAP as clients, so I got to know Ursula.

We worked on the Super Bowl campaign when they were in San Francisco, and we just, when you meet someone, you you got vibes. So we just kept in touch over the years that when she had the opportunity to expand her team, she reached out. Who doesn’t wanna work for SAP, it’s been quite a ride.

Having them as a client, is so cool. It’s like having 12 clients in one with all their lines of business and technology. So it’s, I couldn’t be feel more fortunate. 

[00:09:01] Jason: And I was gonna follow up with that too, because I think you, Everybody knows SAP, it’s a familiar brand, it’s a big business and IT solution software company, but I don’t think everybody understands, all the different fingers of what it does. 

So take us through what an influencer engagement there may look like and tell us about the programs a little bit? 

[00:09:22] Rachel: It’s so vast, so SAP covers 27 industries. So everything you possibly from manufacturing, pharmaceutical, basically they touch on everything. I think it’s 78% of all the world’s financial transactions run through an SAP solution.

So their tagline is, they run the world, they literally do and it’s really hard to imagine, I always tell my daughter, she’s like, what’s SAP? I’m like that Chobani yogurt that you’re eating, that’s from SAP, the Yeti cup that you’re drinking out of, that’s from SAP. So it is really cool.

So our engagements are, we do celebrity engagements for events. So we’ve worked with so many great people from Dax Shepherd all the way, Ryan Reynolds. The roster is just mind blowing and all the way down to what I call like just my bread and butter is the B2B influencer, that’s my sweet spot. But again, we work with sustainability influencers that are on TikTok and Instagram all the way to people who are OGs from LinkedIn who have been there for 20 years.

So it definitely keeps me on my toes because the space is vast, and for each program, the influencer is so very different. But my favorite thing about SAP, they don’t do one-time engagements, when they work with somebody, they work with them for years. And I love that and they become a part of the influencer community and really a part of the SAP team. 

[00:10:32] Jason: And that’s critical I think these days to, for brands to get value out of the relationship. I don’t understand the mentality of let’s hire somebody to do one thing and then never talk to them or their audience again, that seems really, just mistaken, but I’m glad that they have that approach. 

So I’m curious, did you find, in that, complexity conducting the trains in the B2B space was especially challenging? Most of the software platforms out there are focused on B2C brands, and I think B2B influence is far more about offline influence than social media activity, does that make it harder? 

[00:11:10] Rachel: Yes and no. So a lot of my favorite influencers they always tell me that they’re talking about SAP behind closed doors, they’re having conversations and with other clients as well. So they’re really making moves, particularly at C-Suite. They have those closed LinkedIn groups or just those offline conversations, that’s when the magic happens. 

So yeah, it’s so much audience facing as perhaps B2C and I have to respect that, but they’re, again, they’re getting the briefings, they’re doing the hard work. But we have, I think what the pandemic really brought to B2B marketing is you have to be more virtual.

We we’re used to having, going to physical events and now we’re like we can do keynotes from our bedroom or two in a day. I think that’s the push that B2B marketing really needed was to get more heavily into the influencer working digital space. and I couldn’t be more grateful, because a lot of my favorite influencers, they’re crushing it cuz they don’t have to leave their families for three days, and go to speak for an hour in Cincinnati when they can do the same thing at home. So I love it and I respect that. Back to your question, yeah, it is not always audience facing, but that’s just part of the game.

[00:12:14] Jason: So I’m curious we’ve talked about, a lot of tools and software platforms on this program. Obviously my day job is at one, that doesn’t necessarily have an impact on the B2B space yet, that’s coming. But what kind of tools and resources have you found over the years\ that help fuel that B2B influence marketer and help them do what they do?

I know a couple, but I wonder what you’ve had exposure to and what’s worked for you? 

[00:12:38] Rachel: So there are so many tools, there’s no perfect tool, unfortunately. My dream is that I create one and I take my bits and pieces from each tool and actually merge them together. I do love Analytica, I think they’ve emerged.

I know they’ve been around for a long time, the last few years, they’ve really become a key player in the B2B influence marketing space, but for me, a lot of my key findings are just on the native platforms. I spend a lot of time on YouTube, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and I’ve gotten really good at the advanced search and finding people and then mining people’s networks,

and it takes a lot of time and a lot of manual effort, but that’s, for me, has been the most effective way to really find the right people for my campaigns cause the tools, they bring up a lot, a large list, but a lot of it’s clutter. And I find that my searches on the native platforms are a lot cleaner and get me to the right people a little faster.

faster 

[00:13:27] Jason: I’m glad to hear you say that because one of the things that I’m, kind of following in your inspirational footsteps for software, which is why I’m at Cipio because I’m like, Ooh, I get to have impact on a software platform. And one of the things we’re working on that I’ll hopefully be able to talk a lot more about soon is that B2B community influence marketing platform that really helps. Get rid of that clutter and make it easier to surface the right people, so glad to hear you say that. So I’ll circle back once we have something to look at. 

[00:13:55] Rachel: Yeah, happy to, lemme know. I’ll give you my laundry list of things. 

[00:13:59] Jason: I’d love to hear. In fact, I’ll probably just take you up on that, next week and call and say, okay, what do you wanna see and we’ll see what we can do. 

Of course there’s all sorts of challenges there because obviously LinkedIn has a rather closed, wall around it in terms of getting data out, so there’s lots of challenges. Real quickly though, I mean obviously a lot of B2B, I think everybody commonly knows that B2B influence marketing or B2B marketing in general, these days starts with LinkedIn from a social media perspective. 

But what are the other networks that you’ve found to be productive? Because I’ve seen some things that are happening on some of the other social networks that seem almost counterintuitive for a B2B marketer, but I wonder where you’re finding fruitful growth?

[00:14:42] Rachel: I guess the elephant may or may not be in the room of TikTok. There’s some controversy around the platform as we all know, but it’s growing in strides, their search and algorithm is bananas. The way that they’ve built it, it’s truly remarkable. You can grow your audience really quickly and I think once people get past the silly dance phase and just get rid of that mindset.

I’ve found really cool people on there, that you’d be surprised, particularly like in the HR space. They’re more comedic, they’re taking a very, from like remote work, work life balance, so some people do some incredible things to get their message across, and I think we have that kind of that goldfish brain mentality right now and we need that snackable content and that platform is really doing it well.

And I just love that once I find somebody, then they surface up more and more people very similar, So it’s kinda like they’re doing the work for me. I know a lot of B2B markets haven’t really dived in there yet, but they should I think. 

[00:15:34] Jason: For sure. We’re talking to Rachel Miller, who has her own firm now called Suede. When we come back, we’ll look into that a bit more and ask Rachel, what’s in store for us in 2023 is Influence Marketing turns the corner on a new year. Don’t go away.

Back with Rachel Miller talking a little B2B influencer marketing today. Rachel, you left your full-time role I think, or however you were situated with SAP a while back and went in and launched your own thing. Tell us more about suede. Who do you serve? What type of works your, in your wheelhouse, distill all that down for us? 

[00:16:18] Rachel: Sure, Suede is a B2B influencer marketing agency, and I really try to stay true to B2B. That’s been my sweet spot for many years now, and I have so much passion for it. I love the creators in the B2B space, and I love finding those people who just mostly, they’re just passionate. They may not have a huge platform yet, but you find them doing their thing and you, it just infectious, and I love, partnering with them and just seeing them grow and prosper really brings me joy, so I’m really happy to serve clients in the B2B space. 

[00:16:51] Jason: Very nice. One of the things that I think, influence marketers, fall into very quickly in their practice of the craft, if you will, is falling into the, predictive rut of doing what they’ve always done. Now in the B2B space, I think it’s easy for someone to say, okay, let’s do a webinar series and let’s invite an influencer to be a guest or, conduct a webinar for us.

Let’s write a white paper and quote them, or have one of them write it for us. Let’s invite ’em to, take a speaking slot at our event and they’ll call it a day, is that still enough or do we constantly have to be pushing the envelope with B2B influencer ideas to really succeed as B2B marketers these days?

[00:17:31] Rachel: I love to push the envelopes. I definitely side with that side of the house, and I’m blessed to have clients who are as adventurous as I am. And I’d rather do it and see it flop than not have done it. Cause you never know, and often when you do something crazy, that’s the one that actually works.

You have those brainstorming sessions, you’re like what if we invited an alligator and they’re like, yeah, and we’d do it. And then we’re like we moved the needle. It is great to have a healthy mix of content, webinars are still great, I think that’s still one of the strongest legion opportunities that B2B companies have.

White papers have their place as well, but for me particularly working with analysts, it’s tail the arts too long. It’s outdated by the time it goes to market six months ago, in this environment, that’s old news. So I don’t often lean clients towards that medium, I love the live format.

I think that’s gonna be more and more prevalent, just for when we started the conversation before this episode, it’s faster for everybody. You get the content out in real time, there’s no editing, there’s no delays, you’re just, boom, we have a great conversation and now it’s out to the world, I love that realtime engagement. 

And just trying, I honestly knew things like the tos, the Instagram, the reels. I can’t wait for the next day. I’m surprised that something new hasn’t come out, I’m like, okay’s almost old news at this point, like, where’s the whatever? 

[00:18:48] Jason: Yeah, we need a next new thing, cause I guess we had clubhouse for a while and then we had reels and then we had the, TikTok and reels back and forth and then, Elon came along and we had Mastodon all of a sudden, and now what the hell’s next? So I’m with you there. 

The things that I keep hearing in conversations both from a B2C and a B2B perspective, seem to be, and they’ve been platforms that have been around for a while, but they’re starting to take more hold and people are starting to use them better are things like, Discord and Discord servers, and Reddit keeps popping up. It’s been around for damn ever forever but it’s just a lively community of people and separated by topics.

[00:19:33] Rachel: So Discord and Reddit, I play with sporadically. Discord I have, I know if you have your lane, you find your people, you got your server or you start your own. I haven’t done that yet. I have joined a couple and it is remarkable, particularly for the developer side of the communities, Reddit as well.

That’s where I go to identify people for that type of expertise, but again it’s hard going in as a marketer to those spaces cause they do their deep dives on certain LinkedIn groups as well, they look at you and like, oh no, you’re a marketer, you’re not one of us not one of us back away.

So you have to be really cautious going in and I always am very upfront with what I’m doing. I don’t wanna come across as sneaky or not being above board, but there’s great, communities, the information there, they really dive deep, they love to share, it’s very peer driven and I love that knowledge sharing kind of base for those two platforms.

[00:20:25] Jason: All All right. I’m gonna put you on the spot here a little bit, but I want to know and certainly it can be something that you’ve done or it can be something that you’ve seen from someone else. What’s a good example to you of an interesting creative influencer execution in the B2B space?

Either that you built yourself or elsewhere, that, maybe inspired you or might inspire us? Give us an example of something that pushes that envelope, a little bit? 

[00:20:47] Rachel: Ooh, that’s a tough one, cause honestly, I feel the B2B space hasn’t been that in remarkable the last couple of years. I’m trying to think what have people done.

I think most of my inspiration honestly comes from B2C campaigns. I follow a lot of different accounts across my platforms, whether it’s Instagram or YouTube, and I get especially whether they’re foods, cause I’m a big foodie, so food, fitness, comedy.

I see people doing really fun things in those spaces, and then I try to layer them into what I’m doing in the B2B, and not to upset any of my peers, but yeah, I can’t honestly think of a campaign that myself or were like, wow, that was freaking awesome. 

[00:21:25] Jason: Yeah, and that’s again, I think it goes back to explain some of my questions earlier of, are we satisfied with just the webinars and the white papers and stuff? B2B has been a very predictable, campaign generating segment. And I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but I also think, and this is where it surprises a couple people when I say this, I’d love to get your take on it.

I think B2B Influence marketing execution, has A been around a lot longer than B2C in a lot of ways, and B is much more refined, much more well done and dialed in because when I look at, even if it’s just a standard webinar series where, hey, this software company or this construction company, or this accounting firm or whatever, is gonna have a weekly or a monthly webinar, and they’re gonna bring in a useful expert person to supply content to the people that are on their email list or their customers or whatever.

That is a tried and true method of driving leads and engagement with your audience. And why break it? If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. 

[00:22:29] Rachel: There is, that is a huge element. I think B2B, Influencer marketing is the pure evolution of word of mouth marketing. And that’s been around since we were able to speak.

And I love that about it cause you’re right, it has been forever. And I think it’s also caution too, I think B2B markers tend to like, yeah, it’s not broken, why change it? But I guess I’m wired differently. I really love to try new things and push the but I do see a lot of my peers like, okay, we’re just gonna do yeah, another webinar series, or we’re gonna hire an analyst for a white paper cuz this is what we’ve done for the last 10 years.

And it’s not to say it’s not working, but imagine if you did this with the white paper. I think it’s more, for me, it’s like this and that everyone was adding on to things. As new platforms come along, it’s like, okay, we can still do what we’ve always done, but let’s now compliment it with this other thing too and see what we can build.

I think that’s the best way to look at it, we’re not removing anything. We’re just adding to it and, quote unquote making it better. 

[00:23:23] Jason: Yeah. Good stuff. I’m taking some notes, for my work at Cipio cause you know, we want to do webinars and all that good stuff cause we know they work, but we don’t want ’em to be stale, so I’ll be taking some notes. 

Maybe I’ll get you involved, you’ll be one of my influencers, you could come in and do some stuff with me, that’d be great. How perfect a world would we be living in or how much more perfect a world would we be living in if, LinkedIn would open their damn API?

[00:23:48] Rachel: Oh my goodness, that would make my decade. Seriously, all my tools would be better, especially for reporting, cause as if you don’t report on it, it never happened. So we can look really good. We do well of our lives. Do all of our things and then like, what’s the data look like? And you’re like, let me get my team of monkeys to mind that like manually scroll through everyone’s feeds for two days to turn up the data.

That was when they were bought out, that was like the saddest day for especially a lot of my friends that work for MarTech Tools, they were just like, what do we do now, especially for B2B, cause we know LinkedIn is the mothership. I hope that they, one day do open it up. I think it’ll be a game changer, for everybody. Yeah, cause it’s such a common platform.

[00:24:34] Jason: I had the same sort of reaction back when, I was, a real social listening geek for a long time. And, mining online conversations for insights and whatnot, I was really, big on that and

at one point in time, Facebook had a product that you could tap into or that the social listening platforms could tap into called, I can’t remember what it’s called now. Facebook Insights is what I thought it was called, but that still exists anyway. But you could basically go in and they would, it was anonymized data.

They wouldn’t give you an individual, like you go into a social listening platform now and it’ll say, it’ll show you every single tweet and every single Twitter user and you can map everything, really intricately. But with Facebook, they actually, ironically, counterintuitive to what people thought they were protecting their user identities.

They had this feed where you could see conversations that were happening on Facebook, on public pages and whatnot, but it was all anonymized. they basically did the charts and graphs for you and anonymized the data so you couldn’t drill into the individual user, but it was a godsend for me because I did testing and realized that more than half of the online conversations that were happening in the world were happening on Facebook at the time.

, I think it’s probably a little different now, but when they shut that thing off just arbitrarily, they just one day decided, yeah, we’re not gonna offer this anymore, and they’re big and have so many products and so many different things. They don’t care if you’re paying a lot of money to access it.

They just said, we’re not offering anymore, have a nice day. At that point, half of the online conversations in the world disappeared. We couldn’t do anything to quantify or qualify them at all. And so when LinkedIn closed up shop. Now, I will say though, and this is something I do like about LinkedIn, is they have focused their, content and marketing attentions on elevating influential people on LinkedIn.

They’ve prioritized the newsletters, they’ve prioritized blog posts on the platform. They’re doing better things to fuel that, which makes me think maybe just maybe, they may say, hey, all you people that want to do B2B influence marketing stuff, we’re gonna give you a little bit of a feed that will show you who’s awesome here, fingers crossed? 

[00:26:49] Rachel: Yeah, I’d pay for it honestly. I mean if that’s looking for, some to make a monetary thing, I think most B2B marketers were happy to give a little to give back, yep. It’s quid pro quo, but yeah, just being locked out is sad, so I think that’s when we first crossed paths when, cause my, I cut my teeth on social listening when I was at Nimble, a Good 12 years ago. 

And John Fryer dubbed me his chief listening officer. And I do remember that aspect of Facebook. It was invaluable for us at the time. And I was sad. I forgot how sad I was when I went away. Cause it’s never fun when you, one of your favorite things, goes away, particularly when it’s a technology tool. 

[00:27:28] Jason: Speaking of LinkedIn, real quick I know there’s big changes that are coming there with regards to how they elevate influential voices as they continue to improve what they’re doing, but also LinkedIn’s moved to a more video-centric approach, to the newsfeed content prioritization. Curious if you’re hearing the same things and how you’re thinking about your overall influence approaches moving into 2023, are you recommending more video content for folks? 

[00:27:51] Rachel: I’ve been recommending more video content for years, and I know that’s been tough for a lot of B2B people who aren’t used to showing their face. They’re happy to be on a podcast or behind an article or a blog, but I think what we mentioned again offline, like authenticity, transparency, nothing shows that more when you’re on camera and you see me can’t come up with a B2B marketing example that wows me . 

I’m like, I got nothing, but that’s great cause I’m a human, I’m talking. I think it’s more compelling and people can relate, and it’s like going back to when we can’t be standing in front of each other at a physical bench.

We have this and it’s almost as good in many ways. So I highly recommend video and I love that LinkedIn is jumping on, I guess what we call the creator economy. They’re giving people points for putting in the effort. And I like that if you spent the time to create a video or write an article that’s more than 200 words an actual article, yes it’s gonna get shown into feeds. Your value is going to be boosted. 

And I think it’s well deserved, cause I think for a while LinkedIn was becoming Twitter people. Jamming in URLs without any context. They’re just like, boom, and you’re like did you like it or not? Give me something. Why should I read this? Why should I click? They at least gimme something. So I really appreciate that LinkedIn’s taken the time to evolve their algorithm to do that. 

[00:29:08] Jason: We’ve obviously, evolved with it because this is, being played back. It’s not live, but it’s streaming on LinkedIn, because we know it’s, serves the audience that wants to know a little bit more about influence marketing there so we’re on board. 

Rachel’s been such a pleasure to catch up with you. I’m so very sorry we haven’t done this before now, and we certainly shouldn’t let another 10 years go by without checking in. So great having you on the show. Where can people find you and Suade and such on the innerwebs? 

[00:29:34] Rachel: So I am Rachel Lou Miller everywhere. I’ve been very fortunate to have locked that in early, so Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever, that’s my handle. So please look me up and connect with me, I’d love to keep this conversation going. 

[00:29:46] Jason: Excellent, Rachel, thank you so much. Awesome to hear your thoughts and ideas on B2B, we are grateful for the knowledge.

Always good to get a lot smarter, isn’t it? Do check out Rachel on LinkedIn and give her a follow or connection. By the way, if you have or know of a good B2B influence marketing case study or brand that leverages them well, especially outside our little marketing world bubble, do let me know. I’d love to profile more examples from other industries here on the show. Just need you to point the way. So reach out to [email protected] and let me know where to start sniffing, and I will. 

Also don’t forget to check out and completely change the way you produce social media content for the better. Get the community generative, AI app from cipio.ai, a two week free trial, no credit card required awaits you at jasonfalls.co/cgi. 

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