So What? B2B Influencer Marketing Measurement

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus B2B Influencer Marketing Measurement. We walk through what B2B influencer marketing measurement is, where B2B influencer marketing measurement goes wrong and how to set up your B2B influencer marketing measurement plan for success.

Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• What B2B influencer marketing measurement is
• Where B2B influencer marketing measurement goes wrong
• How to set up your B2B influencer marketing measurement plan for success

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:29
Well hey, how are you everyone? Happy Thursday. Welcome to SWOT the marketing analytics and insights live show. I am Katie joined by Chris and John. How’s it going guys?

Christopher Penn 0:38
Going good.

John Wall 0:39
May the Fourth be with you

Katie Robbert 0:41
with you this week on so what we are talking about B2B influencer marketing measurement. You heard that correctly. This is not an AI focus show. We are talking about B2B influencer marketing measurement. So we’re going to talk about what the heck it is. We’re going to talk about where it goes wrong. And we’re going to talk about how to set up your B2B marketing measurement plan for success B2B influencer marketing measurement plan, easy for me to say. So Chris, where would you like to start?

Christopher Penn 1:15
Let’s let’s start with what goes wrong. So Katie, when you think about, for example, as much as we don’t like to use the title, we are all in our own communities influencers, right? You’re very prominent the women in analytics space, John has marketing over coffee, I’m running around on stages. How do you as the as the head honcho of Trust Insights, think about measuring what we’re doing?

Katie Robbert 1:42
So those are two different questions where it goes wrong, and how do we measure and so so let me start with a little bit. So in our newsletter, this week, TrustInsights.ai AI slash newsletter, I actually wrote a post about where influencer marketing measurement goes wrong. And one of the big places it goes wrong is a lack of partnership. And so a lot of times when companies are looking to hire an influencer, they already have like, you know, let’s say we were trying to hire an influencer for our digital customer journey reporting. That’s something we’ve already created. So we’re trying to find someone to bring in to then endorse the thing that they did not help co create. And so it could work, it could be fine. But we would have a better chance of success and a better, you know, shot at measuring impact if we brought in an influencer, who was more of a partner who could then feel like they had ownership over the thing that they that we were creating, together. And then they would feel more comfortable sharing it with their audience to say, look what I built in partnership with these guys. Now, let’s figure out how this all works together. So I think there’s the lack of partnership, but then in terms of measurement, it’s understanding, you know, what you want the outcome to be at all? Are you looking for awareness? Are you looking for revenue? Are you looking for loyalists and evangelists? How are you going to be using the influencer, and you need to actually build out, wait for it a user story to understand what it is you’re going to be doing with this person. So as a CEO, I want to bring on an influencer to help talk about our services, so that we can build more awareness for the work that we do. So I’m trying to build awareness. So I already know I’m going to be measuring things like visits to my website visits to specific services pages, people who are signing up for the newsletter to get more information. I’m not necessarily tracking sales, because I just need to build awareness first. So that’s my spiel.

Christopher Penn 3:56
No, that’s good. I mean, I think it’s a good spiel. So then when it comes to the preparation, right, what we have to do to be ready to measure those influencers? How do we do that? We’ve got the purpose down, right? We know what purpose we’re after, which is awareness. What do we do next?

Katie Robbert 4:19
You need to figure out so you know what you want the influencer for, but you need to figure out like how you’re going to find them? What exactly you want them to do. Is it a, you know, one time campaign or is it a long term relationship that’s going to determine the kind of person you go after the kinds of campaigns you can run? And then again, sort of the What is your intention? Is it awareness? Is it engagement? Is it purchase? Is it evangelism? Is it community, and that’s where you’re going to start to set up like, how much of an impact is this influencer having?

Christopher Penn 4:53
Yep. And so, so we have the purpose, which is awareness. We have the performance measure then because you mentioned a bunch of stuff on the website, right? Just getting just see visitors to the website and things right? What about what about the middle three P’s?

Katie Robbert 5:08
So people process and platform. So people as we were talking about, you know, it depends on the kind of influencer, you’re going after. And so, you know, you might need someone in terms of people in terms of staff and resources. Maybe you have someone who is specifically just working to wrangle that influencer, it depends on the kind of influencer they are and how high or low maintenance they tend to be. And I mean, that in terms of maybe this is an influencer, who has a lot of other things going on. Or maybe this is an influencer, who can be more solely focused, you know, and dedicated to your specific brand. You need an analyst, you need someone to actually figure out what’s happening with the data, are we making an impact? Are we going up? Are we going down? You need the decision maker. And this could all be the same person, or it could be multiple people. In terms of the process. You need to figure out what the heck we’re doing, and how are we going to work with the influencer? And how are we going to collect data on what the influencer is doing? And again, that comes down to the purpose platform. You know, it depends on the purpose. And so if you are doing awareness, you probably want a web tracking system like Google Analytics. If you’re doing purchasing conversion, you probably want your, you know, CRM, or your accounting system, or a combination of things. And then you probably also want some sort of a visualization tool to stand up dashboards like a looker studio or a Tableau or, you know, name a thing from the martec 11,038. The surely rolls right off the tongue.

Christopher Penn 6:42
Totally does. I think you hit on something that’s really important. That is a misconception about B2B influencer marketing measurement, which is, I have seen a number of folks saying all you need to do is give them some some landing pages, whatever, slap some UTM codes on and then you know, how to measure your influencer marketing. And, ya know, that is, as the as the old TV commercials used to go as a part of a nutritious breakfast, but it is it is not the whole thing. Because, again, depending on the objective you’re after, that may not be the appropriate measure, right. So maybe traffic is a measure. But traffic can come through a variety of different ways. If you are listening to this episode of so what and you hear about something that we’re talking about, you know, Katie just mentioned Tableau. If Katie was an influential person, too, you might go Google’s a, what the heck is Tableau and then find your way to that website that’s going to come in at attributed to organic search, not to what Katie just said, but there’s no doubt you would not have done that search. If it hadn’t been a for Katie to have mentioned it, and be that Katie was influential enough to you to make you want to go Google that.

Katie Robbert 8:01
Right. And that’s harder to track to make that to draw that direct line. And so that’s where you go back into process of how are we tracking the impact? And so maybe, you know, so to your example, Chris, like, you know, if you just give an influencer, a landing page with UTM codes, sure, you can track that. And you’re probably you’ll get some data. But chances are, if you’re working correctly, and smartly, with an influencer, you’re going to have things like, oh, Chris had a conversation about this thing. And he mentioned this. So I went and googled it, how you draw that connection, is you start to set up your influencer for success. Knowing that okay, Chris will probably be talking about Tableau. So let’s proactively get ahead and give him like a tableau affiliate link that he can include in his materials. So that when someone goes to that site, and then comes to us, like we have some way of tracking what that path was. And so that’s just a very simple example. But this goes back to sort of that well thought out influencer program, not just, you know, okay, Chris, go ahead, do what you do. And you know, we’re gonna hope for the best, but it’s really thinking through all the different angles of if Chris is on stage and doesn’t have anything digital to track, what do we need to provide him in order to make sure it tracks back to us? Or if John is on his podcast, and he’s talking about a set of tools that we want to be known for? What do we need to provide? John, that that includes our name in the thing that tracks back to us?

Christopher Penn 9:35
John, when you’re talking to to podcast sponsors, what do you tell them for measuring because obviously, you know, if they give you a promo code, like linkedin.com/moc for $50, towards your first free campaign? That’s one way of tracking it. Sure. redemptions, but what about all those other things? How do you what do you tell sponsors about the about sort of the Halo effects of being mentioned on the show because the show is an influence Answer.

John Wall 10:00
Yeah, well, it’s, you know, Jason files actually did a bunch of stuff on this, that I’ve just stolen everything that he put out there, he really nailed it, he has two major things that you measure. One is priority, you know, when you’re talking to influencers, there’s three factors that you can look at its reach, relevance, and resonance. So, you know, reaches, how far does it go? Does it actually cover the full space. But then relevance is important to like, you know, if we’re talking about, say, factor meals, you know, eat at home meal plan stuff on marketing over coffee, that’s not entirely relevant. I mean, obviously, marketing over coffee listeners are more affluent than the general public. So they’re more likely to buy those kinds of services. But it’s not like you said LinkedIn ads were that’s just so in the bullseye. And then resonance is the third party that part of that too, like, just because someone has a big following, that doesn’t mean they’re an authority on the topic. You know, there’s a lot and, you know, we know tons of people like that, that have millions of followers, but like, if you take their advice, you’re gonna crater next week, like, don’t want to deal with any of that. So that’s the first thing is selecting who should be there. And the resonance thing is huge for marketing over coffee, but and then the tracking side, the ones we always use your sales, awareness, conversion, perception and traffic. So like, if you can get a direct sale, that’s awesome. And that’s enough for a lot of folks that are like, Yeah, we got these five leads. So I don’t care how many listens, the show has, or how many social media posts or whatever, like, the deals show up or cool. But then it’s just you do awareness stuff, you may have to just look in the outside world and see, like, what’s your organic website traffic doing? You know? Are you just getting more traffic in general? That can be great. And yeah, if tracking links work, cool, that stuff can be gamed, too. And, you know, there’s all kinds of stuff that goes on with that. But it’s definitely better than nothing if you don’t have anything else.

Christopher Penn 11:51
Okay. And has anyone ever come back and said, Yeah, we put this through an uplift model. And here’s sort of what the show did for us during our campaign period.

Katie Robbert 12:01
They’d have to know what an uplift model is first.

John Wall 12:04
Yeah, you know, 99% of people are like, we got some leads. This was awesome. We didn’t get any leads, we’re going away. Like, it’s yeah, you have to be a, if you have a CMO and 20 people in your department, then maybe you’re starting to talk about left, but that’s yeah, that’s not the career that we’re rolling with. Usually.

Christopher Penn 12:24
I feel like though, uplift modeling is not rocket surgery, right? It’s not like you’re building an artificial intelligence. It’s it’s classical statistics, is what it is. And John, as our resident stats expert,

John Wall 12:38
that’s number one. But this is and you see this all the time, right? This is the dealer, like marketing by the force. They’re just like, putting stuff out there and like, Oh, it didn’t work. And then two years later, they’re like, oh, wait a minute, like eight of these deals came in from this podcast sponsorship, maybe we should go back to that. And that’s why you have like, you know, this week in tech as the sponsors that have been on for 10 years, because they’re like, Yeah, you know, maybe you don’t see it immediately. But you do over the long run, see at work.

Christopher Penn 13:02
I feel like we need to do something with marketing by the force. Because that’s, that’s, that’s perfect for today. And it does describe a lot of the less less effective measure.

John Wall 13:13
A Yeah.

Christopher Penn 13:16
These are not the lead you’re looking for.

Katie Robbert 13:18
So how can we start to set people up for success?

Christopher Penn 13:22
So we should probably explain what uplift modeling is first, because that’s going to be the technique to demonstrate an influencer, particularly if your goal is not just raw conversions. Like if you’re, if your plan is I want to a number of hard sales, I’m going to force people through this funnel. And that’s how you want to measure that’s pretty easy to measure. Right? That’s pretty straightforward to measure. And the it’s incumbent on the influencer to even agree like, Yes, I will agree to these campaign terms, or no, I’m not doing that, because that’s stupid. But at least you know that that’s the case. Uplift modeling is is a sort of statistical subtraction. So what you would do is you would look at the period of time when the influencer was active on your behalf. And then measure everything that was happening during that time. You know, comments, things from social media, things from your your lead generation system, things from your website analytics, you get all that data. And then you’ll pull a year, two years worth of additional data for those same variables. And use this technique, uplift modeling. Well, we’re also propensity score modeling, where you’ll say, Okay, we know, every week, for example, we’re getting 20 leads from organic search, no matter what, that’s that’s what’s happening. So whatever number of organic search leads came in during the time of the influence who was active, subtract 20 Because we know we’re going to get those anyway. It’s business as usual. We’ll let’s take that out. And What good statistical software would do is say, Okay, let’s get the, the statistical averages of all the different channels, all the different activities, establish what business as usual looks like, for a very similar time period, and then deduct that out and whatever you’re left over with at the end, that’s the uplift, right? That’s the, the extra that you got from that minus business as usual. So that’s what an uplift model is.

Katie Robbert 15:25
So question. Um, it sounds like the way you’re describing it sounds like it’s something that could be very simple. In approach, like, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve a statistician or a data scientist, you know, if you’re keeping it very basic, or is this what you’re describing something that you would need to have a data scientist, you can run code on your team in order to do

Christopher Penn 15:51
you definitely need to be able to use statistical software? It’s not machine learning. It’s not AI. But it is, if you have someone who knows SPSS, SAS, are any of those the actual stats tools, this would be helpful.

Katie Robbert 16:05
What if you don’t have that person on your team, but you’re engaging influencers? That’s, that’s sort of the conundrum that I think a lot of teams will find themselves in is they want to measure effectively, but they don’t necessarily have, you know, a world class statistician, like John Wall on your team.

Christopher Penn 16:26
I mean, one of the things that we’ve told people for ever, is, whatever you’re allocating for your campaign budget, 10 to 25% of the budget should be for measurement. And that would allow you to bring in an agency or a partner to do that for you. Because if and if you don’t allocate that budget, then you’re implicitly saying, I’m okay with not measuring it, because I’ve allocated no resources to measure it.

Katie Robbert 16:49
Right, and I’m not disagreeing with you on that point. But I think a lot of companies teams, they either can’t or won’t allocate that much money towards measurement. They’re being asked like, Hey, you have $100,000, I want you to spend $100,000 on the campaign just slap together a spreadsheet. So what are the things that somebody who maybe doesn’t have that flexibility? Who has their hands tied, could be doing to measure?

Christopher Penn 17:23
Well, at the very least, you can do the direct measurement, right? So you can give the influencer here’s UTM tracking codes, here’s your landing pages, right? Here’s, here’s the things that we’re going to be able to measure a portion of your activity with the understanding that if you don’t have access to that statistical modeling, you’re not going to be able to tell the indirect effects. I mean, unfortunately, I can’t think of any layperson way for you to do those calculations, like by hand, or we’re in Excel, that won’t take you months to put it together. And you can, you would just need to figure out how to do that in Excel and get all the data into Excel to do that. Because it was in a little while we’ll walk through the process of how you actually do this thing. But I, John, how would you approach it if if you were tasked with this and you don’t have access to SPSS or

John Wall 18:20
statspack the problem that you end up with the marketing that tons of companies do, which is, you know, the program runs and the numbers go up. So then the influencer gets credit, or the number goes down. And the influencer takes the blame. And nobody’s actually going through and looking and saying, like, oh, actually, you know, the influencer did this in the worst month of the year, seasonally for us. So the fact that, you know, it only went down by x, he’s actually hugely or she is hugely successful, because it wasn’t as bad as a month as it could be. So the problem, yeah, all your results are just not going to be statistically relevant. You know, that’s the problem. So, but yeah, you know, tons of companies just kind of say, Okay, we got a lot of traffic, that’s great. Let’s do it again. Or, you know, oh, no, the CEO feels it didn’t go well, because, you know, he made fun of his kids last week. And so let’s build the whole program. You know, it’s basically marketing by how the top officer feels that day, which is really, then again, there’s tons of people that stumble their way to success with these programs, you know, the sad one are the folks that are actually doing well and pull the plug on stuff. And they don’t feel the pain until the next quarter, the quarter after like that. That’s the most disappointing part of that.

Katie Robbert 19:29
I guess my question for you, Chris. And this could be, you know, a topic for another day is so you’re saying that uplift modeling is the way to measure it? Is that the only way? Or is that just your preferred way?

Christopher Penn 19:42
It’s not the only way to measure it? Of course not. There are more complicated ways you could build an actual neural network model to do the inferences. Uplift modeling is the most accessible way that does not require ridiculous amounts of technology to pull it off. It is also I would call it tried and true approach in the same way that you know, like ARIMA modeling forecasting is still tried and true, yes, you can get super fancy AI and get like a 3% improvement on accuracy and your forecasting, but it was like, okay, is that 3% accuracy worth the million dollars you’re going to spend on big iron to do it? Probably not. And, again, going back to what you’re saying earlier, you can you can look at just raw differences in a time period and say, Okay, well, something happened there, but we still can’t account for it. I’ll give you a real simple example. Let’s go into our Google Analytics. And where did I put this? Let’s go ahead and shift here. So I’m going to use we’ll use this as a proxy example. Now, when I was speaking in London, at the March Ecopia conference, so me as the influencer on stage making a lot of noise on behalf of Trust Insights, right? We can see pretty clearly when I spoke just on our our web traffic alone, during that period of time, really went up significantly in the classroom came back down. So what you could do, I’m not saying you should do this, because it’s statistically not great is look at long grip time and essentially, slap a ruler. And look at the period beforehand, what was happening, look at the period afterwards, what was happening and see, what is the delta in this big, hefty chunk here, as as scoring about the extra that you got from that? It’s not statistically accurate? It’s not mathematically sound. But if you had nothing else, that that would be it.

Katie Robbert 21:48
It’s a guideline.

Christopher Penn 21:50
Yeah, it’s good. And you clearly can see, yes, something happened there.

Katie Robbert 21:56
But for some companies, I would argue that the best they can do is having some kind of a guideline. And so you know, if you know all the different campaigns that you had running at that time, and you could look at this, and then also look at, you know, the channels that were bringing in traffic at that time, then you could start to make some decisions around was this influencer working for us or not? So, you know, let’s just say in this example, like this influencer purely was on stage, and their only job was to drive traffic directly to one website, one page on our website. So then we would take out email as a channel, we would take out certain things as channels, and then say, did they do their job?

Christopher Penn 22:47
That’s right. And this being Google Analytics, you can absolutely go do slice and dice that and take out, you know, different default channel groupings that, you know, assuming UGA four is set up properly, you would know how to do that. And look at go channel by channel say, Okay, well, you know, organic search, traffic increased by this much during this during the period of time, we noticed that was happening. And this is actually important to be able to tell, what is the period of time when something was happening. So if we look here, on March 29, that’s when things started. But you can see it tapers back down to kind of normal, why around the knife, right? So you’re gonna want to you want this information, regardless, because it’s important to determine what, again, uplift modeling is kind of like retroactive AB testing, right? Where you’re saying, Okay, we can’t send people we shouldn’t send people to a completely different website. Because, you know, there’s a marketing technology operations nightmare there. So we would say, Okay, in this period of time, we know, the majority of what was happening was from the influencer being active. So now, based on that, what would it look like if they weren’t? So that’s really what uplift modeling is? It’s retroactive AV testing. Okay, so you want Should we go through and how you actually do the uplift modeling? Sure. All right. The first and most important step, and this is gonna look real familiar for folks who caught previous live streams. The raw data to do uplift modeling for B2B influencer marketing is the same data you use from marketing mix modeling, because you need to know what’s going on with your marketing. So and the reason I was sort of scrambling before the show, to both eat lunch and stuff is because I needed to get updated data for all these different channels. So again, from from previous episodes, we need our Google Analytics data. We know the LinkedIn data, Twitter data, all of our different channels or email marketing data or Hubspot data, and so on and so forth. Are podcast performance data, all that gets goes who gets cleaned, and gets glued together in one room. Easily big table. And that really big table is the basis for uplift modeling, because it allows us to decide, okay, we need to account for all the business as usual. So, again, this is something where you want to invest the time to gather this data from all these different systems and have it in one place. The critical thing to do next is to declare, when is this happening, when was the influence or campaign active. So here, we see a is a treatment declaration that when the date is between these dates, which we got from Google Analytics, right from this, here, we’re gonna say that was when the influence was active. And in doing so, we can then run what’s called a propensity score match or a propensity score model, it’s going to do the mathematics of what we just talked about, which is figure out when figuring out the the differences between business as usual, and the activity.

Katie Robbert 26:03
Now, can you radically also have dates of engagement in a contract with an influencer? Oh, for sure. Like, if you don’t have a contract with you, influencer, that’s a whole different topic of where things go wrong.

Christopher Penn 26:16
And Katie had said you wanted to specifically look at a website, right? Because Oh, it’s awareness, awareness is really important to us. So we’re gonna go ahead, and we’re going to do that we’re going to specify the importance. Alright, and we should have, let’s make sure we did have a match here. Nope. That’s in the wrong place.

Alright, so I’ve gone through, and I’ve said, I want you to go through, do the matching. And let’s take a look at what happened. So, when this was happening, when this this campaign was crashing, we saw a 181% increase in email traffic to the Trust Insights website. We saw a 74% increase in organic social traffic. We saw conversions generically on ngaa for up 71%, we saw 54% new users, we saw 12%, more referral traffic, we saw 3.5% more organic search traffic, we saw a minor decrease in organic video traffic. So for this period of time compared to the past, these are the results that we got from this influencer campaign. This is the lift above normal.

Katie Robbert 27:44
And so, you know, going back to the comment about the contract, you know, in this example, Chris, you were on stage. And so, you know, we would assume that you are talking about this on social on our social channels, and mentioning it in our email newsletter and sort of hitting all the different channels that we typically hit as a company. But in your contract with your influencer, you would want to specifically state, this is the channel that we expect you to have an impact on. These are the dates, these are the things and so for us, it’s more general, in this example, but with a cot with a contract with influence, or you could get very specific, I want you to post on this specific channel at these times doing with to these audiences with these keywords, those kinds of things.

Christopher Penn 28:35
Exactly. And what’s what’s really important here is that all these measures, these are looking at activity differences. So whether or not there wasn’t a tracking link, whether or not there was a digital download. If you know the period of time when the influencer was active, you can then go ahead and say run the see, okay, these differences happened regardless of whether the influencer was driving direct traffic through, you know, scan the QR code on this slide. And force people to do that. This is this is uplift modeling. This is what you would do to determine whether or not the influencer had any impact on your marketing, regardless of the direct traffic now, it is better, it is better to have a call to action in like on stage like yes, you know, go to this URL to download the the Trust Insights tip sheet for creating ChatGPT prompts. It’s certainly better to do that than not. But even if you don’t have that, as long as you know the period of time when there was unusual activity, which we saw on Google Analytics, you can build this model and you can say okay, these are these are the results of this. And what this also lets you do which is really nice. Is apples to apples. So maybe you bought an influencer for or a special event? And maybe two months from now you bring in a different influencer. You could run this exact same analysis on that second influencer and say, What’s the difference? Like who did better? And because you’re looking at these variables, you can do an apples to apples and say, well, this influencer got us 74% more organic social traffic, this one got 72%. This one’s the better one. If they’re doing the same thing, if they’re doing the same thing. Exactly. And again, that goes back to the user story.

Katie Robbert 30:29
John, as a statistician, does this checkout.

John Wall 30:32
This is rock solid, it comes out of the tool, you don’t even question it.

Katie Robbert 30:38
So I guess I’m still stuck on, you know, more of the stripped down, like setting up the measurement plan. And so that’s, so you’re showing the technique to actually measure the data. But, you know, where would you? Where would you have someone start if they said, We want to bring on an influencer? How do we put a plan together?

Christopher Penn 31:05
Obviously, with with the five P’s, right, what’s the purpose? You know? How are you going to identify the person what process you’re going to use them to? To do the influencer? Activation? Right? Is it speaking? Is it an e book? Is this that thing? The platform is going to be contingent upon what the activation is. And then the other performance side? Here’s my big question, what measurement systems do you have in place? And are they correct? Because if they’re not here, like in our case, we’re using as the proxy or Google Analytics 4 as default channel grouping. So we know that our tagging and tracking for everything we’re doing is as correct as we can make it. If you don’t have that in place. If your GA for data is hosed already, then it’s not going to be helpful for you. And and really, before you do an influencer activation, you should be thinking yourself, man, maybe I should fix my systems.

Katie Robbert 31:58
Well, I mean, and that’s true of pretty much everything. And so you know, I did say at the top of the episode, this wasn’t about artificial intelligence. But if you’re running an influencer campaign, if you’re looking to bring in artificial intelligence, if you want to run a Google ads campaign, that’s all well and good. But you’re already failing, if you don’t have the basics of your data, set up your foundational data setup, because you won’t be able to measure it correctly. And that’s true across any marketing campaign that you try to run or any technology that you try to bring in house, you cannot skip the step of setting up your foundational data correctly. Oh, and by the way, there’s less than 60 days until Google Analytics, which is over to Google Analytics 4. And so if you’re not ready to hire an agency and you want to DIY it, you can take our Trust Insights course at Trust Insights, BBEdit AI, slash GA four course and give it a go.

Christopher Penn 33:00
Or just hire us.

Katie Robbert 33:03
You can talk to John, our chief statistician about what it is that you need.

Christopher Penn 33:09
So yeah, that’s that would be where you would get started is how will you measure what you’ve already got? And then what are the expectations of the influencer? How would how would the influencer if they’re professional influencer, in the B2B marketing space, they should be more than accustomed to people saying, Yeah, we’re gonna be checking our marketing automation system for activity from you, we’re gonna be checking our CRM for references to you, we’re going to be looking at website forms because he will talk about you as the referring source, B2B influencer marketing is I would say is actually easier to measure than B2C because a it’s smaller scale, you’re not going to have 100 million Taylor Swift Fans to show up all at once on your website. And do the attribution that way, you’re going to have somebody like your friend Ashley Zeckman, driving a very specific targeted crowd and be because we have systems like marketing automation and CRM software, you should be able to see those levels of activities in in every part of the customer journey. So you absolutely should have a sense of from the influence of what they think they can impact or what they know they can impact. When we talk about stuff like me speaking at an event if an event is slots are selects our premium package, it includes things like a call out in one or both of our newsletters and so we can say to that event, then, hey, you should expect this amount of traffic from email because we know that stats are on on our email marketing. So if you were to engage an influencer now that influencers got a huge list like our friend Ann Handley, you should absolutely expect to see X, Y or Z as and to your point, Katie, that’s something that you might want to do. Have a chat with the influencer and with your legal team about what those expectations should be sort of almost like a service level agreement.

Katie Robbert 35:08
Right? Exactly. Yeah, it’s, it’s like any relationship, you just want to make sure you’re setting the correct expectations, so that you’re getting what you need. They understand what you’re asking of them. And then together, you can measure correctly what’s happening. You know, Chris, we, when we worked with the agency, a lot of the teams would bring on influencers, to help their brands, and we saw a lot of missteps happen specifically around that expectation setting. You know, so very short anecdote, one of the brands brought on a very well known person, a celebrity, and failed to set expectations around what that person should be doing. So they paid, you know, six figures for this person to pretty much not do anything, but they had no leg to stand on. Because nowhere in the contract, did it actually say, We want you doing X. So when they went back to that influencer, and said, Why didn’t you do X? The influencer said, because you didn’t tell me you wanted that. But my contracts expired. So we’re good. I took my money and ran

Christopher Penn 36:20
$140,000 for two Instagram posts. That was that was it? Yeah, they they neglected to do any kind of measurement whatsoever. Even in that case, you know, if you’re just talking about awareness, the least you could have done was say we’re going to track organic searches for this product name, we’re gonna see if there’s any change in the number of people searching for the product name, you know, that at that event, or in the seven days following? And if there was an okay, yeah, maybe we could attribute that, you know, even if they didn’t have uplift modeling, if there’s just a statistically different median in that period, like, okay, yes, something happened there that might or might not be able to trace back to it. But yeah, they didn’t do any of that. And so there was no way to say yep, this is what your this is what your 140 grand Bocha.

John Wall 37:14
That ends up ends poorly, that always ends poorly.

Christopher Penn 37:17
It’s unless except for the influence, so they got 100.

Katie Robbert 37:20
Well, and that’s exactly it. And so it’s, you know, as you’re talking about that service level agreement, you know, that’s true of influencers, that’s true of products, that’s true of anything, any sort of exchange of services are good. If you are not clearly stating the exact the state and the expectations, then you know, you’re going to be out a lot of money.

Christopher Penn 37:41
You get what you get. Yeah, if you if you don’t ask for it, you don’t get it. So that’s um, B2B influencer marketing measurement. It is the the, I guess the gold standard is uplift modeling, to say, okay, based on the goals, and the purpose, what happened? And how is it different than business as usual?

Katie Robbert 38:06
And I would say to that, because again, I always go back to do people have these skills in house if you don’t? We do. And if you are running B2B, influencer marketing programs, and want to get more sophisticated with your measurement of the impact of these programs, then reach out to us at trust insights.ai/contact and you will get a direct line to John Wall, who can tell you everything you need to know about stats and how we do uplift modeling.

John Wall 38:36
Yeah, if you’re looking for 1900s era statistics,

Katie Robbert 38:41
you have your abacus in the background.

John Wall 38:43
Check my slide rule. All right,

Christopher Penn 38:48
I think that’s enough for this video. Thanks for tuning in, folks. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcasts, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers See you next time.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.