The Importance of Relationship Building in B2B Influencer Marketing with Ryan Bares
There are several differences, of course, between B2C and B2B influencer marketing but one that never changes is relationship building.
To explore this more, I chatted with Ryan Bares, Global Influencer Marketing Lead at IBM. Prior to IBM, Ryan worked at Google where he worked on the Google Maps team where he leveraged influencers to write reviews and updates to local places on Maps.
Learn about Ryan's experiences at IBM and Google and takeaways that you can apply to your influencer marketing programs.
Also, since we recorded this during the holiday season, you can also hear our predictions for 2023.
After listening to the episode, make sure you connect with Ryan:
And, if you enjoy learning about influencer marketing and private communities, please consider subscribing to the Influencer Impact newsletter. Until next time!
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript likely contains errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.
Justin Levy 0:01
Welcome back to another episode of Influencer Impact. My name is Justin Levine. Today I am joined by Ryan Bares, who is the global influencer marketing lead at IBM. How are you today, Ryan? Hey, Justin. I'm great. Thanks for having me.
Ryan Bares 0:19
So we'll dive into some of the areas around B2B influencer marketing and how it's different from B2C, your thoughts on where the industry is headed? But first, what brought you to influencer marketing? And what's that career path look like? Because you don't exactly go to school for influencer marketing these days. Right? Well, at least you didn't when I was in school, for sure didn't even have any of that. So my path is a little bit maybe unique I, prior to coming to IBM, I was at Google. And I was working on a product within Google Maps.
So it was getting people to write reviews and updates to local places, on maps. And so part of that was incentivizing people to, to do that. So we leverage influencers, and I kind of got interested in that realm. And then came over to IBM. And there was there was some inklings of program, influencer programs across the company, and I was within a business unit, but they were really sort of ad hoc, they would just be kind of random, mostly tied to an event.
So I came on I and my manager at the time was also my manager at Google. So we kind of put our heads together and said, We need to formalize a program and make sure that it is more than just one-offs. It's more relationship driven.
Justin Levy 1:49
How do you see and I'm always curious to hear people's answers to this obviously, I have my own opinion, but how do you see B2C, influencer marketing, different than b2b influencer marketing in do you think there's crossover between or things that the two can learn from one another?
Ryan Bares 2:10
Yeah, I think the difference for me a couple of different things that come to mind immediately. One is I think the easiest thing is like platform differentiation. So I when I think of B2B influencer marketing, I'm thinking a lot of LinkedIn and Twitter. And when maybe thinking of b2c influencer marketing, it's more of your Facebook Instagram, Tik Tok. And I do think there's crossover. So definitely into your question about crossover.
We have executed campaigns on Instagram and TikTok as a B2B company. I think some of the others, you can make a really quick purchasing decision as a B2C influencer marketer, right, I can, I can buy something with a couple clicks on my thumb, and I can have that pair of shoes or whatever arrive in the next couple days B2B marketing, we are one touch of 30 plus touches that a client might experience from the company when considering a purchase or exploring a service. So we, we no one's probably making a purchase of a piece of technology from IBM, or any tech company from a tweet or from a post that like it's part of the package. I think that's a pretty big difference between the two. But as far as like learnings that I take from the consumer space, it's, it's it really it can be relationship driven and authenticity.
So I think people see through when someone's just a paid sponsor, hashtag ad, and this person in their feed has one brand, the next brand like people kind of see that and can sniff that out really easily. But when you can show up being authentic, so does that influencer or celebrity actually value what you are as a brand and kind of share that. Share that interest. I think that people see that and, and buy into it. So I think there's some importance there on both sides of it to be like, let's make sure that this content we're delivering is authentic and true to the person because the brand then kind of follows.
Justin Levy 4:30
Obviously, you work for a not small company, company, hundreds of 1000s of employees, you know, 10s of billions of dollars in revenue. Most people would think that there's a huge team behind this and you know, a bucket full of money. But you and I know that's not the case with where I've come from in my career and obviously where you are now but if you are To give advice or say, take an example from a program that you've executed on, and provide that advice to a smaller company, maybe some company that just add in this to their, to their list of programs and you know, mark it in or that doesn't have the resources to, say fund a campaign that a larger company might be able to do. What is an example of a campaign that they could almost replicate at their level, or kind of bad advice that they could take from it?
Ryan Bares 5:42
Yeah, and I think when we, when I first started IBM, in this space around 2016, we were testing a lot of things. So this wasn't a ton of people, it wasn't a ton of money, it was, it was really kind of go pilot test, let's see if it's something you want to evolve. So I would what I would tell the companies small, or even large, that are kind of trying to figure this out, or get started. What I learned is to start small, and I think there was a time when it was like, we just want to have X million and reach. And that was sort of what leadership wanted. And it's like that, that not necessarily always make sense, right? For an influencer program. So it's not about the reach. It's not about the number of people in your program, it's about, in my opinion, the relationships, you can build with those two, three people that you think are really great for your brand and build from there. So I my suggestion is start small. And a lot of the data that we see that I see around what influencers want, whether it's through surveys or through this my own q&a, is they want access to like really smart people that are like-minded. So and that comes before a paycheck. So if you have the ability to bring an external partner, influencer to an event, or Zoom call, and it's with someone that at the company that has a like interest, and it has maybe some notoriety and subject matter expertise, then I think that is somewhere you can always explore and not have to go right to the budget and funding. It is it's a little bit of a unique sell to go to the influencer and say, Hey, we don't have the budget for this campaign. But we think these are the values that you you can bring to the to the campaign and what we can bring to your social persona and, and profile. And so maybe it's not a paycheck, but maybe it's an attempt, you can pay for their badge or travel to an event. And they can be on stage with your SME. And I think there's ways that you can leverage influencer relationships that don't always have to come from a big budget. But So start small, get them involved in where they can, like interact, now that we're kind of going back into live events and in-person things are considering that as a way to get started and then build from there. And I think that's how I would start again if I were to go back and do it all over.
Justin Levy 8:23
One of the things that we did, and I totally agree with every everything you've said, right, but, you know, one of the things that we did, we relaunched the DemandBase brand, earlier this year being 2022, as we record this, and we did have an external kind of paid element to it, you know, the brand was being rebuilt from the ground up. So you know, a whole new color palette and logo design, but everything. So with that there was this big external push. But we ended up inviting about 50 people I want to say and they were at more senior levels, decision makers. And we invited them to this, essentially, behind-the-scenes meeting with our CMO, where they got a preview of the brand of the billboards were going to run and what the website would look like and we asked them for their feedback and so that we could iterate on it at that point it nothing would have changed by two or three days from now. But it was a way to make those folks feel that they were part of something that the company was going forward with and that we didn't pay anyone for that was 100% organic, but there were so appreciative to have been part of that.
Ryan Bares 9:56
Yeah, that whole idea around a focus group is you See, we'd love to do it in enough advance where you can maybe pivot or make some Oh, that was a great, yeah. But I think that's a great point. It's what is that behind-the-scenes access you can give to somebody and maybe in for us, it could be a tour of one of our labs. And, you know, we bring you into a lab, you get to talk with some of the experts that and the technologists that work on this stuff, and you can like nerd out for a day, and Doh, and hopefully, you go create content off of that. And I think that there's definitely ways to get creative. It's easy sort of default to be on money, we don't have the thing, but take small chunks is how I don't you're not gonna like, what's a corporate cliche, saying, like, boil the ocean, you shouldn't want to do that you don't think you're gonna be able to do that. And you're not going to be all things, everybody. So it's like, how can you build relationships with the right people. And I think it's through these connections. And they might have with you near example, the CMO or other experts within the company,
Justin Levy 11:02
one of the areas that you brought up that I wholeheartedly believe in and focus a lot of my time and attention on and recommend when I'm at conferences, or anything like that is building deeper, long-term relationships with the influencers you work with. So many companies focus on transactional, one-off relationships, and they have their point in time, they're needed at certain, you know, for certain campaigns or things of that nature. But like you, like you mentioned, focus on, you know, building those few really long-term relationships, and they pay dividends for your brand, because those folks will still continue to talk about the brand, outside of that campaign outside of whatever that engagement looked like. Because they feel tied to the company and you share similar values between the two come, you know, the company and the creator. I think that's so understated in this industry right now.
Ryan Bares 12:24
Yeah, I agree there is a need for the flash in the pan. thing, but I 100% in behind relationship-driven programs, that you're building almost ambassadors for the brand, and you, you have these like tentpole moments throughout the year of campaigns and events and announcements, and how do you kind of level that off? And I think it's when you're those ambassadors or influencers, which are advocating on behalf of your brand when you're not necessarily asking them to? And I think that's like a win for the brand for sure.
Justin Levy 13:07
Oh, you mentioned the part about, you know, in earlier, people will just have, you know, executives just want to see how big that reaches, right? They want to see the milling number next to it. But and that's okay, it's a needed metric that almost everyone is going to provide just like impressions, it is important to a lot of people and the rights in the certain situations of the different campaigns. But what are other success metrics that are really important to you? When you look across everything that you've been a part of are? Obviously, there are some that depend on specific campaigns. But are there some kind of global metrics that always are there for you always matter?
Ryan Bares 14:05
Yeah, the topic of metrics is always an evolving one, right, as we gather more data from our partners and maybe other things that we're building internally. But I would say you're spot on in terms of it depending on the campaign, right? There are sometimes it's really necessary for us to drive maybe responses and get people to download the thing, because that is the goal. But that's not always we try to think of it as we're really at the top of the awareness, and maybe he's already consideration. But what I would say is always on kind of metrics for us. The way we kind of divided is how do we build the brand and grow the business? So the growing the business part is, how do we get people to ibm.com maybe as website Journey or one of our pages. And that obviously we might entail an engaged visitor that might entail Are they are they net new to ibm.com, and over the last certain period of time, so those are all like really important metrics. But those are a little bit down funnel. Some of the things that are kind of globally important to us are, we leverage a lot of what the influencer can send us on the back end to like, part of our expectations are screenshots of the platform and showing us how things like perform. We we gather a lot of sort of engagement rate is important for us, and what is your what percentage of your of the influencers audience consumed that content? So while impressions are great, but did 60 Glue pick our influencers based on their audience, right? Like what you that's who that's really who's in their network and who's engaging with them is really what's important to us. So we want to make sure that that that content is seeing an X percentage of their audience. So we kind of do a lot of funky math in the back end, trying to figure out rates and engagements on the posts. But yeah, the vanity stuff is great, you know, the the views and the comments, engagement. And those are important, because that's what we're really trying to drive to is like, online conversation around product solution, or whatever the thing is. So that's all kind of it all kind of comes together. And definitely when you boil it all the way up to the top, you have to give one or two bullets. So you have to try to figure out what's the most important but as, as we do, like, campaign reports, maybe down on the campaign level, for the teams, you can get even more granular and into the how many leads to this potentially drive? Or how many engagements with clients that we really are interested in? Did this, this live conversation drive on social or whatever? So there's definitely a few different ways for us to slice and dice it.
Justin Levy 16:58
Yeah, and an important metric, for me, at least on the paid side of of life, is cost per engagement. And because right now, as you probably know, it's the wild wild west with how people chart how influencers charge brands for their time. And it's a way for me, measuring cpe is a way to level set some of that, of course, you can look at the qualified responses, or however you measure your market and on the demand gen side because that if you get one lead, but that lead is worth X amount of money, that's fine. But if it's more on the awareness play or things like that CPE helps you level set at all. It doesn't matter how much you paid that influencer, if budget is not an issue, it doesn't matter how much you pay that influencer, what matters is how many how much they got when it comes to engagement in what that is that what that CP is at the end of the day, because it helps you make a decision for the next campaign.
Ryan Bares 18:11
Yeah, I love that. And you're, you're right on the cost and the rates from influencer, there's definitely wild. Very big range on what some expect for some of the work that we're asking for.
Justin Levy 18:29
Now, as we record this, like I said, it's November of 2022. We have all seen that debacle, maybe more than a debacle, the dumpster fire, that is Twitter right now, ever since Elon Musk took over. Now, feelings can be what people, you know, have, obviously, about what's taking place there. But for a marketer, as someone that's involved in social are attached to a social team and certainly for influencer leads like the both of us are. How do you look at that? You know, what are you taking away from that when you see what's happening and how might that change your strategy moving forward?
Ryan Bares 19:25
Yeah. Well, it definitely has me. I'm definitely paying attention because it is it has been wild. It's been a couple of weeks and it's been crazy and it does it does impact us. You know, we were kind of chatting earlier. And Twitter for the most part is where you start your search and a lot of ways based on the way it's been built and how how open it is with their API's so we at scale can really monitor and discover influencers off of Twitter. So if that if that were to go away, it would mean it would kind of have a trickle-down effect to a lot of the vendors that companies are using to help identify influencers that leverage Twitter data and conversations on that platform. So for me, it sounds like we might have to really find more resources for LinkedIn. And at least in the b2b space, I know there's plenty of vendors that leverage their APIs for TikTok and others. And I, I don't think that's going to be a space, we're going to be in 100% of the time just as a b2b brand. But it does have me nervous on if if things shift or change dramatically, with the way the website just built. It's going to impact how we discover influencers and how we want to work with them at scale. And then, I mean, it doesn't go to mention of just how many parody accounts and just like the noise that's happening on the platform, and a lot of it's sort of in response to Alon and Twitter, blue and other things that he sort of tosses out and sees if it sticks. So brand safety is a big thing. And do we want our the conversations or partnerships we're having with influencers that might be taking place on Twitter, in the sea of noise and uncertainty, right now, it's not exactly the smartest place to be. And it's going to greatly impact the way we do work or in way many b2b companies, I think do work with influencers, if it, if it continues to kind of go down this path of the unknown and chaos, is how I would say. What are your thoughts?
Justin Levy 21:44
You know? I completely agree, I do think you have that issue with the LinkedIn API. I mean, at the end of the day, LinkedIn has a closed API. It so you can extract a lot of data, especially on the influencer side, you are relegated to going in like actually looking at the number of engagements on a status update and counting the status updates and just crazy things that obviously you don't have to do on Twitter that a software will allow you to pull in and measure and manipulate. So I do think that's, that will put some pressure on the LinkedIn whether or not they respond to it or not something different, but you are will start to have the brands that want to use their API, as well as the vendors that have all of these big brands that are partners of theirs, kind of knocking on the door, you know, wanting access to that, because for so long, they've had access to the Twitter's Firehose to your point about you know, brand safety there, there will be that conversation and it's already happening but continue to happen if this kind of debacle continues of do brands want to even be associated with Twitter and also do your influencers your creators want to be associated because you have a lot of people in many that are influential, that have downloaded their archives are taking their accounts private are leaving the platform altogether. And so you may get to a point if you have that conversation internally of yes, we're still fine being aligned with Twitter having our logo essentially in our brand associated with them, you may just simply have creators that have left the platform have gone for greener pastures and that will impact all of our programs you know any brand that's that's been running a program that has Twitter integrated into it so with that said, and no other interview I've conducted or been a part of whether it's me interviewing someone else, or vice versa, up until this time has had you know, if you're looking into next year 2023 predictions for you know in for b2b influencer marketing. I think now Twitter becomes almost part of one of those predictions for everyone but that said, when you look into kind of your thoughts into next year, where do you see you know, what you work on? What do you see the industry moving towards?
Ryan Bares 24:54
Yeah, I think there's I look into my like crystal ball I did not yeah did not have The Twitter debacle on my bingo card. But I looked into next year, I think there's two ways I look at it. There's things I hoped for in the industry. And there's things that I could speak from, like, where I could see myself going. So the, where I think we're going, at least in my little world of influencer marketing, is the exploration of other platforms. I think it's been in this kind of goes to Twitter a little bit. But we mentioned earlier, exploring a little bit on tick tock and Instagram and I know we have, there's audiences there, they might not be the person signing the check, if you will, from a target accounts, but they are probably talking to people that are influencing that decision within that company. So there's, you know, on tick tock, there's the whole Tech Talk sort of area of the platform that I think people are going to learn, going there to learn new things. And obviously, it's got really great search volume that we were learning as of late. So while that obviously, platform has some challenges, too, just with regulation over the last conversation on that over the last few months, but I think there's, for us, it's a little bit more of exploring outside of the traditional, maybe LinkedIn, and Twitter, and then where I hope to be kind of looping back to the topic of how vastly different creators or influencers kind of show up and ask for what their rate might be. And I totally support people asking for what they think they're worth and paying them what they're worth. But, you know, there's just a lot of, there's not not really any standard. So I think I would love for there to be, whether it's marketplaces or other things that are sort of helping bringing that together for for b2b influencers, and like best practices are what people are kind of like expecting. What are the brands expecting? What is the influencers expecting? And how do we kind of matchmake? In other ways, I know there's some vendors out there that have, you know, the b2c marketplaces have been around for a while there's some B2B ones that have popped up over the recent years. But I think there's some growth there to do and how do we how do we really sort of standardize some of this work? Because it is a little bit all over the place?
Justin Levy 27:20
Yeah, I would, I would say, I first I, I completely agree. I would say to that. The two areas that I'm leaning on and continue to beat the drum on is one a more simple one, in that, I think you'll start to see more people that have jobs similar to ours, right, where they're dedicated roles, companies are going to go into start to take it so seriously, that they will dedicate roles. And this is something we saw with social 12 or 15 years ago, it became really popular. You saw some brands lean in on it, you know, mostly b2c brands initially, but then it became a standard line item for companies, you know, there's probably no company that doesn't have a social lead. I think next year, we'll really start to see this happened because as it stands right now, there is only a small number all things considered, folks that that's their full-time job like it is for both of us. My second one is video. And it's because for us at DemandBase, we've been you know, had a very in-depth video program for the past year and a half-ish. And, you know, this year with the marketing profs and Content Marketing Institute yearly study, it had found that, you know, 78% of b2b marketers were invested in video, it was the top, you know, area of investment. But the 2022 study was 69%. Again, number one, so it's grown 9% in a year. The flip side of that was then a follow-up report by CMI showed that 59% of companies think they could do better at video if they had a strategy of video strategy. So I think it leaves such a deep and hole of opportunity for companies, of course, that 70% That it's not dedicated, just influencer videos, but companies that realize that and engage creators to do branded content series to do whatever fits a docu-series, a TV series, kind of whatever fits your brand. I think went out I think have a great advantage next year.
Ryan Bares 29:59
I love that I, to your first point I, if even if you like go into LinkedIn and just like type in in the search bar, like influenced you. I know I've seen it over time with like, how many people have it as a job title and it's just grown over the years. So I I love that trend because it it feels like there's some job security there right as as as social media in general just matures and we're no longer the recent graduate or Early professional. Right. Its people have been doing this now for 1015 years. So yeah, and I think I agree I think influencer marketing as a discipline will continue to evolve and grow with it. I you know, it kind of varies on company to company where it sits within the org. But at the end of the day, I think it's your The goal is to reach new audiences and new diverse audiences that you might not be able to reach with a paid or organic tactic. And we know what organic reach is, is really hard to come by anyway. So I think it's a really great addition to that.
Justin Levy 31:05
So as we wrap up the last questions, the really simple one for you, is where can people find you across the interwebs? Yeah,
Ryan Bares 31:14
LinkedIn is the best spot to connect. I got a profile there. Ryan dot bars, and then I sometimes on Twitter, you can find me there. Mostly work stuff. So yeah, reshare, but you can find me about those channels. Appreciate it.
Justin Levy 31:33
Perfect. Well, thank you for being such a wonderful guest. It's great to hear your thoughts on the industry on you know, B2B influencer market and as well as some takeaways from what you guys are doing over at IBM.
Ryan Bares 31:49
Well, thank you for having me. Justin was great. I appreciate the time and the questions and the dialogue.
Justin Levy 31:54
Fantastic. Well, take care. Thank you.
