b2b Influencer Marketing Dos & Don'ts

Kristen Sesto from Custom Influence helps bridge the gap between brands and decision makers through custom influencer programs.

In this conversation we chat about:

- how to take events to the next level by partnering with industry influencers and incorporating them into the event experience
- how it's necessary to understand the brand's goals and existing marketing efforts before implementing an influencer marketing strategy
- why its important to educate and align brands and influencers to ensure a successful partnership

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Previous guests include: Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda, Andrei Zinkevich of FullFunnel, Scott Van den Berg of Influencer Capital, Buster Franken of Fruitpunch AI, Valentin Radu of Omniconvert, Evelina Necula of Kinderpedia, Ionut Vlad of Tokinomo, Diana Florescu of MediaforGrowth, Irina Obushtarova of Recursive, Monika Paule of Caszyme, Yannick Veys of Hypefury, Laura Erdem of Dreamdata, and Pija Indriunaite of CityBee.

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Transcript

Eric M. (00:00.028)
now, but we'll go into the interview in about 30 seconds. So how have you been overall?

Kristen Sesto (00:05.244)
I've had a lot of work from home time the past couple weeks, probably too much work from home time. And so tomorrow I'm like, I need to go into our co -working space and see some humans outside of my husband and my kids. So I'm looking forward to that.

Eric M. (00:21.436)
Yeah, I know my wife gets like that very antsy and I don't know. I don't know if I got in use to it or not. but I don't know. I think maybe it's cause I, I watch a lot of YouTube podcasts on YouTube and I feel like I'm hanging out with those podcasters. I have, again, maybe that's crazy me, but I don't ever ever get like missing the need to see people. Not as much as her.

Kristen Sesto (00:45.436)
I think everyone's different, you know? And also I think it depends on how much work and the type of work you're doing. Like I said, I've been doing so much like deep work and I'm like, I need a little bit of, I need to lighten things up a bit.

Eric M. (00:55.26)
That's it.

Eric M. (00:59.42)
Yeah. No, I think that's totally it. Cause every week I'm usually interviewing one person or I'm creating like video content for my own stuff. I'm working like on different stuff, you know, campaigns or whatever. So it's never like monotonous, but I think that's it. Okay. Let's get into it. You ready? All right, Christian, first question for you. Tell me something about you that most people don't know and they're not going to see this on your LinkedIn profile.

Kristen Sesto (01:09.052)
Yeah.

Kristen Sesto (01:17.34)
Yeah, I'm ready.

Kristen Sesto (01:27.772)
at heart, I'm like a hippie. It comes maybe it comes through a little bit in in LinkedIn here and there. But I think outside of work, I'm really into mindfulness, meditation, spiritual practice, and overall.

wellness and I'm kind of on two journeys. I'm on my career journey and then outside of that I guess I'm on my spiritual wellness journey. And I think it's important to have those two things separate but obviously a lot of things that I learn through meditation or you know tools that

Eric M. (01:55.772)
Okay.

Kristen Sesto (02:05.052)
I have with kind of staying present applied to work and actually a lot of things that I learn in work in my career, I think about, you know, in that other part of my life. So I would say that's something people don't know. But my mind is there a lot.

Eric M. (02:20.284)
Yeah. When you said hippie, when you said hippie, I didn't think of mindfulness or meditation. I imagine you driving one of those VW old classic buses, you know, the little buses with like a sunflower in your hair.

Kristen Sesto (02:31.388)
Yup.

I think in a parallel universe I am, you know, I think that long term and actually really what I got into my career and moved over to London is I love traveling and I love seeing new places, meeting new people. And so maybe somewhere along the journey in the future will be me living my digital nomad life or something like that. But right now I'm very much in London and very much rooted here.

Eric M. (03:02.012)
Yep. Except for the occasional a visa getaway, right?

Kristen Sesto (03:06.044)
Yes, exactly. Those happen once or twice a year. And actually in a few weeks, I'll have my next kind of break, which I think is really, really important.

Eric M. (03:18.3)
All right, good for you. Next question. The Academy Award for blank goes to Christian. What is blank?

Kristen Sesto (03:25.116)
Perseverance, I would say. I will work at something until I can crack it, I think in all aspects of my life. Don't give up easy.

Eric M. (03:38.044)
Okay, next one. I grew up in blank and my favorite thing about that city is blank.

Kristen Sesto (03:44.668)
I grew up in a very small town in upstate New York. And my favorite thing about it is the perspective that you get growing up in a small town. And I think in many ways, it made me

kind of sheltered from the wider world, but I think as a result, I was very fearless when I entered this real, you know, I went to Florida for university, which was a bigger city, I lived in Tampa, and then I moved here to London. And so feeling like that sense of safety that you have growing up in a small town, I think really helped me be bold when I did get out to the wider world.

Eric M. (04:31.15)
Okay. All right. Last rapid fire for you. Blank is a food that my partner dislikes, but I like it.

Kristen Sesto (04:42.364)
Olives.

Eric M. (04:43.42)
Okay. I don't like olives either, but my partner does.

Kristen Sesto (04:47.644)
Yeah, and yeah, because I had to think about that for a minute because my partner likes almost everything. But yeah.

Eric M. (04:55.644)
Okay, let's get into B2B influencer marketing. A lot of companies right now, they feel like that is a very hot space to play in. They want to do something with influencers. How do you help these brands understand where influencer marketing can fit within their, you know, wider marketing objectives?

Kristen Sesto (05:14.364)
I would say the way that we immediately can help out and add value is taking a look at existing marketing channels, what they're already doing well, what they like doing, and then figuring out a creative proof of concept or task that can run alongside those channels or enhance them in some way. And so because we have kind of worked to put together B2B influencer partnerships on almost every platform,

platform and across so many different industries. I think we have a very good sense, relatively quickly, of what is going to work. And so that strategy piece that I think is really important right now for such a new way to market to people, having ideas that we know how to execute adds a lot of value really quickly.

Eric M. (06:14.076)
Okay. Give us an example. Let's say a brand came to you and said, Hey, we're killing it with these Facebook ads. We've tested dozens of ads. These ads with this value proposition, have the best ROI for us. And how can we like take this even further to the next level with influencer help?

Kristen Sesto (06:32.924)
So we might say in that instance, if it's paid ads, we might say, what does your creative look like and what's the creative strategy? And then looking at how potentially a thought leader or an industry expert could almost become that creative asset. So it's almost like this idea of UGC or user generated content for B2B that can be something really interesting to test. And because if some, if some,

somebody's already doing paid ads and a brand's already comfortable with that, again, you're not trying to have them reinvent the wheel to work with industry experts or influencers as a task or in a new way. So that's probably what I would say is have the influencer become the creative asset.

Eric M. (07:24.54)
Okay. And you said that you're working across all different channels. That includes X, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Anything else that I'm missing there?

Kristen Sesto (07:35.356)
Yeah, so I would say it's not just social channels. I think particularly in B2B or in B2C, a lot of ways that influencer marketing strategies are executed is that brands might say, okay, we just want to focus on TikTok and we want to activate, you know, a dozen influencers on that channel. In B2B,

It might be because there's less, there's gonna be less thought leaders overall for a particular industry sector. Now that's a generalization, but overall it's a less people. And so what we would say is you probably want to work with less people on more channels and that could also include things like independent newsletters.

that are supported either by LinkedIn, but also by other platforms like Substack or Beehive. So you include newsletters and we also include some podcasts in there as well. I know you run a podcast network for B2B marketers. So it would be people like yourselves that we could put together a partnership with.

So yeah, the newsletter and then just OG bloggers, industry bloggers that are independent. I think what we are focused on is finding an industry's independent voices wherever they are. So it could be beyond just social platforms.

Eric M. (08:56.476)
Yeah. And it's getting harder and harder. I mean, there's a lot of podcasts that companies are putting out, brands are putting out and they belong to the brand. They don't belong to the host. And I'm starting to see that more and more. Are you, are you starting to see that in other platforms too?

Kristen Sesto (09:10.78)
Yes, we've seen it. Well, we've seen it in podcasts. We've seen it in particular. I can remember one opportunity where the partnership actually couldn't go forward because the host was really influential, but at the heart of the podcast, it was a brand podcast or it was the company's podcast. And so that's going to limit how independent that voice can really be. I think...

social platforms like LinkedIn, the person has more of their, they own that domain a little bit more. You know, and most of, yeah, events that we're seeing influencers or experts and thought leaders building their own communities and hosting their own events. But many industry events are still most, I would say are ran by media companies and publishers that have moved into that space. But they're still creative ways to incorporate.

influencer or thought leadership partnerships into, you know, events. But, but yeah, probably podcasts is the biggest one where it's like who owns that space really.

Eric M. (10:18.108)
Yeah, yeah. Now you guys wrote a playbook on how brands can boost their existing channels like paid ads, which you just talked about, but also content marketing and events through influencer and creator partnerships. I was wondering if you can give some examples.

Kristen Sesto (10:30.876)
Sure, so we did a partnership last week with a construction tech company and this is in the event space. So I think a really good and one of the use cases we lay out in the playbook is how to work with industry influencers to enhance overall events. So for this construction tech company, they were already sponsoring an event, but we...

we kind of paired them up with a content creator in the construction tech space. And he did kind of a stop and chat style interview with the brand at their stand and then shared that out to his network. He posted that on his YouTube channel. And so not only do you have that piece of content going out from the content creators account.

but you also then have the brand, the brand gets that ability to have that content, slice it and dice it, repurpose it and post that from their own organic social channels. So that's a good example recently of, you know, working with influencers in events.

Eric M. (11:44.156)
Yeah, no, I like that idea. that is very, that's very ingenious actually. Cause it, because it looks so organic and natural and it's not necessarily stage either, but at least the location or the booth, you know, that was already going to be there. So that's a good example.

Kristen Sesto (11:58.812)
Yeah, I think with with things like events that so many B2B brands are already invested in, you know, they already know where they're going to be, they know what they're going to sponsor. It's about extracting more value out of that event marketing strategy through the use of creative content and partnerships with the experts that are also going to be there. And quite often there are you know, there's not any additional

Eric M. (12:22.46)
Yeah!

Kristen Sesto (12:26.268)
travel costs for a lot of these events because those thought leaders are going to be there anyway. So yeah, it's a no -brainer really.

Eric M. (12:32.7)
That's right.

That is a no -brainer. I love that idea. Good idea. Okay. What are some other fun campaigns that you got excited about and you're like, this is really cool. I really like this.

Kristen Sesto (12:37.948)
Yeah.

Kristen Sesto (12:46.14)
So another one that we're doing right now that I think is just really, well, AI is obviously the topic that gets a lot of buzz in almost any B2B industry right now because it's just transforming the way that businesses operate. And so we are also running a brand campaign for a real company that's in the manufacturing industry.

And what they want to do is just raise awareness of the fact that they've had AI capabilities built into their product for a long time. They're not just jumping on a bandwagon. And so what we're doing to raise awareness of those AI capabilities is we're putting together a series of partnerships with

but both podcasts as well as just individuals running LinkedIn lives and that brand has got their kind of resident AI expert that's gonna be going on and doing that kind of road show to those three or four different people. And that is, yeah, it's just, it's brand storytelling.

but with AI incorporated, and again, I wanted to kind of highlight that because everyone's really focused on AI right now. It's really hard to differentiate. And quite often you need that person, that internal, talent to speak to them. So, you know, that, that internal person might not have it, their own huge platform of their own. And so again, that partnership with an industry expert, gets the story out there.

And it just reaches new or more people that might be interested.

Eric M. (14:32.412)
Yeah. Yeah. The influencers you work with, do you find that you have to do a lot of training or coaching with them? I, I find that I have to do that with a lot of podcasters because they didn't create a podcast with the intent to becoming an influencer. and so I find myself having to do a lot of education around that. How is it with you and your experience?

Kristen Sesto (14:51.868)
we, it kind of varies, I'd say it varies by industry and sector. I think part of the value that we provide as an agency is understanding what concept and what type of partnership is going to work for everybody and really getting that nailed down from the outset. And, and that's probably where

the most education, it's at the beginning is that education piece because when we're doing outreach on behalf of brands, quite often you're reaching out to somebody who's spent, you know, like literal decades building their career. And so we need to educate what we see as B2B influencer marketing. And a term that I use now more often is,

we're doing a social first thought leadership program. Because we want people to know that thought leaders to know that this is not a new, it's not that new, right? A lot of thought leaders, experts, voices in industry would always be on the conference circuit. They'd always be open to speaking opportunities. We're putting a social framework.

and social first partnerships together, but they're not, that's the biggest education is it's not that different than maybe a lot of the things that you've done before, or a lot of these same people would previously think nothing of giving a quote or contributing to industry trade press articles. And so, yeah, that's where the education is in terms of the actual ongoing sending content through for approval,

collaborating with the brands, there's a lot less coaching or advice that we need to give once we've got the terms of the agreement in place. But it's really important to, from the outset, know what you're expecting of somebody and what exactly are they doing.

Eric M. (16:57.34)
Okay. Okay. And what, I guess before we leave here, what, what advice would you give to brands, who are trying to do influencer marketing for the first time with B2B influencers? Like what's a, what's a first step that they should, really, really focus on if they're working with an agency or consultant.

Kristen Sesto (17:16.956)
No matter

if you're doing agency, consult and freelancer in house, what I would say is go back to what you're trying to achieve overall. So what's the goal? Does this tie to brand activity? Is it a share of voice or is this more performance focused? Do you actually expect or want people to be doing something or your audience to be taking some action? So like getting that overall,

objective or goal down and where it currently aligns within the team is really important. And then as we were discussing earlier on, just what channels what stuff are you already doing? Where you think an influencer might be able to boost, enhance, or compliment, or if you're or if you're not doing something at all, like for example, if you

are a bit light on the content calendar, right? Where are the gaps that an influencer could potentially fill? And that should be, those should be the two kind of starting points for how to structure a test that is gonna give you some learnings. And I would also say that understand what the initial budget could be.

and focus on getting maybe not just performance, whatever that, however you define that, but how can you learn from it? What are you trying to learn? Because with anything new, you don't want a situation where you test something.

Kristen Sesto (19:04.892)
the test isn't really that well thought out and then you immediately bend it off and be like, it just, you know, it didn't work for us. So learn in the beginning, learnings are arguably just as important as performance.

Eric M. (19:18.78)
Totally agree. We recommend like minimum four week campaign using things like UTM custom links. But there's got to be a minimum number of weeks that you're in it if you want to get some kind of learnings.

Kristen Sesto (19:31.964)
Exactly, I would even say a couple months, you know, and it doesn't have to be always on, you know, partnerships firing off or different parts of partnerships firing off every day. But you want a consistent program over, you know, a couple months that at the end of it, you can say,

this is where we think this has moved the needle, this is where maybe we didn't measure something we should have measured. And yeah, just getting some real insights is important.

Eric M. (20:07.996)
All right. Thank you so much, Kristen, for coming on the show. Where do you recommend that people learn more about you? And then also, should they go to the Custom Influence website to get that B2B playbook or is there something else that you recommend?

Kristen Sesto (20:19.516)
I would say just follow me on LinkedIn. I post most things on there. Yeah, our B2B playbook is on our website. If you subscribe to updates on our website as well, you'll also get all of the other content and little nuggets of information we have to share. So yeah, hope we do get some more people interested. It's a growing space and it's really interesting. So I really enjoy.

Eric M. (20:44.732)
Yeah.

Kristen Sesto (20:49.47)
writing and creating and sharing content on it.

Eric M. (20:53.18)
Yeah, no, I enjoy seeing it too. all right. I'll put links to Christian's LinkedIn profile as well as, her website at custom influence .com and the show notes for everybody listening. if you like this hit subscribe, tell others about it and I will see you next week. Thank you, Christian.

Kristen Sesto (21:08.924)
Thanks.