When you think of influencers
on social media, Instagram and TikTok probably come to mind.
But big growth is happening with influencer marketing on LinkedIn.
Yep. LinkedIn.
Let’s talk more about it in this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of marketing for Unbounce, Insightly, and LeadsRx.
Today I am joined by Aneesh Lal.
He is the founder of Wishly Group, the number one LinkedIn creator agency.
Welcome to the show, Aneesh.
Thanks for having me.. I really, really appreciate it.
So I’m going to be upfront with our listeners and say that I’ve used
Wishly’s services both for the Unbounce and Insightly brands,
so I might be a little bit biased in our conversation.
But please go ahead and tell us how you got started in the B2B creator business.
Yeah.
So I actually left Pinterest in 2022 to start my own business.
And part of that was coming onto LinkedIn to, to get business.
And when I got here,. I met so many different, sales creators.
And, these are people I’ve learned from, and I follow them for quite some time.
And when I got to meet them and get to know them, they told me about
the brand deals and things like that that they were getting
or like people are reaching out asking for brand deals.
And, I saw some of the quotes
that these folks are getting and. I was like, this is, this is not right.
Something’s off.
And I’ve been selling to, you know,. I’ve been in media sales for for so long.
I was an agency rep in Canada for for Pinterest.
And, when I got to the, when I started meeting with, like, my first client
as named, Kevin Dorsey, KD, shout out to. KD would not be here without them.
I started helping him package up his stuff.
I was like, hey, if you package up your webinars, your podcasts,
all those things, that’s worth something to brands.
And I got his first call, like,. I joined him on his first brand deal call,
and we closed that deal, and, the rest is history.
He’s like, dude, you’re really good at this.
And I realized in that moment there’s so much
untapped potential with LinkedIn creators.
So I work with KD for a little bit, and then all these folks
talk, they’re all they all have their WhatsApp groups and, one thing
led to another and I signed, you know,. Morgan Ingram, John Barrows, Devin Reed,
who we know very well and, and then Jen Allen-Knuth.
And those are my starting five.
And we have a starting five with those five names.
It helps get your name out there pretty quick.
Yeah, I’d say that’s definitely an all star cast.
Because here’s the thing. Write these creators.
You want them focusing on what they do.
You don’t want them necessarily focusing on contracts and deals and calls, right?
You want them to really, you know, use their talents where their talents belong.
And that’s basically what you offer.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s funny, 100%.
So we now have 32 creators on our roster.
We got 25 on the waitlist.
So the one, the one thing that’s common with all 32
is that none of them are full time creators.
They all, to your point, have a full time vocation and area of focus.
Maybe they have a full time job, whatever it is, the brand deal side
is secondary to their where they want to spend their time.
So our whole thing is to give them time back to double down on what’s
really moving the needle for them.
And, you know, the brand deals is is a secondary.
Well, I think that also lends itself to their authenticity, right?
Because if you’re just a voice for hire.
I’m not sure how much that resonates with an audience versus someone who
the audience can relate to as also being in the trenches of day to day sales.
Yeah, they’re they’re future proofing their full time
focus by being in the game. Right.
By being in the game seeing what’s working.
If I was a sales creator and I was telling you how I sold
like ten years ago because I haven’t done anything in sales since then,
I probably wouldn’t be as credible as, you know, John Barrows
or Jen Allen or all these other folks that we rep.
So, them staying in the game and spending
more time actually helps them with the brand deals, funnily enough,
because brands and their audiences are relying on these folks
to to stay true to what’s happening today.
Okay, so I do have one question about your LinkedIn profile.
It says you’re the Jerry Maguire of LinkedIn.
I’m concerned
there might be some people
who don’t know that reference because that movie has been quite some time now.
But why do you use that tagline?
73%, 70% still know what it is. 30%.
I have no idea what I’m saying.. But just for the record.
For the record, for the audience,
for those 30% that don’t know what Jerry. Maguire is, definitely watch the movie.
It’s a Tom, Tom cruise film.
It’s phenomenal.
If you’ve heard of things like show me the money you had me at.
Hello. It’s from that movie.
this name was actually given to me by by my creators.
some of my creators have told me, like, hey, Aneesh, like you care about us, like
Jerry did with Cuba.
I’m like, oh, wow, that’s you guys are getting me in the feels with this one.
Thank you.
And and I had a lot of folks starting to understand
the reference, like, oh, you’re the agent. Oh, you’re an agent.
So I did it as a marketing thing.
I’m learning from all these marketing experts around me,
and it’s it’s actually worked out really well because a lot of people don’t know,
Jerry Maguire is actually based on a real life person,
and, that
person’s, today is, David Meltzer.
He, you know, he’s used to run one of the biggest sports media agencies out there.
And I actually got to meet David three months ago, at one of his, masterminds.
And there’s 20 people here, some billionaires, some Deca millionaires.
I’m like, what am I doing here?
And I’m just trying to get I’m just trying to learn
how these folks are building, how he built this talent agency.
And, we going around the room and,
introducing what we all do.
And when I told them
I’m running a LinkedIn influencer agency, everyone’s stopping.
Like what?
LinkedIn influencers.
We’re trying to learn how to crack. LinkedIn, like, tell us everything.
And it turned into like a bit of a masterclass with all these people.
I went through all these profiles
telling them what to do, how to improve all that fun stuff.
So at the end of the night,. David Meltzer and his team
come up to me and they’re like, hey, we’re looking into your profile.
And it says, you call yourself the Jerry Maguire of LinkedIn.
And I was like, so embarrassed. Val?
I was like, oh my, here I am in this man’s house
telling him how to do stuff on LinkedIn, when I’m using his name.
And I’m like, he might own the rights to this thing.
Like, oh my goodness. Like, I don’t even know where this is going to go.
And I was like, oh, David, sorry, this is the problem.
He goes, no, no, no.
I think it might be confusing, though, if the Jerry Maguire
of LinkedIn represents. Jerry Maguire on LinkedIn.
And I was like, what are you saying to me right now?
And two days later, we actually signed. David Meltzer.
So, we’re going to be making a bigger announcement about this later
and, in August.
But, we now rep Jerry Maguire, which is incredible.
A lot of people don’t know that yet.
We’re we’re working on some stuff together.
But we now represent his entire social media activations beyond LinkedIn as well.
Okay.
Well, that’s a full circle moment if I’ve ever heard of one.
for those of you who believe in manifesting stuff
and whatever and like, well, how did this that’s connecting the dots and I’m like,
I couldn’t believe it when that happened.
So Amazing.
So let’s drill down a little bit into what’s going on with influencer B2B.
So I saw this really interesting piece of research from Ogilvy
that said that B2B marketing teams are now calling,
B2B influencers spend like essential,
and they are expecting to see huge increases in this upcoming budget cycle
where B2B brands like me are putting a lot more dollars behind influencing.
Why do you think this shift is happening so quickly?
Yeah.
So I don’t think there was, a knowledge economy
ecosystem like LinkedIn in the last 4 or 5 years.
So if you look at the macro level trends of what’s happening,
A, it’s getting way it’s way too competitive and saturated.
When it comes to the influencer creator economy and other channels like,
you look at Instagram and you look at X and you look at, TikTok and Snapchat,
like these are all very, very competitive places where it’s of very expensive
to tell your story, especially if you’re a newer brand.
It’s even harder to tell that story in B2B
because of all the B2C noise that you see on those platforms.
Now, traditionally,. LinkedIn was a job hunting platform.
It’s still very much is job hunting.
It has a lot, you know,
LinkedIn talent solutions still the number one thing they do.
But since Covid and I hate bringing up the C-word,
but since Covid, we’ve had all these people
who came together to understand what we’re going to do next as,
let’s call it, professional services businesses, corporations like B2B,
what is the direction of how we navigate work from home?
Recruiting pay raise, pay,
sales, marketing, all the go to market strategies that we’ve talked about
because we had this unprecedented moment in time when everyone had to come together
to figure this out.
These were not job hunters.
These people came together to connect, to see how we can innovate and get better.
And now that they established those relationships and those forums
of comms, it’s transcended to something like, okay, what else can we talk about?
How else do we keep innovating?
Oh, you’re doing this.
Have you thought about that? This knowledge
beacon that’s turned into LinkedIn.
It has grown. It’s blown up.
And you have all these micro,. I’m sure you’re probably part
of all these marketing leader groups now.
It’s started here at LinkedIn. Right.
So when you take a look at the rise of this ecosystem where
decision makers are actually being active on another social platform like LinkedIn,
that’s creates demand, that creates change agents.
When you have a community
anywhere, you always look up to the people who are making the moves.
Those are the influencers that we happen to represent now.
So brands are now waking up to the fact, like, hang on,
there’s a way for us to activate here.
And that’s why you’re seeing the rise that you are now.
And it wasn’t there before.
So you’re saying the Covid really pushed the,
maybe expedited the business growth community that LinkedIn is now?
And and that is giving birth to the influencer space on LinkedIn.
That’s really interesting. Take.
Yeah. We saw it firsthand. Right?
When Covid happened, you saw, pavilion numbers increase.
You saw different communities like Rev Genius blow up.
I was one of the founding members of Rev Genius, so I know I saw it
and felt it firsthand where you had all these people coming together to be
like, what did we do?
We’re not looking for jobs.
We’re trying to keep our jobs.
What what do we do?
And that was the stepping stone necessary for so many micro communities
and people talking and trying to figure out what to do next.
So, LinkedIn’s turned into that that corporate place that’s like the
the global watering, you know, the watering hole or whatever you call it,
like, where people water cooler, water cooler, water hose different.
I think.
But but you have this global
water cooler where people just come and talk about how they’re trying
to navigate their, their jobs, their careers and what’s happening next.
So, these are all like the keener types as well, the folks
that lead their organizations as change agents, they’re likely six figure earners.
There’s way less bots, way less competition on the platform.
That’s why you’re going to see so many more brands getting active here.
I think you should trademark global water cooler
because I, I haven’t heard that before
but it’s really the perfect way to describe LinkedIn.
Let’s talk a little bit like nuts and bolts.
If you’re, if I was a marketing person listening,
how would a marketing team typically start an engagement with a creator?
And how does your firm kind of facilitate that? Yeah.
So the first thing we’re talking about, we’re talking to 20 brands a week minimum.
Now, and like I said, we’re working with 50, 50 B2B brands.
We’re doing 80, 80 campaigns a month now, which is insane.
I think when you when you when I started working,
it was like the way we’re like 12 people we’re working with, the, the growth
and what we’re seeing every, every week is like,
hey, these we’re going after these. ICP, this title, that’s where it starts.
We know
which one of our creators has followers with those titles,
but we always show that analysis to our to our brands anyways.
Like so.
And so has this many people that follow them that our CROs
or CMOs or whatever the title is you’re going after.
And that helps us recommend talent with confidence.
It’s data backed.
LinkedIn does tell you the people’s titles, so let’s use that right.
And a lot of people don’t know how to access that information and all that.
That’s where we sort of come in and speed that up for you.
And then once you know
that you’re getting in front of people that talk to your audience,
then you want to look at the mediums.
And this is where a lot of brands sort of fail.
I’ve seen a lot of brands come in and just do like these.
Let’s hire ten Nano creators and do a one week take over.
And yes, you will see a spike in impressions that week, but brand recall
and all those things are very difficult to do after just one post.
Like it’s just so hard.
The frequency piece that we’ve all learned in marketing
applies to LinkedIn as well.
You need consistency over time to get deeper with, creators community.
And when you see people just do one off post as the medium,
you’re not going to see the traction that you want for long term
relationships with a potential prospect,
especially if you’re a more expensive, offering.
So what we offer is a multi-channel, multi-month approach.
100% of our creators have this as an offering.
And you know this for sure.
So monthly LinkedIn posts, monthly newsletter blast getting involved
with people’s podcasts, getting webinars, going coauthored content.
This is how people start seeing you across the board beyond just your name.
They know the problem you solve, the considerations that you fall into,
and then hopefully you see
signups, conversions, and leads coming in at the end of some of those engagements.
So that’s sort of the methodology we’ve pushed out to go
beyond an impression spike.
That’s my philosophy.
I think in working with creators is I don’t expect them to perform magic tricks.
And I’ll all of a sudden fill my funnel.
But if their, influence can get me in the initial consideration set with a buyer.
To me, that’s success.
Because from there, my product, my sales team,
we have to have the right solution and and close that deal.
But that initial consideration set is so crucial, and, it’s top of the funnel.
But, boy, does it matter if you’re not in that initial consideration set.
I think the statistics are like you have a less than 1% chance of winning a deal.
So getting in there
early is really the advantage. I see to working with influencers.
Absolutely.
We talked about this with brand leaders all the time.
As, like how often as a team do we really think about what we call it,
the conversation nodes.
And that’s like our goal here is to be in conversations in rooms that we’re not in
as a brand.
We want to be we want to be like, hey, like,
does anyone know how to do this, this and this?
And if your brand is not being mentioned,
that’s a huge problem.
But you know what another big problem is?
Let’s say I’m a CRO and I go to a, the watercooler
and I’m like, and I’m like, hey, is anyone heard of Wishly?
And if nobody says yes to that and that whole
the cool kids of the company,
if no one in that circle is like, yeah, I’ve heard of them or.
Yeah. Or that’s where KD and Devin.
Yeah, if no one’s doing that, the chances of me
making it to consideration and buying is also dead.
So there’s two things people need to worry about.
It’s are you being mentioned at all.
But then is someone sparking that
conversation of to node to node.
And if there’s no second node that they think about
what happens in their brain, nothing happens.
There’s no synaptic, connection.
And you need to create that.
You have to think about if whether it’s top down
or about a bottom up,
there has to be someone receiving that message
in that, in that secondary conversation that you’re not a part of.
And they need to respond saying, yes, I’m aware of who they are.
That is what leads to the next conversation.
Like, okay, let’s check them out.
Let’s sign up, let’s get that done.
Let’s go to that webinar, whatever it is.
So that’s the piece where influencers are so good because they’re creating that
that dialog.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, because I think
if you’ve listened to this,
you might be like, oh,
I definitely want to add this to my marketing mix, but I think a lot of
brands might be hesitant to engage with influencers because they might hear
about these crazy celebrity deals in the B2C space and think, well,
that’s just out of the realm of affordability for our team.
Right. Cost wise.
The reality is, it does depend on whom you’re working with
and how many channels you’re activating against.
But I’ve seen I’ve seen influencer campaigns start as as small as, you know,
1500 or 2 grand a month, all the way up to 10 to 15 grand a month.
It really does depend on whom you’re working with and who
who their audience is.
So obviously, if you’re going to go after,
like a C-suite level activation, that’s going to cost more.
If you’re if you’re going to work with a creator that has 400,000 followers
and lots of engagement and large email lists, you’re going to pay more.
But if you want to go for the nano option,
there are influencers who charge 1000 to 1500 bucks.
So I’ve noticed this across the entire LinkedIn spectrum.
Like the options are there.
And it’s very, very now’s the time for you to scoop up the talent
that you feel speaks to your audience before your competitor does,
because category exclusivity is a very real thing.
Okay, so that sounded like the answer to my next question,
but I’m going to ask it anyway.
If you could give one piece of advice to B2B marketers
about working with influencers, what would it be?
It sounds like move quick.
Well, move quick there.
I feel like you’re going to hear that a lot,
so I’ll give you a deeper take here.
Before even talking to the influencers or coming to
someone like me who can help you match, make or whatever it is.
Ask your marketing team and your C-suite and your sales teams.
What are the preconceived notions that people have about our brands
or brands, whatever you’re selling?
What are the preconceived notions that people have about us?
How are people talking about us at the bar, at the watercooler,
in dark social channels?
And if you cannot answer that question,
then your influencer campaigns
will likely be a very big test
because you don’t know if it’s the influencer, you don’t know
if it’s messaging, you don’t know if it’s your, you’re up against
some preconceived notion about your brand that you haven’t even thought about,
right?
Like, if you think about certain, you know, there’s like so many rev ups
and AI technology is coming out with like, oh, they’re very complicated to use.
And that’s a preconceived notion
you hear about all the time when you go to a conference.
Oh, if you heard of so-and-so.. Oh yeah, they’re too expensive.
Oh, it’s too hard.
Oh, but what I hear all the time.
And when you think of those situations socially, that’s what the influencers
are there to either dispel or amplify is the preconceived notion is good for you.
Amplify the hell out of it.
If you have preconceived notions that are working against you socially,
that’s where you start planting your influencer strategy.
How do you dispel the things that people already think about you.
That’s a
really good way to start as a pre influencer exercise.
Before you even find the person or people
that you’re going to work with to run a campaign.
That’s a really great tip.
You know, I’ll put on.
I represent several brands, but I’ll put my CRM hat on right now.
And and what we have to dispel sometimes is that, you know, CRM
has to cost $100,000 a year and require two
full time employees, you know, and and that really isn’t the case.
But I never really thought about it through that lens.
Like what
what myths are we trying to dispel and, and, leveraging an influencer
for something like that?
That’s a really, really interesting way to think about it.
Yeah.
And most companies are,
especially in the SAS world, are sitting on this type of thing, but.
As they have customer success.
They’ve done surveys.
They know what people like and don’t like about their their product.
And chances are, if that’s
already there and your brand is remotely spoken about,
that, that’s what people are talking about behind your back.
So we have to think, what what do people like?
What are people not telling us that we already know is there?
Because people love saying stuff that you want to hear all the time.
But if you know, if you have real,
real feedback, that’s what you need to take
to the influencers so they’re aware of how they position things as well.
And a lot of brands miss that part.
All right.
Well, this was a great conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We’ll wrap it up there.
But if folks want to learn more about you or Wishly, where should they go?
Well, it’s gonna be LinkedIn, folks.
I’d be shocked if it was anything else, but.
Feel free to follow us on LinkedIn.
Feel free to shoot me an email, Aneesh @wishlygroup.ca, any time.
I love nerding out to this kind of stuff, so I really appreciate
you having me on the show today.
Thank you. Awesome.
And thanks to all of you for tuning into Closing Time.
Remember, you can get these episodes delivered right to your inbox.
Just click on the link in the show notes and we’ll see you next week.
