Spending £30k on Influencers for Five Signups
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What mistake did the team make by treating influencer work as a simple transaction?
This is Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the show that teaches you growth from failure. I'm Chris Norton, and every week a senior marketer sits down with me and my colleague Will Ockenden and tells us what went wrong, what it cost them, and what they would do differently. This is one of those moments, so enjoy. Working in PR, the side of marketing that we come from, it's about relationships. And I suppose that's where media relations, influencer relations, all those sorts of things. I think it's important to build a relationship with that set of influencers that you're going to work with and have a reason for them to have a bloody opinion on what you're doing. So you just said that you had a problem in what you've done.
Let's dive into that. Where have you gone wrong then in that sphere?
Yeah, you said it yourself, Chris, because... I think the cardinal sin that most people make is that they see it as a transaction and they see it like performance marketing, where it's like, well, here's the value exchange. You've got an audience. I've got money. Let's make it happen.
How did the £30k Facebook Live campaign fail to generate sign‑ups and why?
You know, that can't, you know, I'm not saying it can't work, but it's less likely for it to work. And oftentimes, and this is, again, another cardinal sin, I see companies say, oh, let's do a pilot. Let's, you know, get 10, 20, 30 grand, whatever the number is, and split it across five influencers and get them to post about our product, service, whatever it is. And let's analyze the impact in a couple of weeks to post that campaign. Most of the times they'll be like, A little bit underwhelming, right? Because you've done two things. One, you thought that people change perceptions just off the back of one post, right? Trust takes time to build. Just because Chris or Will, you start talking about a widget or a product or whatever, you know, might put it on my radar and be like, ah, never thought about that before.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that after one post, I'm going to use it ongoing. Now, If I keep on seeing you, Will or Chris, start to talk about things regularly, that's a different thing.
Why is confusing demand creation with demand capture a common pitfall in B2B influencer marketing?
Because then I can say, all right, I've started to see how Chris or Will, people I respect, are using this in their workflow. And it now is more contextually relevant to me. So bear in mind, a lot of the lens I talk at this through is through more kind of complicated tech buying in B2B. Typically, that's the kind of... That's the slice of the world that I typically see and think about the most. So there's that point. Transaction doesn't happen. Buying process doesn't happen in a vacuum like that. There's other stakeholders to engage. There's what we call hidden buyers, people that are in the COO or CFO positions that didn't see your post, but they need to be influenced. Anyway, go on that forever. But anyway, transaction is a problem.
pilot looking at things in these little pilot you know confined things and not stretching out over the longer term again problems and that's what we did with one particular influencer where we spent you know 30 grand for them to do a facebook live tour of their audience it just basically basically did nothing and we fell into the usual trap of going you know Oh, great.
What changes did Andy make to focus on the right value exchange with influencers?
This would be wicked. We stayed late in the office because this person was based in North America. And we're like, watch the signups come in, lads. And crickets, maybe five, 10 signups. We're like, oh, because we just, again, misunderstood the difference between demand creation and demand capture. Right. We've just started to put this on people's radar. Right. We started to create demand. This is not a transaction.
Right.
So that's the primary issue that we've fallen into. So how do we resolve that? How do we think about it better?
How can you choose niche operators like agency owners as effective B2B influencers?
Number one, we've got to think about the right value exchange. So what do these people do that we're going to work with over the long term that really makes sense for us as a business? So for ContentCal, we spent time working with agency owners because they were our target audience. So people that also owned agencies that were going to talk about us on our behalf.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What mistake did the team make by treating influencer work as a simple transaction?
0:00–1:01
2
How did the £30k Facebook Live campaign fail to generate sign‑ups and why?
1:01–2:09
3
Why is confusing demand creation with demand capture a common pitfall in B2B influencer marketing?
2:09–3:14
4
What changes did Andy make to focus on the right value exchange with influencers?
3:14–3:47
5
How can you choose niche operators like agency owners as effective B2B influencers?
3:47–5:01
6
What steps to build long‑term relationships with influencers that lead to genuine product advocacy?
5:01–6:00
7
What key takeaways should marketers apply when planning B2B influencer spend?
6:00–7:04
Speakers
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