Lee Odden: What 400 B2B Marketers Say About Creator Marketing

And you see the market is now...

Like crystallizing a little bit into like you start to have marketplaces for creators, you have managers for creators as well.

So it's less of a wild west now and a little bit more organized.

Yes, it's interesting.

When my head of influencer marketing first mentioned to me, it's like, yeah, I've got to go through their manager.

What do you mean? Their manager at their company? No, their talent manager.

They have a creative talent agency that they're working through and that's who we have to negotiate contracts with.

And that's the way it is.

And that speaks to one of the findings we had from the research in that one of the largest, most notable things was The rise in entertainment, what we call entertainment creators.

This is an interesting thing for B2B, right? So usually an influencer is this sort of analyst or subject matter expert, super user, really in-depth, great credentials, many years of experience.

And then they have an audience where they publish to.

But increasingly, the B2C model... is finding its way over into B2B.

And so humor, sketches, micro dramas, you know, the ability to perform, but also with a relevant audience topically is becoming more and more attractive.

And it's one of the fastest.

In fact, there are more, our surveys found that more people We're working with more entertainment creators, about 33%, than analysts, which I think is only 32%, which is crazy.

I never would have imagined

that, but that's kind of where things are headed.

Yeah, you see it on LinkedIn nowadays that there's pages dedicated to just provide daily infotainment.

There's these people who just build a following there that is not necessarily targeted towards being the best cybersecurity analyst

or whatever it might be.

It's an interesting thing because there's a time and a place.

So when the dust settles of the romance of these famous creators who could be actors in Hollywood, but instead they're being a creator, when the dust settles off of that and you look at the data and you're like, okay, what's the ROI? And so one size fits all is a really dangerous trap to fall into.

And like I said, it's a very romantic notion that your brand can be associated with this really famous person.

And there's a time and a place for that in the awareness bucket.

But when it comes time to engagement and conversion, you know, that's where we need to lean a little more on those traditional influencers who have deep domain expertise and the practitioners have respect for them, not because they're charismatic, but because they have proven themselves to be someone who's solving difficult problems, who can give credible and consistent, solid advice.