B2B Influencer and Thought Leadership Strategy - Ep 97

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Show Transcript

AJ Wilcox
Are you using influencer marketing community and thought leadership as part of your LinkedIn Ads strategy? We dive into these topics and more on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Today I have a special treat for you. Lee Odden has specialized in B2B marketing for his almost entire career. And I'm grateful to call him a friend. He and I have spoken at many of the same B2B events. Although I have to admit he's oftentimes the keynote, while I'm one of the breakout speakers. But, I've always looked up to him as a mentor and a thought leader and a friend. Today, we have a wide ranging conversation covering everywhere from thought leadership to influencer marketing and building communities in B2B, and I promise as a B2B marketer, you'll get a lot out of this. I wanted to highlight a review here by Alessia Negro. She's a senior sales and marketing executive in the hospitality industry out of Dublin, Ireland. Alessia says, "Absolutely great podcast. I have learned a lot about LinkedIn from this podcast. I think whoever wants to learn LinkedIn ads should follow it." Alessia, thanks so much for the kind words. And I do agree. Although I realized I'm a bit biased. And if you're a regular listener, I want to feature you so make sure to leave a review. And I'll shout you out live here. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it.

Alright, we've got Lee Odden, co founder of TopRank Marketing. Lee, thanks so much for joining us. We're super excited to have you here.

Lee Odden
It's great to be here, AJ. Good to see you.

AJ Wilcox
Alright, so first off, tell us a little bit more about yourself. Anything that I didn't cover in that rather short and sweet intro.

Lee Odden
I started in marketing, and basically the late 90s. I was actually got into the website sales game selling websites over the phone to small businesses, believe it or not, people would fax us their brochures and we'd make a website out of that. And then of course, people started asking how are we going to get traffic to these websites that you're making us? And that's where I learned about SEO, you know, about creating doorway pages and, you know, creating different web pages for different search engines AltaVista excite Lycos hotpot, you know, no one has heard of those. But then Google came on the scene and linking, and content became more important blogging, social media, and really, over the last 10 years really leaned into the whole idea of CO creating content with influencers. So ultimately, what we tried to do is help customers be the best answer help our clients, b2b tech companies mostly be the best answer for their customers. And it's worked out really well. And, you know, it's kind of funny, on the path from being a really small agency to serving small customers to now serving large enterprise brands. I took that advice myself, right. So I started blogging, and I started doing the kinds of things to make myself known in the industry as a magnet to the agency. You know what I mean by speaking at events and being active on social and connecting with people who were influential to make myself influential, you know, and it's been a fun ride. And when I'm not doing marketing stuff, I'm usually running running is kind of been my thing during COVID. Basically, when I'm actually training for my first marathon, which is going to happen in four weeks. So I'm pretty excited about that. Oh, that's so

AJ Wilcox
Exciting! Alright, so what's your preparation for the marathon look like right now? I know, you start to do a lot more mileage as you go. Are you doing like low high mileage right now?

Lee Odden
Yeah, my highest mileage will be tomorrow. But I did 23 miles last Saturday. And I'll probably do 23.5 or something like that tomorrow. I don't need to do much more. Because the whole race is 26. Yes. So yeah, I've been running more than 13 miles for the last seven weeks or so. I've even run a couple of half marathon races just as a workout, which is kind of a crazy idea. Because a year ago, I was wondering whether I could even run 13 miles, let alone run one quickly. And quickly is subjective quickly to me. Not quickly, compared to a lot of friends of mine that I have out there that are runners that are just smoking it, but it's a great way to get out. It's a disciplined thing. It's a lifestyle thing. Now for me, I feel odd if I haven't run that day. And so it's good for your health. And it's great to have goals, right? Yes, it's great to work towards a goal and having a commitment to a thing that takes a long time is incredibly rewarding when you've been able to reach those milestones, right? And also you connect with a community of other like minded people. And now I'm starting to get all these Instagram posts from running communities with these inside jokes about running and it's like, oh my god, this is so funny, but nobody else cares, nobody else cares. It's fun.

AJ Wilcox
Well, It's so fulfilling, I think to accomplish something physically, that is hard that you know, other people can't. Before a knee surgery, I used to be a runner. And so I do a half marathon every year and an Olympic trial. And I love those kinds of things. I loved accomplishing something physically, that's awesome. Plus, it gives you insight, because you're already community minded, which we'll talk into more, but it gives you something to compare and think about, as you're developing communities around an interest that people have, you can mentally I think, compare it to like, oh, for me, this is running. But for someone else this is whatever the community is.

Lee Odden
You know, that's really important insight. There's a lot of value in metaphor analogy, when trying to break down new or complex ideas into something familiar for people. Because in order for those ideas to be adopted, they have to be communicated in a way that people will be willing to receive. And so yeah, that's a great point running as metaphor, or, you know, overcoming challenges. A lot of people, I'm inspired by our fitness people, but what I'm inspired by them about isn't so much about the fitness it's about overcoming challenges and worldview, and, you know, being resilient and those sorts of things.

AJ Wilcox
Perfect. So jumping back here into B2B, how did you originally get interested in b2b? How did you land? Because my understanding is you're exclusively B2B with your clients, or do you have some VC?

Lee Odden
Exactly. So my agency top rank marketing did start as SEO and PR firm, I had previously mostly consumer experience in marketing doing SEO for consumer websites. And my partner, though, had been working mostly with B2B tech companies as a director of marketing, VP of marketing. And so over time, well, through her knowledge and experience, I learned a lot more about B2B. And the market was responding in terms of inbound interest in our services from B2B companies. And I have a fun story about the big leap early in our business, we were working remotely. And I was working in my unfinished basement, right. And I had a desk down there. And I got a call and someone asked me if I would come speak at their conference, this company was fortune 15 company. So I had been blogging, I spoke a little bit, people knew about me being able to talk about SEO and public relations. So that was a unique intersection. And they wanted me to come speak at their event. And I spoke one morning to their marketing people. And then they said, Come back tomorrow and talk to all of our PR people. So they were a company that was so big, they brought all their different businesses, all the marketers from their all their different businesses and had a little mini conference. And so the second day, I talked to all the PR people. And my contact said, Hey, one of our senior executives was in the room yesterday. And we wanted to know if we could engage your agency on an ongoing basis. So this is the fortune 15 company was a b2b business unit that wanted to hire us. And we were only four people I'm working out of my unfinished basement. Wow. So of course, I said, yes, absolutely, we can help you out. And we figured it out. And that was a fast track to learning about b2b and learning the language of large, complex organizations, because obviously, that's very different than working with a small or medium sized business. And that laid the groundwork for me and the people that I had to competently be able to serve other b2b companies. Right. So now, Adobe, and you know, we've had experience with companies like SAP and Oracle, I've done work for Microsoft, and a really large telecom that I cannot mention, ever, but you know, biggest one, and so on and so forth. So and LinkedIn, my God, what am I saying, we've been working with LinkedIn for gosh, almost 10 years now, providing content and SEO services. So it's been an interesting ride, and b2b is a great space, because there's so much opportunity to raise the bar, it doesn't have to mean boring, boring, there's a lot of exciting things you can do. And there's so much room for us to be able to do it with because of the longer sales cycles, emphasis on content and education and that sort of thing.

AJ Wilcox
Well, I'm glad you shared someof them, I get the feeling that a lot of the kinds of clients that you were with are the kind that don't want you saying that you work with them. So it's really good to understand, and from my understanding a lot of the community and many of the thought leaders within LinkedIn that we hear from, I won't say created by you that you're the one behind them, but you're kind of the inspiration there. Do you have any comment or anything to share on that?

Lee Odden
Well, certainly, it's one thing to make a decision that people within your company should have greater visibility that you want to grow their influence, that you want to facilitate social interaction. But it's another thing to do that with intent with intent in a way that will achieve a particular outcome. So that requires doing some homework developing a strategy and architecting Okay, exactly how are we going to execute this in a way that is best going to accomplish the goal that we're after? So it's not just about tweeting more, or doing a LinkedIn live every once in a while. It's like, okay, what's the topic? And what is the anchor topic? What are the derivative topics? What are the conversations that we can repurpose from that? Who are the content collaborators or influencers on that topic that we can connect with, not only for co creation, but distribution, and so architecting all that stuff is really where the most magic comes from. And then for some companies, we do write content for them. But like I said, a lot of the magic comes in through the strategy and the architecture of the all that, and then of course, the ongoing optimization of performance. And then of course, yeah, and then some content here and there.

AJ Wilcox
Beautiful. I love it. Alright, so talking about thought leadership, specifically, tell us about why B2B marketers should be investing in being seen as a thought leader.

Lee Odden
So if you mean is, like B2B marketer, as an executive at a company or B2B marketer, like you and me are B2B marketers.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think a little bit of everything. I think, executives, I think the frontline workers, everyone in between, like, what's the value?

Lee Odden
Absolutely. So there's a lot of value in that. We all are familiar with the idea, I think Nielsen came out with this research about how people don't trust brands, and they don't trust advertising. And of course, that's been repeated, by different folks since and it still is a challenge in combination with the overwhelming amount of information available to us. I don't know about you, but my email inbox is more of a monster now than it ever was. I mean, just keeping up is crazy. The social channels and people that I follow, I made a lot of effort to craft who I curate, and listen to, but it's just overwhelming amounts of information. I can only imagine what it might be for other folks who haven't had expertise in curation, right. So being a thought leader being a source of truth, for people who are in need, and let's face it, if you're in marketing, you're in need of up to date information every day, right? Ours is a dynamic industry. And so it's super important and to be competent in our industry, it's really very important that we connect with people that are on the forefront of what's new, what's trending, what's relevant. And so being a thought leader helps you as a person who is capable of original thought, who has something to offer, because that's kind of a prerequisite here, and being able to provide value to others in the industry. So that manifests as community building. It manifests as, you know, customers coming to you saying, hey, AJ, I've been listening to your podcast, and I've heard you talk about LinkedIn ads in this way or that way. It's like, you know, we're actually now in a position to get some help. I'm sure that happens all the time. Natalie, I can tell you from personal perspective, I've had it happen. A million times, it feels like where people say, Haley, I saw you speak last week, I saw you speak 10 years ago. And this is people who want to hire my agency, because I'm when I speak, I tell stories about the work the agency does, as well as just best practices, but also people who want to work for me will say, Yeah, you know, I saw you speak, I've been following your blog. And I'm just wondering if there's an opening, oh, my goodness, this person's amazing. And they're coming to us, you know. So for other folks, if you're an executive at a company, if you want to be listened to, if you want to be relevant, it's not enough for your own brands marketing, to go and put out information you think your customers need to know, buyers are looking for sources of truth. buyers are looking for people, humans that they can relate to, that they can subscribe to, so to speak. And if you have subject matter experts, if you are a subject matter expert, and you have something to offer, then it makes sense for you to go down that thought leadership path and make a connection and create value for those folks out in the industry because you know what they desperately need it. And they're overwhelmed with other information. And so you can actually provide them a service. And guess what, what's going to come back to you is new business. What's going to come back to you is community what's going to come back to you is connection with people who can make things happen. And

AJ Wilcox
What I hear from you is you actually have to have something to say in order to be a thought leader. So don't strive to be a thought leader for thought leader sake. But strive to be a great business professional, a skilled expert in your field, and then take that to share with others.

Lee Odden
Yeah, and so there's two things I'd say too, if you don't have that yet, if you're not there yet. I feel like if you're Junior in New York career and you feel like thought leadership is in your future. Two things. One, if you don't have a lot of resources, you could document your journey towards thought leadership. And that actually could help you be a thought leader, as a junior person, you could connect with others who are already thought leaders, they could do things like interviews, you could do things like, get quotes from them, or whatever. And so you can document that journey as you are learning more and more about a particular subject matter. And, you know, hey, I experimented with this. And I found this as an outcome, or I talked to this person. And here's some insight that they shared, I noticed in the news, they're talking about this. And here's what I think about that. documenting that journey can actually help you become a thought leader. The other thing is, if you do have resources, you're at a brand. And you don't know how to do this, you can certainly hire an expert, like an agency, or a PR firm or someone like us who can help you develop a plan for thought leadership, maybe even provide some of the content. And that doesn't happen that often. But it can.

AJ Wilcox
That's a great point. All right. So we've talked about thought leadership as individuals, what about getting your B2B brand to be seen as a thought leadership brand? Do you have any thoughts?

Lee Odden
Yeah, absolutely. You know, for companies, it's a huge differentiator in a crowded marketplace to be thought of first, when companies have a problem, and they're thinking of solution providers, right. And thought leadership is something especially in B2B. But you know, in general, it's useful from a marketing PR perspective. But in B2B, especially, these are large considered purchases. So you're not just looking for the best solution, you're looking for a solution that you know, is going to be relevant, and maybe innovative and important for you in the long run. So if a brand invest in thought leadership, and what that means is you're articulating a point of view, and it's validated by third parties. So that means that industry publications and industry influencers that are validating the ideas that you're putting forth, you're putting out original research, you're pointing out points of view, you're creating opportunities for other people who are important voices and trusted voices in the industry to have conversations with your executives with people that represent your brand. And that kind of combination of information, helps people subscribe to your religion, so to speak, they subscribe to your point of view. And they start to rely in trust on you as the source of truth. So a great example is Edelman puts out the trust research. Edelman is a huge, huge agency, obviously, they have a lot of resources. But it's like, you know, you can rely on Edelman's research about how people trust brands or not, year after year, because they continue to put out that research and they have other marketing conversations around that. For our small part. You know, we put out a report on B2B influencer marketing. And it's really been a great way for people to know that there is data, thoughtfulness and expertise behind the fact that we're a source of solution when it comes to working with influencers or content in the B2B marketing space, because we are connecting with third party entities influencers and media to corroborate those ideas, right? So brands is thought leaders super important. If someone's got a problem, don't you want them to think of you first, as a solution? I totally agree.

AJ Wilcox
I think especially in a crowded marketplace, where you have 15 vendors that you can go to for a CRM and information security service, of course, you're gonna gravitate towards the one that you feel like you have the best relationship with. And I think that comes from the thought leadership that comes from community that comes from being a voice that people want to hear. Absolutely. So I think you've touched a little bit here on parts of the strategy. But if someone wanted to start becoming a thought leader, or having their company be seen as a thought leader, what are the steps, the components that you would tell them? Like, here's the strategy for how you actually start to implement this?

Lee Odden
That can be a really big answer. So I'll be succinct. If I can, I think the first thing you got to do is, you know, specify what is it that you want to be a thought leader about? There's got to be topic specificity. You can't be a thought leader about all things, right? That's just not resource practical. But you've got to identify that thing that sits at the intersection of how you want to be known and what customers are most interested in. And so be a thought leader about that thing, right? Because that represents what's in demand and relevant to your solutions. And as you make that determination, then all things flow from that. What kind of content will you create? What kind of connections will you make? What kind of cadence will you publish and interact at right? So you get an idea about the resources that are needed in order to put something like that into action, right? There's got to be some consistency and continuity of message from thought leader. So in other words, if I talk about 10 Different things over a period of time, it's like, well, yeah, he talks about a lot of stuff like I guess marketing. But if I'm talking about, you know, B2B content, B2B content marketing, b2b content marketing, I mean, I'm talking about derivative ideas around that concept. But really, it's like, wow, B2B content marketing or B2B influencer marketing, people will come to know you as that very specific thing. So you've got to have some choices made about the topic derivative topics, you've got to think about the publishing platform or platforms, you know, is it the company website, the blog, or social channel? As the center of your hub? And the spokes? Are your distribution channels? Okay, where am I going to amplify this? Am I going to amplify through email? Am I going to pull people in through ads? Am I going to do some media relations and talk about these stories with journalists in the industry? Am I going to connect with industry experts? Am I going to partner with them and collaborate with any of them on initiatives? We have what we like to call best answer strategies, how to be the best answer is really kind of a thought leadership play. And you can do things like this is a practical tactic things. Okay, so let's say you want to be the best answer for a particular thing. It's like, okay, Fast Track way to get on the radar of the most important people in the industry, about that topic is to do what we call an honoring post, right? So it's like a list where the 25 top cybersecurity experts, right, I'm a cybersecurity provider of some kind and finance, right. And so here are the top finance cybersecurity experts. I don't even know if I could find 25 of those, but I'll do my best. And then I reach out to them. And I start to create a relationship with those folks. And I'll simultaneous to that, I might do a small version research, what are the trends, what's happening, and I'll invite those folks to be a part of that research. I'll start a podcast. And as I gain momentum, I might do something like, you know, a list of disparate resources like books, conferences, communities, and so on, and so forth. So I become like this destination around the topic. And that seems like a lot of work. But guess what, there's a lot of competition. And to be the best answer, guess what you've kind of have to be the best source of information, I would just say, as far as a thought leadership strategy, whether it's just you, or whether it's your brand, you don't go it alone, that would be one of the biggest mistakes. And that's why I suggest the idea of connecting with other industry experts, and finding opportunities to collaborate with them, you can start a podcast and become a thought leader on the thing that the podcast is about, that's cool. But if you involve other people, that are also well known about that idea, and you can create collaboration opportunities that create mutual value for you and your collaborators, then everybody wins out true, not just you and the person or people you're collaborating with, but especially the audience that you're trying to attract and engage.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, so true. I think it's so easy. If you're, let's say scrolling through your LinkedIn feed, and you're saying, I want to be a thought leader, let me see what other people are doing. You see someone is running a live stream, and you're like, oh, maybe I need to run a weekly live stream, and then someone else is running a podcast, and then someone else is recording videos, screenshare and posting them to YouTube, you're like, oh, I have to have a YouTube channel. And when you start taking from all of these ideas, you overextend yourself, because yeah, there isn't a strategy. So what I appreciate so much about what you shared is like this actually is a specific strategy where you can put the blinders on and ignore some of the other methods that other people are doing work on your own. And then you won't overextend yourself, like you can actually do this.

Lee Odden
Something I learned a long time ago about, you know, being known about a thing is one element, one leg of the stool is document your success, and then duplicate. So be specific, like you're saying, be specific on a particular or very specific channel, grow community on that channel. And you'll get to a point where it's like, wow, now it makes sense for me to extend into some other channels, right. And you can duplicate what you learned in that one channel into others. And that way, you can manage resources appropriately. And you create that continuity of message. And you'll be putting forward the most effective tactics for communication, as opposed to being in a constant state of experimentation.

AJ Wilcox
Yes. And when you look at what everyone else is doing, a lot of times they have a team that's helping them. And so I think that you can do this all yourself, you know, by the time you've done what you've talked about, which is really building a community around one channel or one thing, by the time it's ready to start expanding into other channels and taking on more things. By that time. You've probably built up more of a team and it's a She realistic, you

Lee Odden
could do that. Yeah. And then just thinking of myself, I started blogging, my only thing was I just started blogging, I could not write. And I started blogging in that blogging. You know, I always made mention of other people, I was just a way to have a conversation. And then social media came on. And people that read the blog started following me on Twitter, and then LinkedIn. And then I started speaking, and then I wrote a book and you know, just grew organically 100% organically. I did have help with the book. But with the rest, I publish all my own social stuff, I do all my own speaking stuff. And so it does make sense, at least in my case to branch out, you can get help to facilitate and expedite that stuff. But as an individual person, I think topics specificity specific channel is a great thing to get started with and expand from there.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, amen to that. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox
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Lee Odden
We're kind of in a do more with less age, right? There's a lot of marketers pulling back right now B2B tech especially. And, you know, a lot of folks are looking for what are the most effective things I can be doing? Because the demands on delivering on mid to end to funnel KPIs, you know, forget about brand, right, are really high on people's lists. Well, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn did some research. And they found that at any given time, 95% of buyers are not in market, they're out market, right for any solution and only 5% are in a position like, yeah, we need a solution. And so that's not changed. Well, why influencers? Well, here's the thing, you know, you've got factors that are working against you, as a marketer, in this environment where you got to do more with less, we've got to produce, we've got to get results, we've got to react to this economic environment that we're in. And people are as buyers, you know, they are confronted with this information overload that we talked about before they are struggling to find single sources of truth. Who do they trust, they don't trust advertising. They don't trust brands a lot of the time, but they do trust people, they trust people that they follow. And so the idea of what would happen if you're able to connect with the most trusted voices in your industry? What if you're able to collaborate with them on creating content that was super targeted, super valuable to your buyers, and you're able to build a community of subscribers to a regular cadence of that kind of content, imagine how much more effective you'd be at reaching buyers that are actually going to pay attention, versus, you know, singularly relying on interruptive types of communications, right. And so influencers can play a very important role, not for everybody, but for a lot of companies that want to break through and want to attract and engage with buyers, that are really relying on industry experts that are influenced by people who are the thought leaders in the industry, right? And so there are very effective ways in which marketing programs can be put forward, that are creating content of value, of course, but our collaborations with these industry experts, so it's not just like every influencer is the same. It's not like I'm gonna think of a B2B marketing influencer and handling right? And Haley's, a wonderful, wonderful human being. But just because an Hanley is in a piece of ebook that we make or a video we make doesn't mean that's going to solve all problems. And handle is really broadly known as a very unique individual. She has both broad popularity, and she's actually super competent about her discipline. And so she's a unicorn in that way. So she's actually going to help satisfy bringing people in that don't haven't even heard of you, and actually start to consider you because she has that discipline, competency, about copywriting about content marketing, and that sort of stuff. But not all influencers are like that. So it's not just about working with influencers, it's about okay, how do we pair the right kinds of influencers for different stages of the buying cycle, for example, you know, the most popular influencers, those, you know, the pro influencers, they're doing keynotes. They're publishing books all the time. They're professionally famous in the B2B world, in their respective industry. Those are people you use to attract top of funnel types of outcomes. But then you work with people who are actual practitioners in an area, they can actually speak authoritatively on the discipline. So whether they're super user, whether they're a customer, or whatever, for those middle end to funnel types of content, assets, right. So you kind of line things up. So influencers are important, because everyone is influential, but everyone is influenced on a daily basis in some way. And you can architect programs that not only make your brand more relevant, and more credible, and can reach people that you're not reaching with your ads. But over time, you can build relationships with these most trusted voices in your industry in a way that they are starting to organically advocate for you. And that's priceless, right most valuable form of advertising word of mouth, if you can facilitate that as priceless. Oh, totally true.

AJ Wilcox
I have noticed in B2C influencers, usually they're paid off in some way. But in B2B, I see a lot of influencers, gotten through collaboration opportunities, and a lot of times money doesn't even have to exchange hands, you're doing something that's mutually beneficial to both of these companies are influencers audiences. Yeah, and you know, that's becoming more of an art to achieve that.

Lee Odden
So we started doing influencer marketing for B2B brands back in 2012. So back then, yes, it was true that the vast majority of influencer engagements were what we call organic. In the case of B2B influencer marketing, most of the influencers are contributing to content that lives on the brand channels. So if a person who's really well known in their particular subject matter area, could be seen in combination with a major brand, that's really credibility building for them, right. So they're creating influence for each other in that way. And so they'd be happy to do it for free, so to speak, obviously, it has to do with the ask too, if I ask someone for a quote, you know, no problem. But if I asked someone to write me 1000 word article, these days, that's probably going to cost something if I want them to write an article every month, that's gonna cost something. So it used to be maybe 90%, were organic 10% were paid way back in the day. Nowadays, it's like 60/40 60% might be organic activations, and 40% are paid. And that paid number is going up and up and up, as more people who are influential in the B2B space are creating media properties for themselves, right, they've got a really established podcast, they're part of a network of podcasts, you know, they're a blogger, or increasingly video assets of some kind, right? And so they're able to not only just say one nice thing about the brand, but they're actually able to put together a package of social distribution and content assets and this and that we're even, you know, do reports, and so on and so forth. So it's great, though, to have that mutual value, it's important to find something that you have in common with the influencer. And in some cases, they may want to contribute, because it's an easy Ask, and it aligns with what they want to do, and it doesn't cost you anything. And it could be that's the first thing you do. But then you might follow up and say, Wow, that was amazing. We'd really like to do to do this more robust thing, how much would that cost? And they're going to appreciate that. And trust me, when you pay an influencer. It's awesome, of course, for the influencer, but it's awesome for your brand, because now you've hired them. They are accountable to delivering to a specification. Whereas if you engage with people organically, and they say, Yeah, sure, I'll give you that thing by next Thursday. And if they don't, you have no recourse. You can't count on it. Right. They're not signing an agreement. So paying influencers is actually a really good thing. It's up to you to negotiate and to do your due diligence as far as who they are and their ability to deliver and have impact.

AJ Wilcox
Beautiful. I want to switch gears to talking about community because we've mentioned community several times. Yeah, you've put a lot of value and community over your career here in B2B, what role do you see communities playing in B2B.

Lee Odden
community is hugely important, I think because so many buyers are going to rely on their peers for recommendations. I mean, think you've probably had it happen I know I have. It's like, we go to remote work, and we need a new phone system that we can work, you know, so I don't know who to go to. So I asked a friend of mine, I go to a group community that I'm part of, and I say, Hey, does anybody know what's a good phone system? And this isn't real. But you know, I'm thinking of a silly example. And this happens every day. Right? And so being present with a community is important for b2b because it helps make you relevant, right? I talked about that expression being the best answer, right? Being a thought leader, being first choice means being where your customers are. And certainly your customers are part of different communities. So you have a couple of choices. You can be present in communities where your customers are, and you can exchange value, you can be a participant and you know, answer questions and interact or whatever your salespeople can or whoever, or you could create communities, right, you could say, Look, you know, we see that there's a common interest here, there's something that we can solve for. And it's not something we can do by ourselves. Why don't you join us at helping solve this problem together? Or why don't you join us on this journey to making our industry a better place, we actually are at the beginning of building a community around elevate b2b, right, elevate b2b marketing. And you know, we want to make b2b marketing a better place. And there are different messaging pillars that go along with that marketing, that is more experiential marketing, that is more inclusive, marketing that is more focused on connection, right community building, that sort of thing. So community is super important, I think, to be relevant, to be relevant. And first choice to customers in spaces where they're actually spending time. And where there can be a value exchange, right? It's one thing to provide useful content or utility to your customers through content marketing. It's another thing for you to create a place where as a brand, where your customers can connect with you, but also they can connect with each other. And there's a lot of momentum that can come from that. So I think community is super important. And when it comes to influencer marketing, same thing, you can engage with influencers on an individual basis, and that's fine. But when you can create a community of influencers that can connect with each other, in the context of your brand is solving Wow, now you have something really powerful right, that you can go to market with. And that can have a much bigger impact than these little one off campaigns, people are kind of dipping their toe in the water with here and there. Perfect.

AJ Wilcox
Alright, so lead, tell us what are those components to creating a community, especially as we're thinking about it for b2b?

Lee Odden
So as I mentioned, with, you know, thought leadership, I think that idea of topics specificity? Well, it's around the problems that you're trying to solve for, or the things that you stand for, that would be best served by the community. Right? So what's the glue that's going to hold this community together? What is the common interest that they have that aligns with that intersection of what it is that you stand for as a brand? And what's interesting to your customers, right? You also have to define who's going to be part of this community? How is the community get a function? There are other practical questions to be answered? Like, what platform are you going to use? And who are going to be your champions and your moderators? And what are the goals that you have for the community in terms of messaging penetration, in terms of size, in terms of engagement, and ultimately, you have to be accountable to some sort of ROI, right? And with any marketing initiative, those things all need to be defined, right? So sometimes community can start very intentionally. Yeah, there's communities is starting all the time where people just start in a LinkedIn, LinkedIn group or Facebook group or something like that. And it's just like, hey, and they invite a couple of other people who have a common interest. And it just starts organically and they start inviting, who do you know, that we can invite into this community and so on and so forth, or community could be an extension of an event? I think about marketing profs, and their marketing community, right, or Content Marketing Institute, has a whole community, but they also have an event, right? There's a marketing conference called PubCon that's been around. It's an SEO conference been around forever. And there's absolutely a community, you know, that is tied to that event where people you know, get to actually meet in person. So, you have to make choices about what is the purpose of the community, what are the topics that You're gonna cover what problems you're going to try and solve. And then you gotta identify some champions, some people who are going to help facilitate conversations, there's technology choices to make. And then obviously, you got to set up what kind of goals you're trying to achieve, not just for yourself, but the goals for the community itself. Well, selfishly, this

AJ Wilcox
is an awesome conversation, because we're actually just getting ready to launch our LinkedIn ads, courses and community all together. And so I'm paying special attention here. So thanks for the free advice. What are some of the phases that you'd actually go through in building and then scaling the community app? What should we keep in mind as we actually go to build this?

Lee Odden
Well, you know, again, you've got to think about some sort of milestone goals. Maybe the first phase is simply, you know, creating the architecture of the community. And as it relates to the major topics, the subtopics, and getting people involved that represent relevance and interest around those topics, inviting them to be actually be a part and then you've got to decide, okay, what are we going to offer them, right? You're so you're offering courses? Or you're offering opportunities for roundtables or discussions? Are you giving them visibility opportunities, and, you know, set some goals for that first milestone of having a certain level of participation. Maybe your first phase is very private. And no one knows about it, except, you know, those early invitees. And we've seen this demonstrated by the social networks that have all popped up all over the place over the last 20 years, or 15 years. And then maybe once you get to a certain threshold or milestone of participation, then you open it up, you know, more publicly as a phase out. And this is what I've observed being successful. One thing though, that, I think what happens is, there's a lot of excitement about anything new. And it's going to be really important to keep that excitement alive. And so you've got to allocate resources to a community manager, or managers that are not only going to be moderating stuff, but are going to be paying attention to what's the ebb and flow from a topic interest standpoint, from a content format standpoint, and adjusting and optimizing. Because if you do the same stuff, six months or a year into your community, it's probably going to peter out, right? If you're not responsive to where the community is growing and showing interest, you're, you're going to lose them probably. So hopefully, I think that's something to look forward to. That's something to anticipate from a face standpoint, maybe, you know, not every community has to start as an exclusive thing. That seems to work really well, though. And then it evolves into an inclusive thing, as there's something of more substance for people to experience, once you open the doors to all. I love it.

AJ Wilcox
Haley, just kind of off the wall question here for you specifically about LinkedIn ads. I mean, we've talked about communities, we've talked about thought leadership and influencers. One of the new features that's going to be coming out here in the next I would estimate one to three months that LinkedIn has are these thought leadership ads, where we're going to be able to boost personal posts, rather than rely on boosting or creating posts that come from the company for something like this coming out. What role do you see this playing? Do you have any feedback or thoughts or advice for us marketers? In thinking about the new ad format?

Lee Odden
I'm super excited about that. Because we know that things can get lost in the stream, but not so much about being able to put money behind a thought leadership posts for an individual. It's just like, you know, the targeting, how can we make sure how can we increase our ability for people that we want to see this thought leadership content? Well, other than through a feature like this, right. So I think that's super, super important. And, you know, we've already talked about the importance of individual thought leadership. And by the way, we did some research in our influencer marketing report about the value of executive influence and executive thought leadership at 65% of the companies that were engaging with building their executives, as thought leaders, said that that effort elevated the influence of the brand itself, right. So something like this being able to augment organic content at the individual level with LinkedIn thought leadership ads. Excellent, excellent opportunity. And, again, it'll really help people be able to be a little more intentional and targeted about what's showing up to who, and I think will really give those advertisers a big advantage over those who are relying on just the organic visibility that happens when you post normally I

AJ Wilcox
love that. All right, so final switch of gears here. What are you most excited about professionally right now? I'd love to ask the same question about what are you most excited about personally?

Lee Odden
Well, professionally, you know, we are celebrating our 22nd year in business this year. So that's amazing. That is amazing. Wow. And, you know, we made some strategic hires recently in marketing and sales. And we're launching a fresh brand fresh brand new website and blog will be launching with hundreds and hundreds of articles on content, search and influence, and a lot of really cool features, but a really well architected brand, and messaging and all that stuff. So I'm super excited about it. We haven't launched a new website in 10, fit 12 years, and we haven't really had a professional brand engagement with like a branding agency ever, never ever. So I'm super excited about that. Launching for influencer marketing here, late summer, and lots of other things happening. So I'm super excited about that great team. Yeah, an even bigger things plan that can't even talk about later on this year. So I'm super excited about that. I'd say at the intersection of personal and professional, I get to speak at a conference, the biggest conference for b2b in France, next month in Paris. Wow. And then a week later, I get to speak at the largest b2b conference in the UK, in London. So I'm super excited about that. And then I get to visit a client of ours in Geneva in between. So you know, that's pretty awesome. Get to do a little travel, get to do a little business abroad. And there you go.

AJ Wilcox
That's a lot to be excited about. All right. So I've caught a couple of the resources that you've kind of mentioned here. You talked about the Elevate b2b marketing community, you've talked about your influencer marketing report, I will put the links to those down below in the show notes for anyone. But as for resources, what would you like this LinkedIn ads audience to do what you want them to come follow you contact you in some way? Join the community, download a report, like, what do you have that we should be paying attention to?

Lee Odden
Absolutely check out top rank marketing.com. Our blog is there as well. With those actually, it's more than hundreds, it's 1000s of articles. But it's probably in the hundreds of those that are most recent and relevant. Yeah, toprank marketing.com, people obviously can connect with me on the socials, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, to see all the crazy food that I eat and all the running that I'm doing and other thing and travel especially, that's always fun, le e o d, d, e n. Yeah. And that's where we're going to announce our report. And we've got a enterprise brand, influencer marketing report coming out very, very quickly, we have a search intent report that's out already. So lots of fun resources there. And also, I have to say, if you're in the LinkedIn ads audience, if you're not already, you've got to be subscribing to the LinkedIn marketing blog. The LinkedIn ads blog, for sure. Also, in the LinkedIn Collective is another great resource over at LinkedIn. That's a great example of LinkedIn, own thought leadership. And of course, the b2b Institute is another great resource at LinkedIn. And you know, my disclaimer is that yes, LinkedIn is a client. But these are resources I, myself personally, rely on quite a bit.

AJ Wilcox
Perfect. Well, Lee, thank you so much for sharing your mountain of knowledge here. I'm grateful to get to hear it. Everyone, please go follow Lea, check out the resources that he and his company have come up with Lee, thanks again so much. And we'd love to have you on for around two sometime down the road. Super. Thanks, AJ, I appreciate it. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox
All right, like we talked about with Lee, if you go to his site, top rank marketing.com. And we have links to that down in the show notes. You can get access to everything, all the reports and everything he was talking about. You'll also see his three social media handles there in the show notes, his LinkedIn, his Twitter and his Instagram links. So go follow him stay caught up on what he's doing. He's constantly sharing gold. I'm telling you, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn learning all about LinkedIn ads. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest production value course that there is out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome. Thanks for coming. Make sure to hit that subscribe button if you've liked what you've heard. If this is not your first time listening, though, please do go and rate and review us. Usually it's Apple podcasts, but anywhere where you can leave a review. That is by far the best way that you can say thanks for us putting out this content week after week with any questions, suggestions or corrections about what we talked about here, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.