Influencer Marketing

Tom Nixon (00:01.688)
So Curtis, few years ago, there was this awesome podcast and it was these two old gen X dudes talking to these two younger millennial women. was called generational fight club. And the whole purpose of this was to demonstrate how little millennials know on any topic. one of those stars of that show is on the podcast today. That’s me.

Claudia Pfau (00:29.644)
Uh-huh.

Tom Nixon (00:31.852)
The other star who was proven not to know nothing was our guest for today’s podcast. Someone you and I have been working with. But I think what’s going to happen today, she’s going to prove that she knows more than us two old Gen X dudes, Kurt.

Curtis Hays (00:32.747)
and

Curtis Hays (00:47.076)
She probably does. Yeah, I I asked you if you knew anybody who might know about this topic and you said, yes, I know somebody, which is good because I was starting to get some rumors that were floating around that I wasn’t, people thought I wasn’t letting you invite guests onto the show because most of the guests I was introducing, they’re like, are you ever going to let Tom invite somebody on the show? Why are you trying to steal all the guests?

Claudia Pfau (00:47.468)
I sure hope so.

Tom Nixon (01:07.032)
Hmm

Tom Nixon (01:11.79)
you

Well…

Curtis Hays (01:14.382)
So I’m excited we’ve got someone from your network on the episode today.

Tom Nixon (01:17.292)
We do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously my network is not nearly as vast as yours. so, but we’ll find out how to change that today because we want to welcome on our colleague, our friend, our influencer, Claudia. I’m not even going to try to pronounce your last name. Fowl.

Curtis Hays (01:21.934)
That’s not true.

Claudia Pfau (01:35.013)
Yes. Tom, you’ve known me for over 10 years and you don’t know how to say my last name.

Tom Nixon (01:40.642)
Well, your maiden name was much easier, so it didn’t have two consonants together like that.

Claudia Pfau (01:44.02)
True, true, true. Yes, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tom Nixon (01:49.612)
Yeah. So remember the great fun we had on the generational fight club podcast.

Claudia Pfau (01:53.622)
I sure do. And I remember knowing things. I wasn’t completely clueless. Hopefully I prove myself.

Tom Nixon (01:57.23)
All right. Well, people could go. Yeah, they could go listen for themselves to make that determination still out there actually. But we are going to talk about a topic today that is probably more in your wheelhouse than mine. Or so people think it’s this whole concept of influencer marketing, which sounds like we’re going to try to find some famous tick tocker with two billion followers and ask if she will chew our gum live during a tick tock. But that’s not entirely.

what it is. Most of our audience is B2B. So, Claudia, just give us a quick sort of bring us up to speed. What are we talking about when we’re talking about influencer marketing?

Claudia Pfau (02:36.364)
So especially, you know, in the B2B space, feel like when you talk about influencers, you do think of the TikToker who’s trying to sell you a weight loss supplement or the Instagrammer who’s trying to sell you a beauty product or, you know, even somebody, a podcaster, maybe they are in your industry, but they have hundreds of thousands of followers on LinkedIn. And it is that.

But I think in the B2B space, it’s more so about anybody who’s willing to talk about you to somebody else is technically an influencer. So that could be your own employees. It could be your customers. It could be industry podcasts or people who could write articles about you. People on LinkedIn, people who are building their personal brands. There’s, think the term is very wide and it can be leveraged.

in the B2B space so much more than we think. Because when we think of influencers, we just think of what’s happening on social media.

Tom Nixon (03:42.444)
Yeah, it is. So the first thing is, so if you’re a B2B brand, you shouldn’t have tuned out already. So hopefully you haven’t because we’re going to be talking about why it’s appropriate and applicable to B2B space. But we also, think that we wanted to spell the notion, and I think you sort of already did, Claudia, but to put a finer point on it, that it needs to be somebody who has a mass audience. mean, aren’t influencers potentially like deeply embedded within niche audiences and might those not be the same?

niche audience that a B2B brand is looking to penetrate or influence?

Claudia Pfau (04:15.276)
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be somebody with a huge audience. It has to be someone who other people trust. That’s really what it comes down to. sometimes, and I think we’re going to talk about this eventually, but micro influencers gain the trust of their followers a lot more deeply than maybe somebody with millions of followers because they kind of sell out, not everybody, but…

You know, they start working with brands that might not align with the original audience that they intended to speak to or things like that. So it doesn’t really matter. The number doesn’t matter. It’s just somebody who has a voice in the space that people trust, who has authority in the space, who, you know, is willing to provide value on whatever topic is related to your brand. And then other people, you know, are chiming in or they trust that person. They’re willing to take their.

condition.

Tom Nixon (05:11.35)
Yeah, Curtis, that word trust sounds like it’s very close to a word we’ve been using a lot this season. Actually, I think we started this season talking about authenticity. We talked about earning trust. I’m thinking again about the story of your daughter who eventually bought Chicken Feed from an online website that influenced her into choosing a name for your chickens. But so

authenticity and I know if you want to respond directly to the example of your daughter again, but authenticity is something that you and I’ve been preaching really since day one of season two.

Curtis Hays (05:44.623)
Yeah, think authenticity boils down to establishing trust. Like you’re not going to likely trust somebody who isn’t genuine and that you’re not going to believe in. I think in the B2B space, influencer marketing has been going on for a long time. We just haven’t called it influencer marketing. So like I was in the IT space and in the IT space, we were called a value added reseller, a bar. So we had relationships with Microsoft and

Claudia Pfau (06:03.46)
Exactly.

Curtis Hays (06:13.72)
Netgear and Dell and all of these larger brands who utilized us who were face to face with the clients, again, not on a mass scale, but to talk about their brands and to sell and implement their brands within the markets they wanted to be in and participate in. And then they educated us so we in turn could educate our customers and sell their products. So I think it’s now starting

to, I think this is what I’ve been sort of wrestling with over the last year is that there’s sort of this influencer marketing outside of what we have traditionally looked at it, that there’s these opportunities to turn those sort of advocates who are genuinely believe in your product, your service, whatever. And whether they’re an employee, whether they’re a user or customer in some way, but you can turn them into

essentially an influencer, right? Somebody who’s willing to talk about your brand in a positive way, educate their audience. It doesn’t have to be a large audience. I think there’s a lot of different ways that they can do that.

Tom Nixon (07:26.61)
Well, maybe let’s dive into a couple of those. So just to level set. So what we’re talking about is a brand, a B2B brand, for example, is trying to get some exposure or influence within a certain market. Let’s call it that market already has an audience that audience might not think of themselves as an audience, but that’s who the market is. And within that audience, there are centers of influence, and those could be celebrities. Those could be organizations. We just mentioned a few others could be a podcast, could be employees. So what we’re

advocating for, and this what we’re going to talk about how you do it now, is a B2B brand. How do they identify centers of influence? And then how do they go about using them? Maybe that’s not the best word. Leveraging them. Also not the best word. Tapping into that as a resource to market in non-traditional ways. Maybe we use an example, Claudia, because maybe you’re the real world influencer among us, but tell us how

Claudia Pfau (08:07.493)
Thank

Tom Nixon (08:21.92)
start with the basics. How is this done effectively?

Claudia Pfau (08:26.508)
You have to, you just have to see who is willing to talk about you organically. mean, there’s several routes you can take. can go down the, me find the most influential voices in this space and contact them and see how I can create a partnership with them that feels organic to them. think the important thing is that they would.

willingly use your product or service, regardless of whether you’re going to be paying them to talk about it or not. Cause that’s when things get disingenuous and people start to not trust that person because, I would never use this platform on my own, but they’re paying me. So I’m going to talk about it. So it’s finding those users who would be willing to use this product. You know, maybe you, you know, if it’s like a tech product, let’s just say you

provide them with free access, let them play around with it, let them give you feedback, kind of like really create a partnership with this person so that whatever they are going to relay to their audience feels very natural and authentic to them because they’ve actually used it. That’s one route. That’s a harder route to take because these people are constantly bombarded by brands and companies like yours. Then there’s the internal route.

you know, there, if you created a culture that, you know, allows people to build their personal brands and you encourage it, then you most likely have advocates already in your team, whether it’s a salesperson or your own CEO, that’s usually the number one influencer that you could have in your business. If they’re willing to be active on LinkedIn and, you know,

post organically about what’s going on in the business or what’s going on in the industry. That’s an easy, easy shot, as long as people are willing to raise their hand for it. And then, yeah, go for it.

Curtis Hays (10:29.07)
Let me pause you there, Claudia, because you both are working with one of our clients right now who’s attempting to do that. So maybe tell that story. We have a client, we don’t have to name the name. Maybe they’ll come on the show. I think they want to be on the show here soon. they have a younger employee. I don’t want to age them, but they don’t have as much seniority. They don’t have the influence that some of the other members of the business have. And they’ve expressed some interest. So where have they taken that from there? And what have you guys seen?

Claudia Pfau (10:36.769)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (10:58.01)
There’s at least some early results from that.

Claudia Pfau (11:02.838)
mean, the tenacity that this person has is great because they have a connection to the company. They want to see the company succeed. You know, they’re I believe they’re on the sales team. So obviously they’re getting something out of this. But personally, they also want to grow their own personal brand and you know, their status in the industry. They want to be known for something that’s like the perfect combination of a person that you could have internally who

would act as an influencer for you. And I think because he’s so excited about it and is so authentic about it, he’s posting consistently, he’s really willing to grow his audience. So he shows up for people, he provides value, he talks about things that maybe other people aren’t talking about, or he talks about it in a very fun and engaging way, and people are reacting to it, which is…

It doesn’t matter that he’s not the top tier person in this industry. It’s the willingness to show up, which most people don’t have, surprisingly.

Curtis Hays (12:07.45)
And I told the client, even if you don’t get any business out of this person attempting to do this, they’re going to grow. It’s a personal professional development opportunity for this individual because frankly, getting in front of the camera and speaking to an audience, even if it isn’t live, requires you to dig in and really know that content.

and be confident in it. And that repetition and practice is going to help them when they’re face to face with clients and trying to close deals. I think it’s awesome. Tom, sounds like you maybe had some thoughts on this too.

Claudia Pfau (12:41.526)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (12:44.258)
I do in sort of the big picture like blur my eyes kind of what are we talking about here? I think is maybe starting with baby steps. So that’s what this person is doing, right? This person doesn’t have a huge following and isn’t going to wait until they do have a huge following. Just start creating content now. Similarly, if there’s any apprehension from a B2B brand to say, well, how am going to approach the most influential people in my community to use my product and talk about it?

It doesn’t always have to be that either. can be invite them onto a podcast, say, right? Let just talk naturally for 30 minutes like we’ve done with our guests. And then when the podcast episode comes out, that person, of course, is going to say, Hey, everybody, look at this podcast I was in. Now, we’re not doing it selfishly. We bring on great guests like Claudia because they add value to the conversation and talk about things that you and I are experts in. But the residual is that

Claudia Pfau (13:20.902)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (13:42.424)
these people who have large followings, you know, spread the word about what we do and who we are. So you could think those terms too. Like if you’re apprehensive about asking somebody to use a product and you’re unsure of what they might say about you once they test it, invite them into a conversation. That’s a baby step, right? The other baby step thing that I wanted to pick your brains on, maybe I’ll start with you, Curtis, is I think it could be daunting too for companies who are not

used to marketing and certainly not influencer marketing is to think that they need to build this community themselves. So they’re not going to get anywhere until they have the million followers on Instagram or Tik Tok, whatever. And it’s not always lonely pose it as a question. Do you have to necessarily build the community or can you find the community?

Curtis Hays (14:32.162)
Yeah, I personally think you can, you can find a community if, well, I think that’s what you should do first, in my opinion. First, I think you should go out and see, are there other people having conversations about the problem that you’re actively solving with your product or service? And then somebody needs to join in on that conversation. We help a lot of HR type.

Tom Nixon (14:38.958)
Thank

Curtis Hays (14:57.668)
companies and provide professional services or technology services and human resources in various different ways. Every single one of those companies, said, are you active on SHRM? SHRM is the Society for Human Resource Management. If you’re going to get anywhere in human resources manager above, you need to be likely certified in SHRM. And so you go through this rigorous process of certification, and then you get a membership into SHRM where there is a forum.

where all these professionals are having conversations and helping each other. Now, you could be a lurker. If you’re smart, we can go back another episode, you could be a lurker and just listen to the conversations or watch and pay attention to the conversations that people are having and how they’re addressing problems and whether or not you solve those problems and if you should be part of those conversations or…

Tom Nixon (15:31.822)
Going back to that.

Claudia Pfau (15:32.396)
Hmph.

Curtis Hays (15:54.721)
If maybe you have an opportunity to change your platform, change the way that you deliver, change the way that you’re talking to prospects based off the conversations that are happening there. that’s just a really good example, I think, for, you know, like if I was a Salesforce implementation person, I’d be at Dreamforce. And then I’d be part of, you know, some sort of Salesforce Slack channel or

Reddit thread, like, I’d want to be part of those conversations. So if it’s big like that, then, you know, go and join the conversation and either find influencers or have the opportunity. You could potentially be an influencer. If you happen to be in a space where there isn’t anything at all, then now I start you think you look at the opportunity to create your own, your own community and invite people into it.

that can start to have the conversations that you can be a part of. now, it’s not an influencer in the sense that you are talking to people and expecting them to buy the product. You’re just basically creating community to a lot of people to have the conversations that you now sort of control those conversations, right? And control and that data and that sort of ecosystem.

There’s a reason why Salesforce and HubSpot have these user groups and these big conferences. I want to talk more about conferences and events and those types of things, but like there’s a reason why they do it.

Tom Nixon (17:22.491)
yeah.

Tom Nixon (17:25.836)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to share my quick example, Claudia, because I can’t resist it. And you can share yours. So going back to the conundrum, do you create the community or do you join the slash find the community? So a few years ago, my brother and I each separately, believe it or not, decided that we were going to create rock music. If you’re familiar with the term rock, there’s this whole modern rock movement. And so obviously, we wanted people to find us so that they would be by fans, maybe download the music, stream it, whatever they’re going to do. And so like.

Claudia Pfau (17:26.477)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (17:53.356)
We could have tried to create community around our projects, around our bands. But instead there was this built in community that already existed and founded on Facebook. There was 5,000 members of a Yacht Rock fan page, a group. And so we just decided to kind of infiltrate that and observe and be active observers. And we thought, you know what? You know what these people don’t have going back to, you know, identifying the need. They didn’t have a podcast that talked all about Yacht Rock. So, okay.

You know, my love for podcasts. Um, and right away at Cloud Out, we were talking about ourselves. We were talking about Yacht Rock, thing that all of these 5,000 people already loved. And before you know it, people start, we started to gain an audience and, um, that group of 5,000 today is over 168,000. Um, and now because of our podcast, we are seen as like the center of influence. Like, Hey, you guys all listen to this podcast. He’s taught these guys are experts.

And so now we’re not experts. We’re just kind of along for the ride. But the point is, is we decided to become part of the conversation. We become part of the community. The community grew naturally. Of course, every once in a while we talk about our bands that we’re trying to plug in. Of course, all hundred sixty eight thousand people have discovered these bands. That’s what I’m advocating for is like you can create content, create community, become part of a community, Claudia, and you don’t necessarily have to build it yourself. But to Curtis’s point, if it doesn’t already exist, maybe you do.

So do you have an example that’s not Yacht Rock related?

Claudia Pfau (19:22.164)
I do. I am not a yacht rock specialist. However, I do enjoy listening to it if you can believe it or not. Yeah, so building a community, I have experience with this is very, very, very hard. Very hard to convince people to join a group and I’ll explain more but

My mom and I started a friendship club for women over 30 who are going through like life transitions, whether it be a move or a divorce or relationship changes or becoming a mom, whatever it may be. And originally we started with just a Facebook group, just a free group that anybody could join. And within that group, we learned the problems that people are having.

when it comes to making friends, which then led to us creating an actual membership based club. In that group, have 15,000 or almost 16,000 members. And it’s pretty amazing to see how everybody complains about the same things, but they don’t do anything about it. So yeah.

Curtis Hays (20:40.442)
you

Tom Nixon (20:40.632)
Did you just say 16,000 members? Wow. Good for you. All right. Sorry. Continue.

Claudia Pfau (20:46.848)
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it happened organically. It, and we can talk about how to grow Facebook group on another podcast episode, but really you can use these communities for research, which is exactly what we did. So we looked at what the women were saying. What were they complaining about? Why did they feel like they didn’t have friends or couldn’t find their tribe?

And then we built out our community platform based off of that. So now within that group, similar to Tom, we are seen as influencers in the space of like, we know everything about friendship, which we don’t. We have just learned through experience and people are seeing us as the leaders in that space for them because we’re able to provide value to them all the time. And because of that, not

not those 15,000 people I wish, but a group of them do switch over to the membership because the membership gives them the hand holding that they’re requiring when it comes to making friends and making sure that people are showing up and being present and, you friendship takes a lot of effort. And I think that’s what people were missing in this group. long story short, yes, you can build your own community.

I would say don’t build it to be an influencer, build it with another purpose, know, build it to either, you know, obviously provide value to whoever is going to be in the group. That’s number one, but get something else out of it, whether it’s research or, you know, understanding your ICP a lot better. That’s exactly what we did. Now we know exactly who to talk to, how to talk to them, what their problems are, because we created a safe space for everybody.

out. So that’s another way to be an influencer is, you know, building a community. It’s extremely difficult, but it is worth it if you can find the pain point that people are are missing and the gap that you can fill by creating a community for them that allows them to connect with other people who are like them or going through the same thing.

Tom Nixon (22:58.062)
I think that the math resonates too because I don’t know what what your membership level is but Brian Clark who’s very famous influencer in content marketing space will tell you that like it’s hard to build the tribe but even only a small percentage of that tribe is willing to pay for the value that you provide. you gotta go into it knowing that you’re gonna be giving out free content, advice, value, whatever it is and it’s converting that top of the top, the 1 % maybe.

Go ahead. was going to ask you though, while I ask you the question, you have a follow up.

Curtis Hays (23:31.162)
Well, I wanted to ask you both a real quick question. So you got to 160,000. How long did that take you?

Tom Nixon (23:38.99)
I didn’t. It was somebody else’s group. That was the point. So that

Curtis Hays (23:42.138)
Okay, but the group itself, yeah, from the time that you joined it to 500, you said to 160,000, how long did that take?

Claudia Pfau (23:42.357)
You

Tom Nixon (23:49.56)
five years.

Curtis Hays (23:50.616)
Okay, and Claudia to 15,000.

Claudia Pfau (23:52.108)
It actually took us about eight months, so under a year.

Curtis Hays (23:57.145)
Okay, so that’s pretty good. My message to businesses would be, and we’ve said this over and over again, Tom, you got to have patience with these things. You’re not going to create something in 30 days later, 90 days later, you’re generating a bunch of leads and you’ve got this thriving community and all this. There can be instances where things take traction and a lot of things got to go your way for that to really happen.

Tom Nixon (24:09.286)
yeah.

Curtis Hays (24:25.934)
But other times, you just have to get the flywheel going. And sometimes, even though you’re on an upwards trajectory, it can seem slow and it might take some time. But when you get there, you’ll know you’ve arrived, I think. But you’ve got to have patience. And so I would say, don’t even do these things if you don’t have patience for it. You’re not going to do influencer marketing and B2B and get some payoff in the next 30 days.

Tom Nixon (24:37.838)
yeah

Tom Nixon (24:45.592)
P? Patience?

Tom Nixon (24:52.61)
Well, as we’ve said many times, the B2B’s sales cycle does not allow that to happen anyway, typically. But the other thing that Claudia pointed out that I want to emphasize is audience first, not yourself first. was audience first. We didn’t grow. That’s why I wanted to make the point. We didn’t grow the Yacht Rock Facebook page. They grew at all. It grew by itself because this thing called Yacht Rock is this groundswell that is happening on its own, right? So all we had to do is be a part of it.

Claudia Pfau (24:53.088)
You’re not.

Tom Nixon (25:20.258)
But there was another example you brought up yesterday, Curtis WP engine, and they created a community not for the purposes of selling into it even.

Curtis Hays (25:25.378)
Yeah, so there’s

Yeah, there’s two I’m a part of. we had SEO testing on Nick from SEO testing on last season, he’s got an SEO platform for tracking, you know, Google organic data and all that. So he’s got, certainly isn’t a HubSpot size company. you know, he’s growing his company and saw this need as support requests were continually coming in as one way for him really to offload some of the support requests that says, hey, you guys could help each other out. Right? Like,

lots of common questions and concerns. Let me just create a Slack channel where you guys can have conversations, but also you can reach me and my team through that Slack channel. When I have bug fixes or new features, or I’m going to release beta features and get your feedback, I’m going to release that in here. And then you guys in the meantime can have conversations about what you’re doing with your businesses and how you’re solving SEO problems. And now he’s created this niche group of SEOs who are really more of the

data nerds on the SEO side who like have a place to go, right? And the two years or so I’ve been in that group, I’ve seen it sort of evolve and his platform evolve because we’re talking about the problems that we’re facing, the problems in the types of things we’re trying to solve for our clients. And then he looks at it and says, could this be something my platform could solve? And he wouldn’t have those insights really. He’d have to do surveys and…

know, questionnaires to his customers and all that. The other one I just got invited to, so I think another big company, WP Engine, which is a hosting company, think of them like a GoDaddy, but for only WordPress websites, US based, female founder, the company’s like 12 years old, most people in the hosting space, unless you know WordPress, really don’t know who they are, because they’re not a big hosting company like a GoDaddy, but high trust within the WordPress space.

Curtis Hays (27:21.722)
And they just recently created Slack channel and now have thousands of developers in there who again, you know, are all talking about how they’re solving problems and the types of things that they’re working on within WordPress. and, you know, I, if I were on that WP Engine team, I would be a lurker.

Tom Nixon (27:39.694)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (27:40.065)
and just consuming all that data or giving that data to AI and sifting through it and say, how could we improve our platform based on the conversations that people are having about the types of problems? And those problems aren’t necessarily directly related to the software. They’re just directly related to WordPress itself. And maybe there’s ways that they can enhance their software that improves those customers’ experiences to not only retain them, but to hopefully get new ones. And then…

you know, that community then potentially some of those people become influencers and start to bring more and more people in, particularly in this group I’m in, I’m in a specific group of partners, right? So as a reseller, which is what I am, I’m there with other partners. So, yeah, again, I think if you have the opportunity to do it and you don’t see it currently exists out there, you know,

go and create it. And if it’s nice and niche like that, I think you’ll get a lot of good, you know, data and insight. Maybe there’s concern that there’d be a lot of noise if you go and create a channel like that, and people would be complaining. It’s certainly you need moderators and stuff for if you’re going to create a forum and a group like that, as I’m sure you know, Claudia, managing a Facebook group is a lot of work. And you’ve got to moderate a lot of stuff on Facebook. Because it’s a platform open for. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (28:46.317)
Yeah.

Claudia Pfau (28:47.317)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Claudia Pfau (28:55.889)
Yes, there’s a lot of weird people out there.

Tom Nixon (28:56.152)
you

Tom Nixon (29:00.022)
Now we’re going back to the generational gap. She’s going to say something about old people. I know it.

Curtis Hays (29:03.802)
I

Claudia Pfau (29:03.948)
No, no, but I did want to bring up because I had this experience with, I was once a beauty influencer and I got invited by a brand to be a spokesperson for, know, an affiliate for them. And they invited me because I was affiliate, they invited me into their affiliate community, which

This is another important point is if you’re going to create a community created in a space where these people already participate in. if the, if your ICP is somebody who uses Slack on regular basis created in Slack, if they’re on Facebook created on Facebook, this community was built. I couldn’t even tell you what the platform was. don’t remember, but it was something that I don’t use all the time. And they didn’t have a real.

purpose behind it. was just like, let’s get all of our influencers together in one space. And that’s that. There was no, why are we here together? What’s the point of us chatting with each other? Are we supposed to be friends with these people? Are we supposed to like get tips on how to sell these products better? There was no guidance. It was more so like, let’s dump you all into this platform and hope that you connect with each other.

And it fizzled out within months. know, nobody used it. wasn’t. just going back to the point that it’s, you have to think about the person that you want to be part of this community. Where are they? Where do they hang out normally? What do they want to get out of this and how can you help them with that versus let’s just create a community just because we should and dump people into it. It’s not going to work.

Tom Nixon (30:53.496)
can vouch for that too going back to the the out rock examples. know, most of the fans are people like me 40s 50s 60s cuz they’re listening to music from the 70s and 80s. so as you might imagine, Facebook is huge. I just mentioned 168 thousand. Twitter is a like tumbleweeds go through Twitter like and a lot of those same people are on Twitter but they are more comfortable on Facebook having conversations there so that to your point, you know, you gotta go where the community naturally wants to go.

All of this to say, think why this is important in this is sort of the theme of 2025. think Curtis is brands come to us and they say things like our website’s not performing as well in search or everything’s being taken over by AI. So I think finding community within humans who aren’t necessarily using Google to find a product or service that very day.

is going to be more and more important for brands because it’s even if you were winning search six months ago, that might be irrelevant six months from now. So what else can you do? And this is one of the things we’re talking about doing.

Curtis Hays (32:02.53)
Yeah, yeah, and I think we should keep talking about ideas here, things even within this influencer space. Like I mentioned events earlier, and I am hearing customers say they’re attending events again, they’re doing booths, like, you know, this is something people are thinking about again and allocating marketing budget to and add events, guess what we have usually speakers and roundtables and those are your influencers and

Claudia Pfau (32:11.596)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (32:30.614)
If you’re attending those events, maybe there’s opportunities for you to have conversations with those influencers and maybe bring them on board with your brand. Maybe there’s opportunities for you to be on those roundtables. Maybe you have somebody who’s a subject matter expert that should be participating and start looking at ways for you to getting part of those conversations. But like I said, there’s reasons why these companies like a Salesforce or HubSpot hold.

a dream force or HubSpot user conference and those types of things. It’s to bring that community together in a central spot and have those people talk about the brand, even if they’re already existing users, because then afterwards they’re going to be filled with information and excitement in ways that they are actively solving the problems that they have at hand. And then they go out into their own individual communities to work on those.

the expense into that one event then sort of gets spread out into hopefully revenue, some of which you can track some of which you’re not going to be able to but I think the moral of that story is we’ve, we’ve got to move away from attribution type marketing where we can track and measure everything that we’re doing and get back to just brand building.

Tom Nixon (33:40.302)
music to my ears. Yeah. Claudia, one other thing that I just sort of wrap up here. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier because more music to my ears is the notion of smaller audiences and going deeper within smaller audiences. And you said something along the lines of sometimes your greatest influencers could be, you know, very deep within a niche audience. So I think a lot, especially B2B branch that maybe they might be thinking big, but they should start small. Why?

or give us an example of why is maybe that more effective than trying to find the TikToker with a million followers.

Claudia Pfau (34:14.412)
Well, for one, they will be more open to working with you if they aren’t already part of your team. Let’s say if you’re looking for an outside influencer, if they, let’s just say a LinkedIn influencer and they have a couple thousand followers, but they are actively on their every day, constantly communicating with people, answering comments, posting videos or written posts, whatever it may be.

And those people are going to be more willing to work with you as a brand who wants to partner with them. They’re going to be more receptive to having somebody come on and, you know, show them a new product or show them a service and how they could work together. It’s a low lift. know, it’s not like bigger influencers require so many.

Just a lot of things that you have, a lot of hoops that you have to jump through in order to work with them. And with microimpulsors, that’s not really the case. Also, because they have a smaller audience, they’re more connected to their audience than somebody who has a million followers. So those people tend to feel like they’re almost a friend of this person. They feel like they know them very well.

And that connection, you know, as soon as you recommend something to that person, they’re like, well, yeah, I’m, I’m going to go try it at least because this person said I should, and I trust them. They’re my friend, even though it’s an online friend. so I think there’s a lot of value in starting small and the big guys are never going to pay attention to you. if you haven’t had some experience with other influencers in the past. So I think, you know, it’s a building block, just like.

Tom Nixon (36:00.194)
Yeah.

Claudia Pfau (36:04.276)
If you were gonna go on a podcast tour, huge podcasts aren’t gonna say yes to you unless they’ve seen you in other interviews before. So it’s the same concept, but with influencers. I don’t think so.

Curtis Hays (36:16.44)
You mean Joe Rogan won’t invite me on? I’m a big podcaster now.

Tom Nixon (36:22.429)
I will say to the opposite is also true. So we’re going back to what I said about bringing the influencer into your platform. The very first guest we had on our Yacht Rock podcast was a band called State Cows. You’ve never heard of State Cows, but the Yacht Rock fans really love them. Eventually, then Firefall came on the podcast. Have you heard of Firefall? No, but Yacht Rock, they had some top 10 hits back in the 70s.

Eventually, this kind of built and built and you know where I’m going with this is that eventually we got Kenny freaking Loggins on our podcast because he saw what you just said, Claudia said. Well, you did a great job with this person which led to this person led this person. I’m willing to go on it. Jokes on him were just a bunch of yucks. But anyways, it was a great, great interview and going back to that’s why now people think we’re the influencers. It’s like, they’ve got Kenny Loggins phone number.

Claudia Pfau (37:07.092)
You

Claudia Pfau (37:16.308)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (37:16.332)
So Curtis last thought and then we’ll get your last thought Claudia. Is there any what like what would be your takeaway or advice or if you’re going to do this yourself? Curtis, what would be the first thing you go out and do in 30 days? I’m going to dip my toe into influencer marketing and this is how I’m going to do

Curtis Hays (37:33.851)
I have one approach and then one piece of advice. Okay, so my approach would be get somebody out who’s doing research to see if you do have any power users, power customers, who’s actively talking to you, whether that’s you’re looking through reviews and man, this person posted an amazing review, we did not solicit it at all. Maybe we should reach out to them and you start to dig into that individual and they’ve got a YouTube channel. We were just evaluating.

project management tools. And I was looking on YouTube because I wanted to see how they worked. We found these, I found a husband and wife that I kind of went through their journey of videos. And then they started talking about in some other videos, their journey. And they had used a bunch of different platforms in their careers, found one they really liked to started to just personally make videos about how to use the platform. Then that company contacted them and eventually got into a relationship with them.

where they’re now being paid to create content for them. This is part of your marketing budget, essentially. Now you have people who are creating content for you that you don’t have to hire somebody to come into the organization. These people already have a following and they’re doing it from this place of authenticity. not, they weren’t hired at least when they got started. Now they’re being paid for it, but that wasn’t their objective when they got into it. They just wanted to help other people. Now, the advice I want to give with that is,

there’s implications to that if you’re a business that you haven’t got into this before like legal, right? You can’t just go and pay an influencer and not have contracts in place and the proper ease and seize, right? So, if you start internally and it’s employee, it’s a little different. So I would say start internally if you can, can do some research, look out there, see if there are some communities, if you see opportunities.

Claudia Pfau (39:09.54)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (39:26.574)
then start to explore those routes, but know that you might have to get into legal and finance and some other things in order to make something happen, but it could be fruitful. Or it could be like this, Tom, a simple podcast where we bring people on and somebody like an Amy Schuster has a great following, posts one of our podcast episodes and she gets 30 comments on it on LinkedIn. That’s…

Tom Nixon (39:49.73)
Yep.

Curtis Hays (39:52.943)
That influences us and now we get new subscribers, new people who seeing our content and you never know where that’s gonna spread to.

Tom Nixon (40:00.399)
Yeah, even new guests. Claudia, what would you recommend people do either as a first step or?

Claudia Pfau (40:09.516)
I agree with what Curtis said as a first step, like do your research, figure out what bucket you want to go down, whether it’s the outside influencer, internal influencers or communities, figure out which of those three fits your audience the best. And at the end of the day, like my one piece of advice is to just stay consistent, like keep doing this. Whatever bucket you choose, show up there consistently.

because that’s the only way that people are going to start to trust you as a brand. I think a lot of people give up when, you know, maybe they partner with one influencer and the numbers aren’t what they thought they would be. okay. Well, we’re not going to do that again.

No, because that’s your first time. You have to keep going. You have to try again. if it’s, your, you know, CEO is trying to become a LinkedIn influencer, let’s say it’s not just, let me post one thing and I only got five likes. I’m never going to post again. You have to keep showing up. and at the end of the day, nobody, you guys have said this multiple times on your show. People buy from people.

There it’s very rare that somebody searches something. They find your website. They say, this is great. And they sign up for a demo or free trial or buy your product. So they’re going to go to LinkedIn. They’re going to go to Reddit. They’re going to go to, and they’re going to ask their colleagues. They’re going to ask their friends, have you used this part? They’re going to go to YouTube and see if there’s a tutorial. So figure out where your person is going and how you can show up there with people who have influence or you yourself becoming an influential voice.

Tom Nixon (41:51.246)
Great, great advice. All right.

Curtis Hays (41:52.807)
And that stuff lives in perpetuity. I want to hear your thing too, but like, you know, I’ll see brands spend a hundred and some thousand dollars a year in advertising. And after the click, that money’s out the door. They’ve spent it. It’s gone. You go and invest in these types of things where you’re building content that can live in perpetuity forever online. And it’s two years later and somebody stumbles across a YouTube video. It’s like, I didn’t know that product existed. I should probably look into that. And they buy.

And that’s just living out there on the internet, ready to be consumed. Now in a LinkedIn feed, that’s a little bit different, but you look at these channels where that content could live out there in perpetuity, which basically means forever, theoretically, and those investments could pay off. Again, but you need patience. And thank you for saying show up. You got to show up. What are your thoughts, Tom? go ahead, Claudia.

Tom Nixon (42:42.606)
Absolutely.

Claudia Pfau (42:46.412)
You gotta show up. Even if you, oh go. I was gonna say even if we were talking about events, even if you say, I’m gonna go to an event, I’m gonna be a spokesperson at this event, you have to continue that conversation afterwards, whether it be on LinkedIn or your own blog or on YouTube, people won’t just see you once and say, that’s my guy, I’m gonna buy from him and move on. No, they have to see you, you have to show up.

There was something, Curtis, you brought this up before the 714 rule where you have to show up 11, yeah, where you have to show up so many times for so many hours in front of people for them to trust you. And that’s, you just gotta be consistent in order to get there.

Curtis Hays (43:19.354)
11. Yep.

Curtis Hays (43:30.308)
Wow, my stuff is sticking. I love it. Man.

Tom Nixon (43:32.246)
Yeah, boy, whoever convinced you to start a podcast was brilliant. So, well, speaking of which, Claudia, thank you so much for coming on. Last question. Was it more fun for you to come on a podcast with two old Gen X dudes talking about something you clearly do nothing about or talking about influencer marketing with two equally old Gen X dudes?

Claudia Pfau (43:57.056)
I think I liked when I didn’t know anything.

Tom Nixon (43:59.15)
That was never. That was never. We did. All right, Curtis, it’s up to you and I now. We got to go build the community. All right. Until next time, see you.

Curtis Hays (44:08.28)
Let’s do it. Keep rocking and rolling.

Claudia Pfau (44:11.18)
Thanks guys.