How the Right Creators Can Transform Your B2B Marketing

John Jantsch (00:01.17)

Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Nick Bennett. He’s a co-founder of TACK, a media network and go-to-market firm, helping businesses convert demand into revenue through their people-first GTM model. With over a decade of experience in B2B tech industry, Nick specializes in crafting innovative go-to-market strategies. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today.

John Jantsch (00:28.25)

B2B influencer marketing, work with creators to generate authentic and effective marketing. So, Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Bennett (00:36.198)

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

John Jantsch (00:38.69)

So let’s define influencer marketing. I suspect that people would have different definitions of what that means or perceptions of what that is. How do you describe it when you tell somebody about your book and they say, what’s influencer marketing?

Nick Bennett (00:42.748)

.

Nick Bennett (00:53.2)

Yeah, so I think in B2B, it’s a little bit different than B2C. I think that’s the first thing that we have to tackle. But in B2B specifically, I think an influencer is someone who holds authority or credibility within a specific industry. So they could be a subject matter expert, they could be a creator, they could be a practitioner. There are people who share valuable insights. They have a loyal, engaged following of an audience on different social media platforms.

John Jantsch (00:56.474)

Yes. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:19.302)

So I think a lot of people, especially when you talk about in the B2C world, naturally think of Peyton Manning, Kim Kardashian, I don’t know, some of the folks that show up that way. But really, I’m guessing in the B2B space, it might be somebody you’ve never heard of, but 1,000 people think that he or she knows everything. mean, is that kind of micro audience pretty significant?

Nick Bennett (01:43.484)

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that’s the big thing in B2B. It’s not the million person follower counts that matter. It’s that kind of like 10,000 to 50,000 follower range. That is like the sweet spot in B2B.

John Jantsch (01:58.19)

In fact, would you go as far as saying, I know this is a blanket statement, so there’s holes in it, but would you go as far as saying that traditional celebrity endorsements really are not going to work in B2B?

Nick Bennett (02:10.414)

absolutely. I’ve

Nick Bennett (02:11.554)

seen B2B companies try to specifically at events and it just hasn’t worked, which is why I think so many people are turning to working with creators. And I should mention there is a difference between creators and influences. So everyone can become a creator. You and I are both creators, but not every creator has influence. in B2B, you shouldn’t self-dub yourself in influence. So just like B2C, people can do that because it’s just what is known, but there’s such a misunderstanding of

Nick Bennett (02:38.714)

what a creator and what an influencer is in B2B. And that’s everything that I’ve been trying to battle for the last couple of years.

John Jantsch (02:45.744)

Yeah, it’s really more than to get somebody excited. Like you bring to your CMO, we need to do influencer marketing in all sense. Like, no, you know, that’s not for us, right?

Nick Bennett (02:54.908)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (02:57.327)

So what are some of the best practices or strategies that B2B marketers should employ?

Nick Bennett (03:02.362)

Yeah, well, I think it’s figuring out what are the outcomes that you want to achieve. And so when you think about, know, hey, I’m going to deploy this as a tactic because it’s interesting. Creators and influencers can be used as its own channel, but it can also be used as a tactic within other channels that you’re already running, like events and social and things like that. So I think it’s understanding what are, what does success mean for us?

Nick Bennett (03:29.742)

in aligning your goals around that. So when I think of like, what are the core KPIs of what success actually means, it could be engagement metrics. So again, if you’re going to go on LinkedIn, for example, and partner with people to drive brand awareness, you care about the likes, the comments, the shares, how many people are driving traffic to my website. If you care about reaching impressions, hey, I’m trying to get into manufacturing, tech for manufacturing. It’s like, I care about

Nick Bennett (03:58.588)

the size of the audience reach within that specific industry. Then you’ve got the lead gen side, which is like, all right, number of inquiries, signups, pipeline growth. Like you could use that for a PLG motion. And then revenue impact. Are you directly or influencing sales as someone that is promoting a service? Cause it’s not like B2C where it’s like, Hey, go buy this, you know, $20 hair straightener. It’s, Hey,

Nick Bennett (04:22.298)

you don’t go buy this $50,000 piece of tech that you’re going to use in your stack. It’s a big difference. And so a lot of people, unfortunately, are promoting stuff and they’re not using it. And so you build trust with your audience and then you promote stuff and they believe you. And it just leaves a lot of people disappointed. So when I look to partner with brands or I’m working to build programs,

Nick Bennett (04:46.3)

you have to use the product. I’m not saying you have to use it for years, but you can’t just go into a partnership without using the product.

John Jantsch (04:54.064)

So you mentioned different metrics, so there would be different objectives possibly, right? I mean, somebody might want to create awareness. like, I’m going to sponsor this podcast so people start hearing about us. Or I’m going to sponsor this techie webinar because I want to create demand. mean, would that be a true statement?

Nick Bennett (05:16.056)

Absolutely. And I think it’s a great way when you can figure out, multiple, it’s, you don’t want to silo things. So when you can make it part of a larger part of your integrated strategy, makes sense. I’ll give you good example of that. I had an old podcast called the anonymous market and it’s no longer going, but Google actually used to sponsor that podcast. And I was like, all right, why would Google want to sponsor my podcast? You know, it’s, it was Google cloud and we ended up integrating it into a lot of different pieces. So there was the podcast, there was the social media aspect.

John Jantsch (05:39.12)

Yeah.

Nick Bennett (05:45.808)

There was actually webinars. So it was a much more than like, hey, we just want to sponsor the podcast to get more awareness out there. Like they don’t need the awareness. They were trying to tap into specific audiences in certain parts of the, the U S actually.

John Jantsch (06:00.048)

Yeah, yeah. So what have you found are some of the challenges or limitations of B2B? So we talked a little bit about best practices, but what are some of the realities in some of the limitations for B2B companies?

Nick Bennett (06:15.3)

I think a lot of people just still don’t know how this works or how that you should be operating or building a program from this. Like so, so often I talk to CMOs and founders and they’re like, I want to do influence of marketing. And I’m just like, okay, like, what do you want to do? And they’re just like, I don’t know. I want to do a LinkedIn post. Now the issue is you’re going to go partner with say five people, do a LinkedIn post. You’re going to get some hype that, that day. Maybe you’re launching on product taunts or you’re doing new product, whatever it is. The issue is.

Nick Bennett (06:43.77)

a lot of brands don’t do anything with that content after they have that lightning strike for that one day. And then everything goes away because just like, just like real life social media, like all that stuff disappears in about 24 hours. And so then what, and I think that’s the biggest issue is so many CMOs and marketing leaders are disappointed in their spend because they’re like, it’s not, it’s not impacting sales. It’s not impacting, you know, signups. And it’s just like, you can’t just do a one-off thing and think it’s going to change the world here. This is something that

Nick Bennett (07:13.402)

It has to become a program and it has to be bought in from the top down and be part of your integrated strategy.

John Jantsch (07:20.814)

Yeah, and really, you know, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about, know, especially in B2B, that you’re not looking at this as an endorsement. It’s more of a partnership, right?

Nick Bennett (07:29.436)

And you nailed that word partnership because that’s still what people still aren’t sure. just like, I want to do a one-off thing. It’s very transactional. And one of the things that I work on in championing it as well is people first. it’s like, okay, people first, the core of what people first actually means is partner driven, ecosystem driven. so creators and influencers play a big piece of that.

Nick Bennett (07:53.542)

But it’s still, there’s so much education that still has to be done because we’re very much in the early adopter phase, at least in tech for B2B.

John Jantsch (08:02.534)

So I’ll put you on the spot a little bit. Can you think of a, could you give an example of what, you know, what a typical successful campaign like this would look like? mean, pick whatever medium or you don’t have to even name names. You can even just kind of give us a, you know, a fake case study.

Nick Bennett (08:19.386)

Yeah, no, no, I have a real one I can use for sure. So we actually partnered with a company called Path Factory. They’re in the of kind of content repository world, but they were building an AI product, know, surprise, everyone’s building an AI product. And it was like an, exactly. And it was an AI chat bot. And so they were launching that, but they had to launch it.

John Jantsch (08:21.669)

Okay.

John Jantsch (08:34.086)

Even if they aren’t.

Nick Bennett (08:44.302)

literally in a two week window because they were acquiring another company and they needed like they needed this product to fit in here before they announced the acquisition of that company. So they came to us and one of the things they said, you hey, we need you to build the whole brand narrative positioning messaging, but we also want you to build an influencer program to be able to get the awareness out there because it was kind of like a PLG play. So it was part PLG, like they needed the signups, but they also needed the awareness piece of it.

John Jantsch (08:48.848)

Mm.

Nick Bennett (09:13.764)

And within a week, I was able to get them about 15 people. were like, listen, I have a $5,000 budget on what we can spend on paying these creators to create LinkedIn posts. was solely LinkedIn. And I went out, found these people, got their approval, built this entire program. We went live and it was one of their most successful launches that they’ve had. And it’s actually still going really, really well. And now they’ve actually adopted an entire.

Nick Bennett (09:39.63)

influencer program and they’re hiring an actual person to like manage this all for them now. But we did the whole thing in two weeks from like start to finish and it was like, I don’t recommend anyone do that. with what we had to do, I’m very happy with the results.

John Jantsch (09:48.688)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:52.72)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (09:58.726)

So one of the challenges probably is fit, AT &T sponsored my, I’m just gonna say this, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it, AT &T sponsored my podcast for about a year and I wasn’t really a fan of AT &T, frankly. I probably wasn’t a great fit. I mean, I didn’t do anything to tarnish the brand or anything, but I didn’t have any passion for it. How much of that do you believe needs to be there?

John Jantsch (10:28.518)

Does somebody need to be a champion or does somebody need to, or is it basically, if they’re going to pay me, I’ll say what they need me to say.

Nick Bennett (10:36.444)

Well, the issue is there’s so many people that are now under the mindset where, if they’re going to pay me, I didn’t realize I could get paid for this type of stuff, which is, which is hurting a lot of the original people that have been doing this like me and others. Exactly. And that’s the issue because then it’s, it’s false advertising because you don’t use the product. You’re promoting it. I’m going to go buy that. And then I’m going to be mad that, you know, Joe told me to go buy this and now it’s a terrible product, but

John Jantsch (10:44.024)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:48.624)

Yeah, they were just like, I love this product. You should see it. Right.

John Jantsch (11:01.168)

Right?

Nick Bennett (11:04.9)

In my mind, and what I tell everyone that I work with, and even in the book, it’s like, you have to believe in the mission. Maybe it’s not the mission of the company, but the mission of the category. Because if you’re not a believer of the category and what you’re looking to solve, then you’re never going to be bought into anything. And like I said, you have to use the product. Because as a marketer myself, I don’t partner with any brand where they won’t let me use the product. And I want to see how I can fit it into my regular life.

John Jantsch (11:28.974)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nick Bennett (11:32.132)

I did just one recently with this company called Tango, small company, but they basically, what they do is they help you create, you know, SOPs for different. Yeah. And fantastic product. And so like, I started using it because I’m just a two person business and we have worked with a lot of contractors and I started to map out all these things. I was like, wow, this is fantastic. And I feel like it comes across so more human, so more authentic in the content that you create when you can actually use it.

John Jantsch (11:38.66)

Yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with it, yeah, Yep.

John Jantsch (11:58.192)

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree 100%. In the early days of influencer marketing, it was, know, people were used to controlling the message, right? And so in the early days, people were very freaked out by the fact that, somebody else is gonna, who’s not an employee is gonna talk about us and we’re gonna pay him. You know, how much risk or exposure, you know, do people still feel is a part of this?

Nick Bennett (12:07.1)

Thank

Nick Bennett (12:22.448)

I don’t think there’s much anymore. Every brand that I’ve worked with and talked to, they have ultimately write a refusal on like, does the content go live or not? But they are lessening the guardrails and they say, listen, I want you to bring your creative freedom. That’s why we’re paying to work with you. We don’t wanna dictate what you should write because that’s not human. so every…

Nick Bennett (12:46.384)

I’m working on one right now where I’m going through and I’m kind of thinking about it and I sent it to the brand and they were like, well, we want you to spin it more like this. And I was just like, no, that’s not how this works because you’re trying to dictate my point of view, which is that that’s not how I feel. And so we actually ended up ending the partnership because they were trying to put words in my mouth a little bit and I didn’t want those words to come out.

John Jantsch (13:05.851)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:10.01)

Yeah. Yeah. I personally, we do a lot of sponsors on this show and I personally like it when a brand says, here’s the talking points, but we want you to say it like you would say it as opposed to read this script. I, and personally, I know for a fact, comes off more authentic when I just make it up. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Bennett (13:29.756)

100%. I’m the same way. I feel like

Nick Bennett (13:31.787)

it’s it’s so much more conversational versus like, you robotic. It’s like, it’s just like, you know, AI has made content creation so easy today. It’s so easy to spot on social media what’s written with AI and not. So we don’t, we don’t need that when people are, you know, doing podcasts, webinars, things like that.

John Jantsch (13:44.358)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:50.372)

Yeah. Yeah. Especially the comments on LinkedIn. Those are painful. What about the international market? I know that, you again, sometimes, you know, you’re in your little bubble, you know, who the people in your space are, you know, you start going out globally. How do you find those? How do you connect? You know, maybe in some cases, you know, you’ve got obviously language, you know, issues or not issues, but challenges. So how, you know, how do you, how do brands kind of

Nick Bennett (13:52.86)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:20.154)

manage that if that’s goal.

Nick Bennett (14:23.534)

Yeah, I think it’s something they’re still trying to figure out. There’s one brand in particular called Cognizm. They’re like a data provider in the UK, and they do influencer marketing really, really well. They’ve been doing it for like seven years. Fantastic job. They have an entire program. But they were running into a similar issue where they were like, it’s hard to find people globally if you’re based in another part of the world. And it’s just like, what if you know…

John Jantsch (14:30.704)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Bennett (14:49.936)

The way I talk about something is not the same way that you talk about something. How do you get that to come across in a different tone? but marketplaces have made it really easy to, find people to partner with. And that was something that was always lacking in B2B and B2C. You could go find influencer marketing, you know, marketplaces like, Hey, I want to find someone that talks about AI and tech. Boom. Here’s a hundred people that I could go partner with through this platform. Now B2B hasn’t really had that up until about.

Nick Bennett (15:19.67)

six months or eight months ago. So many have tried, but they couldn’t figure out how to monetize that. And now a few brands have created these marketplaces where they play matchmaker. And they pair, regardless of where you are in the world, you with different types of creators based on the filters that you want. And I’ve been waiting for this for so long because outside of that, you just had to go on LinkedIn or X and find these people and just send them a cold message.

Nick Bennett (15:46.714)

And these platforms have made it a lot easier to facilitate the outreach, to facilitate the campaign actually happening, the reporting, all of that stuff.

John Jantsch (15:56.304)

So let’s flip it around a little bit. I’ve been talking mostly about how businesses would use this. But if I’m a content creator and I think, hey, I want to get in on this influencer action, how do I get myself identified as a potential influencer?

Nick Bennett (16:09.946)

You just got to show up every single day. So I’ve been creating LinkedIn on LinkedIn now for five years, every single day. think most I’ve taken a couple of weeks off over the last five years, mostly around the holidays or if I went on vacation, but I have showed up every single day and it’s repetition, it’s consistency. think that all pays off. Like you don’t have to have the biggest number of followers. I only have like 53,000 followers, but I have an engaged audience of people that actually care what I have to say.

John Jantsch (16:15.002)

Right. Yeah.

Nick Bennett (16:39.308)

And again, what I’ve said has changed over those five years. When I started five years ago, I was a field marketer. was an event marketer for early stage tech companies in-house doing my thing. And I would talk about that. Then I started talking about account-based marketing and customer marketing. And then about a year and a half ago, went out on my own with my partner, who was my former CMO at our last company. And now we champion everything around People First and the creator economy and things like that. But again,

Nick Bennett (17:07.312)

I’ve got to a point where it doesn’t matter what I write or what I have to say. There’s going to be people that support me. I could say the sky is blue and it’s going to be still people that support me even though that adds no value, but it’s because I’ve done it so consistently over the last five years.

John Jantsch (17:21.69)

Yeah, so you’ve got to move beyond hobby, amateur, to GoPro. Would you say that it’s probably useful to pick a niche or to pick a point of view or to pick a very specific topic so that you can, you you may not have a million followers, but for people who do X, you you’re it.

Nick Bennett (17:25.198)

Yes.

Nick Bennett (17:44.38)

It’s a loaded question because there’s going to be people that will debate both sides of it. I personally will say yes, because for me, as a field marketer and event marketer originally starting, that was my niche and it was so impactful the amount of DMs I got from people that was like, hey, I can relate. Thank you. Now, there is some people that say, you don’t need to just talk about whatever you want.

John Jantsch (17:48.42)

Yeah, yeah.

Nick Bennett (18:08.92)

It’s again, going back to AI, AI has made it so easy to create content. You’re not going to stand out if you just talk about random stuff and you’re just starting out. You have to have a strong POV and you have to stand for something. And if you don’t stand for something and cannot kind of add your own spin to it, you’re just going to get lost in all those other people that just, you know, throwing up posts every once in a while.

John Jantsch (18:29.54)

Yeah, yeah, there’s no question. mean, you, you, you see it all the time. The people who have the most reactions, positive and negative, you know, are saying stuff that’s kind of polarizing. Right.

Nick Bennett (18:39.324)

Yeah, it’s

Nick Bennett (18:40.524)

you know, there’s there’s this guy out there. You know, he’s he’s fantastic person Adam Robinson He’s the founder of our RB to be and he always puts controversial stuff on LinkedIn and like he’ll start like LinkedIn like Beefs with people it’s so so interesting. Like there’s so many like LinkedIn beefs now but like he is very controversial and like there’s people that will go off like negatively in his stuff and positive but

John Jantsch (18:55.493)

Yeah.

Nick Bennett (19:05.68)

He gets so much engagement on every single one of his posts because people know like, Adam’s gonna post something that is gonna like set some people off.

John Jantsch (19:14.842)

Yeah, that’s funny. I often sometimes this can come off as a lame question, but I often like to kind of wrap up interviews with talking about giving you an opportunity to talk about like what’s next? What’s coming? You know, for what’s the future look like?

Nick Bennett (19:28.764)

Yeah, you know, honestly, I should say, you know, I had no intention of ever writing a book when the publisher reached out and was like, hey, you want to write a book? This was a year and a half ago. And I was like, not really. And they convinced me to do it. And I missed so many deadlines. I have three small kids. I have a six year old and 19 month old twin girls. And so I was like,

John Jantsch (19:46.296)

wow.

Nick Bennett (19:50.148)

yeah, you know, I’ll do it. And then I missed multiple deadlines. They canceled the book on me twice. They’re like, you’re not taking this seriously enough. was like, well, hold on. I never wanted to write the book. You guys stepped on trying to push me to do this. And so finally, you know, we’re here and it’s out. like, I will never write another book, at least not like a published book, maybe self-published. they are like, are on you like hawks. And for me, like, you know, tack and just everything that we’re working on, like,

John Jantsch (19:58.798)

Yeah.

Nick Bennett (20:19.888)

I’ll continue to champion the creator economy, but like the broader umbrella of that is people first and how do we get people to think about the company first mindset, which was like the old school way of doing things and moving to more of a human way, which again, creators and influencers plays a huge piece in, but that’ll be everything that kind of, you at least for the next couple of years that I continue to push forward.

John Jantsch (20:43.408)

Well, and I think we’re, you know, I’ve been talking a lot about, think we’ve been, you know, we see change every year, but I think the pace of change increases every year. And I think AI has just thrown gasoline on that, certainly. And so I think that what you’re talking about is I think we’re going to see, I’ve been doing this 30 years, and I think we’re going to see a return to that, you know, people, I mean, that’s, you know, all the control is going to the buyer.

John Jantsch (21:11.59)

in the marketing world and I think that the human connection is going to be more important than ever.

Nick Bennett (21:17.18)

100%. Well, and one more piece to that is like, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use AI. I use AI every day. Now, it’s going to be, know, so many people, marketers are afraid that AI is going to take their job. No, it’s going to be the marketers that learn how to master AI to use it to do the tasks that they don’t want to do. That’s who’s going to take your job.

John Jantsch (21:34.726)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (21:36.407)

Yeah, yeah. That’s what I tell people all the time. It’s not AI. It’s another marketer who’s just as strategic as you that’s using it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Nick, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to connect with you and find a copy of B2B Influencer Market?

Nick Bennett (21:38.48)

you

Nick Bennett (21:44.323)

Exactly.

Nick Bennett (21:57.338)

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. I post a lot about it there. I have a bunch of links where you can find it on Amazon, Kogan Page, Barnes and Noble, all those websites. So find me on LinkedIn, DM me. Always happy to chat with new people and appreciate you having me.

John Jantsch (22:14.298)

You bet. Again, thanks for taking a few moments and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Nick Bennett (22:19.898)

Absolutely.

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