Unlock the secrets to mastering influencer marketing on TikTok with insights from Drew Moffitt, head of marketing at Kumospace. Discover how performance-based compensation and cutting-edge AI tools are transforming influencer campaigns, making them more effective and measurable.
We explore how TikTok and influencer marketing became instrumental in promoting Kumospace, especially when LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities fell short. Dive into the innovative strategies that propelled this B2B product forward in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, emphasizing real-time collaboration and productivity for remote teams.
This episode also delves into the mechanics of influencer marketing success. We dissect the role of performance-based payment structures, the challenges of multi-device attribution, and the synergy between brand and performance marketing. Learn how specific user targeting, like SMB owners and remote work executives, can significantly boost your campaigns. We wrap up with expert advice on scaling influencer strategies, leveraging AI for SEO, and the importance of finding the right creators whose content aligns with your brand’s vibe.
Don’t miss this chance to elevate your digital marketing game!
Learn More:
- Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/
- Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
- Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/freebies/
- Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
- All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com
Speaker 1: Influencer marketing.
00:00:02
You've seen it dominate social media, but do you really know
00:00:05
how to tap into its evolving landscape for your brand success
00:00:08
?
00:00:08
Today, we're diving deep into the new rules of influencer
00:00:12
marketing on TikTok, with expert insights from Drew Moffitt,
00:00:16
head of marketing at Kumo Space.
00:00:17
Discover how performance-based compensation and AI tools can
00:00:22
revolutionize your approach and drive impactful results.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: We're going to unpack all of this and lots more so
00:00:28
stay tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing
00:00:39
Coach podcast, linkedin, twitter , facebook, instagram, youtube,
00:00:43
seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover.
00:00:50
Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or
00:00:53
business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert
00:00:57
advice.
00:00:58
Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer
00:01:03
is your digital marketing coach , helping you grow your business
00:01:11
with digital.
00:01:12
First marketing, one episode at a time.
00:01:14
This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer.
00:01:20
Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil.
00:01:22
Speaker 1: Schaefer.
00:01:22
Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil
00:01:25
Schaefer, and welcome to my podcast, and happy September.
00:01:29
This is episode number 377.
00:01:32
Today I'm going to skip over the industry news, give you a
00:01:35
little personal update and then we'll go into the interview.
00:01:38
So I'm actually recording this the day before I traveled to
00:01:42
Dallas, texas, for VidSummit.
00:01:44
Vidsummit really is the definitive video marketing
00:01:47
YouTube marketing, also advice on TikTok and Instagram Reels
00:01:51
what have you?
00:01:51
Everything video related, content creator related and I'd
00:01:55
go as far as saying entrepreneur digital marketing related,
00:01:58
because there are a number of entrepreneurs there who share
00:02:01
their successes with video.
00:02:03
So that is this week.
00:02:05
If you're going to be at VidSummit, please ping me on the
00:02:08
Wova app.
00:02:09
If you're going, you should know what that is and I would
00:02:12
love to see you there.
00:02:13
And if not, be on the lookout for my VidSummit recap, which I
00:02:18
can't wait to record for you shortly.
00:02:22
On personal updates so, as you know, if you've been following
00:02:26
me on social media, you might be a little bit confused, but I am
00:02:30
actually publishing two new books in the next 30 days.
00:02:33
I know it sounds crazy.
00:02:35
There is a method to the madness, trust me, but I just
00:02:38
want to give you some quick updates.
00:02:39
First of all, maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth
00:02:42
will be the first book to be published right now, tentatively
00:02:46
September 17th.
00:02:48
Hopefully by the time this goes out, you are going to see a
00:02:51
pre-order come up for the e-book .
00:02:53
I'm releasing an e-book only to begin with and it's only going
00:02:57
to be 99 cents, so be on the lookout for that.
00:03:00
Really excited.
00:03:01
I just did the final edits, got the final copy back yesterday.
00:03:05
Out for that.
00:03:06
Really excited, I just did the final edits, got the final copy
00:03:08
back yesterday.
00:03:08
Digital Threads really is the longer, bigger book, for lack of
00:03:13
a better word.
00:03:13
Maximizing LinkedIn for business growth is going to be
00:03:14
somewhat of a mini book.
00:03:15
That's why it's 99 cents.
00:03:16
But Digital Threads is my legit business book where I hope to
00:03:19
really reshape how you think about digital marketing.
00:03:22
If you've been listening to this podcast for years, you're going
00:03:25
to recognize a lot of the concepts that I talk about.
00:03:27
That is getting very, very close to being scheduled in
00:03:32
Amazon.
00:03:32
I expect to get the final audio book, which I spent all of last
00:03:36
week recording, which is why my voice is a little bit hoarse,
00:03:38
but I expect to get that back in the next few days.
00:03:41
I went through and after reading the audiobook, I
00:03:44
realized that I should probably have done one more deep
00:03:47
proofread on the book, which I did as well, and I just sent
00:03:50
that off to my editor to get the final files back from him, and
00:03:54
I'm still working on a hard cover print issue.
00:03:57
Hopefully that gets resolved soon.
00:03:59
But anytime you work with printers, there's always a back
00:04:01
and forth and there's always a time lag.
00:04:03
So if you are on my Kickstarter , you will be getting the ebook
00:04:07
first and the audio book second, and then the paperback and
00:04:11
hardcover will be distributed third, but I can't wait to start
00:04:14
distributing those before it actually goes on sale.
00:04:18
That was my promise to all of my Kickstarter backers.
00:04:21
So that's where I am.
00:04:23
Be on the lookout for that.
00:04:24
They will be for sale on Amazon and wherever you buy books, and
00:04:27
I am also drinking my own medicine and in the process of
00:04:31
launching a Shopify store where you can also buy all of these
00:04:36
books from me directly, without going through a middleman or
00:04:40
middlewoman or a e-commerce platform, which well, helps me
00:04:44
because I can maximize the royalties and hopefully helps
00:04:47
you because you won't have to be limited to where you can buy my
00:04:51
content.
00:04:51
So be on the lookout for that.
00:04:53
That is sort of in the background, still needs a little
00:04:55
bit more time.
00:04:56
It may happen in time for the launch, may not, but we'll keep
00:04:59
you updated.
00:05:00
Obviously, everything that I'm learning from all this, I can't
00:05:02
wait to share with you in future episodes.
00:05:04
And, obviously, everything that I'm learning from all this I
00:05:06
can't wait to share with you in future episodes.
00:05:07
So let's get on to today's interview.
00:05:08
I get pinged by a lot of people .
00:05:10
I just counted right now, and in the first eight months of
00:05:14
2024, I have had 116 different requests as guests to be on this
00:05:21
podcast.
00:05:22
I only interview.
00:05:23
You know, half of my podcast episodes are interviews.
00:05:26
I only publish 50 a year.
00:05:27
So do the math I only interviewed 25 people a year.
00:05:30
And I have a lot of friends who are experts, authors,
00:05:34
influencers, what have you.
00:05:35
So it is very rare when I interview someone that I don't
00:05:38
really know that well, but once in a while I will see a pretty
00:05:42
compelling pitch, and this one came from a gentleman, drew
00:05:45
Moffitt, who is the CMO of a company called Kumo Space.
00:05:49
Kumo Space really evolved during COVID.
00:05:51
It is an experience like Zoom, but it also has a virtual
00:05:57
reality aspect to it.
00:05:58
So instead of just seeing someone on Zoom, you can
00:06:01
actually enter their virtual office, see who else is around
00:06:04
at the office.
00:06:05
So it's really great for keeping on tabs of your colleagues if
00:06:08
you work at the same company, and it has this video
00:06:11
conferencing feature, so pretty cool.
00:06:12
And although they're really trying to sell it to companies,
00:06:18
they found a lot of success working with influencers on
00:06:20
TikTok and well, you're just going to have to hear about it,
00:06:24
but what Drew was talking about with TikTok and working with
00:06:27
influencers there really does represent a new way of looking
00:06:31
at influencer marketing and on a new platform, and it's
00:06:34
interesting because TikTok has always been about views, but now
00:06:37
we see Instagram changing to views, we see Twitter changing
00:06:41
to impressions.
00:06:42
So I think, although this is related to TikTok, this is a B2B
00:06:46
company and everything that you hear is going to be really
00:06:49
relevant for every B2C company, as well as really any social
00:06:52
media platform.
00:06:53
So I'm going to I don't want to give away any more of the of
00:06:56
the deets that you was going to spill on this episode, so,
00:06:58
without further ado, here is my interview with Drew Moffitt from
00:07:02
Kumo Space.
00:07:03
Speaker 2: You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach.
00:07:06
This is Neil Schafer.
00:07:08
Hey everybody.
00:07:13
Speaker 1: This is Neil Schafer, and welcome to another live
00:07:15
stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
00:07:19
So one of the themes of this new book that I am writing and
00:07:23
hope to announce soon is that since the coronavirus pandemic,
00:07:27
the digital trends have only accelerated.
00:07:30
Digital marketing, and especially social media, is just
00:07:33
very different now than it was just a few years ago.
00:07:37
However, is your company pivoting quick enough to meet
00:07:41
the changing environment, the changing atmosphere?
00:07:43
And I think one area where this is especially true is
00:07:47
influencer marketing, and in fact, I've had to redo how I
00:07:51
teach influencer marketing at my own class at UCLA Extension,
00:07:55
because just a few years ago, things were just so different.
00:07:58
Just the emergence of TikTok alone and what that means and
00:08:02
we're going to get into a lot of that today is going to be
00:08:05
indicative of just how different things are.
00:08:07
So today I'm really excited to bring on a special guest who has
00:08:10
a refreshingly new look at influencer marketing, and it's
00:08:14
not your traditional B2C e-commerce company.
00:08:18
It's more of a B2B company, and that's why I'm really excited
00:08:21
to hear about how they have found success with influencer
00:08:24
marketing and the advice that they have for you to find
00:08:27
success with influencer marketing.
00:08:29
So we're going to discuss the new rules of influencer
00:08:31
marketing today with my friend, drew Moffitt, who is the head of
00:08:35
marketing at Kumo Space, and I know we'll find out a lot about
00:08:38
what the heck Kumo Space is for those that aren't familiar with
00:08:40
it in the interview.
00:08:41
Speaker 3: But, drew, welcome to the podcast that aren't
00:08:44
familiar with it in the interview.
00:08:45
But, drew, welcome to the podcast.
00:08:46
Yeah, thank you for having me and excited to dive in and talk
00:08:48
about how we've leveraged influencer marketing and kind of
00:08:50
a realm that typically isn't thought of as a place that you
00:08:53
would use it.
00:08:54
Speaker 1: Indeed, can't wait to get into that.
00:08:55
But before we get into that, I always like to ask my guests the
00:09:00
backstory.
00:09:00
How did you get into marketing?
00:09:01
How did you get started with marketing Everything that led up
00:09:04
to your joining Kumo Space?
00:09:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm.
00:09:07
I think I'm probably the 13th year of my career in marketing.
00:09:09
Now it's starting to number there.
00:09:12
Yeah, so I went to school.
00:09:14
I graduated in 2011, which wasn't a particularly hot time
00:09:17
to graduate.
00:09:18
I had gone into school in New York City and the natural path
00:09:23
for me, you know, going to college had seemed to be to go
00:09:26
to finance.
00:09:27
And I ended up not going to finance.
00:09:29
I ended up in real estate initially, and then I got the
00:09:33
bug to do my own startup and I did a business called Forever
00:09:37
Not, which allowed you to place a social bet on the relationship
00:09:42
status of celebrities.
00:09:44
It was pretty fun.
00:09:45
It went viral Very cool.
00:09:47
And that was my first foray into discovering how to market right
00:09:51
.
00:09:51
It was marketing by need.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: It's so funny.
00:09:54
I once played around with the idea of I don't know if you
00:09:58
remember Klout K-L-O-U-T.
00:09:59
It was an influencer platform that basically gave every social
00:10:03
media user a score of their influence from zero to 100.
00:10:07
And I played around with the idea of creating a game where
00:10:10
people would bet on other social media users influencers clout
00:10:13
scores to see if they go up or down over time.
00:10:16
So a little similar, but anyway , I'm glad I never did that,
00:10:19
because clout we don't talk about today.
00:10:20
So they went out of business and, yeah, that would have
00:10:23
failed.
00:10:23
So cool.
00:10:24
So finance, real estate, marketing, startup, and after
00:10:28
that you joined Kumo Space.
00:10:30
So tell us a little bit about Kumo Space.
00:10:32
I had never heard of you before you reached out to me and I
00:10:34
think it's a really cool, really cool concept and I want to make
00:10:37
sure that, in order to understand how you did things
00:10:40
differently with influencer marketing, I think it's really
00:10:42
important to understand what Kumo Space is.
00:10:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, so fast forward .
00:10:46
Nine, 10 years almost, from when I did my own first startup.
00:10:50
I'm onto the seventh business I've helped build in some
00:10:53
capacity and I joined Kumo Space September of 2020.
00:10:57
So we're approaching almost four years now Second longest
00:11:01
standing employee, second longest standing employee.
00:11:09
And right around that time the rise of tiktok took off and I
00:11:11
had been consulting that summer and that really exposed me to
00:11:13
the, the ability to to leverage tiktok.
00:11:15
So that that's how we got into it.
00:11:16
But you know first, like what is kumo space the business?
00:11:19
So initially, during the height of the pandemic, we threw this
00:11:21
product out into the market and just said, hey, you know, people
00:11:24
use this and it was largely used for kind of a virtual
00:11:27
events use case.
00:11:28
It was just better group video chat.
00:11:29
And then, as the world started to get together again physically
00:11:33
, we noticed it was a subset of users who were 100% remote teams
00:11:38
and they were trying to replicate the benefits of
00:11:41
collaboration or transparency and productivity that you get
00:11:45
from a physical office.
00:11:45
And subsequently we realized that's what our product had at
00:11:49
the core and we've continued to build those features.
00:11:52
So today, thousands of people use Kumo Space inside this
00:11:56
product, signing in for eight hours a day like you would to
00:11:59
Slack or Zoom, or you would show up to your physical office and
00:12:02
instead they're doing it from different parts of the world and
00:12:05
able to sit there and simply just tap a colleague on the
00:12:08
shoulder and quickly collaborate , brainstorm, solve problems and
00:12:12
ultimately, our clients tend to be around 30% more productive
00:12:17
as companies.
00:12:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a very cool concept.
00:12:19
When you show me the demo, I was sort of blown away that that
00:12:22
sort of product didn't exist.
00:12:23
So if you work hybrid, you're either going to schedule you
00:12:28
know, zoom calls with your colleagues in advance at weird
00:12:31
times, or you're always, when you log in to start the day, you
00:12:36
log into a work environment where people are, like you said,
00:12:39
only like a tap away.
00:12:40
So it was very, very cool experience.
00:12:43
And I guess, from my perspective, you know September
00:12:47
2020, the rise of TikTok.
00:12:49
I think the normal this is a, you know, a B2B sale.
00:12:52
Obviously, there are individual people that can use it, but
00:12:54
it's mainly geared towards teams and therefore, the larger the
00:12:57
corporation, the larger the enterprise, the bigger the sale,
00:13:00
I'm assuming.
00:13:00
So the normal sort of marketing mindset would be that we need
00:13:04
to target marketing leaders, or in this case, I suppose it would
00:13:07
be HR leaders or whoever's in charge of that environment.
00:13:11
So from that perspective, I'm thinking LinkedIn is going to be
00:13:14
your target market, but tell me about how you began to think
00:13:17
differently, about how you were going to market from what space.
00:13:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, so very early on, back in early 2021, we
00:13:25
started playing around with TikTok and influencer marketing
00:13:27
and we saw just great success.
00:13:29
Everyone was locked down.
00:13:30
You had social media usage as a whole was on a tear because
00:13:35
people were just I think some of the numbers were like 40% more
00:13:39
daily active usage across all these platforms.
00:13:41
Usage across all these platforms and the way that the
00:13:48
TikTok algorithm and Reels has tried to replicate is that it
00:13:49
distributes to the people who are most interested in that kind
00:13:51
of content.
00:13:52
So, yes, linkedin is a great channel, but for Kumo space, the
00:13:57
data isn't quite there.
00:13:58
With a lot of digital ad platforms, you can't go into
00:14:01
LinkedIn and click is this company remote?
00:14:04
Which seems a little odd because, on the flip side of
00:14:07
that, I can go there and look for a job and click remote jobs
00:14:10
only.
00:14:10
So the data exists inside the LinkedIn platform.
00:14:13
They just haven't made that accessible to advertisers yet.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: So when you said you saw results with influencer
00:14:20
marketing, why don't we take a step back?
00:14:21
How did you start to foray into influencer marketing?
00:14:24
What were some of the first things that you did that you saw
00:14:27
early success on?
00:14:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:14:29
So it was around kind of March timeframe in February, through
00:14:33
like a friend, they had reached out, a journalist at the New
00:14:36
York Times had reached out to our CEO and he ended up being in
00:14:40
an article that was largely kind of around remote work and
00:14:43
virtual events, ended up being in an article that was largely
00:14:46
kind of around remote work and virtual events and we saw
00:14:51
obviously like a nice natural flip there.
00:14:52
And the next month later we were testing influencer
00:14:53
marketing specifically on TikTok and we'll get into how we do it
00:14:56
a little differently, some of those new rules.
00:14:58
But all of a sudden we had our first video go viral and it was
00:15:02
like 4 million views and something in the vicinity.
00:15:05
We estimated 60, 70 people came to the website and it
00:15:10
completely dwarfed that New York Times article.
00:15:13
I remember our head of engineering at the time going
00:15:15
well, I guess TikTok's better than the New York Times.
00:15:19
So that's how it started and we kind of got hooked on that bug.
00:15:23
Fast forward today, whether it was across the virtual events
00:15:27
use case or the virtual office use case, on those short form
00:15:31
video platforms.
00:15:33
So YouTube Shorts, instagram Reels, tiktok, etc.
00:15:37
There are probably over 250 million views now.
00:15:41
Wow.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: So let's sort of dissect that first viral video.
00:15:46
So that was not your own organic content, that was
00:15:50
content working with an influencer, correct?
00:15:53
Speaker 3: That's correct.
00:15:53
Speaker 1: So normally, like I said, the customers are people
00:15:57
in charge of deciding on technology for remote work.
00:16:00
Yet you reached out to TikTok influencers.
00:16:03
So what were the rules or the guidelines as to who you reached
00:16:04
out to TikTok influencers?
00:16:04
So what were the rules or the guidelines as to who you reached
00:16:06
out to on TikTok that you thought would reach your target
00:16:09
audience?
00:16:10
And I'm assuming the target audience you were looking for?
00:16:11
There were less of the managers and more of the actual users,
00:16:15
correct, yeah?
00:16:16
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:16:16
So it's important kind of to understand the original product.
00:16:19
We just threw it out in the wild and just let anyone use it,
00:16:22
so there wasn't particularly a buyer.
00:16:23
The product was 100% free at the time and so, as the fact
00:16:29
that there wasn't really a buyer , there was use cases happening
00:16:31
and in 2021, we did everything from having people do virtual
00:16:34
weddings and hanging out with friends to classrooms, to happy
00:16:38
hours, to webinars, all the way up to the Google Cloud
00:16:41
Conference, so completely across that spectrum.
00:16:43
So when we were looking for creators, we were just looking
00:16:46
for people who authentically could incorporate the use of
00:16:50
this video chat product into a video, Got it and that creator
00:16:55
specifically, he was a college student.
00:16:57
He was doing like a lot of like career business kind of tips
00:17:02
and he just did a quick I think it was like 17 second video that
00:17:05
just kind of like slams his laptop down and goes guys, you
00:17:09
got to stop using Zoom, there's something cooler.
00:17:11
This is Kuma Space.
00:17:12
And what we realized is that, because the product is so visual
00:17:16
, it does really well in that environment.
00:17:18
And then we started to build a brief around that success, which
00:17:22
was, you know, the first.
00:17:24
This was the 10th video.
00:17:25
Right, the first nine videos failed, so there's always going
00:17:27
to be failure here.
00:17:28
I want to be clear with everyone.
00:17:36
The typical tricks sometimes that looping trick can be very
00:17:39
good and showing using the product and showing a lot of
00:17:43
people using the product.
00:17:44
If you just do like, hey, here's me in a Kumo space by
00:17:47
myself like that was not exciting, People did not engage
00:17:51
with it.
00:17:52
If you showed other people in the space, maybe some comedy to
00:17:55
it, that did well.
00:17:56
And then fast forward today.
00:17:58
Our buyer today is typically an executive.
00:18:01
It's typically someone who works as an SMB owner or a
00:18:06
C-suite, typically between like 10 and 200 employees.
00:18:09
That's kind of a pretty good sweet spot.
00:18:11
The company is 100% remote.
00:18:12
But the strategy hasn't changed much.
00:18:15
Right, we had a recently a video get over 6 million views
00:18:19
on Instagram.
00:18:20
Recently a video get over 6 million views on Instagram and
00:18:25
that video was just more speaking a little bit more
00:18:26
towards that SMB and remote work and using it as a virtual
00:18:28
office.
00:18:28
But the strategy and the descriptors are kind of very
00:18:32
similar and that Instagram Reels algorithm just picks it up and
00:18:36
shows it to people who are SMB.
00:18:38
You know, work at SMBs or 100% remote.
00:18:42
Speaker 1: So I want to continue dissecting.
00:18:43
I try to speak on behalf of the listeners, and they're probably
00:18:46
thinking okay, you contacted 10 influencers I don't even know
00:18:50
if we classify them as influencers or content creators
00:18:54
or nano influencers and I want to ask you about that as well.
00:18:56
You contacted 10, one went viral.
00:18:57
What was two things right.
00:18:59
What were the guidelines that you had in order to choose those
00:19:03
people on TikTok that you wanted to collaborate with?
00:19:06
And then, number two what did the financial compensation look
00:19:09
like at the time?
00:19:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we typically you know, I think a lot of
00:19:14
people a rule that has been around for a while, that I would
00:19:18
say is no longer valid is people say, okay, here's the
00:19:23
rules, here's the guidelines of the creators I want to work with
00:19:27
, and that makes like a lot of sense in say fashion and you're
00:19:30
saying, okay, let me just find someone who's a fashion
00:19:33
influencer, right?
00:19:34
Speaker 1: Right.
00:19:35
Speaker 3: And or a fashion blogger.
00:19:36
And the reality is that we figured out is we want to find
00:19:42
people who can authentically incorporate Kumo space.
00:19:45
But we flipped the way that we look for creators on its head by
00:19:49
saying, okay, these are the people we don't work with, and
00:19:52
the reason we don't work with them is because authentically
00:19:54
they can't incorporate Kumo space.
00:19:56
So people who do like street prank jokes, that's out in the
00:20:00
physical space, like that doesn't work in a virtual world.
00:20:03
There's no way to authentically incorporate that.
00:20:06
People who are doing like fashion outfits, like again,
00:20:09
that's not going to work.
00:20:10
Well.
00:20:10
But someone who just like does funny humorous stuff, totally
00:20:15
fine, because they can just do funny humorous stuff inside of a
00:20:19
Kumo space with their, you know , with their colleagues.
00:20:22
So that's how we approach them Collectively.
00:20:26
Today we're pushing over 5 creators that we've ultimately
00:20:29
prospected and reached out to.
00:20:31
And then, from a cost perspective, initially no one
00:20:35
knew what the value of themselves was on TikTok.
00:20:37
So in the case of that creator, I think he had 10, 20
00:20:41
followers or something and maybe a few more, and we kind of
00:20:44
figured out there's two buckets specifically on TikTok, where
00:20:48
it's quite democratic If the content is just great and the
00:20:51
algorithm and what I mean by great is you get people to
00:20:54
engage the comments.
00:20:55
You can really see who's actually viewing the content.
00:20:59
If there's a bunch of people talking about work in the
00:21:01
comments and getting a lot of likes, then the algorithm was
00:21:04
displaying that to remote workers.
00:21:06
And we find that that less than 100 followers is a great
00:21:11
bucket because if they have in their page past examples of
00:21:15
getting several times their follower count, those smaller
00:21:19
influencers or creators, they can.
00:21:21
Actually.
00:21:22
They figured out how to catch that magic in a bottle a couple
00:21:26
of times and they can replicate that for you.
00:21:28
And then we'll work with the much larger creators who have
00:21:31
very consistent volume of views.
00:21:34
So they have a million followers and they're
00:21:36
consistently in the high hundred thousands, low millions.
00:21:39
So those are kind of the buckets.
00:21:42
Initially, back then no one knew the value and historically, the
00:21:46
rise of influencer marketing was.
00:21:47
You priced people based on their follower count and that
00:21:51
like comes from Instagram, original Instagram feed, because
00:21:55
it was like it went to all your followers.
00:21:56
And today, what?
00:21:59
So?
00:21:59
No one knew how to price themselves on TikTok because
00:22:02
they were still trying to price themselves based on a follower
00:22:04
count.
00:22:04
So you know, that creator was a couple hundred bucks.
00:22:07
He was obviously quite disappointed.
00:22:09
So immediately we like said okay, let's put in a performance
00:22:12
structure If you do this again no, by the way, I'll give you
00:22:15
some some compensation repertoire actively.
00:22:17
And then he subsequently made more videos that also got
00:22:20
millions of views.
00:22:21
And then we just built upon that compensation structure.
00:22:26
Speaker 1: Right.
00:22:26
So you started the compensation structure from the Instagram
00:22:28
days and we'll go a little bit deeper.
00:22:30
That which is like for every you know 1000 followers, $10.
00:22:34
So if you have 20 followers to it, you sort of based on
00:22:37
that sort of scale, correct?
00:22:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was roughly what people were
00:22:41
comfortable.
00:22:42
They were not just like what we're comfortable, but that's
00:22:46
what the creator was comfortable , because the creator didn't
00:22:48
think that they were particularly special because
00:22:51
they're like I only have 20 followers.
00:22:52
I'm not, you know, some celebrity with 50 million
00:22:55
Instagram followers.
00:22:55
Right, that was the way and it was very much the rise of TikTok
00:22:58
in that moment of time.
00:22:59
That was the way and it was very much the rise of TikTok in
00:23:01
that moment of time.
00:23:01
Now, today, a lot of creators get a lot of views, but they
00:23:05
also maybe have a lot larger followings.
00:23:07
The relationship to engagement and following count has
00:23:11
drastically changed on TikTok.
00:23:13
So we still favor, we'll do fixed.
00:23:17
We always negotiate you always negotiate the price because
00:23:21
there's always room to improve.
00:23:22
We will do flat rate deals because there are some creators
00:23:25
who only want to do that.
00:23:26
But our preference is to do some type of performance
00:23:29
structure, some base upfront payment and then 10 days later
00:23:33
calculate all the views and we have, you know, these various
00:23:36
bonus structures.
00:23:37
That's typically tied to thresholds.
00:23:39
So if you hit like 100 views or 250 views, that's
00:23:43
an extra bonus and then also just a standard performance tied
00:23:46
to the number of views.
00:23:48
Speaker 1: And I'm assuming that what's become very commonplace
00:23:51
if there's e-commerce involved is that it's a standard fee, but
00:23:55
also that affiliate marketing performance marketing boost.
00:23:57
So what you're doing is you don't have e-commerce, but
00:24:00
you're doing it based on actual performance in terms of video
00:24:02
views.
00:24:02
Speaker 3: then yeah, it's a very easy attribution that we
00:24:09
found is actually very difficult .
00:24:11
Often what we can see in our data is our traffic.
00:24:14
So we identify traffic that comes to our homepage as branded
00:24:17
search.
00:24:17
So we identify traffic that comes to our homepage as branded
00:24:20
search and then we have direct traffic.
00:24:22
So those two buckets of traffic will spike and we'll see
00:24:27
subsequently people creating accounts and spaces.
00:24:29
But it becomes more complicated kind of down funnel to look at
00:24:34
that way.
00:24:34
We also have an intake form that people just say how they
00:24:37
found us.
00:24:37
But there's a lot of disconnect that can happen because it's
00:24:41
not a real ad that you can click on.
00:24:43
That breaks between the mobile device and their desktop.
00:24:46
Maybe they did actually go this way and then they went back in
00:24:49
a different way.
00:24:49
So we found it was just the most simple for a SaaS business
00:24:54
to just pay on the views and if we were e-commerce I would
00:24:58
absolutely have been doing some type of commission affiliate
00:25:01
structure tied to sales.
00:25:03
Speaker 1: But I assume, because this all started when that
00:25:05
video got what was that?
00:25:06
4 million views, like more traffic than from New York Times
00:25:09
.
00:25:09
So you've been able to see over time that when you work with
00:25:13
influencers and TikTok, it generates more views, which
00:25:17
generates more traffic, which inevitably, whatever the
00:25:20
conversion rate you have, inevitably leads to new business
00:25:23
.
00:25:23
So I'm assuming that you've set that up and it's very, very
00:25:26
clear.
00:25:26
So do you work with influencers like in spurts?
00:25:29
I mean, how do you, outside of video views, do you schedule
00:25:34
influencers to create content on different days to see the
00:25:36
different effects that they might have on the traffic and
00:25:39
conversions?
00:25:39
Or have you tried to get a little bit more sophisticated or
00:25:41
is it still just based on video views and then attribution
00:25:45
versus traffic, branded search and direct traffic?
00:25:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we have an in-house data scientist and we
00:25:52
spent about a month really trying to crunch our numbers and
00:25:56
ultimately the outcome of that was that we couldn't know, we
00:26:02
couldn't attribute it very well and it's from those kind of
00:26:06
mechanics when you add the form data or you add the sales reps
00:26:12
having a conversation, all of a sudden it becomes, you know,
00:26:16
around 30, 40% of our revenue as a business.
00:26:19
Speaker 1: Wow, that's huge.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: It's very tough, I would say.
00:26:23
The way we use the product is a little bit of like brands
00:26:27
marketing and performance marketing.
00:26:30
So often when you hear people in the B2B space talk about you
00:26:35
need to run brand ads alongside demand gen ads.
00:26:38
So it is really creating brand awareness.
00:26:41
It's just hard to directly correlate and there's also a
00:26:45
long tail effect here.
00:26:47
So all those videos almost all of them still exist on those
00:26:52
creators pages.
00:26:53
They still get served.
00:26:54
They don't get the same kind of crazy volumes of views, but
00:26:58
that continues to drive traffic for us.
00:27:00
So we know that, yes, we haven't gone viral in a couple
00:27:04
months and what I mean is really over a million views.
00:27:07
We'll get hundreds of thousands of views kind of consistently
00:27:11
every month, but we can see that traffic still coming.
00:27:15
So my cautionary tale here is don't try to get overly complex
00:27:21
with it.
00:27:21
Trust that it's working.
00:27:24
If you see the money coming in, especially if you're a B2B
00:27:27
business that's like ours, like a sales-led, where most
00:27:31
customers are talking to a sales rep just have the sales rep ask
00:27:34
the question, put that data into the CRM or have a form, and
00:27:38
you'll very quickly kind of realize that this is working or
00:27:42
not working for you.
00:27:43
Speaker 1: It makes a lot of sense.
00:27:44
I mean, you need to be discovered, and this leads into
00:27:47
the topic of just well, how do brands get discovered right?
00:27:50
And search plays a big role in that, and social media plays a
00:27:53
big role in that, and I think for younger generations, social
00:27:56
is search, tiktok is their Google, and I think you know,
00:28:00
think there's a lot of data that supports that as well, as well
00:28:02
as anecdotally.
00:28:03
So instead of just boosting your own posts to try to get
00:28:06
that brand awareness, it's really working with influencers.
00:28:09
And then I'm assuming in parallel, you're also doing some
00:28:12
sort of lead gen ads as well, correct, like on LinkedIn or
00:28:15
webinars or eBooks or things of that sort.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: So we're engaged in category creation here and, as I
00:28:21
said, like there isn't a way to target remote only workers.
00:28:25
So we've actually found that traditional paid channels are
00:28:29
not good for us.
00:28:30
They are not effective.
00:28:32
So when you look at our business, right, it's definitely
00:28:36
around 40% is coming from influencer.
00:28:39
Another around 30 or so percent is coming from SEO.
00:28:43
We do a lot of content SEO.
00:28:45
We, you know, in a given month we're publishing like close to
00:28:48
80 blogs with the assist of humans plus AI.
00:28:51
So we're very effective there.
00:28:54
And then the other bucket that people often say in that form is
00:28:59
word of mouth.
00:29:00
The word of mouth tends to convert not so well.
00:29:03
So the volume is from the influencer.
00:29:05
That's the second best converting channel.
00:29:07
Seo is the second volume channel, but number one
00:29:11
converting and then kind of the bottom of that is word of mouth.
00:29:14
So for our business that's really what works for us.
00:29:19
We've tried other channels and other tactics.
00:29:21
If we were a different business , we weren't engaged in this
00:29:24
category creation and we had the ability to handle higher tax
00:29:29
that come from traditional paid channels, then we would
00:29:33
absolutely be doing what you're describing.
00:29:34
We know that that doesn't work in a unit economics positive way
00:29:40
, so it doesn't make sense to invest that money.
00:29:42
Instead, focus on the other channels that make us money.
00:29:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is an important point is that a lot of
00:29:48
and I've worked with marketing teams where they see a blog
00:29:51
about a success story and they just try to emulate that right,
00:29:54
and it requires this holistic approach because no two brands
00:29:57
are the same, no two target markets are the same.
00:30:01
What's gonna work for one might not work for another, and that's
00:30:03
what I love about this case study is that you would not
00:30:06
think of B2B, saas, influencer marketing, yet you found that it
00:30:09
worked and, like you said, you've sort of turned it on its
00:30:11
head.
00:30:11
I want to ask you a few more questions.
00:30:13
So you brought up SEO and I'm just curious because some sites,
00:30:17
my site included, have been sites that have been sort of
00:30:20
devalued in Google's eyes since the recent changes over the last
00:30:23
six to nine months.
00:30:25
With the appearance of generative AI search, with the
00:30:28
seemingly Reddit and Quora results being boosted up, big
00:30:32
brands seem to be taking over search results.
00:30:34
I'm curious if you or anyone on your team has noticed any
00:30:37
changes over the last months.
00:30:39
Or is SEO, you know, is it as profitable for you now as it was
00:30:43
a year ago?
00:30:44
Speaker 3: So it's a great question and before I answer I
00:30:46
just want to touch back on the.
00:30:48
I think you were making a really good point about
00:30:50
marketing.
00:30:51
Channels are going to be specific to your business and
00:30:54
they're going to be unique to your business.
00:30:56
So at Kumo Space we've tried everything except for, like TV
00:31:01
and billboards and some cases those channels not TV and
00:31:05
billboards everything else several times over.
00:31:08
So you approach hey, this is what may have worked in the past
00:31:13
in this business in my career, or this is what I read someone
00:31:18
else Go test that channel, just verify that it's working well
00:31:21
for you.
00:31:21
If it's not, kill it and move on to the ones that are Going to
00:31:25
SEO.
00:31:26
We have taken a lot of.
00:31:27
You know we early on made some bad mistakes around technical
00:31:33
and kind of on page and our domain structure.
00:31:36
Unfortunately, we start off with a subdomain, so that kind
00:31:38
of set us back.
00:31:39
But in the last two years we focus on a single domain and
00:31:46
when we did that we also invested very heavily in
00:31:48
technical SEO.
00:31:49
So very fast page load times.
00:31:52
On mobile we use a service called Cloudinary that makes
00:31:55
sure it renders and serves the best images for the best devices
00:31:59
on the best on that browser right.
00:32:01
These are things that Google really has started to really
00:32:04
care about, and it's difficult because a Mac on Chrome it's
00:32:09
different than a Mac on Safari and you know it's different on
00:32:13
Android or iOS device.
00:32:14
So in those different environments.
00:32:16
So Kinect does a great job.
00:32:18
It makes all those assets in you know, the JPEG, the PNG, etc
00:32:23
.
00:32:23
The newer formats and serves that.
00:32:25
So I think holistically we've been very lucky and I would
00:32:30
attribute that luck to the fact that we just things like schema
00:32:32
markup to get those featured SERPs and then we did a lot of
00:32:46
backlink building to those sections of the blog.
00:32:49
We had a lot of organic backlinks that had gone to
00:32:52
mostly the homepage and other parts of the website, so we did
00:32:55
that.
00:32:56
We've ultimately stopped that because we've gotten enough.
00:32:58
And then the key for us has really been use AI to draft the
00:33:04
article and then have a native speaker edit that article and,
00:33:10
as a result, we're able to crank out a lot of volume of content
00:33:14
and we do see that that content tends to rank pretty well better
00:33:18
than when we were using freelancers to write that
00:33:21
content.
00:33:22
And I have noticed certain industries.
00:33:24
I think it's also very subjective in certain industries
00:33:26
, like I was looking at an industry recently.
00:33:30
They helped.
00:33:31
You know there's a bunch of online businesses that do the
00:33:35
accreditation for a service pet, for a service pet, and that you
00:33:42
know, the business that I, you know, looked at someone had sent
00:33:43
to me and I was looking at all of its competitors.
00:33:45
They, all of those companies, were hit in September, and so
00:33:49
that speaks to some type of fact in that that Google had was
00:33:52
deciding to change the way it approached that sector and maybe
00:33:56
be prioritizing something like the Mayo Clinic or, like you
00:34:01
know, penn, or you know New York Presbyterian or Kaiser
00:34:05
Permanente.
00:34:06
Right, they were wanting a different authority there.
00:34:08
We've been lucky, maybe partially because we are engaged
00:34:12
in a category creation here, a virtual office software that you
00:34:16
know.
00:34:16
We have not seen that happen to ourselves, nor to our kind of
00:34:20
our immediate competitors around us.
00:34:22
So this experience that you're experiencing, it could be any of
00:34:25
those buckets, and that's the unfortunate reality of SEO is
00:34:30
that it is complex, but it could also be sector specific.
00:34:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I read an article.
00:34:36
Foundation Inc is a blog, their content agency, but they have a
00:34:40
lot of great blog posts and just recently, I think, I
00:34:42
included in my newsletter that B2B SaaS companies on average
00:34:45
saw like a 10% decrease in traffic as a result.
00:34:47
Right, and that 10% is an average, so I'm assuming some
00:34:50
had 20, 30, 40.
00:34:51
But once again, you are in a category.
00:34:54
My content is based around categories that are pre-existing
00:34:57
.
00:34:57
You are still in a space where it is not a pre-existing
00:35:01
category.
00:35:01
It's still, like you said, category creation, which is
00:35:03
really unique.
00:35:04
So maybe that's it.
00:35:06
I mean, who knows?
00:35:06
Right, that's SEO.
00:35:07
We're all guessing, but that's really awesome that you found
00:35:10
success there.
00:35:10
Curious about the and I've heard very similar things AI
00:35:14
generated content and human writer Is there any specific
00:35:18
software that you're using that you think has really helped with
00:35:21
that, or is it just standard chat, gpt type prompts or any
00:35:26
other information?
00:35:27
Since we have you on the line here, I want to get back to
00:35:30
influencer marketing in a second , but I think a lot of companies
00:35:32
are still trying to figure that out.
00:35:33
So any advice that you might have there companies out there.
00:35:42
Speaker 3: We use a product called Surfer SEO.
00:35:43
Inside of that they have a Surfer AI product Surfer's kind
00:35:44
of a cool product.
00:35:44
I particularly was attracted to them.
00:35:46
They had been around before the Gen AI craze that we're now
00:35:51
living in and at the core their product was you, as a human,
00:35:55
wrote a blog article and then you fed it that content and you
00:35:58
fed it keywords you wanted to rank for and it looked at the
00:35:59
current search results and fed it that content and you fed it
00:36:00
keywords you wanted to rank for and it looked at the current
00:36:03
search results and it scored your content and it scored those
00:36:07
results.
00:36:07
So the way that I understand that their product works and
00:36:11
it's also it's quite slow, meaning it can take hours to
00:36:14
make you an article, and the reason is that it's making many
00:36:18
articles and it's scoring what ultimately it thinks is the best
00:36:21
article to rank in that content .
00:36:24
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
00:36:25
So I use a tool called Phrase, which is very similar to Surfer.
00:36:27
They both came around the same time.
00:36:29
I had the AppSumo lifetime deal , which is why I ended up using
00:36:31
Phrase and it does the same thing, and they also have the
00:36:34
generative AI feature.
00:36:35
So, in other words, you're using the Surfer SEO generative
00:36:39
AI feature to actually create that content based on the
00:36:42
keyword.
00:36:43
So you're just feeding it a keyword then and it is
00:36:45
generating the content that it thinks will rank for that
00:36:48
keyword.
00:36:48
Or are there other inputs that you're giving it outside of that
00:36:50
keyword?
00:36:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we approach identifying content in kind of
00:36:54
two ways.
00:36:55
So, because of the fact that we're engaged in category
00:36:57
creation, we already kind of own that category, but that
00:37:00
category is kind of small and it's not really growing at some
00:37:03
exponential rate.
00:37:04
So what we do is we know there's tertiary topics.
00:37:08
So example like Kumo Space as a product is, it has team chats
00:37:14
so things like Slack and Microsoft Teams and it has video
00:37:18
conferencing, so think Zoom.
00:37:19
So we will feed Surfer, a master keyword like that, and
00:37:23
it'll give us topics and then we'll select ones that we think
00:37:26
are relevant.
00:37:27
So we'll write a lot about video conferencing, a lot about
00:37:29
team chat or synchronous communication or async
00:37:32
communication, and then we'll feed it things like
00:37:34
communication.
00:37:35
And then we'll pick through that and say how do you manage
00:37:38
styles of leadership, things like that?
00:37:40
Because we know that typically our buyer is an executive who's
00:37:44
leading a team.
00:37:45
So that would be one strategy.
00:37:47
Another strategy is we look at our immediate competitors, where
00:37:51
they're getting traffic, and then we also look at what I
00:37:54
would describe as SEO competitors.
00:37:56
So that could be someone as simple as HubSpot, right,
00:37:59
because HubSpot is also selling to SMBs.
00:38:01
It's like, what is the top content that's on HubSpot's blog
00:38:04
.
00:38:04
Okay, let's look at all that using a tool like SEMrush and
00:38:08
then we will select those articles.
00:38:10
And in that secondary case you're not just feeding the
00:38:14
keywords, because you're not feeding one.
00:38:16
You're typically finding, you know, five or six or 10 keywords
00:38:20
that Surfer may have suggested to us.
00:38:22
We'll also just look at other topics that are interesting and
00:38:25
then we'll just find the keywords and feed it that way.
00:38:28
But when it's a competitor type piece of content, the way that
00:38:31
we do that is we look at, you can actually feed the URL.
00:38:35
So it's looking at this HubSpot article about tactics for
00:38:41
marketing agencies.
00:38:42
So we're feeding that and we're feeding the keywords.
00:38:47
Speaker 1: Got it so in the first bucket it's not just the
00:38:49
keyword, it's also a little bit of back and forth on the outline
00:38:52
and agreeing to that, and then it generates the content.
00:38:54
Is that a correct assumption?
00:38:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:38:56
So the next step for Surfer is it will spit out an outline that
00:39:00
can take again, you know not, it's not instant, it's, you know
00:39:04
, several minutes, maybe up to 10 minutes.
00:39:05
You edit that.
00:39:06
That will feed it information, a blurb about Kumo Space,
00:39:10
related to that topic as well, and then it lets you select kind
00:39:15
of content that's ranking in that first keyword in the top 10
00:39:19
results that you really want to go after and it'll ingest all
00:39:23
of that information into its model and spit out a typically
00:39:28
between 2000 to 4000 word article.
00:39:31
It'll have places where it suggests the images.
00:39:34
Now we'll give you AI generated images.
00:39:36
I've found those.
00:39:37
We found those to be very, you know, just focus on getting like
00:39:40
an iStock account and just kind of download something.
00:39:42
That's like a uniformity.
00:39:44
The AI stuff looks sometimes looks really weird, and then we
00:39:48
export that and then we give it to a human editor and they read
00:39:51
through it and they'll often start adding Kumo space into the
00:39:55
content a little bit more.
00:39:56
You know, if it's about video conferencing, it'll maybe say
00:40:00
Zoom a lot.
00:40:00
Every time it says Zoom, we'll say Kumo Space and Zoom, for
00:40:03
example, and then we'll put in a sections that are maybe more
00:40:07
descriptive about our product to fit that in organic like in a
00:40:11
nice way.
00:40:12
And then sometimes it writes weird things.
00:40:13
You just got to catch that there was something about
00:40:16
collaboration and started talking about the USSR and
00:40:21
communal collaborative civil societies in Russia and you're
00:40:25
like, oh yeah, it ingested something weird from the
00:40:29
internet.
00:40:29
Speaker 1: It hallucinates right .
00:40:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
00:40:32
Speaker 1: But I think that's the point about AI Whether your
00:40:34
organization uses it or not, your competitors, like the Kumo
00:40:37
spaces, probably are.
00:40:38
So if you're getting outranked and you're wondering why, this
00:40:42
could very well be the reason.
00:40:43
So that's a great takeaway from this episode.
00:40:45
I do want to switch gears, though.
00:40:47
Man.
00:40:47
We could have had a thing about AI SEO.
00:40:48
I'm getting back to the influencer marketing.
00:40:51
There's just additional questions here.
00:40:53
So that very first time where you were talking about
00:40:55
influencer identification for those first 10 people because a
00:40:59
great question I always get from companies that are just
00:41:01
starting out with influencer marketing is who do we work with
00:41:03
?
00:41:03
And you talked about starting out with who do we not work with
00:41:06
?
00:41:06
But at the end of the day, you did choose 10 people.
00:41:08
So I'm curious was it like a keyword search and then looking
00:41:13
at their content?
00:41:14
And I want to ask you about the vibe.
00:41:15
We're going to get to that in a second but was it just, you
00:41:17
know, did it begin with a hashtag keyword search and then
00:41:21
going through the profiles and seeing where it made sense?
00:41:22
Or did you use a marketplace or recommendations?
00:41:26
Or you know what?
00:41:27
Was that like initial step you took for the identification of
00:41:29
potential creators to work with?
00:41:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, like I love working with our co founders,
00:41:34
there was there was a lot of internal disagreement right At
00:41:36
the time.
00:41:36
We were like a five person team and we were the number one
00:41:41
mistake.
00:41:42
Is that, I see, in the new world it was funny our co
00:41:46
founder had been pushing me at the time to say, oh, you need to
00:41:50
find someone who, like, really cares about remote or really
00:41:53
cares about like video conferencing.
00:41:55
Like he or she is the like video conferencing guru of
00:41:59
TikTok.
00:41:59
And that's very much the common thought and the way that people
00:42:03
approach it, because people apply the best practices of
00:42:07
performance marketing on, say, something like Facebook or
00:42:10
LinkedIn and say you build a great audience, you're going to
00:42:14
control the CAC in the best way.
00:42:18
In TikTok, the algorithm will find the audience.
00:42:23
It's more about making sure that content is getting created
00:42:28
that is going to be interesting to your audience and then the
00:42:31
audience will be brought to those viewers by the for you
00:42:35
page algorithm.
00:42:36
So it's funny.
00:42:38
He was just recently speaking at Saster in Europe and there
00:42:42
was someone who is, you know, a head of something inside of
00:42:45
TikTok and this person was literally preaching this and I
00:42:49
was like, wow, that's kind of.
00:42:50
It's kind of nice, because we're just talking about the
00:42:52
black box.
00:42:53
That that is.
00:42:54
That is Google and its search product.
00:42:56
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:42:57
Speaker 3: It's kind of nice when you get some affirmation
00:42:59
from these black boxes, so that was kind of cool.
00:43:03
But yeah, I think a lot of those early ones we were trying
00:43:08
all the different strategies right, we were trying to be
00:43:11
hyper-specific, we were trying to be super controlling of the
00:43:15
content that was made right, doing multiple iterations,
00:43:19
giving them like a really tight script.
00:43:21
All of that failed.
00:43:22
I was down to the last few dollars in the budget and I just
00:43:31
kind of did what I wanted to do in that moment of time and that
00:43:33
was the one that went viral.
00:43:34
So it's good to show up with a strategy.
00:43:36
That was the one that went viral.
00:43:38
So it's like it's good to show up with a strategy.
00:43:39
But, as you know, mike Tyson would say I think it's his quote
00:43:40
you know, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the
00:43:42
face.
00:43:42
So every you're testing a new channel, it's going to be like
00:43:47
that Just go in with a plan but then be very willing and happy
00:43:51
to rip up that plan.
00:43:53
Speaker 1: So I take it that it was then someone that you found
00:43:56
randomly, maybe on your own For you page, that you thought would
00:43:59
fit, and that you were sort of going out of that plan and being
00:44:03
really freestyle with how you were choosing people.
00:44:07
And this is where I wanted to get to the vibe, and this is
00:44:09
something that we talked a lot about.
00:44:10
That I think for those that aren't as active on TikTok, they
00:44:15
may not understand this, but you know one of the.
00:44:19
Getting back to the topic of this podcast, which is like the
00:44:21
new rules of influencer marketing, I think you've hinted
00:44:23
at a lot of them this concept of the vibe, the vibe of your
00:44:27
brand, the vibe of the content creators, the content they make,
00:44:30
the platforms that they're on.
00:44:32
So at this point, I think is it safe to say that that vibe and
00:44:36
this is once again looking at it holistically, if not
00:44:38
emotionally that there seemed to be a really good fit of the
00:44:42
vibe and therefore you felt that there'd be success working with
00:44:45
these creators and from there you found others with similar
00:44:48
vibes.
00:44:49
Is that sort of how it played out since then?
00:44:51
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:44:52
So it's a lot more mechanical for us than Then.
00:44:55
I'll get to the vibe in a second because it's important,
00:44:57
but the mechanics of it are the way that we approach it.
00:45:00
So I look at a creator and the first thing and we actually have
00:45:07
people who do this on our behalf and look at profiles.
00:45:11
So at the time I didn't answer the question to the best way.
00:45:14
We were just looking at hashtag you know, virtual video
00:45:18
conferencing or something like that on TikTok and we were
00:45:20
paying someone part-time to just build a list of those people.
00:45:22
We'd have their emails and I was emailing and that's how we
00:45:26
found them and we were trying different hashtags.
00:45:29
We were trying different personas and I'll get to the
00:45:31
vibe in a second.
00:45:32
But really, like, when I look at a creator or the people doing
00:45:35
the prospecting for us, look at a creator, what we initially
00:45:38
want to see is one is there any disqualifying content?
00:45:42
So for us it's the, the you know physical work.
00:45:46
So if you're doing construction, humor, for example, that's just
00:45:50
not going to work because Kumo space isn't a physical product,
00:45:52
it's for remote teams, so that would be a disqualifier.
00:45:55
The next thing is like what's the relationship between their
00:45:59
followers and their typical posts?
00:46:01
So someone who went viral last August she had around 100
00:46:06
followers.
00:46:07
She is kind of like a quirky, more introverted designer type,
00:46:13
does a lot of just day in the life content.
00:46:15
Some of that's like wake up, read her book, open her laptop,
00:46:19
go to the gym, come back.
00:46:21
Some of it's a little bit of travel related.
00:46:23
But because she's doing that work aspect, we're like
00:46:27
immediately you can have that laptop open up to Kumo space.
00:46:30
So that's like right away, like we can see that.
00:46:33
But she's very soft spoken.
00:46:35
Her vibe is like the most boring content, almost Like we
00:46:40
actually took her video and we threw it into some Reddit ads
00:46:44
and our comments on the Reddit ads was like this is the world's
00:46:47
worst creative.
00:46:48
Could you find someone who was more boring to make your ad Like
00:46:52
they're two splurge more?
00:46:53
And I'm just kind of laughing like man.
00:46:56
This thing has almost 4 million views on TikTok.
00:47:00
And all the comments are about work, remote work, productivity,
00:47:04
collaboration, like how cool the tool is and so the vibe is.
00:47:11
Actually, you don't want to impose upon the creator your own
00:47:14
vibe, you want to impose the creator.
00:47:16
Creator your own vibe.
00:47:17
You want to impose the creator to use their existing vibe.
00:47:21
So that person's vibe is polar opposite from someone like the
00:47:25
creator European Kid, which someone may have seen.
00:47:27
There's like this outlandish kind of personality that's
00:47:31
supposed to be like a rich kid in Europe and he just like does
00:47:34
over the top things.
00:47:35
He made a video of him using Kumo Space, yelling at quote his
00:47:39
dad's employees from a pool and that did quite well.
00:47:43
You know four or 500 views.
00:47:45
So if I told him and said, make a video exactly like Sam, and
00:47:52
it's super low energy, super like just kind of almost
00:47:56
introverted, Telling an extroverted type creator to do
00:48:01
that, that vibe would not work with his.
00:48:03
The people are used to seeing his content and it wouldn't like
00:48:07
initially start to gain traction.
00:48:09
That would push it into getting served heavily in the For you
00:48:12
page.
00:48:12
So from a vibe perspective, it's like the reason the other
00:48:16
videos failed was two, One they're just random.
00:48:19
Maybe those people weren't going to go viral or maybe they
00:48:21
just weren't a good fit.
00:48:22
Right, the Pearson, we prospected.
00:48:24
But the second piece was really we tried to tell them the vibe
00:48:27
to have.
00:48:28
But this creator, we just let him do his thing and it was like
00:48:34
great, you did what we were supposed to.
00:48:35
You showed people in Kumo space , you said the word Kumo space,
00:48:39
you had that pop up on the screen.
00:48:40
Great, that's all, that's all we need.
00:48:42
And then it went viral.
00:48:44
I think of it more as card counting at a blackjack table
00:48:49
than knowing like showing up with a the production budget and
00:48:54
production crew that you would have for Pirates of the
00:48:57
Caribbean.
00:48:57
Identify these creators who you know can go viral, give them
00:49:03
the freedom to do it and then just place enough bets in a
00:49:08
given month and you will see content that gets hundreds of
00:49:11
thousands of views, and every couple of months, or maybe even
00:49:14
every month, depending on how broad your audience is, you
00:49:16
might see into the millions of views.
00:49:18
Speaker 1: Now, really great advice, I think you know.
00:49:20
Getting back to this, the concept of new rules for
00:49:23
influencer marketing.
00:49:23
That is obviously something I wrote about in the age of
00:49:26
influence, which is you're not.
00:49:27
You don't want to impose your stiff brand guidelines on
00:49:32
creators because they are great at content creation.
00:49:35
They're better than you at content creation.
00:49:36
Why would you want to impose your rules?
00:49:38
But this takes it even one step further, which is it's about
00:49:41
that vibe.
00:49:42
Right, it's about the content they create, but it's also that
00:49:44
vibe, the content they create.
00:49:46
It may not look like the best content, like that Reddit ad
00:49:50
example, yet it had a vibe that attracted people.
00:49:52
And I think the second rule which we can skip, or new rule,
00:50:01
which is it's about the video views rather than the follower
00:50:02
count.
00:50:02
I think it's really clear, because all the social networks
00:50:04
with short form video, you can see all that.
00:50:05
So all it takes is to see these content creators that you think
00:50:07
fit your vibe, to see if they have a track record of
00:50:10
delivering, and then, like you said, it's like counting cards
00:50:12
at the table If you place your bets in a few different tables,
00:50:15
one of them at some point will spark those views.
00:50:19
So that's all great advice.
00:50:21
I keep on hitting on the influencer identification
00:50:24
because once again, I'm sort of playing the role of someone in
00:50:27
the audience.
00:50:27
Did you use any tools to help you find those influencers in
00:50:31
TikTok, or was it all just manual searches?
00:50:34
For you pages recommendations from other employees?
00:50:37
Was there any process involved with that or was it just manual
00:50:40
search on TikTok?
00:50:42
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:50:42
So initially, like you start any channel, you should start it
00:50:47
kind of cheaply and you know, the first thing that we did is,
00:50:56
you know, just was paying someone to look at hashtags on
00:50:57
TikTok, and that's a great starting point.
00:50:59
And we were just sitting there PayPal-ing people and we didn't
00:51:02
have the W-8 bins, we didn't have the W-9s.
00:51:05
Our accountant was very unhappy with me about 60 days into this
00:51:09
.
00:51:10
She was very, very unhappy with me.
00:51:11
We have a great relationship now and quickly we went out and
00:51:15
we got a tool called Grin.
00:51:18
I love the tool.
00:51:19
It deals with all of your payments.
00:51:21
It deals with all your W-8 bins , w-9s.
00:51:25
It sends it right through PayPal and then also in there
00:51:29
you can add creators to that.
00:51:30
You can do email sequences and you have this kind of CRM
00:51:36
function to it so that you can know what the past conversations
00:51:41
, whether or not it was me emailing or someone else on the
00:51:43
team that was emailing.
00:51:45
But that's an expensive tool and it's definitely worth the money
00:51:48
.
00:51:48
But you need to prove that influencer marketing works for
00:51:51
your business before using it.
00:51:52
At the time Grin had a very large database for recruiting
00:51:58
creators to work with.
00:51:59
They still have a database.
00:52:00
It's gotten smaller for some compliance issues with the
00:52:05
various social media platforms.
00:52:07
But we use a combination of creatorco now their basic price
00:52:14
package.
00:52:14
It lets us do kind of unlimited searches in there.
00:52:16
But it only gives you a few exports, which is fine because
00:52:19
we just need to find the creators.
00:52:20
Then we import them directly from the creator's social media
00:52:23
page to Grin, where they get outreached and, as I said, we're
00:52:28
pushing like five and a half thousand creators that we've
00:52:31
reached out over the last three years of using this tactic.
00:52:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing, and, for those listening, grin is one
00:52:38
very, very popular influence marketing platform and there are
00:52:40
a number of others out there that do similar things.
00:52:43
But, yeah, so the technology has helped you scale, and I
00:52:47
suppose you know if you were going to do all that manually,
00:52:49
that would require a lot of time , obviously, and being able to
00:52:52
track the emails and being able to scale it across your
00:52:55
organization.
00:52:56
And that was sort of.
00:52:56
The final thing that I wanted to ask you about today was this
00:53:00
concept of scaling content creator relationships.
00:53:03
So being in contact with over 5 influencers is not an easy
00:53:08
feat, especially when you're not just in charge of influencer
00:53:10
marketing, you're in charge of everything.
00:53:11
So tell me more about how you've been able to scale these
00:53:15
relationships.
00:53:15
Do you work with the same influencers multiple times?
00:53:19
Do you have a large team that's constantly reaching out to new
00:53:22
influencers, or what does that look like at Kumo Space?
00:53:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's gone through many iterations.
00:53:27
As I said, I'm head of marketing here.
00:53:29
I'm good at figuring out how to make a channel work or solve a
00:53:33
problem, and then my second superpower would really be
00:53:37
figuring out how to turn that into a repeatable process that
00:53:39
can scale.
00:53:40
So today we have a full-time onshore person.
00:53:44
Who?
00:53:44
That person does all the management and negotiating.
00:53:48
I love working with creators.
00:53:50
They've been great for our business, but they're typically
00:53:53
rough around the edges from a professional business
00:53:56
perspective.
00:53:57
Right, you have to do a ton of handholding.
00:53:59
You have to just really help them.
00:54:02
We get questions constantly.
00:54:04
Why do I have to pay taxes?
00:54:05
I'm like, come on right, it's a necessary people that we all
00:54:11
experience.
00:54:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, gen Z think they can rewrite the rules of
00:54:14
business and I have to tell them that they can't.
00:54:16
Speaker 3: But anyway, Now the IRS has to tell them that they
00:54:18
can't.
00:54:19
But anyway, no-transcript.
00:54:38
At some points we were using as much as five people doing the
00:54:44
prospecting, doing other tasks for us as well.
00:54:46
Now we have someone full-time offshore in Southeast Asia and
00:54:50
that person just sits there and goes through the search tool.
00:54:54
We identify spreadsheets of keywords.
00:54:57
So that's how we kind of run that prospecting at scale.
00:55:01
It depends on your business and your strategy.
00:55:04
We've done both, like sometimes we'll build longer term
00:55:07
relationships with creators.
00:55:08
You know we'll try to do a couple posts, see if they go
00:55:10
viral.
00:55:11
If they don't, then we're okay.
00:55:12
You know, the creator I was speaking to, saw him earlier who
00:55:16
had that really great video back in August.
00:55:18
She the first video with us just completely bombed.
00:55:23
But it was the person who's running the process.
00:55:25
They're also responsible for negotiating.
00:55:27
The person had negotiated a good base rate and I was just
00:55:30
like let's spin this roulette Well, more accurately, let's
00:55:34
serve another hand at this blackjack table.
00:55:36
This person I feel you know the card count is looking good for
00:55:40
us right now and you're balancing what's the cost of
00:55:43
doing one post with a creator, or five posts with a creator and
00:55:47
then ones that you work with that do.
00:55:49
Well, then you want to try and continue to work with, but you
00:55:53
want to spread that out because you don't want to saturate their
00:55:55
audience and you need their initial followers to engage with
00:56:03
the content and that's what's going to really push it into the
00:56:05
for you feed.
00:56:05
But yeah, that's how you scale it up.
00:56:07
Is you figure out what are the different pieces of that puzzle
00:56:11
for your business, right?
00:56:12
And then where can you apply technology?
00:56:15
Where can you apply labor, whether that labor's lower costs
00:56:19
offshore or higher costs onshore and you kind of break
00:56:22
out those pieces of the process.
00:56:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, I always use the analogy that this is all an
00:56:27
experiment, but I love that.
00:56:29
You're sort of counting cards at the blackjack table.
00:56:32
You never know what's going to happen, but yeah, that's a
00:56:35
really great analogy.
00:56:36
So, drew, this has been awesome .
00:56:38
We've covered.
00:56:39
Obviously, we did a foray into SEO, but all of this is related.
00:56:41
Right, it's all about developing relationships with
00:56:45
potential customers, keeping them with current customers and
00:56:47
discoverability and all that so fantastic.
00:56:49
Is there anything else that you want to add?
00:56:52
I think we covered a lot of what we plan to talk about
00:56:54
vis-a-vis Kumo Space and Influencer Marketing, but any
00:56:57
other piece of advice you'd like to give the listeners?
00:56:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think understand.
00:57:01
There's a John Wanamaker quote that always sticks with me quite
00:57:06
well and, for those who don't know, he's often considered kind
00:57:09
of the father of marketing and the quote goes 50% of my
00:57:14
marketing budget is wasted.
00:57:15
I just don't know which 50%.
00:57:16
The quote goes 50% of my marketing budget is wasted, I
00:57:19
just don't know which 50%.
00:57:20
And the way that that applies to today, in a digital marketing
00:57:26
age, is just be willing to test and willing to waste money on
00:57:29
new channels and understand that maybe those channels will not
00:57:32
work.
00:57:33
But the more channels you try, the more channels you're going
00:57:35
to find that are really good for you.
00:57:36
And then just double and triple down on those channels and, as
00:57:41
we were describing, apply tech, apply human capital and make
00:57:44
that thing as scalable and as efficient as you possibly can.
00:57:48
Speaker 1: Experiment data-driven scale Awesome.
00:57:51
And the B2B SaaS company that's doing Reddit ads.
00:57:54
I applaud you for you know, walking the walk and talking the
00:57:56
talk.
00:57:57
So, drew, thank you, this has been awesome.
00:57:58
Where can people, if they want to find out more about Kumo
00:58:01
Space or about you, where should they connect?
00:58:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know, go to Kumo Space's website If you
00:58:07
book a demo.
00:58:08
We actually use it because our product is so visual and it is a
00:58:11
virtual office.
00:58:12
We actually do all of our demos in our virtual HQ, so people
00:58:18
for booking a demo will actually come and see that space.
00:58:19
That's where I show up every day to work and you can come say
00:58:22
hi to me when you meet with one of the team members and then,
00:58:26
separately, you can find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email.
00:58:29
It's just drew at Kumo spacecom .
00:58:30
And, yeah, definitely, if you're running a remote company
00:58:34
especially, a lot of people that love using our product tend to
00:58:37
be in the marketing space.
00:58:38
So remote, like creative agencies, digital agencies, ad
00:58:41
SEO, et cetera agencies yeah, if you're remote, give Kumo Space
00:58:46
a try.
00:58:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you.
00:58:47
I'm going to definitely check it out.
00:58:48
I have a number of overseas freelancers that I work with and
00:58:53
it'd be really cool, just even one hour a week, to have a
00:58:56
common space where we could all engage.
00:58:57
And that's you know.
00:58:59
Unless we do a group Zoom, it's a different vibe altogether,
00:59:02
right.
00:59:02
So very cool.
00:59:03
We'll put the links in the show notes, but if you're listening,
00:59:06
k-u-m-o-s-p-a-c-e KumoSpacecom Drew, awesome.
00:59:11
Thank you so much.
00:59:11
Looking forward, you know, I think 12 months from now you're
00:59:14
probably gonna have another cool case study to share with us.
00:59:16
So looking forward to keeping in touch.
00:59:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, it's a lot of fun.
00:59:20
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that interview.
00:59:22
If you follow me on social media, well, first of all, you
00:59:29
should know that all of these interviews are being live
00:59:30
streamed and recorded on YouTube , so make sure that you go over
00:59:32
to youtubecom slash Neil Schaefer subscribe to get
00:59:37
notified of future live streams, where you'll get the content a
00:59:38
few months in advance, actually, and you can also watch the
00:59:41
videos there.
00:59:41
This is also an episode where I have been experimenting with an
00:59:45
AI tool called Opus Clip.
00:59:47
Go to neilschafercom slash opus O-P-U-S and I have basically
00:59:51
been cutting the interview into short form content.
00:59:54
So I've also released a lot of these on LinkedIn X, tiktok,
00:59:57
instagram, youtube shorts.
00:59:59
So if you're not following me on the socials, make sure you
01:00:06
find me.
01:00:06
I'm basically Neil Schafer everywhere, with the exception
01:00:08
of TikTok, where I am Neil Schafer social.
01:00:09
Well, that's it for another episode of this podcast.
01:00:12
I'll be back at you next week with a solo episode.
01:00:14
Make sure you stay subscribed.
01:00:16
And well, if you're on Amazon, be on the lookout for my new
01:00:20
books, the pre-sales coming soon .
01:00:22
Until then, this is your digital marketing coach, neal
01:00:24
Schaefer, signing off.
01:00:27
Speaker 2: You've been listening to your digital marketing coach
01:00:30
.
01:00:30
Questions, comments, requests, links go to
01:00:34
podcastneilschafercom.
01:00:36
Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at
01:00:41
neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil
01:00:46
has published to support your business.
01:00:48
While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group
01:00:52
coaching membership community If you or your business needs a
01:00:55
little helping hand.
01:00:56
See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.
Related Episodes
Boost Your Online Visibility with Google Knowledge Panels and Social Media Signals with Dennis Yu
Unlock the secrets to boosting your online visibility and making your brand irresistible with Google Knowledge Panels. I sat down with digital marketing expert Dennis Yu to uncover the transformative power of social media signals in search results. Learn how genuine customer engagement and user-gene...
AI is About Innovating Your Approach, Not Prompt Engineering
A lot is being said about how to best use AI in your marketing, but there is one thing that needs to be said:ChatGPT is all about democratizing the use of AI. While understanding how to "prompt" an AI chatbot is important, what is more important is imagining the many different ways in which you can ...
Mastering Personality-Led Growth: Andy Lambert on Customer Understanding and Brand Building
Today we dive deep into the world of personality-led growth and brand building with our special guest, Andy Lambert, co-founder of ContentCal and Senior Product Manager at Adobe Express. In this episode, we explore the crucial role of understanding customer pain points, especially in the realms of r...