Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

The New Rules of (TikTok) Influencer Marketing with Kumospace's Drew Moffitt

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 377

Share episode

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:

Speaker 1:

Influencer marketing. You've seen it dominate social media, but do you really know how to tap into its evolving landscape for your brand success? Today, we're diving deep into the new rules of influencer marketing on TikTok, with expert insights from Drew Moffitt, head of marketing at Kumo Space. Discover how performance-based compensation and AI tools can revolutionize your approach and drive impactful results.

Speaker 2:

We're going to unpack all of this and lots more so stay tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital.

Speaker 2:

First marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer. Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil.

Speaker 1:

Schaefer. Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, and welcome to my podcast, and happy September. This is episode number 377. Today I'm going to skip over the industry news, give you a little personal update and then we'll go into the interview. So I'm actually recording this the day before I traveled to Dallas, texas, for VidSummit.

Speaker 1:

Vidsummit really is the definitive video marketing YouTube marketing, also advice on TikTok and Instagram Reels what have you? Everything video related, content creator related and I'd go as far as saying entrepreneur digital marketing related, because there are a number of entrepreneurs there who share their successes with video. So that is this week. If you're going to be at VidSummit, please ping me on the Wova app. If you're going, you should know what that is and I would love to see you there. And if not, be on the lookout for my VidSummit recap, which I can't wait to record for you shortly.

Speaker 1:

On personal updates so, as you know, if you've been following me on social media, you might be a little bit confused, but I am actually publishing two new books in the next 30 days. I know it sounds crazy. There is a method to the madness, trust me, but I just want to give you some quick updates. First of all, maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth will be the first book to be published right now, tentatively September 17th. Hopefully by the time this goes out, you are going to see a pre-order come up for the e-book. I'm releasing an e-book only to begin with and it's only going to be 99 cents, so be on the lookout for that. Really excited. I just did the final edits, got the final copy back yesterday. Out for that. Really excited, I just did the final edits, got the final copy back yesterday. Digital Threads really is the longer, bigger book, for lack of a better word. Maximizing LinkedIn for business growth is going to be somewhat of a mini book. That's why it's 99 cents. But Digital Threads is my legit business book where I hope to really reshape how you think about digital marketing.

Speaker 1:

If you've been listening to this podcast for years, you're going to recognize a lot of the concepts that I talk about. That is getting very, very close to being scheduled in Amazon. I expect to get the final audio book, which I spent all of last week recording, which is why my voice is a little bit hoarse, but I expect to get that back in the next few days. I went through and after reading the audiobook, I realized that I should probably have done one more deep proofread on the book, which I did as well, and I just sent that off to my editor to get the final files back from him, and I'm still working on a hard cover print issue. Hopefully that gets resolved soon.

Speaker 1:

But anytime you work with printers, there's always a back and forth and there's always a time lag. So if you are on my Kickstarter, you will be getting the ebook first and the audio book second, and then the paperback and hardcover will be distributed third, but I can't wait to start distributing those before it actually goes on sale. That was my promise to all of my Kickstarter backers. So that's where I am. Be on the lookout for that. They will be for sale on Amazon and wherever you buy books, and I am also drinking my own medicine and in the process of launching a Shopify store where you can also buy all of these books from me directly, without going through a middleman or middlewoman or a e-commerce platform, which well, helps me because I can maximize the royalties and hopefully helps you because you won't have to be limited to where you can buy my content. So be on the lookout for that. That is sort of in the background, still needs a little bit more time. It may happen in time for the launch, may not, but we'll keep you updated.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, everything that I'm learning from all this, I can't wait to share with you in future episodes. And, obviously, everything that I'm learning from all this I can't wait to share with you in future episodes. So let's get on to today's interview. I get pinged by a lot of people. I just counted right now, and in the first eight months of 2024, I have had 116 different requests as guests to be on this podcast.

Speaker 1:

I only interview. You know, half of my podcast episodes are interviews. I only publish 50 a year. So do the math I only interviewed 25 people a year. And I have a lot of friends who are experts, authors, influencers, what have you. So it is very rare when I interview someone that I don't really know that well, but once in a while I will see a pretty compelling pitch, and this one came from a gentleman, drew Moffitt, who is the CMO of a company called Kumo Space.

Speaker 1:

Kumo Space really evolved during COVID.

Speaker 1:

It is an experience like Zoom, but it also has a virtual reality aspect to it.

Speaker 1:

So instead of just seeing someone on Zoom, you can actually enter their virtual office, see who else is around at the office.

Speaker 1:

So it's really great for keeping on tabs of your colleagues if you work at the same company, and it has this video conferencing feature, so pretty cool. And although they're really trying to sell it to companies, they found a lot of success working with influencers on TikTok and well, you're just going to have to hear about it, but what Drew was talking about with TikTok and working with influencers there really does represent a new way of looking at influencer marketing and on a new platform, and it's interesting because TikTok has always been about views, but now we see Instagram changing to views, we see Twitter changing to impressions. So I think, although this is related to TikTok, this is a B2B company and everything that you hear is going to be really relevant for every B2C company, as well as really any social media platform. So I'm going to I don't want to give away any more of the of the deets that you was going to spill on this episode, so, without further ado, here is my interview with Drew Moffitt from Kumo Space.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neil Schafer. Hey everybody.

Speaker 1:

This is Neil Schafer, and welcome to another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. So one of the themes of this new book that I am writing and hope to announce soon is that since the coronavirus pandemic, the digital trends have only accelerated. Digital marketing, and especially social media, is just very different now than it was just a few years ago. However, is your company pivoting quick enough to meet the changing environment, the changing atmosphere? And I think one area where this is especially true is influencer marketing, and in fact, I've had to redo how I teach influencer marketing at my own class at UCLA Extension, because just a few years ago, things were just so different.

Speaker 1:

Just the emergence of TikTok alone and what that means and we're going to get into a lot of that today is going to be indicative of just how different things are. So today I'm really excited to bring on a special guest who has a refreshingly new look at influencer marketing, and it's not your traditional B2C e-commerce company. It's more of a B2B company, and that's why I'm really excited to hear about how they have found success with influencer marketing and the advice that they have for you to find success with influencer marketing. So we're going to discuss the new rules of influencer marketing today with my friend, drew Moffitt, who is the head of marketing at Kumo Space, and I know we'll find out a lot about what the heck Kumo Space is for those that aren't familiar with it in the interview.

Speaker 3:

But, drew, welcome to the podcast that aren't familiar with it in the interview. But, drew, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me and excited to dive in and talk about how we've leveraged influencer marketing and kind of a realm that typically isn't thought of as a place that you would use it.

Speaker 1:

Indeed, can't wait to get into that. But before we get into that, I always like to ask my guests the backstory. How did you get into marketing? How did you get started with marketing Everything that led up to your joining Kumo Space?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I'm. I think I'm probably the 13th year of my career in marketing. Now it's starting to number there. Yeah, so I went to school. I graduated in 2011, which wasn't a particularly hot time to graduate. I had gone into school in New York City and the natural path for me, you know, going to college had seemed to be to go to finance. And I ended up not going to finance. I ended up in real estate initially, and then I got the bug to do my own startup and I did a business called Forever Not, which allowed you to place a social bet on the relationship status of celebrities. It was pretty fun. It went viral Very cool.

Speaker 3:

And that was my first foray into discovering how to market right. It was marketing by need.

Speaker 1:

It's so funny. I once played around with the idea of I don't know if you remember Klout K-L-O-U-T. It was an influencer platform that basically gave every social media user a score of their influence from zero to 100. And I played around with the idea of creating a game where people would bet on other social media users influencers clout scores to see if they go up or down over time. So a little similar, but anyway, I'm glad I never did that, because clout we don't talk about today. So they went out of business and, yeah, that would have failed. So cool. So finance, real estate, marketing, startup, and after that you joined Kumo Space. So tell us a little bit about Kumo Space. I had never heard of you before you reached out to me and I think it's a really cool, really cool concept and I want to make sure that, in order to understand how you did things differently with influencer marketing, I think it's really important to understand what Kumo Space is.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so fast forward. Nine, 10 years almost, from when I did my own first startup. I'm onto the seventh business I've helped build in some capacity and I joined Kumo Space September of 2020. So we're approaching almost four years now Second longest standing employee, second longest standing employee. And right around that time the rise of tiktok took off and I had been consulting that summer and that really exposed me to the, the ability to to leverage tiktok. So that that's how we got into it.

Speaker 3:

But you know first, like what is kumo space the business? So initially, during the height of the pandemic, we threw this product out into the market and just said, hey, you know, people use this and it was largely used for kind of a virtual events use case. It was just better group video chat. And then, as the world started to get together again physically, we noticed it was a subset of users who were 100% remote teams and they were trying to replicate the benefits of collaboration or transparency and productivity that you get from a physical office. And subsequently we realized that's what our product had at the core and we've continued to build those features. So today, thousands of people use Kumo Space inside this product, signing in for eight hours a day like you would to Slack or Zoom, or you would show up to your physical office and instead they're doing it from different parts of the world and able to sit there and simply just tap a colleague on the shoulder and quickly collaborate, brainstorm, solve problems and ultimately, our clients tend to be around 30% more productive as companies.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a very cool concept. When you show me the demo, I was sort of blown away that that sort of product didn't exist. So if you work hybrid, you're either going to schedule you know, zoom calls with your colleagues in advance at weird times, or you're always, when you log in to start the day, you log into a work environment where people are, like you said, only like a tap away. So it was very, very cool experience. And I guess, from my perspective, you know September 2020, the rise of TikTok.

Speaker 1:

I think the normal this is a, you know, a B2B sale. Obviously, there are individual people that can use it, but it's mainly geared towards teams and therefore, the larger the corporation, the larger the enterprise, the bigger the sale, I'm assuming. So the normal sort of marketing mindset would be that we need to target marketing leaders, or in this case, I suppose it would be HR leaders or whoever's in charge of that environment. So from that perspective, I'm thinking LinkedIn is going to be your target market, but tell me about how you began to think differently, about how you were going to market from what space.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so very early on, back in early 2021, we started playing around with TikTok and influencer marketing and we saw just great success. Everyone was locked down. You had social media usage as a whole was on a tear because people were just I think some of the numbers were like 40% more daily active usage across all these platforms. Usage across all these platforms and the way that the TikTok algorithm and Reels has tried to replicate is that it distributes to the people who are most interested in that kind of content. So, yes, linkedin is a great channel, but for Kumo space, the data isn't quite there. With a lot of digital ad platforms, you can't go into LinkedIn and click is this company remote? Which seems a little odd because, on the flip side of that, I can go there and look for a job and click remote jobs only. So the data exists inside the LinkedIn platform. They just haven't made that accessible to advertisers yet.

Speaker 1:

So when you said you saw results with influencer marketing, why don't we take a step back? How did you start to foray into influencer marketing? What were some of the first things that you did that you saw early success on?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So it was around kind of March timeframe in February, through like a friend, they had reached out, a journalist at the New York Times had reached out to our CEO and he ended up being in an article that was largely kind of around remote work and virtual events, ended up being in an article that was largely kind of around remote work and virtual events and we saw obviously like a nice natural flip there. And the next month later we were testing influencer marketing specifically on TikTok and we'll get into how we do it a little differently, some of those new rules. But all of a sudden we had our first video go viral and it was like 4 million views and something in the vicinity. We estimated 60, 70,000 people came to the website and it completely dwarfed that New York Times article.

Speaker 3:

I remember our head of engineering at the time going well, I guess TikTok's better than the New York Times. So that's how it started and we kind of got hooked on that bug. Fast forward today, whether it was across the virtual events use case or the virtual office use case, on those short form video platforms. So YouTube Shorts, instagram Reels, tiktok, etc. There are probably over 250 million views now. Wow.

Speaker 1:

So let's sort of dissect that first viral video. So that was not your own organic content, that was content working with an influencer, correct?

Speaker 3:

That's correct.

Speaker 1:

So normally, like I said, the customers are people in charge of deciding on technology for remote work. Yet you reached out to TikTok influencers. So what were the rules or the guidelines as to who you reached out to TikTok influencers? So what were the rules or the guidelines as to who you reached out to on TikTok that you thought would reach your target audience? And I'm assuming the target audience you were looking for? There were less of the managers and more of the actual users, correct, yeah?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So it's important kind of to understand the original product. We just threw it out in the wild and just let anyone use it, so there wasn't particularly a buyer. The product was 100% free at the time and so, as the fact that there wasn't really a buyer, there was use cases happening and in 2021, we did everything from having people do virtual weddings and hanging out with friends to classrooms, to happy hours, to webinars, all the way up to the Google Cloud Conference, so completely across that spectrum.

Speaker 3:

So when we were looking for creators, we were just looking for people who authentically could incorporate the use of this video chat product into a video, Got it and that creator specifically, he was a college student. He was doing like a lot of like career business kind of tips and he just did a quick I think it was like 17 second video that just kind of like slams his laptop down and goes guys, you got to stop using Zoom, there's something cooler. This is Kuma Space. And what we realized is that, because the product is so visual, it does really well in that environment. And then we started to build a brief around that success, which was, you know, the first. This was the 10th video. Right, the first nine videos failed, so there's always going to be failure here. I want to be clear with everyone. The typical tricks sometimes that looping trick can be very good and showing using the product and showing a lot of people using the product. If you just do like, hey, here's me in a Kumo space by myself like that was not exciting, People did not engage with it. If you showed other people in the space, maybe some comedy to it, that did well. And then fast forward today.

Speaker 3:

Our buyer today is typically an executive. It's typically someone who works as an SMB owner or a C-suite, typically between like 10 and 200 employees. That's kind of a pretty good sweet spot. The company is 100% remote. But the strategy hasn't changed much. Right, we had a recently a video get over 6 million views on Instagram. Recently a video get over 6 million views on Instagram and that video was just more speaking a little bit more towards that SMB and remote work and using it as a virtual office. But the strategy and the descriptors are kind of very similar and that Instagram Reels algorithm just picks it up and shows it to people who are SMB. You know, work at SMBs or 100% remote.

Speaker 1:

So I want to continue dissecting. I try to speak on behalf of the listeners, and they're probably thinking okay, you contacted 10 influencers I don't even know if we classify them as influencers or content creators or nano influencers and I want to ask you about that as well. You contacted 10, one went viral. What was two things right. What were the guidelines that you had in order to choose those people on TikTok that you wanted to collaborate with? And then, number two what did the financial compensation look like at the time?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we typically you know, I think a lot of people a rule that has been around for a while, that I would say is no longer valid is people say, okay, here's the rules, here's the guidelines of the creators I want to work with, and that makes like a lot of sense in say fashion and you're saying, okay, let me just find someone who's a fashion influencer, right?

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 3:

And or a fashion blogger. And the reality is that we figured out is we want to find people who can authentically incorporate Kumo space. But we flipped the way that we look for creators on its head by saying, okay, these are the people we don't work with, and the reason we don't work with them is because authentically they can't incorporate Kumo space. So people who do like street prank jokes, that's out in the physical space, like that doesn't work in a virtual world. There's no way to authentically incorporate that. People who are doing like fashion outfits, like again, that's not going to work. Well. But someone who just like does funny humorous stuff, totally fine, because they can just do funny humorous stuff inside of a Kumo space with their, you know, with their colleagues. So that's how we approach them Collectively. Today we're pushing over 5,000 creators that we've ultimately prospected and reached out to. And then, from a cost perspective, initially no one knew what the value of themselves was on TikTok. So in the case of that creator, I think he had 10,000, 20,000 followers or something and maybe a few more, and we kind of figured out there's two buckets specifically on TikTok, where it's quite democratic If the content is just great and the algorithm and what I mean by great is you get people to engage the comments. You can really see who's actually viewing the content. If there's a bunch of people talking about work in the comments and getting a lot of likes, then the algorithm was displaying that to remote workers. And we find that that less than 100,000 followers is a great bucket because if they have in their page past examples of getting several times their follower count, those smaller influencers or creators, they can. Actually. They figured out how to catch that magic in a bottle a couple of times and they can replicate that for you. And then we'll work with the much larger creators who have very consistent volume of views. So they have a million followers and they're consistently in the high hundred thousands, low millions. So those are kind of the buckets.

Speaker 3:

Initially, back then no one knew the value and historically, the rise of influencer marketing was. You priced people based on their follower count and that like comes from Instagram, original Instagram feed, because it was like it went to all your followers. And today, what? So? No one knew how to price themselves on TikTok because they were still trying to price themselves based on a follower count. So you know, that creator was a couple hundred bucks. He was obviously quite disappointed. So immediately we like said okay, let's put in a performance structure If you do this again no, by the way, I'll give you some some compensation repertoire actively. And then he subsequently made more videos that also got millions of views. And then we just built upon that compensation structure.

Speaker 1:

Right. So you started the compensation structure from the Instagram days and we'll go a little bit deeper. That which is like for every you know 1000 followers, $10. So if you have 20,000 followers to it, you sort of based on that sort of scale, correct?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that was roughly what people were comfortable. They were not just like what we're comfortable, but that's what the creator was comfortable, because the creator didn't think that they were particularly special because they're like I only have 20,000 followers. I'm not, you know, some celebrity with 50 million Instagram followers. Right, that was the way and it was very much the rise of TikTok in that moment of time. That was the way and it was very much the rise of TikTok in that moment of time.

Speaker 3:

Now, today, a lot of creators get a lot of views, but they also maybe have a lot larger followings. The relationship to engagement and following count has drastically changed on TikTok. So we still favor, we'll do fixed. We always negotiate you always negotiate the price because there's always room to improve. We will do flat rate deals because there are some creators who only want to do that. But our preference is to do some type of performance structure, some base upfront payment and then 10 days later calculate all the views and we have, you know, these various bonus structures. That's typically tied to thresholds. So if you hit like 100,000 views or 250,000 views, that's an extra bonus and then also just a standard performance tied to the number of views.

Speaker 1:

And I'm assuming that what's become very commonplace if there's e-commerce involved is that it's a standard fee, but also that affiliate marketing performance marketing boost. So what you're doing is you don't have e-commerce, but you're doing it based on actual performance in terms of video views.

Speaker 3:

then yeah, it's a very easy attribution that we found is actually very difficult. Often what we can see in our data is our traffic. So we identify traffic that comes to our homepage as branded search. So we identify traffic that comes to our homepage as branded search and then we have direct traffic. So those two buckets of traffic will spike and we'll see subsequently people creating accounts and spaces. But it becomes more complicated kind of down funnel to look at that way. We also have an intake form that people just say how they found us. But there's a lot of disconnect that can happen because it's not a real ad that you can click on. That breaks between the mobile device and their desktop. Maybe they did actually go this way and then they went back in a different way. So we found it was just the most simple for a SaaS business to just pay on the views and if we were e-commerce I would absolutely have been doing some type of commission affiliate structure tied to sales.

Speaker 1:

But I assume, because this all started when that video got what was that? 4 million views, like more traffic than from New York Times. So you've been able to see over time that when you work with influencers and TikTok, it generates more views, which generates more traffic, which inevitably, whatever the conversion rate you have, inevitably leads to new business. So I'm assuming that you've set that up and it's very, very clear. So do you work with influencers like in spurts? I mean, how do you, outside of video views, do you schedule influencers to create content on different days to see the different effects that they might have on the traffic and conversions? Or have you tried to get a little bit more sophisticated or is it still just based on video views and then attribution versus traffic, branded search and direct traffic?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we have an in-house data scientist and we spent about a month really trying to crunch our numbers and ultimately the outcome of that was that we couldn't know, we couldn't attribute it very well and it's from those kind of mechanics when you add the form data or you add the sales reps having a conversation, all of a sudden it becomes, you know, around 30, 40% of our revenue as a business.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's huge.

Speaker 3:

It's very tough, I would say. The way we use the product is a little bit of like brands marketing and performance marketing. So often when you hear people in the B2B space talk about you need to run brand ads alongside demand gen ads. So it is really creating brand awareness. It's just hard to directly correlate and there's also a long tail effect here.

Speaker 3:

So all those videos almost all of them still exist on those creators pages. They still get served. They don't get the same kind of crazy volumes of views, but that continues to drive traffic for us. So we know that, yes, we haven't gone viral in a couple months and what I mean is really over a million views. We'll get hundreds of thousands of views kind of consistently every month, but we can see that traffic still coming. So my cautionary tale here is don't try to get overly complex with it. Trust that it's working. If you see the money coming in, especially if you're a B2B business that's like ours, like a sales-led, where most customers are talking to a sales rep just have the sales rep ask the question, put that data into the CRM or have a form, and you'll very quickly kind of realize that this is working or not working for you.

Speaker 1:

It makes a lot of sense. I mean, you need to be discovered, and this leads into the topic of just well, how do brands get discovered right? And search plays a big role in that, and social media plays a big role in that, and I think for younger generations, social is search, tiktok is their Google, and I think you know, think there's a lot of data that supports that as well, as well as anecdotally. So instead of just boosting your own posts to try to get that brand awareness, it's really working with influencers. And then I'm assuming in parallel, you're also doing some sort of lead gen ads as well, correct, like on LinkedIn or webinars or eBooks or things of that sort.

Speaker 3:

So we're engaged in category creation here and, as I said, like there isn't a way to target remote only workers. So we've actually found that traditional paid channels are not good for us. They are not effective. So when you look at our business, right, it's definitely around 40% is coming from influencer. Another around 30 or so percent is coming from SEO. We do a lot of content SEO. We, you know, in a given month we're publishing like close to 80 blogs with the assist of humans plus AI. So we're very effective there.

Speaker 3:

And then the other bucket that people often say in that form is word of mouth. The word of mouth tends to convert not so well. So the volume is from the influencer. That's the second best converting channel. Seo is the second volume channel, but number one converting and then kind of the bottom of that is word of mouth. So for our business that's really what works for us. We've tried other channels and other tactics. If we were a different business, we weren't engaged in this category creation and we had the ability to handle higher tax that come from traditional paid channels, then we would absolutely be doing what you're describing. We know that that doesn't work in a unit economics positive way, so it doesn't make sense to invest that money. Instead, focus on the other channels that make us money.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and this is an important point is that a lot of and I've worked with marketing teams where they see a blog about a success story and they just try to emulate that right, and it requires this holistic approach because no two brands are the same, no two target markets are the same.

Speaker 1:

What's gonna work for one might not work for another, and that's what I love about this case study is that you would not think of B2B, saas, influencer marketing, yet you found that it worked and, like you said, you've sort of turned it on its head. I want to ask you a few more questions. So you brought up SEO and I'm just curious because some sites, my site included, have been sites that have been sort of devalued in Google's eyes since the recent changes over the last six to nine months. With the appearance of generative AI search, with the seemingly Reddit and Quora results being boosted up, big brands seem to be taking over search results. I'm curious if you or anyone on your team has noticed any changes over the last months. Or is SEO, you know, is it as profitable for you now as it was a year ago?

Speaker 3:

So it's a great question and before I answer I just want to touch back on the. I think you were making a really good point about marketing. Channels are going to be specific to your business and they're going to be unique to your business. So at Kumo Space we've tried everything except for, like TV and billboards and some cases those channels not TV and billboards everything else several times over. So you approach hey, this is what may have worked in the past in this business in my career, or this is what I read someone else Go test that channel, just verify that it's working well for you. If it's not, kill it and move on to the ones that are Going to SEO.

Speaker 3:

We have taken a lot of. You know we early on made some bad mistakes around technical and kind of on page and our domain structure. Unfortunately, we start off with a subdomain, so that kind of set us back. But in the last two years we focus on a single domain and when we did that we also invested very heavily in technical SEO. So very fast page load times.

Speaker 3:

On mobile we use a service called Cloudinary that makes sure it renders and serves the best images for the best devices on the best on that browser right. These are things that Google really has started to really care about, and it's difficult because a Mac on Chrome it's different than a Mac on Safari and you know it's different on Android or iOS device. So in those different environments. So Kinect does a great job. It makes all those assets in you know, the JPEG, the PNG, etc. The newer formats and serves that. So I think holistically we've been very lucky and I would attribute that luck to the fact that we just things like schema markup to get those featured SERPs and then we did a lot of backlink building to those sections of the blog. We had a lot of organic backlinks that had gone to mostly the homepage and other parts of the website, so we did that. We've ultimately stopped that because we've gotten enough. And then the key for us has really been use AI to draft the article and then have a native speaker edit that article and, as a result, we're able to crank out a lot of volume of content and we do see that that content tends to rank pretty well better than when we were using freelancers to write that content.

Speaker 3:

And I have noticed certain industries. I think it's also very subjective in certain industries, like I was looking at an industry recently. They helped. You know there's a bunch of online businesses that do the accreditation for a service pet, for a service pet, and that you know, the business that I, you know, looked at someone had sent to me and I was looking at all of its competitors. They, all of those companies, were hit in September, and so that speaks to some type of fact in that that Google had was deciding to change the way it approached that sector and maybe be prioritizing something like the Mayo Clinic or, like you know, penn, or you know New York Presbyterian or Kaiser Permanente.

Speaker 3:

Right, they were wanting a different authority there. We've been lucky, maybe partially because we are engaged in a category creation here, a virtual office software that you know. We have not seen that happen to ourselves, nor to our kind of our immediate competitors around us. So this experience that you're experiencing, it could be any of those buckets, and that's the unfortunate reality of SEO is that it is complex, but it could also be sector specific.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I read an article. Foundation Inc is a blog, their content agency, but they have a lot of great blog posts and just recently, I think, I included in my newsletter that B2B SaaS companies on average saw like a 10% decrease in traffic as a result. Right, and that 10% is an average, so I'm assuming some had 20, 30, 40. But once again, you are in a category. My content is based around categories that are pre-existing. You are still in a space where it is not a pre-existing category. It's still, like you said, category creation, which is really unique. So maybe that's it. I mean, who knows? Right, that's SEO. We're all guessing, but that's really awesome that you found success there. Curious about the and I've heard very similar things AI generated content and human writer Is there any specific software that you're using that you think has really helped with that, or is it just standard chat, gpt type prompts or any other information?

Speaker 1:

Since we have you on the line here, I want to get back to influencer marketing in a second, but I think a lot of companies are still trying to figure that out. So any advice that you might have there companies out there.

Speaker 3:

We use a product called Surfer SEO. Inside of that they have a Surfer AI product Surfer's kind of a cool product. I particularly was attracted to them. They had been around before the Gen AI craze that we're now living in and at the core their product was you, as a human, wrote a blog article and then you fed it that content and you fed it keywords you wanted to rank for and it looked at the current search results and fed it that content and you fed it keywords you wanted to rank for and it looked at the current search results and it scored your content and it scored those results. So the way that I understand that their product works and it's also it's quite slow, meaning it can take hours to make you an article, and the reason is that it's making many articles and it's scoring what ultimately it thinks is the best article to rank in that content.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha. So I use a tool called Phrase, which is very similar to Surfer. They both came around the same time. I had the AppSumo lifetime deal, which is why I ended up using Phrase and it does the same thing, and they also have the generative AI feature. So, in other words, you're using the Surfer SEO generative AI feature to actually create that content based on the keyword. So you're just feeding it a keyword then and it is generating the content that it thinks will rank for that keyword. Or are there other inputs that you're giving it outside of that keyword?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we approach identifying content in kind of two ways. So, because of the fact that we're engaged in category creation, we already kind of own that category, but that category is kind of small and it's not really growing at some exponential rate. So what we do is we know there's tertiary topics. So example like Kumo Space as a product is, it has team chats so things like Slack and Microsoft Teams and it has video conferencing, so think Zoom. So we will feed Surfer, a master keyword like that, and it'll give us topics and then we'll select ones that we think are relevant. So we'll write a lot about video conferencing, a lot about team chat or synchronous communication or async communication, and then we'll feed it things like communication. And then we'll pick through that and say how do you manage styles of leadership, things like that? Because we know that typically our buyer is an executive who's leading a team. So that would be one strategy.

Speaker 3:

Another strategy is we look at our immediate competitors, where they're getting traffic, and then we also look at what I would describe as SEO competitors. So that could be someone as simple as HubSpot, right, because HubSpot is also selling to SMBs. It's like, what is the top content that's on HubSpot's blog. Okay, let's look at all that using a tool like SEMrush and then we will select those articles. And in that secondary case you're not just feeding the keywords, because you're not feeding one. You're typically finding, you know, five or six or 10 keywords that Surfer may have suggested to us. We'll also just look at other topics that are interesting and then we'll just find the keywords and feed it that way. But when it's a competitor type piece of content, the way that we do that is we look at, you can actually feed the URL. So it's looking at this HubSpot article about tactics for marketing agencies. So we're feeding that and we're feeding the keywords.

Speaker 1:

Got it so in the first bucket it's not just the keyword, it's also a little bit of back and forth on the outline and agreeing to that, and then it generates the content. Is that a correct assumption?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So the next step for Surfer is it will spit out an outline that can take again, you know not, it's not instant, it's, you know, several minutes, maybe up to 10 minutes. You edit that. That will feed it information, a blurb about Kumo Space, related to that topic as well, and then it lets you select kind of content that's ranking in that first keyword in the top 10 results that you really want to go after and it'll ingest all of that information into its model and spit out a typically between 2000 to 4000 word article. It'll have places where it suggests the images.

Speaker 3:

Now we'll give you AI generated images. I've found those. We found those to be very, you know, just focus on getting like an iStock account and just kind of download something. That's like a uniformity. The AI stuff looks sometimes looks really weird, and then we export that and then we give it to a human editor and they read through it and they'll often start adding Kumo space into the content a little bit more. You know, if it's about video conferencing, it'll maybe say Zoom a lot. Every time it says Zoom, we'll say Kumo Space and Zoom, for example, and then we'll put in a sections that are maybe more descriptive about our product to fit that in organic like in a nice way. And then sometimes it writes weird things. You just got to catch that there was something about collaboration and started talking about the USSR and communal collaborative civil societies in Russia and you're like, oh yeah, it ingested something weird from the internet.

Speaker 1:

It hallucinates right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

But I think that's the point about AI Whether your organization uses it or not, your competitors, like the Kumo spaces, probably are. So if you're getting outranked and you're wondering why, this could very well be the reason. So that's a great takeaway from this episode. I do want to switch gears, though. Man. We could have had a thing about AI SEO. I'm getting back to the influencer marketing. There's just additional questions here.

Speaker 1:

So that very first time where you were talking about influencer identification for those first 10 people because a great question I always get from companies that are just starting out with influencer marketing is who do we work with? And you talked about starting out with who do we not work with? But at the end of the day, you did choose 10 people. So I'm curious was it like a keyword search and then looking at their content? And I want to ask you about the vibe. We're going to get to that in a second but was it just, you know, did it begin with a hashtag keyword search and then going through the profiles and seeing where it made sense? Or did you use a marketplace or recommendations? Or you know what? Was that like initial step you took for the identification of potential creators to work with?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, like I love working with our co founders, there was there was a lot of internal disagreement right At the time. We were like a five person team and we were the number one mistake. Is that, I see, in the new world it was funny our co founder had been pushing me at the time to say, oh, you need to find someone who, like, really cares about remote or really cares about like video conferencing. Like he or she is the like video conferencing guru of TikTok. And that's very much the common thought and the way that people approach it, because people apply the best practices of performance marketing on, say, something like Facebook or LinkedIn and say you build a great audience, you're going to control the CAC in the best way.

Speaker 3:

In TikTok, the algorithm will find the audience. It's more about making sure that content is getting created that is going to be interesting to your audience and then the audience will be brought to those viewers by the for you page algorithm. So it's funny. He was just recently speaking at Saster in Europe and there was someone who is, you know, a head of something inside of TikTok and this person was literally preaching this and I was like, wow, that's kind of. It's kind of nice, because we're just talking about the black box. That that is. That is Google and its search product.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

It's kind of nice when you get some affirmation from these black boxes, so that was kind of cool. But yeah, I think a lot of those early ones we were trying all the different strategies right, we were trying to be hyper-specific, we were trying to be super controlling of the content that was made right, doing multiple iterations, giving them like a really tight script. All of that failed. I was down to the last few dollars in the budget and I just kind of did what I wanted to do in that moment of time and that was the one that went viral. So it's good to show up with a strategy. That was the one that went viral. So it's like it's good to show up with a strategy. But, as you know, mike Tyson would say I think it's his quote you know, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. So every you're testing a new channel, it's going to be like that Just go in with a plan but then be very willing and happy to rip up that plan.

Speaker 1:

So I take it that it was then someone that you found randomly, maybe on your own For you page, that you thought would fit, and that you were sort of going out of that plan and being really freestyle with how you were choosing people.

Speaker 1:

And this is where I wanted to get to the vibe, and this is something that we talked a lot about. That I think for those that aren't as active on TikTok, they may not understand this, but you know one of the. Getting back to the topic of this podcast, which is like the new rules of influencer marketing, I think you've hinted at a lot of them this concept of the vibe, the vibe of your brand, the vibe of the content creators, the content they make, the platforms that they're on. So at this point, I think is it safe to say that that vibe and this is once again looking at it holistically, if not emotionally that there seemed to be a really good fit of the vibe and therefore you felt that there'd be success working with these creators and from there you found others with similar vibes. Is that sort of how it played out since then?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So it's a lot more mechanical for us than Then. I'll get to the vibe in a second because it's important, but the mechanics of it are the way that we approach it. So I look at a creator and the first thing and we actually have people who do this on our behalf and look at profiles. So at the time I didn't answer the question to the best way. We were just looking at hashtag you know, virtual video conferencing or something like that on TikTok and we were paying someone part-time to just build a list of those people. We'd have their emails and I was emailing and that's how we found them and we were trying different hashtags. We were trying different personas and I'll get to the vibe in a second. But really, like, when I look at a creator or the people doing the prospecting for us, look at a creator, what we initially want to see is one is there any disqualifying content? So for us it's the, the you know physical work.

Speaker 3:

So if you're doing construction, humor, for example, that's just not going to work because Kumo space isn't a physical product, it's for remote teams, so that would be a disqualifier. The next thing is like what's the relationship between their followers and their typical posts? So someone who went viral last August she had around 100,000 followers. She is kind of like a quirky, more introverted designer type, does a lot of just day in the life content. Some of that's like wake up, read her book, open her laptop, go to the gym, come back. Some of it's a little bit of travel related. But because she's doing that work aspect, we're like immediately you can have that laptop open up to Kumo space. So that's like right away, like we can see that.

Speaker 3:

But she's very soft spoken. Her vibe is like the most boring content, almost Like we actually took her video and we threw it into some Reddit ads and our comments on the Reddit ads was like this is the world's worst creative. Could you find someone who was more boring to make your ad Like they're two splurge more? And I'm just kind of laughing like man. This thing has almost 4 million views on TikTok.

Speaker 3:

And all the comments are about work, remote work, productivity, collaboration, like how cool the tool is and so the vibe is. Actually, you don't want to impose upon the creator your own vibe, you want to impose the creator. Creator your own vibe. You want to impose the creator to use their existing vibe. So that person's vibe is polar opposite from someone like the creator European Kid, which someone may have seen. There's like this outlandish kind of personality that's supposed to be like a rich kid in Europe and he just like does over the top things.

Speaker 3:

He made a video of him using Kumo Space, yelling at quote his dad's employees from a pool and that did quite well. You know four or 500,000 views. So if I told him and said, make a video exactly like Sam, and it's super low energy, super like just kind of almost introverted, Telling an extroverted type creator to do that, that vibe would not work with his. The people are used to seeing his content and it wouldn't like initially start to gain traction. That would push it into getting served heavily in the For you page. So from a vibe perspective, it's like the reason the other videos failed was two, One they're just random. Maybe those people weren't going to go viral or maybe they just weren't a good fit.

Speaker 3:

Right, the Pearson, we prospected. But the second piece was really we tried to tell them the vibe to have. But this creator, we just let him do his thing and it was like great, you did what we were supposed to. You showed people in Kumo space, you said the word Kumo space, you had that pop up on the screen. Great, that's all, that's all we need. And then it went viral. I think of it more as card counting at a blackjack table than knowing like showing up with a the production budget and production crew that you would have for Pirates of the Caribbean. Identify these creators who you know can go viral, give them the freedom to do it and then just place enough bets in a given month and you will see content that gets hundreds of thousands of views, and every couple of months, or maybe even every month, depending on how broad your audience is, you might see into the millions of views.

Speaker 1:

Now, really great advice, I think you know. Getting back to this, the concept of new rules for influencer marketing. That is obviously something I wrote about in the age of influence, which is you're not. You don't want to impose your stiff brand guidelines on creators because they are great at content creation. They're better than you at content creation. Why would you want to impose your rules?

Speaker 1:

But this takes it even one step further, which is it's about that vibe. Right, it's about the content they create, but it's also that vibe, the content they create. It may not look like the best content, like that Reddit ad example, yet it had a vibe that attracted people. And I think the second rule which we can skip, or new rule, which is it's about the video views rather than the follower count. I think it's really clear, because all the social networks with short form video, you can see all that.

Speaker 1:

So all it takes is to see these content creators that you think fit your vibe, to see if they have a track record of delivering, and then, like you said, it's like counting cards at the table If you place your bets in a few different tables, one of them at some point will spark those views. So that's all great advice. I keep on hitting on the influencer identification because once again, I'm sort of playing the role of someone in the audience. Did you use any tools to help you find those influencers in TikTok, or was it all just manual searches? For you pages recommendations from other employees? Was there any process involved with that or was it just manual search on TikTok?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So initially, like you start any channel, you should start it kind of cheaply and you know, the first thing that we did is, you know, just was paying someone to look at hashtags on TikTok, and that's a great starting point. And we were just sitting there PayPal-ing people and we didn't have the W-8 bins, we didn't have the W-9s. Our accountant was very unhappy with me about 60 days into this.

Speaker 3:

She was very, very unhappy with me. We have a great relationship now and quickly we went out and we got a tool called Grin. I love the tool. It deals with all of your payments. It deals with all your W-8 bins, w-9s. It sends it right through PayPal and then also in there you can add creators to that. You can do email sequences and you have this kind of CRM function to it so that you can know what the past conversations, whether or not it was me emailing or someone else on the team that was emailing.

Speaker 3:

But that's an expensive tool and it's definitely worth the money. But you need to prove that influencer marketing works for your business before using it. At the time Grin had a very large database for recruiting creators to work with. They still have a database. It's gotten smaller for some compliance issues with the various social media platforms. But we use a combination of creatorco now their basic price package. It lets us do kind of unlimited searches in there. But it only gives you a few exports, which is fine because we just need to find the creators. Then we import them directly from the creator's social media page to Grin, where they get outreached and, as I said, we're pushing like five and a half thousand creators that we've reached out over the last three years of using this tactic.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, amazing, and, for those listening, grin is one very, very popular influence marketing platform and there are a number of others out there that do similar things. But, yeah, so the technology has helped you scale, and I suppose you know if you were going to do all that manually, that would require a lot of time, obviously, and being able to track the emails and being able to scale it across your organization. And that was sort of. The final thing that I wanted to ask you about today was this concept of scaling content creator relationships. So being in contact with over 5,000 influencers is not an easy feat, especially when you're not just in charge of influencer marketing, you're in charge of everything. So tell me more about how you've been able to scale these relationships. Do you work with the same influencers multiple times? Do you have a large team that's constantly reaching out to new influencers, or what does that look like at Kumo Space?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so it's gone through many iterations. As I said, I'm head of marketing here. I'm good at figuring out how to make a channel work or solve a problem, and then my second superpower would really be figuring out how to turn that into a repeatable process that can scale. So today we have a full-time onshore person. Who? That person does all the management and negotiating. I love working with creators. They've been great for our business, but they're typically rough around the edges from a professional business perspective. Right, you have to do a ton of handholding. You have to just really help them. We get questions constantly. Why do I have to pay taxes? I'm like, come on right, it's a necessary people that we all experience.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, gen Z think they can rewrite the rules of business and I have to tell them that they can't.

Speaker 3:

But anyway, Now the IRS has to tell them that they can't. But anyway, no-transcript. At some points we were using as much as five people doing the prospecting, doing other tasks for us as well. Now we have someone full-time offshore in Southeast Asia and that person just sits there and goes through the search tool. We identify spreadsheets of keywords. So that's how we kind of run that prospecting at scale. It depends on your business and your strategy. We've done both, like sometimes we'll build longer term relationships with creators. You know we'll try to do a couple posts, see if they go viral. If they don't, then we're okay.

Speaker 3:

You know, the creator I was speaking to, saw him earlier who had that really great video back in August. She the first video with us just completely bombed. But it was the person who's running the process. They're also responsible for negotiating. The person had negotiated a good base rate and I was just like let's spin this roulette Well, more accurately, let's serve another hand at this blackjack table.

Speaker 3:

This person I feel you know the card count is looking good for us right now and you're balancing what's the cost of doing one post with a creator, or five posts with a creator and then ones that you work with that do. Well, then you want to try and continue to work with, but you want to spread that out because you don't want to saturate their audience and you need their initial followers to engage with the content and that's what's going to really push it into the for you feed. But yeah, that's how you scale it up. Is you figure out what are the different pieces of that puzzle for your business, right? And then where can you apply technology? Where can you apply labor, whether that labor's lower costs offshore or higher costs onshore and you kind of break out those pieces of the process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I always use the analogy that this is all an experiment, but I love that. You're sort of counting cards at the blackjack table. You never know what's going to happen, but yeah, that's a really great analogy. So, drew, this has been awesome. We've covered. Obviously, we did a foray into SEO, but all of this is related. Right, it's all about developing relationships with potential customers, keeping them with current customers and discoverability and all that so fantastic. Is there anything else that you want to add? I think we covered a lot of what we plan to talk about vis-a-vis Kumo Space and Influencer Marketing, but any other piece of advice you'd like to give the listeners?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean I think understand. There's a John Wanamaker quote that always sticks with me quite well and, for those who don't know, he's often considered kind of the father of marketing and the quote goes 50% of my marketing budget is wasted. I just don't know which 50%. The quote goes 50% of my marketing budget is wasted, I just don't know which 50%. And the way that that applies to today, in a digital marketing age, is just be willing to test and willing to waste money on new channels and understand that maybe those channels will not work. But the more channels you try, the more channels you're going to find that are really good for you. And then just double and triple down on those channels and, as we were describing, apply tech, apply human capital and make that thing as scalable and as efficient as you possibly can.

Speaker 1:

Experiment data-driven scale Awesome. And the B2B SaaS company that's doing Reddit ads. I applaud you for you know, walking the walk and talking the talk. So, drew, thank you, this has been awesome. Where can people, if they want to find out more about Kumo Space or about you, where should they connect?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so you know, go to Kumo Space's website If you book a demo. We actually use it because our product is so visual and it is a virtual office. We actually do all of our demos in our virtual HQ, so people for booking a demo will actually come and see that space. That's where I show up every day to work and you can come say hi to me when you meet with one of the team members and then, separately, you can find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email. It's just drew at Kumo spacecom. And, yeah, definitely, if you're running a remote company especially, a lot of people that love using our product tend to be in the marketing space. So remote, like creative agencies, digital agencies, ad SEO, et cetera agencies yeah, if you're remote, give Kumo Space a try.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you. I'm going to definitely check it out. I have a number of overseas freelancers that I work with and it'd be really cool, just even one hour a week, to have a common space where we could all engage. And that's you know. Unless we do a group Zoom, it's a different vibe altogether, right. So very cool. We'll put the links in the show notes, but if you're listening, k-u-m-o-s-p-a-c-e KumoSpacecom Drew, awesome. Thank you so much. Looking forward, you know, I think 12 months from now you're probably gonna have another cool case study to share with us. So looking forward to keeping in touch.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, definitely, it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

I hope you enjoyed that interview. If you follow me on social media, well, first of all, you should know that all of these interviews are being live streamed and recorded on YouTube, so make sure that you go over to youtubecom slash Neil Schaefer subscribe to get notified of future live streams, where you'll get the content a few months in advance, actually, and you can also watch the videos there. This is also an episode where I have been experimenting with an AI tool called Opus Clip. Go to neilschafercom slash opus O-P-U-S and I have basically been cutting the interview into short form content. So I've also released a lot of these on LinkedIn X, tiktok, instagram, youtube shorts. So if you're not following me on the socials, make sure you find me. I'm basically Neil Schafer everywhere, with the exception of TikTok, where I am Neil Schafer social.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's it for another episode of this podcast. I'll be back at you next week with a solo episode. Make sure you stay subscribed. And well, if you're on Amazon, be on the lookout for my new books, the pre-sales coming soon. Until then, this is your digital marketing coach, neal Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.