The Changing Landscape of Influencer Marketing in 2024: Insights from LunarCrush CEO Joe Vezzani

[00:00:02] We talk about changes to the buyer's journey. This idea of how customers learn about products

[00:00:08] and services, and influencers are more and more a part of that. Got a little bit of a

[00:00:13] bias, I'm theoretically one myself. How does this industry work? And how can solution

[00:00:19] providers take advantage of it? So I spoke with Joe Vizani, he's the CEO and co-founder

[00:00:23] of Lootercush, a company that studies the space on this bonus episode of the Business

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[00:01:20] Joe, thanks for joining me today. Hey, thanks for having me, Dave. I appreciate it.

[00:01:26] I want to talk a little bit about the buyer's journey as we think about it in B2B, because

[00:01:31] you spent a lot of time thinking about the way that's changed based on influencers. Give me

[00:01:38] a sense of the state of play for the way we think about a buyer and their information sources

[00:01:45] in 2024. Man, the landscape for buying and even social media in general,

[00:01:54] citizen journalism, there is so much that has changed with the influencer landscape that we

[00:01:59] see out there. At Lunar Crush, we are looking at everything across social media. We're a social

[00:02:05] media analytics company. We're pulling all this incredible data from places like X at TikTok

[00:02:10] and Reddit and YouTube. And we help people understand what these markets look like, whether

[00:02:15] that be investment firms or marketing firms to help make better decisions for their businesses.

[00:02:21] And what we are seeing is that there are tons of these smaller businesses that are kicking up

[00:02:27] that used to be just creators or just influencers doing one-off things. They have teams now.

[00:02:33] The way that you interface with those teams is a little bit more, I would say, ad hoc than

[00:02:39] normal. Some of this stuff is happening in DMs on X. You're getting a lead that comes in,

[00:02:47] and some of those are some of the best relationships that we've created

[00:02:50] are through social media. You're seeing a big shift in the creator economy when it comes to

[00:02:56] the way that business is done. I feel like I need to do a disclosure at this point,

[00:03:01] because at some level, that is literally my business. I'm a podcaster with an audience

[00:03:07] who communicates up. So I feel for my listeners, hey, you want to know that's actually my

[00:03:10] business. The reason I wanted to have you on the show was not about what I do, but actually

[00:03:15] more to think about what typical technology companies need to know about the way this works.

[00:03:23] Talk me through a little bit about the way influencers work for these technology

[00:03:30] companies that are going to consider, hey, we need to go to market and reach potential

[00:03:34] customers, but also our customers are learning things from influencers. Talk to me about how

[00:03:39] help them understand how this economy works. So influencers start in all sorts of different

[00:03:45] ways, and these platforms are all different in the way that they create content. You have a lot

[00:03:50] of, I think, hobbyists that start and they kind of think to themselves, can I do this?

[00:03:55] Can I create some sort of audience on here? And I think the best people have started

[00:04:01] with just an idea, hey, I'm just going to start putting myself out there a little bit.

[00:04:05] And I'm potentially a subject matter expert on a specific topic that maybe has a broad

[00:04:12] use case or maybe it has a niche. You might be the most influential person on ice baths

[00:04:18] and cold plunges, or you might be on just broad-based AI and you have some great opinions.

[00:04:24] And so these things start in all sorts of different ways. Some of these influencers

[00:04:28] start anonymously. There's someone that potentially is working at a business and they

[00:04:34] can't put their face and name out there the way that you or I can, but they want to get their

[00:04:39] ideas out into the world. And even in our industry, in Web 3, there's a lot of influencers

[00:04:44] and creators that get hired and you don't know who they are, right? But you do know that they

[00:04:49] have a great reputation online. And then how do you utilize a partnership there to

[00:04:55] potentially get your brand out there with these people? And so we've created some tools

[00:04:59] at Lunar Cross that we're launching that help this kind of micro influencer economy work where if

[00:05:04] you're a brand, you're used to hiring a creator and we have a lot of budget leak, as we say.

[00:05:12] You're kind of like it's the same thing as having a billboard. You don't necessarily know it's more

[00:05:17] of an awareness play where we're trying to shift that into more of a performance play,

[00:05:23] where it's I know exactly how many impressions I'm getting from this budget, from every influencer

[00:05:29] that's out there. And as the transparency and the data starts to happen, we're now able to correctly

[00:05:35] get those people the right amount of money for the campaigns that they're doing. And so

[00:05:40] as you look at social media data, there's a lot of different use cases here for understanding

[00:05:47] the creator economy. Now, you hit it on what I actually wanted to get into, which is the

[00:05:51] meat of this, the metrics. Like give us this feels like for people that are initiated into it

[00:05:55] that is, oh, it's really squishy. How do you measure this? These are just people posting.

[00:06:00] But you've spent considerable amount of effort like putting metrics around it. Walk me through

[00:06:04] some of the metrics that help understand the impact of creators. Yeah, I like that term,

[00:06:12] by the way, squishy. It's because social media has always been pretty squishy. We're

[00:06:15] trying to make it just a lot less squishy, right? There's still going to be that piece in

[00:06:20] there, but we've made a lot of progress in that. So what we're doing is we're looking at things like

[00:06:25] keywords, but we're also looking at every individual creator that's out there mentioning

[00:06:30] XYZ topic, right? Like mentioning different companies, mentioning Nike, mentioning Under Armour,

[00:06:36] mentioning PGA Tour, right? Or they might just mention the word pizza, right? And so we're

[00:06:41] trying to help understand the landscape of what all the interactions are. So if you're out there,

[00:06:48] specific example, and you're on X and you mentioned some sort of AI technology, right?

[00:06:55] And we categorize that AI technology. We're going to know exactly how many interactions

[00:06:59] you drove on that specific post, right? And so as we're collecting that in real time across all

[00:07:06] these different social networks, we're really helping to frame the market when it comes to

[00:07:12] what is the potential reach of all of these different individuals, and then the reach

[00:07:17] that happens on a potential campaign might be different for every single person, right? You might

[00:07:23] some, you know, it's always about the creative and then your audience. You might come up with some

[00:07:27] sort of epic post and epic creative that just goes viral in just that one moment. So we want to

[00:07:32] be able to reward you for that when a brand is hiring you for their services. And so,

[00:07:40] you know, I think there's a really cool thing that happens here where creators were bridging

[00:07:45] the gap for them that they can't really monetize as well as they want to on some of these social

[00:07:50] media channels. And for brands, we're helping create a lot of transparency around, hey, I've got a,

[00:07:55] you know, $100,000 budget. I don't want to just go pick five creators and then maybe not

[00:08:00] have as much creative control over what's going on. It's more about amplifying some of the

[00:08:05] things to put out into the world, right? They have the perfectly crafted post, you know,

[00:08:09] the perfectly, you know, created production piece of creative content that they put out there.

[00:08:14] And sometimes they just need amplification of that. And so we're trying to kind of help

[00:08:18] create the transparency and bridge that gap. Now, you look at this a lot. Help me understand

[00:08:24] the dichotomy here of viral versus consistency because the traditional idea in marketing is

[00:08:30] always the idea of, look, look, a good consistent message over time gets heard. You know, we

[00:08:35] hear all of the folklore myths of like, oh, it's seven touch points before a customer

[00:08:39] remembers you, those kinds of things. But the real message there is about deliver a consistent

[00:08:44] message over time so that it's heard versus a viral impact. Everyone, you know, there's this idea

[00:08:51] of chasing a single viral impact where that's going to make the difference. But you've looked

[00:08:56] at the data. Talk me through like, what is the right way to approach this and think about

[00:09:01] the outcome that you want? It's a little bit of both, I would say. And you need that

[00:09:07] consistency in your messaging to stay out there. You have your current audience that you're creating

[00:09:12] content for. And so your current audience is, you know, maybe a little bit more interested

[00:09:17] in the changes around the products or the services that you've created. And so you're

[00:09:21] trying to kind of keep them updated on little things that you've changed. And then you

[00:09:25] potentially might have a larger brand launch or redesign or something that you do where

[00:09:30] you're always, you're always hoping for some piece of virality in what you're doing there.

[00:09:35] And but what you really end up seeing in that is you don't just start, for most brands,

[00:09:40] just shooting straight up. You don't go from, you know, if your baseline is, hey, we get 100

[00:09:45] new customers a day, right? And then that's your kind of consistent piece. You might have a viral

[00:09:49] moment, maybe you have a 500 customer a day. You're most likely not going to see that trend

[00:09:55] continue unless you've just completely changed your product and launched something brand new

[00:09:59] that the world's never seen suddenly, right? Then maybe you're going to launch something

[00:10:02] new and you're going to see that increase. But what you tend to see and what's nice about

[00:10:07] having a little virality that happens in what you're doing is you might see a higher low, right?

[00:10:14] You might go from, hey, we're now, you know, we were at 100 kind of was our average a day.

[00:10:18] Maybe we're now at 120, right? And, you know, it kind of comes back down from that 500 to that

[00:10:23] 120. And so you're just kind of trying to build on top of that. And so that's why you see,

[00:10:28] you know, people go after a celebrity and doorspin or something like that. They see a bam,

[00:10:31] they see a huge spike in what they're doing. They're probably going to see a little bit of a

[00:10:36] tail off in conversion, right? Because you've got people that are just kind of trying something and,

[00:10:40] you know, dusting something off and seeing if they can figure it out. But it's still, I think

[00:10:45] it's a positive thing to try for both. Obviously, you just have to stay consistent,

[00:10:49] right? Social media is all about consistency, staying relevant, staying within the algorithm.

[00:10:54] But definitely go for the virality when you can.

[00:10:57] Now how much is that offset by B2B? Particularly because one of the things that I

[00:11:02] love B2B is that you don't need to do the same amount of volume because the value of individual

[00:11:07] customers is so much higher, right? You know, we're doing, you know, relationships where we're

[00:11:12] talking thousands or hundreds, tens of thousands of dollars in terms of the sale when it's a

[00:11:17] technology conversion versus a single consumer buying a single product, which is, you know,

[00:11:21] much lower. How much balance and what data should be looking at when you think about

[00:11:27] it from a B2B perspective? Yeah, I think we're seeing this a little bit with open AI and chat GPT.

[00:11:34] You know, it went viral from a retail standpoint and now they're in there trying to create

[00:11:39] B2B products for businesses that have maybe a closed loop of their data. They don't want,

[00:11:45] businesses don't want their data going into this open loop and training this large set of

[00:11:50] this large data set for open AI to then go and resell. And so I think when it comes

[00:11:55] to social media, social media is a great place. You know, I kind of look at Slack,

[00:11:59] when this is like a good Slack example of Slack started where there were pods of people at

[00:12:05] advertising agencies or small companies that started to utilize Slack from a B2C perspective,

[00:12:11] right? They didn't have the, you know, a lot of these companies, they didn't have,

[00:12:16] you know, contracts in place with their HR department or, you know, procurement to go

[00:12:20] and use Slack, but little small teams started using it because it was just a

[00:12:24] straight up better product, right? The communication was better. The efficiency was

[00:12:27] better. And then it started to grow into this kind of B2B business from there. So I think you,

[00:12:33] you really, it's a great business model and you love to see the retail kind of spider

[00:12:39] into an organization. And then Slack would come in and say, Oh, you have 15 people working

[00:12:44] here. Let's do this large one year reoccurring contract. And now we have ARR as a business

[00:12:50] and put that together. So I think that's a really interesting business. And I think that's a really

[00:12:55] effective way of getting new technology into a business is to get it loved by the people

[00:13:00] that are making decisions and maybe some of the product managers within that business.

[00:13:04] And so I think that, that social media game is a little bit different where you're trying to

[00:13:09] get some attention. But then that turns into a relationship business pretty quickly.

[00:13:14] When you have large contracts, you've got someone at that business that's got to pay for it.

[00:13:18] You've got to get the contract signed and then you got to get the bill paid and you got to go

[00:13:22] through all that landscape. So it's just a little bit of a different game when you're

[00:13:26] talking about straight up B2B, but the awareness and the coolness of something still kind of lives

[00:13:32] on social media and lives in the B2C space. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, what's AI doing

[00:13:38] to shift this? Because it feels like this would be a space that would be right for a

[00:13:42] little bit of impact and disruption from AI. What are you seeing?

[00:13:46] AI, everyone in the startup world is using AI in some way now. We use AI at Lunar Crush to

[00:13:54] understand what sentiment looks like. Every single post that we pull in, we're utilizing

[00:13:59] five or we're going on six different open source models to try and understand,

[00:14:04] is this a positive post? Is this a negative post? What's being said here? Are there other

[00:14:09] keywords that relate to what's being said here? AI has just found its way into tons of technology and

[00:14:17] it will continue to find its way at businesses utilizing this stuff on the back end. On the

[00:14:23] front end, there's been a lot of pretty amazing examples that are starting to come out with single

[00:14:27] use AI, some of them around customer support, I would say. There was a company that I think

[00:14:33] they've already found $47 million in efficiency with their customer support, where the customer

[00:14:38] support can answer these questions in about a fifth of the time. They're answering more questions

[00:14:45] and they're finding that maybe there's not as many customer support people are going to need.

[00:14:50] I think you're just going to continue to see AI disrupt and some of these single use businesses

[00:14:57] where you can train just a specific, everything on law and all the legal framework that's

[00:15:03] out there for one specific niche. That's going to start to be some software that a lot of businesses,

[00:15:09] especially smaller businesses, if the price is right can start to utilize. If I was out there

[00:15:15] selling to 10,000 different SMBs out there, I would be looking for the next single use AI

[00:15:21] disruptive software that's out there that is looking for channel or vertical management

[00:15:27] and can have someone that can help translate that language of, hey, this really difficult

[00:15:32] AI thing is going to help solve this for your business. That's a big piece of what's happening

[00:15:37] and where the disruption is coming from. I want to make this conversation a little tactical

[00:15:42] for people. You're a person who spends a lot of time thinking about this space,

[00:15:46] thinking about social media and influencers. Can we give one or two really tactical

[00:15:51] piece of advice for leaders in their organizations to be thinking about as they want to measure

[00:15:57] success and be successful in leveraging this way of communicating? What guidance would you give them?

[00:16:04] I'd say there's a huge opportunity. If you're not as good at social media or you don't think

[00:16:10] you're a social media person and you're a CEO of a company, I would say don't worry about that.

[00:16:16] Just try it and see what happens. X is a great place for thought leadership as a CEO or as

[00:16:22] a manager of a business or a CMO to go and just put your ideas into the world and start talking

[00:16:28] about your business. It's a much more accepted thing to be out there and maybe talk about your

[00:16:34] day a little bit, maybe have some inspirational quotes that are out there that's something

[00:16:38] that you're thinking about each morning. Then as you go along throughout your day,

[00:16:42] you're just thinking about, hey, what are some of the insights that I heard throughout my day?

[00:16:46] Who are some of the people that I talked to that I thought something was interesting

[00:16:50] and start posting those things? Start putting that out there. I think you will be wildly surprised

[00:16:56] as to the inbound that you get from a quote, founder-led movement when it comes to your business

[00:17:02] and what you're working on because that literally is the goal of the entire internet. We're able

[00:17:07] to connect with people in other niches that maybe we didn't think were out there. Those people

[00:17:12] are out there and whatever you're into and whatever business that you're doing,

[00:17:15] those people are out there on social media and they're just waiting for great content to come

[00:17:19] out there. I'd say it's never going to be perfect. Your first 100 posts or whatever content that you

[00:17:25] do is, it's not going to be that good and that's fine. Just keep plugging through and you'll get

[00:17:30] your fans. Well, give me a little... You've mentioned ex a couple of times, but they're not the only

[00:17:35] player out there. In particular, we've seen a big resurgence of LinkedIn for another kind of

[00:17:40] market. Give me your sense of the lay of the land of the different tools and what the

[00:17:45] audiences are just from a high level so that people can match to where their relevant audience is.

[00:17:53] Yeah, it's a great question. I think LinkedIn for sure is business and B2B oriented.

[00:17:59] You're out there. You're probably not going to be posting a sunset on LinkedIn.

[00:18:06] You're going to be really sticking to your business and what you're seeing in your business

[00:18:10] if you're hiring. You're really going to focus there on innovation or maybe you put

[00:18:15] together a really awesome presentation at your business and you're like, hey, I think this would

[00:18:19] be a great thing to share. Here's how we see the world and here's how we see something that's changing.

[00:18:25] X is... There's a lot of really awesome stuff on X too. I think it's the ability for a

[00:18:31] business leader to get in and mix it up a little bit. You don't have to get overly

[00:18:37] opinionated on what's going on. You can, but it does create the ability to get more

[00:18:43] followers faster and really spread out and do more networking, I would say.

[00:18:49] And quality networking of people that are around the world that you may never have run into.

[00:18:54] Instagram is... That's more e-commerce oriented. A lot of... If you're flipping through Instagram,

[00:19:00] I'm sure you've been targeted with an ad that is probably extremely relevant to what you're

[00:19:05] looking for. You're probably going to get an ad. If you are going on a vacation,

[00:19:10] you're going to get ads for new beach towels or something like that. So I'd say, if you're into

[00:19:15] e-commerce, you're probably all over Instagram already and that's the nut that you're really

[00:19:19] trying to crack. Reddit is a completely different place. They also just went public here.

[00:19:25] There is long form on Reddit. There are people that spend their entire lives moderating

[00:19:31] some of these channels and creating niche culture. So I would say, if you're someone

[00:19:35] that likes to be able to write long form content and really dive into some specific... I'm sure there's

[00:19:44] AI subreddits that are out there, if that's what you're into or

[00:19:49] hardware, computer hardware subreddits, there's so much there to get into. I would say you're

[00:19:54] probably not going to get a bunch of inbound leads out there, but it's a great place to

[00:19:59] research, I would say. And then TikTok... We'll see they could be banning TikTok here in the US.

[00:20:06] They just passed a bill. So that's a little bit of a tougher one, I would say depending if you're

[00:20:13] out there trying to sell software as a B2B leader out there, TikTok might not be the place for

[00:20:20] you, but again probably more e-commerce oriented businesses that are out there trying to have

[00:20:25] that viral moment hiring influencers that have huge audiences to wear a watch that you're selling

[00:20:31] or a hat that you're selling, you'll have a lot of effectiveness there as well.

[00:20:37] Joe Vazzani is the CEO and co-founder of Lunar Crush, a company that provides real-time data

[00:20:43] analytics and insights. He's got a diverse background spanning finance, technology, advertising,

[00:20:47] sales and marketing. He's a seasoned entrepreneur and expert on leveraging data to drive competitive

[00:20:52] advantage. Joe, how can people get in touch if they wanted to learn more?

[00:20:57] You can check us out at LunarCrush.com. My Twitter handle, I still call it Twitter is just

[00:21:03] jovesjevezz, hit me up in the DMs, love to hear from you.

[00:21:08] Joe this has been great thanks for joining me. Thanks Dave.

[00:21:13] The business of tech is written and produced by me, Dave Sobel under ethics guidelines posted

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