The Case for Influencer Marketing in B2B with Brianna Doe (Founder at Verbatim)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by agentic AI. I want to be the person on my team who actually knows how to build with AI, not just talk about it, not just use Claude to ask silly questions, but I want real output, something I can point to and say, I built that and it saved my team hours every week. If you want to be that person, check out this resource. My team at Optimizely is super smart in this area. They've developed a new AI marketing certification called Opal U. It's a five day live course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI. This is a structured hands-on program with just one hour a day for five days where you'll build three real AI agents that saves 10 hours a week. Plus, you're gonna learn five prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output, how to feed your agents the right context for how they write and think like you, how to connect them to real data sources so they're pulling from what actually matters to your business. And you'll do all of this alongside 50 other senior marketing leaders just like you dealing with the same challenges. And at the end, you'll present what you built, get feedback, see what others created, and leave with 10 new ideas for what to build next. Plus, 20% of Opal U graduates have gotten a promotion or a new job after completing this. That's pretty cool. So now's the time, check it out. Opal U kicks off every Monday. You can apply right now, optimizely.com/exitfive.
Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones in your site, clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. And they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Cloud and ChatGBT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and Vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to vector.co to learn more. That's vector.co.
And if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them Exit Five, please. See ya. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
Hey, it's Dave, quick note on this one. This is a conversation with Brianna Doe. She was a super popular speaker at Drive 2025, and she's returning this year for Drive 2026 with more where that came from. So we're gonna run this episode back. Brianna is the founder of Verbatim, an award-winning influencer marketing agency, and she spent 15 years helping B2B brands figure out how to actually make influencer marketing work. Her session gets into why most companies treat influencer marketing like a vending machine, put money in and expect to get leads out, and that's exactly why it fails. She also covers how to structure a 90-day pilot without blowing your budget, why follower count is mostly a distraction, and how to get leadership bought in before the campaign launches, not after it flops. If your influencer marketing strategy isn't built around a place where trust already exists with your buyers, you're probably just shouting into the void. I know a lot of you are focused on influencer marketing right now, and Brianna's great at talking about it, so enjoy this session.
All right. I love this theme. A lot of stuff about social media. We talked a lot about there isn't social media and marketing anymore. Social media is the way to do marketing. The thing that Harry mentioned about what Ramp is doing when I asked him about posting that, I think that's the way that companies need to operate today, is let's post something organically on social, see what works, and then we can decide to spend and do more of that.