Influencer Marketing & Growth @ lempire (Taplio + lemlist) | Exploring how B2B influencers help SaaS companies drive growth

Alex Llull

I've worked with 200+ creators. Only about 10% get rebooked.

Here's what separates them from the rest:

→ They send a recap without being asked

Post links, key metrics, screenshots. All in one message.

Most creators post and disappear. The ones who make it easy for me to report back to my team go to the top of my list.

→ They offer a discount for round two

"Hey, if you want to lock in another collab, I'll do 15% off."

This might seem counterintuitive. But for creators building a business, consistent work beats one-off payments. And brands appreciate your commitment.

→ They reply within 24-48 hours

Many creators ghost after a collab ends. That's one of the fastest ways to get blacklisted.

Be communicative. And if you can't, just say so. That alone builds trust.

→ They pitch before I do

"Want to turn this into a series?" or "I have an idea for a follow-up."

Brands value proactivity. It shows you're invested beyond just the current project.

→ They're honest when things underperform

One creator told me: "Hey, this one flopped. Here's why I think it happened, and here's what I'd do differently."

That message made me want to work with them more, not less.

Most creators don't do any of this. Which is exactly why you should.

Partnerships @ Perspective | Building B2B creator, influencer and partner programs that drive revenue

→ Found a creator on our niche
→ Paid for one sponsored video (flat fee)
→ Offered affiliate commission on top (he didn't ask for it)
→ Video did really well, signups came in
→ A few converted to paid customers
→ He started seeing passive income hit his account

Then, without us reaching out for a new one, he made 3 more videos about Perspective.

On his own, with no ask, brief or second payment from our side.

Why? Two things:

- He loved the tool and thought it was valuable for his audience
- He saw the potential to own this niche before others did (smart creator)

Once I noticed he was doing that, I reached out. Now we're plotting how to 10x his impact together.

Here's the thing most brands get wrong:

They pay a flat fee. Creator posts. Done. Transaction over.

But flat fee only pays for their time. It doesn't keep them around.

That's why we always offer affiliate compensation on top, even when creators don't ask for it.

Yes, the affiliate cuts into margins on video one. But it almost guarantees videos 2, 3, 4 without extra spend.

It's a retention strategy (if you have a good product).

How do you structure your creator deals? 🤝

Get Leads From Your LinkedIn On Autopilot | Founder @ Hat Tip

If you:

→ Make social content
→ Want to make social content
→ Tried making social content but were unsuccessful

… you’re in the right place.

Truth is, publishing content you’re proud of on a consistent basis is tough.

You get busy. Things come up.

And for most founders, content takes a backseat to whatever fire they’re putting out at their company that day.

That said, its 2025.

Content is king — and the benefits for B2B founders are clear:

→ Drive low-cost brand awareness
→ Generate inbound leads from a new lead source
→ Become a “thought leader” in your space (even though you may hate that word)

And after meeting tons of founders while working in influencer marketing, starting Hat Tip felt like a no-brainer.

You can still benefit from publishing high-quality social content — without worrying about blocking out time to write, being inconsistent, or if you’re making content the “right way”.

Hat Tip handles that for you—while maintaining your voice—through:

→ Bi-weekly content interviews
→ Product and industry-specific thought-starters
→ The will to edit and revise until you’re proud of the content being published

If high-quality, consistent social content sounds like something you’re interested in, DM me or visit the link in my profile to book a call.

Thanks 👋

Christian

📧 christian@hattipagency.com
🐤 Twitter @dibratto

Christian Di Bratto

I'm trying to find the best writers who haven't defaulted to one-shotting posts with ChatGPT. Every time I go to one's profile, I find myself subconsciously looking for these things:

(1) Are they posting their own content?

This doesn't matter as much for other verticals, but being that I'm hiring for writers in B2B social, I want to see what I'm working with. Accounts actively posting automatically "win points" with me.

(1a) If posting, is the content good?

Like it or not, the work displayed on a writer's account often dictates how they're perceived. 

- Is the content well-written, or clearly a ChatGPT export? 
- How well are thoughts formulated?
- How does the writing sound, look, and feel?

(2) Personality.

I want to intentionally curate a culture of people who love working together. As such, I find myself gravitating to people who show a bit of their personality, both in their writing and on their profile (I actually think I am guilty of not doing this as well as I should).

(3) Constant job hopping.

I totally get that everyone has to look out for themselves, but I do hesitate to favor candidates who are in a new job every six to eight months based off their LinkedIn profile.

For what it's worth, I'm sure there are hiring managers and founders that disagree with me on all points, but these are what I've noted about how I subconsciously screen in my own search. 

Figured it might be valuable to writers looking for work.

Founder @ Hat Tip. Founder Brand for startups.

I've gone down the AI rabbit hole and cannot come out. 4 non-writing AI use cases founders/marketers should use to generate pipeline from social (no coding required):

1. Scraping all of your past posts and feeding the dataset to Opus 4.6 for analysis on what themes, topics, hook formats, and media choices correlate with better performance (comment if you want the master prompt).

2. Scraping your 3-5 closest competitors' posts to draw conclusions on what lands and doesn't land with decision-makers in your space (comment if you want the master prompt here, too).

3. Gathering ICP likers/commenters from your post automatically.

4. Automatically aggregating most recent industry news for commentary-style posts (we used this to crack 100k impressions for 2 different clients this week).

Comment if you want a video breaking down each of these if you're interested. There's no excuse not to be running each of these - none of it costs more than $20/mo and there's massive upside here (source: we do this for all clients now).

Head of Marketing: We finally got our CEO to start posting on LinkedIn. It's a disaster.

Me: What happened?

Head of Marketing: The content isn't working. We've been at it for 3 weeks and nothing's happening.

Me: Alright. Walk me through the process. How much time is your CEO spending on content review each week?

Head of Marketing: Maybe 15 minutes total? He's super busy.

Me: Got it. And when you send him draft posts, what's he approving versus rejecting?

Head of Marketing: Well...he rejects anything that might be even slightly controversial. Like, we had a great post about how most founders waste money on branding too early. He killed it.

Me: What did he say?

Head of Marketing: That he didn't want to offend anyone in our network.

Me: So what's he approving?

Head of Marketing: Generic stuff - tips on productivity, leadership lessons, safe content.

Me: When did he start asking where the results are?

Head of Marketing: Last week.

Me: Two weeks in.

Head of Marketing: Yeah.

Me: Let me guess. He's wondering why there are no demo requests yet.

Head of Marketing: Exactly. He keeps asking if LinkedIn actually works.

Me: So your CEO won't post anything with an actual opinion, allocates 15 minutes a week to review, and expected pipeline in 14 days.

Head of Marketing: When you say it like that...

Me: The problem isn't that you convinced your CEO to post. The problem is nobody convinced him to actually commit to it.

Head of Marketing: What do you mean?

Me: Building pipeline from LinkedIn takes time. Budget for 3 months - and that's if you're posting strong content consistently.

Head of Marketing: So what do we do?

Me: Have a different conversation with him. Either he commits 30 minutes a week for review, approves posts with a real point of view, and sets realistic timeline expectations, or you shut it down until he's ready.

Head of Marketing: He's not going to like that.

Me: He doesn't like the current situation either.

LIVE NOW: 12-hour live stream making Clay in the middle of the street in Austin.

Available on Aidan Brannigan’s profile, presented by Clay.

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TechCrunch: 3M followers, less than 10 likes/post.
Forbes: 18M followers, less than 100 likes/post.
Microsoft: 28M followers, less than 100 likes/post.

(Btw, Microsoft owns this platform).

People just don't resonate with brand accounts anymore. There's no reason to follow or favor them, and these pages' stats are the best indicator of that.

On the other hand, Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft) has less than half the following of Microsoft's brand page, but (literally) gets 100x the engagement (sometimes more).

It's clear where the puck is going, and smart companies have already leaned in.

They're not totally ditching brand account, CNBC appearances, and traditional PR, but they're supporting those channels with thought leadership from founder/exec social channels.

Through this, they're able to tell their company's story in a much more personal way that actually resonates (while being in full control of the narrative they present!).

For your reference, here are a few CEOs/execs executing on this well and consistently:

Ryan Petersen, CEO at Flexport
Harley Finkelstein, President at Shopify
Peep Laja, CEO at Wynter

These people were early. Hell, we're still early. But time is ticking, and CEOs who start building their presences now will undoubtedly have a leg up on competition when they start.

- Signed, an agency owner whose entire life is building these presences for CEOs.

I sat on my couch and told myself I couldn't get up until I built a working tool. 2 hours later, I solved a massive content headache for my agency.

For context, we often clip our clients' podcast appearances at Hat Tip. Before, we'd to download 1-2hour-long .mp4s, cut the 1-minute clip from it, then delete the file. Not anymore.

Partially out of curiosity and frustration from past failed attempts, I wanted to prove to myself that I could build something useful (imagine the least technical person you know - that's me).

This felt like a problem ripe to be solved with an internal tool.

I wanted to be able to:

1. Feed it a YouTube URL.

2. Let me clip what I want without downloading the whole file.

3. Download only my clipped version.

My stubbornness paid off. With ChatGPT on the left side of my screen telling me what to do, and Codex on the right actually doing it, I built a tool that solved the problem.

I'm also ~90% sure deploying publicly is against YouTube ToS, but comment if you want the tool anyway and I can figure out how to deploy.

(video recorded a couple of weeks ago - I believe there have been two model updates since then)

PS - will be in Austin for the next few days…let me know if you’re around.

Watch me build an AI agent that Slack's me a Sheet of everyone who commented on my LinkedIn posts this week (in 8 minutes):

Below, I build an agent that, every week:

- Searches my posts from the week
- Finds all comments not left by me
- Grabs all the commenter's info
- Sorts it into a Google Sheet
- Slacks me the finished product

...and does it without logging into my account.

CONTEXT

Last weekend, I went down an AI agent rabbit hole and ended up here. By "rabbit hole" I mean binging Jacob Bank and Relay.app's YouTube channel.

I am by no means an expert, but know people who follow me will find this valuable.

WHY:

Everyone's obsessed with outbound signals. LinkedIn engagement (comments/likes) is among the best, but figuring it out manually sucks.

This solves that problem.

Below, I build the entire thing in 8 minutes. If you want me to set this up for you, comment or DM me.

I was extremely close to not posting this.

I compiled over 100 of my favorite LinkedIn hooks from my swipe file, and templatized them. Then I got my graphics guy to make them look pretty in a carousel.

And the hooks are great - there's a reason they're in my swipe file.

But I do want to caution: Using any 1 of these 101 LinkedIn hooks is not going to be the reason you build the presence you want, generate millions in pipeline, or anything else.

You'll get that from:

1. Committing to building your social presence for 3-months minimum.

2. Not treating social like an afterthought.

3. Play the game the way it's intended: Without automating anything away, outsourcing writing to an LLM with no oversight, or anything else like that.

With all of that said, enjoy the hooks.

Linkedin Hooks

If I were in charge of generating pipeline for Vanta's founder brand starting from 0, here's exactly what I'd do by end of Q1:

(FWIW - an agency is not exactly required here. Sarah (Kollmorgen) Cottone or Jessica Munday could run this internally if needed):

1. Pick LinkedIn as the platform. Master one channel before expanding. Commit to 5 posts per week (3 minimum if handling yourself).

2. Assign Christina Cacioppo as the SME. Assumption: she's busy and can't allocate 10+ hours weekly. We'll build a system requiring less than 1 hour per week (45-min bi-weekly interview + 15-min weekly review).

3. Send Christina an onboarding form covering company understanding, messaging, ICP definition, content preferences, POV definition, and success criteria.

4. Define the POV. Clarify who Vanta counter-positions against, how the product differs specifically, and what makes Christina unique as a founder.

5. Research Vanta's competitors making founder-led content. Identify what's working, what's failing, and where the white space exists.

6. Map content buckets to each funnel stage:

TOF: Building Vanta stories, culture/team-building, general founder takes
MOF: Compliance education, competitive advantage angles, pro tips, horror stories, step-by-step processes
BOF: Customer stories, FAQ answers, objection handling, product updates

7. Write 10-12 content prompts mapping to these buckets (4-5 TOF, 4-5 MOF, 2-3 BOF) for the first interview. I have 400+ of these in a database if you want them.

8. Record the bi-weekly call on Riverside. Ask prompts like a podcast conversation. Let Christina elaborate naturally.

9. Draft 5 posts weekly from the transcript, linking exact timestamps for transparency. Pair each post with high-converting media based on internal data.

10. Share posts via Notion calendar. Christina reviews for 15 minutes. Log all feedback to reduce future edits.

11, Post approved content and reply to early comments to maintain engagement momentum.

12. Pull 1,000 ICP decision-makers using Sales Navigator (CISOs, VPs of Security, CTOs at Series A/B companies). Manually connect with 100 weekly. Once they accept, Christina's content starts appearing in their feed.

13. Weekly, pull ICP profile viewers from Sales Navigator. Share this "warm" list with Vanta's sales team for targeted outreach.

14. Report every Monday via Slack: impressions (WoW), followers (WoW), profile visits (WoW), saves (WoW), best post link, tracking sheet link.

15. Repeat the cycle, optimizing for winning topics, angles, formats, and media choices each iteration.

Coinbase's marketing is way more founder-led than they get credit for. Recently, though, this got them in some hot water.

The company's X account posted Brian Armstrong explaining their earnings, split-screened with Subway Surfers gameplay (retention hack from the short-form video world).

People hated it.

There was tons of negative commentary around how "unprofessional" this was, and how this is terrible for building trust.

All I saw was a Coinbase marketing team that "gets it", a founder willing to play along, and 3,000,000 views as their reward.

I'd estimate the raw earnings call video without the brainrot overlay would get less than 1% of this viewership.

Credit to all involved.

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The Battle

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