Turning Creators into Revenue Drivers with Fiona Turko

Fiona Turko (00:00):

I think the flashiness of the faceless accounts, the AI avatars, all of that fake stuff is people see it and are already tired of it, and I think the thing that I always come back to is as humans, we want to connect with other humans, especially in this digital age, is actually becoming more important to connect with other humans in a deeper level.

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Tyler Calder (00:29):

Hello everybody. In this episode of Get It Together, I sat down with Fiona Turko, who is currently the creator partnership lead at Gamma. Previously, she held down roles agency side. She has led influencer programs at companies like Jobber and Zapier and we go really deep into all things creator, influencer ambassadors, how to measure it, how to talk to your exec team about it, how do you get great results out of it when some companies are struggling to figure it out, she's come to the table with a pretty interesting playbook, take a listen. I think you'll learn a lot. Welcome everybody to another episode of Get It Together. Today I am with Fiona Turko and I am super excited to have this conversation because we have yet to have a conversation with anybody on all things influencer creator and Fiona's background is just that starting agency side and then moving into owning and running influencer and creator programs with the likes of Jobber, Zapier. And now Gamma, welcome. Thanks for joining.

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Fiona Turko (01:41):

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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Tyler Calder (01:43):

For sure. So I'd love to dive right in and I always like to understand people's journey a little bit. Let's talk about your start agency side. That's something we share in common, starting agency side and then making the shift. What did that look like for you?

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Fiona Turko (01:57):

Yeah, I think I did agency for a couple years and I was like, I think I'm aging out of this. This is not sustainable. No, it was really fun. I always tell people kind of new in their career or folks who are in school just work at an agency for a year. It's the fastest way to figure out what you like, what you don't like and also make the most amazing network. I went into startups, which is kind of funny, but went into startups and then went into tech, which I went to school for fashion and for business. So it was kind of a weird journey that I had, but I always have a really good gut feeling when I'm interviewing somewhere or looking at a new company. And so I just trust my gut feeling and it hasn't let me down so far.

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Tyler Calder (02:41):

Oh, I like that. Let's maybe dig into that a little bit. I know that's certainly something that comes up in a lot of conversations I have. How do you tell, is this a company I should take a leap with? Is it not, what is it that you're listening to when your gut says either yay or nay to a potential opportunity?

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Fiona Turko (03:01):

I think, yeah, it's about how they treat their team. What is the product, what is their goal, what are they trying to be, who are they inspired by? And usually that's enough to tell me, okay, is this going to be a good fit for me? Does it align with my personal values? Is it going to challenge me too? Is this the same thing I've always been doing or this is an exciting new thing that I could try and even I fail? It's totally fine. But yeah, I usually get a really good gut feeling from that first recruiter call or LinkedIn DM if it's going to be a good fit. And I dunno, I've just been lucky. I feel like it's worked out for me.

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Tyler Calder (03:39):

Cool. Awesome. So what led directly into influencer programs, creator programs? Let's talk about that journey a little bit. Obviously a very emergent space B2C and B2B. What drove you there?

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Fiona Turko (03:54):

Yeah, I worked at a startup in Toronto actually. It was a jewelry company. Our biggest competitor at the time was mad. We were actually bigger than Mejuri, which is kind of funny now because they're huge. But we used to give product to people in the community, true influencers, and they would go out and wear the jewelry and then we would always be amazed at how many people came in from seeing something on someone. And that was like before Instagram was monetized, we were just uploading pictures to the grid. There was no Instagram stories and that was kind of my first taste of how powerful true influencer can be somebody who's a real brand advocate for you. And then yeah, it just kind of all happened from there. And then I went into startups that were doing it with consumer packaged brands and then into tech. So very different from where I started, but the same idea of how do you work with your biggest brand advocates and give them the tools to talk about you. So that's not coming from the brand, it's coming from people who have a community who have connections because people always want recommendations for everything. And so that's the best way I think to market yourself

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Tyler Calder (05:04):

A lot of shifts agency to in-house B2C to B2B. One of the probably obvious questions. What have you noticed in terms of B2C versus B2B when it comes to influencer creator programs? Similarities, differences?

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Fiona Turko (05:20):

I think when I was in B2C, definitely leaner budgets just didn't move as fast tech just now just moves so fast and the risk tolerance, people want to take risks in tech. It's the only way to stand out and cut through the noise. I dunno, maybe that's a unique experience for me with the brands that I've been at, but I find that tech, yeah, things are just one week is a month, anywhere else's, just so much happening. Whereas before I'm like, oh yeah, it was slower pace, pretty chill. We did some cool campaigns, but no, when you're in tech, you're juggling multiple campaigns, hundreds or thousands of creators usually globally too, especially like Gamma. We're a global brand, so we're working with people in all different time zones. It's just very different from working for a consumer brand or jewelry brand or anything like that.

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Tyler Calder (06:14):

Interesting. Yeah, I never really thought of it that way, but I can totally see that. That's interesting. That's cool. Before we dive into I think the meat of what I want to talk about, which is what does this look like as a playbook? Maybe tell folks a little bit about Gamma. I know a lot of folks are familiar, but for those that maybe aren't.

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Fiona Turko (06:35):

Yeah, gamma is an AI presentation tool. So if you're used to Google Slides or PowerPoint, we are the disruptor. So if you're somebody like me who started an agency land where you're responsible for making decks all day with pretty minimal support from the creative team, I don't want to call them out, but that's how it is. They're all busy. Gamma is the solution to unlock, to get all that time back where you can put in a super simple prompt. You can copy and paste whatever you need to go in there and it basically makes the deck for you. And then you have all the control. You can go back and edit, you can change the themes, you can remove things. It's so flexible, but also if you're a visual learner, it's amazing because you're not basically building a presentation as you're thinking through it. If you use Google Slides or PowerPoint, it really is your best friend when you're building a presentation. And that can be for anything, sales, collateral, marketing, creative pitches, brand pitches if you're a creator, pitching your brand to a bigger brand if you want to do a sponsorship. There's so many really cool use cases for Gamma. And yeah, just also very interesting brand if you've seen any of our branding.

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Tyler Calder (07:44):

Yeah, no, I think it's awesome. I think people should definitely check it out where, I actually don't know if I'm allowed to say this, I don't know if it's improved internally, but our marketing team's a heavy user, so I'll just throw that out there. Yeah, hopefully our CTO isn't listening if he hasn't approved yet. Hilarious. So I'd love to dive into this idea of what this all looks like as a playbook. Maybe let's start just getting a shared kind of understanding of language. So when you think of creator versus influencer versus ambassador, are they different? Are they the same? Are there nuances? How do you just think about that language?

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Fiona Turko (08:25):

Okay, I know it's different for every person that works in this industry. Probably it's probably different company to company too, how you classify those things, but for me, so influencer is somebody who might work with tons of different brands. They might actually have a nine to five, maybe they're just doing content creation on the side, whereas a content creator in my mind is somebody who's a full-time content creator. They are making videos, they are editing, they might have a team that works with them, it's their full-time gig and they take it very seriously. And then ambassadors, it's probably a pretty broad term, but to me an ambassador is somebody who's already a heavy user of your product who's already talking about you organically. So all you have to do is formalize the partnership in writing and give them better tools to talk about you. And oftentimes those ambassadors are your biggest advocates.

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(09:21):

Those are the people that you're going to be working with for years and inviting to events, but influencers can become creators, can become ambassadors, can become all of those. I think it's really smart to tear out your programs and kind of nurture those high value partners and kind of graduate them into the next tier and keep your high value partners really close to your brand. But yeah, there are definitely differences between the three and also there's a lot of creators who have talent managers now who do a lot of the negotiating for them. Then there's others that just don't have managers at all and the brand just works directly with them, which I think is always preferred. Right.

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Tyler Calder (10:01):

Cool. So right now at Gamma, are you tiering them using that language or are you using different language yet? How do you do it today? Not yet.

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Fiona Turko (10:10):

Yeah, we have more of an influencer program I would say where we work with a handful of different agencies from all around the world that help us run basically like an always on kind of influencer program. Something that I would love to do here is create an ambassador program or whatever we decide to call it, where it's a handful of really high value partners who are super invested in Gamma already using it, deeply understand it, their audience is already warm to it, their audience is very much aligned with our ICP. So I think that's kind of the natural direction of where our program can go. We have volume, we have reach, but I'd love to do something super special for the folks that are just very invested in us always talking about us, including us in organic content. Again, our biggest brand fans, I think they definitely need their own category and there's definitely partners that we have longer term partnerships with versus we might work with a handful of creators month to month on content. There's another group of creators that we tap on more often for content because again, they can show Gamma so easily trust them to represent the brand.

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Tyler Calder (11:17):

Maybe a silly question around language. You use the word partners a couple times there. Do you consider these all types of partners? Is partner an umbrella term? Does it have its own unique meaning?

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Fiona Turko (11:31):

I think I use partner because when I was at Jobber we said brand partners a lot. We didn't want to ever say influencer, it just didn't feel right. These were very blue collar tradespeople who were influencers on the side. So yeah, we would always just say brand partners because brand partners can be inclusive of endorser, people who are endorsements, celebrities, ambassadors, influencers, UGC content creators, so I always just think they're a partner of the brand, so I often will say brand partners or just partners.

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Tyler Calder (12:01):

Nice. Awesome. I like that. Where in the org do you sit? You sit in marketing, do you sit in partnerships? Do you sit somewhere else?

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Fiona Turko (12:08):

Yes, marketing, which is great. Yeah, we're still pretty small. I'm sure it could change, it could evolve over time, like most startups. Yeah, no marketing, which is great. We have a really robust marketing team here, which is amazing. And yeah, I think it was the same at Zapier marketing community and also the first team I was on there was paid marketing, which was really interesting to be separate from community.

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Tyler Calder (12:33):

Oh, cool. Nice. Let's talk a little bit about recruitment because again, that's one of the things that seemingly pops up all the time across all partner types is just recruitment. How do you think about identifying the right types of influencers, creators, ambassadors, whatever language you want to use, but what does that process look like for you historically? Kind of recruitment and vetting.

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Fiona Turko (13:01):

Quite manual. Yeah, there is no one tool for B2B that can go through everyone's profiles, look for those red flags, those markers that you set out, review engagement, comment sentiment, audience quality. There is just no platform that's built for B2B companies that do that for beauty brands, for fashion brands, I'm sure it's a lot easier. They often just want volume, so honestly a lot of it's manual going through their socials, looking at the comments, are they responding, are they engaging? What types of comments are they getting? Looking to see who they follow and who follows them. It's actually quite time consuming. It has gotten better because there's more agencies now that can support with that, like creator, match, passion, fruit, there's just so many out there that can support and act as an extension of your team so they have a deep understanding of who you ultimately want to reach.

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(13:56):

They can help that creators with you, but honestly, it's still quite manual, so I always try to jump on a call with them too. If I've gone through all their socials, I've looked at the comments, I'm looking at the content quality and style, the best thing to do is always just jump on a 20, 30 minute call just directly with them, chat with them and just get a deeper understanding of how much they know about your brand, how much do they know about their own audience, what type of content do they like making and help build that relationship is one of the best things that you can do when you're going through that full vetting process.

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Tyler Calder (14:29):

How do you think about maybe what I would call outbound versus inbound? Everything that you just said to me sounds like outbound, right? You're proactively out there identifying folks, reaching out, booking calls. What about inbound? Would you expect that to be part of your motion? Is it mostly outbound? What have you seen that look like?

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Fiona Turko (14:50):

It's a real mix. So for Gamma, a lot of it is inbound, so a lot of what we're sorting through is how good does this look? While also balancing there's this list of creators that we really want to work with. How do we build relationships with those folks? When do we find the perfect campaign for them throughout the year to partner with them? And then we have this always on content engine where they're more of an influencer. We can work with them anytime for content, but it's figuring out where does that person fit in what you're already doing. I think a good example of that was when I was at Jobber, we worked with a bigger YouTube creator and that was very separate from influencers that we were doing all the time and very much a one-off and we basically nurtured that whole relationship, went to his agency, pitched the idea, sold it up to exec, and it was just a really unique experience. But I think it's always a balance between inbound and outbound and often a lot of times realizing that inbound is like 80, 90% of it is probably not a good fit for your brand and knowing when to pick out when is it a good fit, when is it worth it to like, okay, I'm going to jump on this call with this person or this talent manager to figure out if it's actually a really good fit for both parties.

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Tyler Calder (16:11):

Cool. You talked about how manual the outbound aspect of it is, and you mentioned no necessarily real end-to-end tools to support. Are you using anything else though to help you identify enrich data or is it truly like you are just hitting the channels, seeing who's talking about in this case maybe gamma vetting outside looking in and then reaching out?

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Fiona Turko (16:36):

Well, at Gamma we would definitely work with a handful of agencies that have their own setup for reviewing performance and all of that. I would say though, when I was at Jobber, it was much more manual. We did use a couple different tools, but nothing ever really stuck because we were so B2B focused at that time. There was just no tool really that was perfect. So we'd be using partner stack over here, aspire over here, and just bringing it all together month end or quarterly for our reporting. And so yeah, it's really interesting to see how the space is changing, but I would say for b2b, there's still not that one perfect tool that brings it all together, social top of funnel, all the way to bottom of funnel conversions that we can just look at as one source of truth.

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Tyler Calder (17:20):

One of the other big questions that we oftentimes get when it comes to influencers, creators, these types of brand partners is compensation and how to think about it. What are the various models? Is there a difference between just getting started versus really scaling out? What have you seen in the past? What have you looked at framework wise to help make some of those calls?

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Fiona Turko (17:46):

I think if you're just starting out, keep it as simple as so a flat fee and figure out some kind of flat fee structure. It also depends on is your org more focused on bottom of funnel conversions you want to incentivize for people who come in through your creators to become a paid signup or are you just trying to make noise and create that surround sound effect and you don't care so much about bottom of funnel? Every company cares about bottom of funnel, so I think in most cases, having a flat fee structure with some kind of commission incentive, you're always going to find those creators who are super competitive that see the commission as this amazing thing that they want to hit every month and they want to get as many referrals in as possible. And then you can also do things like seasonal incentives, like double your bonus if you hit X, Y, Z or double your base pay if you do this. I've seen that work really well. So there's all different ways to approach it, but it's trying to figure out what makes the most sense for your product, who are the types of folks you're already working with, and also talk to them how do they want to be paid, what type of compensation do they value? And taking their feedback to heart I think is really important, versus just rolling something out and thinking it's going to work. They should be an active part of that conversation as much as possible.

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Tyler Calder (19:09):

Cool. So hybrid it sounds like is where you've seen the most success, the flat fee plus performance.

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Fiona Turko (19:17):

Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (19:19):

Cool. What about the balance between something that you had mentioned earlier, which is always on versus campaign based? How do you think about that?

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Fiona Turko (19:28):

Oh, always on should always be on. There's many different reasons for that. When you're doing a big campaign, let's say you have an H one, you have this big 10 pole moment, you have this big tent pole moment, you need to have a roster of people that you can tap on for those big moments that you know of like, okay, we have eight months of historical data to say these five partners are our top performers. If we put them into this campaign with X budget, we're going to be able to hit our targets. If you don't have an always on program, you have no historical data to pull that from and you're just working with cold partners who maybe don't understand your brand, you just have no relationships. You're just starting from ground zero. So having an always on program, always adding new people to it, removing any low performers or folks who just aren't good fits, optimizing that, it just makes your life a million times easier when you have a big cross-functional campaign to plan and marketing comes to you a couple weeks before it launches and says, Hey, we need influencers.

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(20:31):

And you're like, great. Okay, I have this perfect group of five, 10, a hundred people that I think would be really great. Let's collaborate on what this would actually look like. You do not want to be starting from zero when you get those requests to execute an influencer campaign in a couple of weeks and you have no warm relationships or any data to base your recommendation on.

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Tyler Calder (20:52):

Oh, I love that. I've never heard anybody articulate it that way. The importance of always on being the data component of it, really understanding what's working, what's not working.

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Fiona Turko (21:04):

Yeah,

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Tyler Calder (21:05):

That lands really well.

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Fiona Turko (21:06):

Very helpful.

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Tyler Calder (21:08):

I like that. One of the things you said, I'm always curious, how do you fire a partner? How do you talk to somebody who maybe isn't performing where you want them to and politely ask them to exit the program?

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Fiona Turko (21:23):

I think it's like he said, it's a conversation. Meet with your partners as much as you possibly can. Jump on a 20 minute coffee chat once a month, bimonthly once a quarter, whatever, if they're in Australia, and that means the middle of your night still have that call. Nurturing those relationships is so important and it also gives you a chance to be like, oh, hey, I saw that post went viral last month, or, oh, hey, that post due as well. What do you think happened? And keeping it as a constant conversation where they're a part of it so that there are no surprises, good or bad is really important. And yeah, you definitely don't want to ever have that type of conversation with somebody and have it be a complete shocker out of nowhere for them. So yeah, having a regular call with them, phone calls, zoom, whatever, texting I text.

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(22:10):

A lot of the creators I've worked with is very casual. WhatsApp and just keeping that relationship very open and transparent, just pays dividends and just makes your life as an influencer manager so much easier when you have to have those more difficult conversations. And also it gives them a moment to be like, Hey, I'm off, or Hey, I'm going through this personal thing. I don't think I can be in the program right now. Can we pause for a couple months? Versus you just coming at them being like, we're not working together anymore. They're real people that could be going through something and just give them the benefit of the doubt and always give them a second chance too, I think, to prove to you and the brand that it's a good fit. But yeah, I've definitely had to have those uncomfortable conversations in the past and it's not fun.

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Tyler Calder (22:54):

Kind of sounds like having a team of a few thousand people at any

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Fiona Turko (22:57):

Given time and having to break up with them sometimes.

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Tyler Calder (23:01):

So that's sort of the compensation piece and then derail a little bit into having tough conversations, measuring success. So how do you do that? I mean, we just talked about potentially having to identify low performers and having tough conversations. What are you typically looking at? What is that based on?

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Fiona Turko (23:19):

It depends definitely on the org that you're at. Like I mentioned before, some orgs are very bottom of funnel. Some just want to create noise because a super competitive market or niche that they're in, but I would prefer to look at everything as a full funnel. So you're looking at social content, performance and trends that you can find there month to month, what content performs best, what videos go viral, what's a great hook that worked really well for the majority of your creators all the way down to bottom of funnel conversions. That's where Partners stack comes in. I want to see link clicks. I want to see people signing up. I want to see people converting, especially if there's a piece of content that went viral, I want to see that connection that they have a qualified audience that's actually interested in trying this tool or this product.

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(24:05):

Were they able to bring them in and get them signed up that tells the full picture story versus just looking at one or the other? Again, there's all different kinds of tools that can help you with that, but that's something that I tried to really focus on when I was at Zapier was setting up performance metrics and how do you tell that story? How do you convince leadership that this is a worthwhile channel to keep investing in people who are so numbers focused? How do they grasp, okay, this is amazing viral video, this is important. Here's why we should keep investing. Here's why we should do more content with this person. Having all of that data to go back on really helps build a case of further investment in your program, taking bigger bets or bigger risks or doing unique types of campaigns, especially when you're in tech and it's so competitive and things move so fast, it's very important to have all of that data and understand it deeply so that you can tell that story up.

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Tyler Calder (24:59):

How do you have that conversation so somebody asks, Hey, how are things going? I hear everybody talking about this viral video. How much pipeline, how much revenue did we close? What does that conversation look like, sound like? Do you steer it away from, well, it's not, not at the pipeline revenue stage, here's how we're thinking about it, here's why it's important. What does that conversation look like to somebody who just kind of cares about dollars and cents? What did this deliver?

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Fiona Turko (25:31):

Yeah, it definitely was like that at Jobber where we were very much like a sales led organization and influencers paid a big part of that, of bringing in qualified leads for our sales team to nurture. So if a video did really pop off, it was you'd see a spike, which was always great, but I think it's more about telling that full story. So anytime you're getting in front of exec or you're presenting, it's really important to look at the whole program holistically in terms of brand awareness where you're creating that moat around your brand, and if you're working with the top 200 creators in your niche and you're nurturing those partnerships, your competitors can't come and take those from you. If those partners are equally invested in your brand as you are them, it makes it very difficult for your competitor to come and say, Hey, I'm going to offer you X, Y, Z, and that happens all the time. Influencers would come to me and say, Hey, your competitor over here offered me triple the amount, but I'm not going, I'm loyal to you. Those are things that you just can't quantify, so it's very important to tell that full story when you're chatting with exact, when you're making a big pitch and kind of reframe it for them beyond just the solid numbers of pipeline and sales and things like

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Tyler Calder (26:45):

That. What you just said I find interesting. So partners sticking and staying loyal, why do they,

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Fiona Turko (26:53):

So many reasons. I think honestly, jobber is a great example of a super scrappy program that when I was there, it was just the three of us. We each had our own roster of partners that we were responsible for, so I was the face of jobber for my 50 creators that I worked with, and that roster would change ever so often, but it was pretty locked in, and so I was always nurturing that relationship with them, sending them gift baskets if they were sick. There's so many different ways to build loyalty, brand trips, paying them fairly, things like commission and also doing surveys, ask for their feedback regularly, give them great merch, give them great experiences, give them opportunities to meet each other and connect and connect in real life and yeah, it's actually amazing how many brands don't get that piece and then they have partners that maybe aren't super loyal.

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Tyler Calder (27:47):

I love the gift basket example. Did you at Jobber or anyone else or anywhere else was that, I guess I'll say operationalize in any way and it was,

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Fiona Turko (28:01):

Yeah, it wasn't at first, but once you get to a hundred partners, basically when you're onboarding them, you're asking them, when is your birthday? What size t-shirt do you take? What is your address? Just so that you have that ready for a birthday, but because you're chatting with them so regularly, if their partner's expecting you can get a rough date, text you, my partner, had the baby send a gift basket, or if they miss their post that month because they're sick, send them a basket. A handwritten note also goes so far. But yeah, any details you can gather in that onboarding process to simplify and have a great swag vendor or swag store that can help you with that. Even if somebody's sick, like sending an Uber Eats gift card so that they can order food, it goes a long way and just obviously it feels so personal. How many people get that from a brand? It's just, again, it's so rare. It is those super low cost, low lift things that actually make a big difference because they're much more thoughtful.

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Tyler Calder (28:59):

And so did you have a separate budget for this?

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Fiona Turko (29:05):

Yes, typically, yeah, we'd have a swag budget for a gifting budget. It could be if you're sending holiday gifts or surprise and delights at Jobber, we would also send, every summer we'd do a summer basket, so it'd have different theme one year it'd be grilling, another year it'd be camping, and we'd send them jobber brand, really high quality swag, and then it just also turns into organic content it turns into see, and so yeah, you're just always finding ways to surprise and delight and figure out how to make it easy for your team, especially if you have a lot of partners.

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Tyler Calder (29:37):

Awesome. I love that. I'm going to shift away from this in a second, but you mentioned all of the tracking and there's tools that can help you with that. Any tools that you're comfortable talking about sharing that have been really helpful?

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Fiona Turko (29:56):

Yeah, when I was at Zapier, we used something called Creator iq, which is pretty similar to Aspire, but it was very good at, if you're only sole person running a program like this where you have so many partners, all of the projects you do are cross-functional, having something like that that can pull together reports very quickly of all you're doing is uploading the link and it's populating all of the metrics for you, it's doing all the reporting with you, you can edit it and you basically share out a pediatric dashboard at the end of the campaign or the end of the month. That is very helpful because if you're having to build that all from scratch, nobody wants to spend their time doing that. Maybe some people do, but I don't. So anything that helps me streamline that process and I can help craft what the story is, I can record a Loom video going over the reporting. That's my preference, but also just keep it very simple. Try to have one source of truth that you go back to that has all of your data and just find the one that works for you and do all the demos. So many out there, and again, a lot of 'em are just not built for tech companies or B2B companies, so a lot of trial and error.

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Tyler Calder (31:03):

Alright. Let's talk a little bit about, let's call it enablement and onboarding. So you've figured out what potential partners look like a good fit. You've figured out this hybrid comp model, you got a pretty good operation in place to measure it. That creator starts with you, influencer starts with you. What does that onboarding look like? How do you make sure that they're prepped ready, they understand the brand, all that?

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Fiona Turko (31:33):

Yeah, something that we would do at Jobber that I think is so helpful was an onboarding brief, a three page PDF overview of our program, overview of what we're about. You could even send that to potential creators, but we would typically send it during onboarding just to give them information, but I find anytime you can send just a one page brief bullet points, super easy to scan, very digestible for that first month, the content that they should be focused on and don'ts, where their custom link is coming from, how partner stack works, all of that, the more simplified it is and one doc, it just makes your life so much easier and anytime we would try to complicate it or add new things in, it would just fall apart. These are people who have jobs usually outside of content creation, they have families, they have lives.

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(32:23):

The more simple you can make it for them for their onboarding, so it just feels so seamless to their first video, the better and the faster you can make that too. Something that we always talked about at Jobber was like, how do we make this more efficient? How do we optimize this? How do we optimize the onboarding so that instead of it taking three weeks from initial call to first post, it's actually a week and a half or two weeks so that we can speed up the entire program and then therefore onboard more people and have a higher quantity of content going out each month. And so we would use a song,

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Tyler Calder (32:54):

Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but is that a metric that you are tracking regularly, like time to first, whatever it might be. First post, first video, first thing that they put out there.

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Fiona Turko (33:06):

I don't think we're tracking it the same way that we're tracking other metrics, but it's something that I always think about is you want to keep the relationship warm. It's always this excitement when you sign on with a new creator. It's like how do you keep that excitement going through the contracting process, the brief process, and keep them really excited leading up to their first video? It could be a couple of weeks, it could be months. There was one contract I did that took six months with back and forth with legal teams, and so you start to lose that excitement as you build into the partnership. And so yeah, I'm always trying to think about how do we expedite this whole process? How do we make it easier for them and also easier for our own team internally and really just ride that wave of excitement of signing a new creator to that first video. It really makes a difference in the performance too. I've noticed the faster you can do it and give them a really good onboarding, that first video is just much higher quality. They just genuinely sound much more excited.

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Tyler Calder (33:58):

Oh, interesting. When you get into things like video creation, how much back and forth is there typically in terms of asking for revisions and all of that fun stuff that comes with creative?

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Fiona Turko (34:11):

It's very different for each person. It's very different for each platform. I will say though, having an outline or brief of how they envision the video to go is very helpful. There's definitely some craters that will just send you a video and you're like, oh, no, no, we need to change 50 different things, whatever. Getting a script in advance with an outline is so helpful, and then you can do all of the heavy editing suggesting feedback in that stage. Then they go film the video. Maybe they only have one or two edits and also just saves both parties so much time, but it really varies on the creator, their experience, their niche, the platform. Yeah, it really varies. I've seen it all.

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Tyler Calder (34:53):

It sounds like you would suggest if you can try to get some upfront outline, kind of agree to generally what this is going to look like versus just, okay, cool. Let me know when you're done. And hopefully it turns out

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Fiona Turko (35:06):

Even if they can record a quick video of here's my idea, just verbally tell me that idea. I can watch that video and comment back or reply back like, okay, this is great. Here's something I would fine tune, or This is something that actually we would prefer you not to say or not to show, but there needs to be some kind of communication before the actual video is delivered. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (35:27):

Awesome. Is video the most common sort of medium folks are using?

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Fiona Turko (35:33):

It really depends on the platform, so definitely of course for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, but LinkedIn is really the rising star right now, I'm sure as well for thought leadership, content creators and typically what works best on LinkedIn. I mean as of today, February 3rd, it's static posts, it's written content, it's carousels, it's not video, so each platform is quite unique, but LinkedIn definitely has a lot of creators who are new to content creation who are just posting a lot of thought leadership content and it's just basic text, and that honestly performs really well. It's like how people want to consume content right now. Also, we're probably inundated with video content from every other platform on our computer or on our phone, so actually reading something feels really nice on LinkedIn and being able to have great in-depth discussions in the comments. So yeah, it's a real mix, but that's why I love LinkedIn. It's a little bit different from the other platforms.

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Tyler Calder (36:30):

That's really cool to hear, and I say that because in regards to LinkedIn, I think everywhere you turn, you still hear people saying video on LinkedIn, you got to do video, but to your point, we haven't seen the data kind of back that up

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Fiona Turko (36:48):

No one has.

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Tyler Calder (36:49):

Yeah, so cool to hear you reinforce that.

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Fiona Turko (36:53):

Yeah, I don't know if LinkedIn will like to hear that, but yeah, they keep telling everybody, creators, brands optimize for video and not a single person I've ever spoken to has had. Maybe there's that odd video. If you're posting five posts a week, maybe one of them should be video. Okay, but every post should not be video. There's also certain formats if you're thinking about boosting or paid spend when it comes to creator content, there's certain formats on LinkedIn that you cannot boost. It was actually quite limiting, so if you're a creator or if you're a brand building out a program and you're thinking about making LinkedIn a channel, think about mixing in static posts, carousels, texts and video, and allocating a little bit of spend every month to boosting. So let those posts be organic and run for two weeks maybe, and then figure out and look and see, okay, what's top? I'm going to put behind this one or two videos so we can get more eyeballs on it and then keep doing the same thing month over month.

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Tyler Calder (37:52):

I think that's fantastic advice. I love that events, getting people in person. How big is that as part of your strategy?

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Fiona Turko (38:01):

Gamma? It's pretty big. A lot of the work that we're doing is how do you get people in real life to a dinner, to an activation, to a cultural moment? We're doing a dinner, I'm in San Francisco right now. We're doing a dinner leading up to the Super Bowl, which is very cool. I don't even know if I can't say Super Bowl, but we're doing a big dinner before the big event, and so a lot of the work we're doing here is like, because we're such a global company, how do we meet our audience and community and creators where they are? When I was at Zapier, it was a big test. We did this creator event in Zion National Park where we brought out a 20 or so creators to these renovated Airstreams in the park and surrounded by mountains. It was really cool, very cool setting, and that was really about, let's get the right people here, let's educate them on the product.

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(38:50):

Let's bring people together who can network, who have commonalities in tech or AI or automation that help nurture those relationships. We had the founder Wade there, and so it was a way for them to get to know each other and also Zapier the brand in real life, and it's like you just won an award for it last week, or something as like best B2B marketing something event. I don't know who gave it to you, Zapier, but it really made waves. It's like, oh, B2B brands can do cool stuff like Poppy Tart, all these beauty brands that do these global trips with creators like, Hey, we can do them too and be really intentional about how we do them and who we bring out. Just making sure it's very valuable for them. Obviously, you're asking them to take time away from their families and their work to join you on a trip. You want to give them as much value as possible, and so yeah. When I was at Zapier, that was something that we were starting to test more and more of. What would this look like as a series? What would this look like if it were to happen once per quarter? Where would it happen? Is it unique enough for people to fly from Australia and Japan to come to this thing? And it was very unique and we got really good feedback from that activation.

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Tyler Calder (39:58):

Now, something like that, was that fully owned by your team? Did that start to go and

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Fiona Turko (40:05):

Very

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Tyler Calder (40:06):

Cross? Very,

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Fiona Turko (40:07):

Yeah. Yeah. Zapier has a very robust events team. It also was about how do we bring in product marketing? If we're doing hackathons and demos, how do we get the people from our brand who are experts to help educate? And then for me, bringing in the right creators, figuring out what does that list, that guest list look like? What activations do they want to do? What would actually be fun and valuable for them? And then kind of curating the event towards them versus if you were to bring in a group of 20 prospects or existing customers, the actual event might look different for each group, so that's where the influencer marketer comes in to say like, oh, no, I think this would actually be good for these creators. Yeah, them best from working with them every day.

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Tyler Calder (40:51):

Nice. I love that. Where does this all go wrong? Where are companies saying, you know what we should do? We should really get into this influencer thing I keep hearing about, and then it doesn't go anywhere. Where is that falling down? Where doesn't this work?

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Fiona Turko (41:08):

If it's something that you're turning on and off consistently and you're not nurturing those relationships, it's not going to work. Basically using it as a paid acquisition channel, but really I think creators should be an extension of your brand. They are some of the best marketers for your brand. Nobody cares about brand ads anymore. People do not trust companies, but they do trust their peers. They are going to think about recommendations that they hear on social media, and if you can nurture those relationships and create a group of people who are doing that for you, that's very, very powerful. But if you're going and turning it off every month and then not communicating with that person for a year or two years, and then you wanted to go do a campaign with them again, it's a very strange way to approach it. And I do believe in if you can lock in people to exclusivity so that they're not working with your competitors, ideally you're working with people who are truly users of your product and who wouldn't want to work with your competitor anyway, because if they're talking about you one week or one month and then your competitor the next month, it ruins their credibility, but also it confuses their audience.

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(42:18):

So if you can really build a program that's always on of true brand partners and just build on that a little bit every month, it's so much more valuable than just spending a million or 2 million on a campaign and then turning it off right after and you go dark.

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Tyler Calder (42:33):

I think that's a really, really clean line that it's not a paid acquisition channel. You got to treat it as an always on brand play that lands, I've seen so many B2B companies, some of them are customers treated as paid acquisition, and it almost never works, and if it does work, it's almost accidental more than

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Fiona Turko (42:58):

Pretty, maybe your product, maybe product is so good. Yeah.

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(43:01):

After I did that Zion trip with spi, you wouldn't believe the people, the companies that were in my LinkedIn DMs being like, tell me about this thing that you did. The way that we did it was so scrappy, and yeah, it was an investment, but it wasn't terrible, terribly expensive, and so just the fact that these companies that have so much more marketing budget hadn't figured it out was so eyeopening to me of like, oh, this actually is this really cool unique thing that we have here that's very special, and we should definitely invest more in it because yeah, so-and-so company over here does not have it figured out. That made me feel really good about what we created. Yeah, I can't believe that these big companies had no clue. They had no idea and didn't know how to get from the program that they have today to an event like that, and I was only at Zapier for a year and a half, so I did that in basically 12 months. So it doesn't take long when you're a product that has a lot of brand fans already, those are the easiest people to activate. That makes the most sense. That's the low hanging fruit work with the people who are already advocating for you and you can build a program really fast.

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Tyler Calder (44:05):

Wow, I like that. We're coming up on time, so I've got a couple more quick ones. We can't leave without talking about ai. What do you see the intersection between AI and creator influencer, and that can go in any direction that can go in the direction of creators largely using AI to support their creation. It could be synthetic creators themselves, right? An AI avatar. What are you seeing or where do you see this all going?

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Fiona Turko (44:37):

I think the flashiness of the faceless accounts, the AI avatars, all of that fake stuff is people see it and are already tired of it, and I think the thing that I always come back to is as humans, we want to connect with other humans, especially in this digital age is actually becoming more important to connect with other humans in a deeper level. And so when you have people who are authentically talking about your product, which literally could be anything and advocating for you, to me, that's always so much more powerful than a lot of the AI generated content or AI slop that we see out there That said AI for creators to help them grow their brand as an entrepreneur, a founder, people who can't afford to hire team members or contractors. That's where the biggest shift is for me of you can have an agent help you with your inbox.

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(45:35):

You can have Gamma help you pitch brands, you can use Claude or chat GT as a thought partner, as a sounding board. If you don't have those types of people in your life where you can afford to hire people for that, that's the biggest thing that AI can change for you and really accelerate your career as a creator and just give you really helpful advice, especially if you're using Clot or Chat GBT as a thought partner for content creation for pitching. There's just so many different ways that a creator can use those tools. So yeah, that's the biggest shift that I've seen in the past five years,

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Tyler Calder (46:08):

And it's moving so fast, but I think everything you just said, I think lands quite well. Maybe last question here, so B2B companies, we're in 2026. A lot of people are thinking about influencer programs, creative programs. What is one way to get started without necessarily having to invest way ahead of impact, if that makes sense? Yeah.

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Fiona Turko (46:37):

Find your community, your heavy users, identify them and gift them your product. Bring them to your office. Do a dinner, find some way, send swag to them to activate them, and that's the low hanging fruit is find the people who are already so excited to talk about you to their peers, people who are already referring you business, and just make it slightly more official. Give them something, show how you appreciate them and just start to build that over time.

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Tyler Calder (47:07):

Awesome. Fiona, thank you so much.

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Fiona Turko (47:10):

Thank you.

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Tyler Calder (47:12):

How can people get in touch with you if they have any questions

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Fiona Turko (47:15):

In dm, but it might take me a while to respond?

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Tyler Calder (47:19):

I think that's a very fair expectation to set. Awesome. Well, thank you. Enjoy the festivities around and I We can say Super Bowl. I mean, yeah. If I were to get a cease and desist from the NFL, I think that would be my proudest moment.

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Speaker 3 (47:36):

That'd be

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Tyler Calder (47:36):

Cool. I'd be okay with that.

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Fiona Turko (47:37):

Say that.

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Tyler Calder (47:38):

Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

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Fiona Turko (47:41):

Take care. Thank you, you too.

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Tyler Calder (47:44):

Thanks for listening to Get It Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getittogether

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