REVENUE MARKETING

Morning Brew Design

Influencer marketing has gone from a “nice to have” to an essential sales outlet for brands both big and small, with platforms like Instagram and TikTok acting as crucial channels for cultivating that change. According to Grand View Research, the global influencer marketing industry was valued at $34.2 billion last year and is projected to grow to $45.2 billion this year.

“It’s one of the easiest [revenue channels] to track in terms of direct ROI,” said Alex Nisenzon, CEO of Charm.io, an intelligence and predictive analytics platform for TikTok Shop. “Because of the evolution and proliferation of platforms like TikTok Shop, a lot of brand activities are shifting to more of these social commerce platforms.”

Democratizing access

Social media has given both brands and influencers more access to the masses. TikTok is a standout thanks to its hyperspecific algorithm, making it easy for smaller companies and creators to build a following quickly.

“TikTok is meant to be the democratic platform of social media and that’s because anyone can be famous,” said Alison Bringé, chief marketing officer at Launchmetrics, which measures the financial return of brands’ public relations and influencer work. “Anyone’s content could be found. You don’t necessarily need a community and that’s been a huge win for small brands.”

Bringé highlighted athleisure brand Gymshark as one company that’s experienced this type of success with influencer marketing. She said that last year the brand generated 75% of its media impact value (MIV)—a proprietary metric that assigns a monetary value to social media engagement—from its influencer partnerships.

The right strategy

The rapid evolution of the influencer landscape means brands need to strategize accordingly to ensure that all-important ROI. Bringé said they should focus on building long-term partnerships.

“To do that, they should pick those influencers that really resonate with the values of their brand,” she said.

Read more about the importance of TikTok Shop.—LI

      

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Revenue teams pulling ahead don’t necessarily use more AI than other ones. They simply strategize around it.

The major distinguisher for those teams is when workflows, data, and operating models connect to one another in a way that lets AI act on their behalf rather than just advise. Outreach’s AI Maturity Model Assessment evaluates where your organization stands across core workflows and gives you a directional picture of where to focus first to achieve an AI-efficient GTM.

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A team can invest heavily in AI but still stall if workflows aren’t connected. The assessment shows what’s actually holding back your AI initiative so you can prove progress to leadership.

Take the assessment to see exactly where your revenue org stands.

REVENUE MARKETING

RealSelf

A traditional B2B conference isn’t always the most compelling: bland hotel ballrooms, bone-chilling air conditioning, generic meandering keynotes, and panel after panel trying to tick every box while ticking almost none.

So for its Real Talk Summit in New York City in May, RealSelf, the 20-year-old aesthetic treatment community and resource-sharing platform, decided to flip the script. It approached the event with what CEO Minou Clark described as “community-led marketing.”

“I realized we’re not really speaking to the space holistically in that format, and RealSelf is uniquely positioned as the connective tissue between the doctor brand side of the space and the consumer community that RealSelf is built on,” she said. “We have the luxury of being able to speak to both sides of the equation.”

Community first

The Real Talk Summit was full of engaging activations like acupuncture and ear seeding, along with panels focusing on today’s biggest beauty and wellness topics. According to RealSelf, the event garnered $1.5 million in earned media value (publicity or exposure a brand gains organically) in a single day. Clark thinks the engaging and topical panels—which covered topics like “AI in aesthetics” and GLP-1s—plus the integrated brand activations, drove the performance.

“There’s so many different players in this multiverse of beauty and we really didn’t want the panels to feel like QVC,” she said.

Brand activations and panels had more “peer-to-peer integrations,” said Clark, and included a diverse roster of doctors, treatment providers, creators, and press, which allowed for more friendly and organic interactions among attendees.

Read why community summits can be mutually beneficial.—LI

      

REVENUE OPERATIONS

Morning Brew Inc.

Sometimes, deploying AI is like an “As seen on TV” product. Take light-up shoelaces (bear with us.) They’d certainly be useful if you frequently...lose your shoes in the dark. But if you manage to keep tabs on your trainers? You’re stuck with something you paid for that you won’t use.

The same goes for AI: Before deploying it, identify a use case. That’s the biggest piece of advice Morning Brew got from experts when we asked them what IT pros need to do to ensure their cloud platforms are ready for the data storage and analytics that AI entails. Without a thought-through use case (and AI-ready data), you risk committing AI—and its associated energy and costs—to questionable projects that might not benefit larger goals.

“Workload optimization goes down to even the granular task, job, application, and user level,” Linda Yao, VP and general manager of Hybrid Cloud & AI Solutions at Lenovo, told Morning Brew. “That actually allows the organizations to ensure that they are using that precious compute [power] and using that precious technology on things that have a chance of succeeding rather than churning through those tokens.”

On time

Once IT pros have a use case, the next step is evaluating the data that AI will work with. Mike Ni, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research, told us that when it comes to deploying AI, “you don’t need the biggest cloud platform. You need one that can connect to your data, analytics, and AI tools.”

To accomplish that, Ni said, IT pros need to locate the data and ensure it’s clean and accessible. On top of that, AI tools need to be able to reach data at the necessary speed.

“If I need [data] because I’m in a call center and I want [AI] to tell me something about the customer who’s calling,” Ni said, “then the accessibility has to be in a semi-fast mode to get that data back.”

Keep reading for the importance of trusting your data.—TC

      

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AI for the revenue guy. For revenue teams to pull ahead of the pack, they need AI initiatives that actually create measurable business impact. Outreach’s assessment evaluates where your organization stands across core workflows and gives you a directional picture of where to focus first to achieve an AI-efficient GTM. Take it here.

active pipeline

Stat: 16%. That’s the revenue growth recently IPO’d fashion brand Reformation posted in 2025. Find out why some investors are worried about its prospects. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “In addition to building out services and experiences, Airbnb is growing ​hotel supply, such that room nights grew at three times the rate of homes. We see these verticals ‌adding ⁠billions in incremental bookings through the end of the decade.”—Morningstar analyst Dan Wasiolek on Airbnb’s earnings report (Reuters)

Read: A Heated Rivalry star shopped at Canadian Tire. Then so did the internet. (the New York Times)

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