The Business Of Marketing

There are some useful practitioner nuggets - using Claude to match creators to clients, the preparation checklist before hiring influencers, and the lurker dynamic at events - but these are diluted by two in-episode ads, extended host monologues, and repeated platitudes about authenticity. The signal-to-noise ratio is mediocre for a 33-minute episode.

“I use Claude to a huge extent to automate a lot of that where I would say you know, here's the client, here's their call to action, here's their objective and topics they won't covered who are the best creators for this”

“if you post five times a day, LinkedIn is going to say, kate, chill, we don't want that much from you”

Most of the advice - know your KPIs before you start, pick creators with relevant audiences, authentic content outperforms fake engagement - is entirely recycled B2B influencer marketing wisdom. The algorithm-gaming 'dark side' reference and the Claude-as-matchmaker workflow are mildly fresh but are not explored with enough depth to elevate the episode.

“there are creators in this space who actually do provide those guarantees because they, they use systems, I'm going to call them, um, to kind of game the algorithm”

“if you're trying to reach data leaders in the United States and you have engagement from hairdressers in Australia, maybe that's, you know, not the right content creator for you”

Kate Strachnyi is a genuine practitioner who built a niche B2B influencer agency from scratch, has real client experience, and has sat inside Deloitte - she is not a pure thought-leader. However, the operation she describes is small (35 creators, word-of-mouth sourcing, a Google spreadsheet as the 'database'), limiting the scale credibility.

“dedicated has over 35 influencers and content creators and over 100 speakers and experts in our agency”

“It started this in March 2020, right? And I was the only creator. I was just, I left, um, my employer of nine years”

Kate offers a handful of concrete specifics - agency size, the Google form workflow, UTM tracking, the motorcycle video anecdote - but there are no named clients, no campaign metrics, no pricing structures, and no hard performance benchmarks. The numbers that do appear are illustrative ranges ('you can get three, you can get 300, you can get 30,000') rather than real data.

“we can almost guarantee the number of impressions you'll get because we have average ranges for our prior content”

“I created for a client, it was me on a motorcycle to show how like speed of insights with the help of A.I.”

A few of the questions are genuinely well-framed - especially 'what needs to happen inside a company before they hire an influencer?' - but the hosts regularly take over with extended personal monologues, there is no substantive pushback on any of Kate's claims, and two in-episode ad reads break momentum entirely.

“This question should be like the main question honestly because so many of my customers are not prepared for influencer marketing”

“Have you ever ran into a situation where you had to pivot on a live event and you're like, let's go to someone else”