The time is now for TikTok B2B Marketing

An interview with Rashad Assir from Redpoint

Increasingly I find the most helpful time to consider a topic is when it’s in the bottom right hand quadrant of its hype-to-impact cycle. It’s a time when the cabal of pseudo-influencers are aiming their Twitter threads elsewhere, and the voices we hear are largely of people who truly care about right-sizing the power and potential of the tool in question.

Below is how I see the broad consensus in the world of technology right now:

Two disclaimers. First, there are other hyped and potentially impactful topics in tech right now not featured on this graph, but there are only two major ones which pertain to Marketing, and I covered AI last month. Second, Web3 is included as an illustrative example; I have too limited an understanding to know whether it belongs on the low impact potential side of the equation, but that is what I perceive the consensus to be today.

Where my understanding is less limited is in relation to TikTok. The experiences of customers working with TikTok specialists on Passionfruit gives me a front row seat to swoon at the unparalleled results it can deliver. Even if the threat of its ban in Montana going nationwide in the US has not abated, it’s no longer front page news, and, at least for this month, that puts it in my preferred sweet spot of low hype and high impact.

For marketers, then, it is a good time to have a rational conversation about the merits of the platform. There remain numerous misconceptions about what it is and what it can do. To take but one, it is not social media in the model of Instagram or Facebook. It builds from a content interest graph, rather than one built through individual followership. As the co-founder of Instagram put it in an interview when launching his new startup earlier this year:

TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world. “I saw that shift, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the future of social,’” [Kevin] Systrom said. “These unconnected graphs; these graphs that are learned rather than explicitly created. And what was funny to me is as I looked around, I was like, ‘Man, why isn’t this happening everywhere in social? Why is Twitter still primarily follow-based? Why is Facebook?’”

— Casey Newton, The Verge, January 2023

Rather than wrangle with this point by myself, and indeed the many other gaps in common understanding about TikTok, I decided to reach out to someone who has demonstrated that their understanding of the platform is close to gap-free.

Rashad Assir runs digital content for venture capital firm Redpoint, and he’s the mastermind behind an account which has racked up over half-a-million likes in just ~9 months. In November last year, Fast Company even ran a piece entitled: “Your company’s TikTok strategy needs a Rashad Assir.” High praise!

So, yes, this month I am excited to share an exclusive interview with Rashad, and hopefully bring more readers around to at least see my position: that this is such an opportune moment to start or grow your TikTok account if you’re a B2B business.

P.S. if you’re a B2C business without one, then that is beyond irresponsible!

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Raffi Salama: You good? Busy?

Rashad Assir: Yeah, fairly, it's a good kind of busy because it feels like I'm investing in things that are going to make me less busy in the future. I just hired these two people.

RS: What are they going to do?

RA: Content Operations stuff. After a year of experimentation we're starting to put a real team in place to focus on all things content!

RS: So, honestly, I wish we had just recorded our first conversation because we could have used that. But that chat is what I'm trying to recreate and hopefully improve because, not to blow smoke up your ass, there are a few people who are as thoughtful about TikTok and it’s important for more marketers to hear your perspective. There are a lot of companies right now that are getting this wrong. Earlier today, to give one instance, I got an email from the CEO of a Series C start-up in a specific niche that the TikTok algorithm loves, who basically said that “TikTok isn't important to us because we're focused on B2B businesses.” And I thought how this opportunity might pass his business by, and I thought that would be a great shame! I presume you agree?

RA: I agree but I do think I have a nuance to add: B2B spans a lot. There are your cool sexy SAAS tools like Zapier, Notion, and things like that. But if you’re selling some really boring CFO-focussed suite of tools… Maybe not. It’s a great place to start.

RS: Where's the line for you then? What it is and out of scope?

RA: Maybe a little bit informed by my former sales background, as well as some conversations that I've had with the social media teams at Notion and a handful of others, but the trend in B2B sales is that decisions are being more and more made by consensus as opposed to one person at the top who pounds on the table saying, we're going to do this. You still have a final decision maker, but there are layers underneath.

So in talking to Notion regarding their Enterprise offer, they use TikTok as a way, and social media in general, as a way to sort of build trust with their constituents. Especially with the trend of Product Led Growth, as you aim for mass adoption of your product in the enterprise world… it's definitely somewhere they're investing. Before an enterprise contract or a top down selling motion is put in place, to “make the sale” in the traditional sense - this is increasingly important and they're seeing the rewards. Like most things in marketing, it's initially harder to measure but when you have a head to head between Notion and whatever their alternative is, and the majority of your team already likes it and feels like they’re part of the brand in some way... That really helps.

One example: maybe someone replies to a potential buyer on a comment beneath a TikTok about an internal Product decision at Notion, and then in the demo they recognise the face of the Sales Engineer and that potential buyer feels like they were part of the process for a lot longer. They know feel that they know the direction of the product, or that their voice was heard, or that they understood why Notion made certain decisions that they did in the feature set.

All of that comes from TikTok. All of that is building trust. Think of your audience as a sea of assorted constituents that might not be your exact buyer, but might be what we would call Internal Influencers in sales.

RS: I love that and the use of the phrase “building trust” is so important because a lot of B2B teams forget is that it's not a binary zero or one that you win a deal. It’s all about increasing the aggregate probability that a deal will go through and therefore what you need is to win at the margins and keep pushing that probability up. What you said also reminds me of that recent stat which suggests only 5-10% of the B2B buyer journey is actually happening with you. The other ~90% is happening when you're not in the room

RA: That’s certainly the case. Another, “ism” I like in sales is that by the time you reach the demo, you're 70% of the way in terms of the sale. You might not make a decision solely based on a TikTok that you've seen. But if the analysts on your team slacks the manager who's in charge of the decision and says, “Hey, have we checked out this product? That product feels like it could really save us time.” Maybe that the thing that leads to a demo or tips a later stage deal over the line. That internal influence has a valuable impact.

Let’s be clear: if you know your buyers are the 55 year old CFO, then you’re still probably better off sponsoring golf tournaments than you are trying to generate leads or win deals on TikTok because it's a hard channel to do well. I don't want to suggest that that it’s easy to compete with. professional creators for attention. There are more of them and they have better tooling. And so to do this right, it does require investment and intentionality. All that good stuff we’re talking about, you're not going to accidentally stumble upon without a good TikTok.

RS: So that Fast Company piece… Help me understand what does a Rashad Assir do for a company’s TikTok strategy? And more importantly, why do you do it? What is the underlying belief?

RA: At a very fundamental level what I do is I write, edit, produce, and distribute content. That's close to 100% of how I spend my days. Sometimes it's in partnership with investors, sometimes it's in partnership with our founders, and sometimes it's for our brand. Our thesis is that this is a lane that we could uniquely own given that our customer base - which is the next generation of founders - over-index as a large and growing segment of TikTok. People that work in Big tech and are quitting their jobs, that product manager at that impressive big tech company that crushed it, people who are quitting Stripe and founding amazing companies… That's kind of our audience.

RA: In VC, arguably, brand might be the only thing that matters and if brand is like the sum of the experiences that somebody has with your company, then social media is just a medium through which you can deliver a lot of experiences at scale. You can host events (and we do that), you can speak on webinars but those are more focused and important later in the funnel. But at the very top of the funnel, social media is pretty much unmatched as a way to reach as many people if you can do it well.

RS: I like the mention of the funnel, because people forget how often cross pollination happens from TikTok to other digital spaces, like LinkedIn or Twitter. And then the question becomes: how do you know it's working? Are you asking the investment team, which is effectively your sales team, how many of would-be portfolio founders mentioned our TikTok? Because I could plausibly imagine that founders are choosing Redpoint, at least in part, because they believe their platform team can help them succeed through new and imaginative ways to distribute their product. How do you manage that feedback loop with the investment team?

RA: So we didn't make it a huge priority to measure every interaction for the first year. So I'll start with that as sort of a disclaimer: I wouldn't grade us A+ in how we're measuring the impact of our brand. That said, there's quantitative inputs and there's qualitative inputs. If numbers are going up and to the right from an engagement and follower perspective. That's usually a good signal to suggest that you're making good content, but it might not be relevant.

This is where you have to be careful: you can get all the likes and engagement and following making content that has nothing to do with the domain that you care about; which in our case is sophisticated tech business building, not your mom-and-pop shop entrepreneur. Not every founder of a business is thinking about hiring a head of product or engineering lead. That's a very niche thing and that’s who we want to attract. So if we're attracting an audience by talking about those topics then, naturally, I think it's safe to assume we're building the right audience. So if we stay focussed, and deliver some level of growth, say 5-10% every month, then we have growth that is meaningful to the investment team.

RS: The specificity of the niche is something you speak about a lot. So in not wanting to ask the standard question of “why is the niche so important?”, what I would like to ask is what happens if you don't go niche enough? What ends up being the result?

RA: I can share an anecdote on this… For a little while, I was experimenting with my own podcast and Redpoint gave me creative license to do whatever I want; which I'm appreciative of! But the idea for me was to learn go through the learning cycle of making a podcast from start to finish. How do you come up with the idea? How do you book guests? How do you prep? How do you post production? How do you distribute on socials? So, I chose to focus on creators that were doing businesses on the side, but were mostly content creators. One of the first people I interviewed is called Jason Ladanye. He's a magician and he does card magic: tricks to do with poker, sleight of hand, all that kind of thing. And so we did an episode where he talked about all that and how he turned it into a business. We put it live and the episode started crushing it on YouTube. It got, I think, close to 20,000 impressions, and we got a bunch of subscriptions from it. But now all our followers are people who love magic! And they ask whether Redpoint is a magic company!

RS: I don’t know how many venture scale magic tech companies are out there…

RA: Ha, exactly. So it's a one off mistake, and it's great. We learned from it, but that's what happens when you don't focus. You build the wrong audience in the world of algorithmic social media where the algorithm is just going to show people the content based on how likely they are to engage with it. So if you make magic-themed content, you're attracting the magic-loving audience!

RS: I've heard this talked about in terms of product marketing - you want to go uncomfortably narrow, right? It should be at a point where you're saying internally: “eesh, is anyone going to watch this?”

RA: Yes exactly. A good sign of niche content is when you are you using an acronym or a vernacular that only your audience would really understand. You'll lose some people, but the ones that get it will be like, “ohhh!”. It'll hit harder for them.

RS: So it's kind of a lingo thing?

RA: Well I think that's one way to signal that you're deliberately communicating to a niche, and that you exist for them.

RS: I think it's quite instinctively obvious that your niche is going to be out there on TikTok, but are there tools you use to know what they’re talking about? Or is that more like qualitative analysis on Reddit? Or how are you narrowing that specificity?

RA: You could go by hashtag - like right now, of course, AI tech is hot. During the pandemic, it was Robinhood and investing folks giving investing tips. But yes you can do some basic trend analysis, like you would do on YouTube and Google Trends, or anything you have from a SEO perspective to figure out are people talking about this thing? And am I tapping into an audience that already exists? Or am I doing what would probably be a much harder feat, and creating a new category?

RS: I hesitate to use the word viral, but the big hit videos you’ve had… did you know they were going to be hit publish? Or did they surprise you?

RA: I've trained my brain to a certain extent to know whether something might fly, but it's still random. I'll still be surprised sometimes with something that takes off. We know characters that generally do well, and themes. For instance, when people talk about remote work, it tends to go viral because people hold such polarized opinions about remote work. And we'll tap into that sometimes…

RS: To your point around the core premise of these algorithmic setups being driven by engagement, it seems like we always forget that the most effective approach on socials is often answering the question of how can I be 10% more polemic without being offensive?

RA: It's okay to offend someone if you're platforming an opinion about something like Remote Work - that others may disagree with. There are legitimate arguments on both sides. And so it’s a good example of something we can tap in because it’s hard to have a nuanced discussion and that drives engagement.

RS: I did a quick LinkedIn stalk before this, and as mentioned, you used to be in sales. Evidently Redpoint had a kind of good sense of your ability to do this from your personal TikTok account, but what traits are in someone who is naturally good at running a TikTok channel? I don't know if you did any stage work?

RA: I had actually taken a few acting classes in college as electives. But really I was justmaking videos on Snapchat and sending them to my friends, then I was making them on Instagram. And then eventually my friends kind of convinced me to put them TikTok and I probably did five or ten before anything went viral. So we were messing around on TikTok, trying to go viral and I just felt natural talking to a camera. The other trait you can screen for is the soft skill of storytelling… Editing is important: knowing what to keep and what to remove and having a feel for what's relatable. That's maybe one of the biggest must-haves: do you have this sort of Spidey-sense that a video can be relatable while still being niche? Those are a few of the skills, but I think there's undiscovered talent out there.

RS: There's I can shout out called Ryan Shirley who runs sales at Marco.

RA: Yeah, I met with him a few times, actually! He's a funny guy.

RS: But what a great idea… As a salesperson, the amount of color and personality you can now give yourself through a platform like that. It's never been possible before.

RA: I’ll use Logan [Bartlett, Managing Partner at Redpoint], as an example, but there are 63 episodes of Logan's show available on the internet. That's 60 hours of him interviewing people, sharing his takes, talking to founders. If I'm a founder and I want to get a sense for what would Logan be like on my board. I can start to form an opinion. Some people might say, “oh wow, he’s super smart - I want that advice.”

RS: So do you encourage all members of the Redpoint to use TikTok or socials in general?

RA: Yes but we are careful. It's a huge investment of time, Resources, energy to create good content. So we’re intentional. I would say not careful, but intentional about where it makes sense based on that person's unique ability to create a content series. And their level of commitment to the game. It's such a grind that if you're in it for the followers - and it's such a cliche! - but if you are in it for the followers. You'll probably just burn out.

RS: one of the things I've seen a company like Pleo do is really encourage everyone, to post on socials and I think if I'm being polemic, what I would say is: you should lean into your winners and let your losers go. And what I mean by that is you should find the 5% of your team that is very comfortable and natural at doing that, and maybe even them pay them bonuses for doing that as extensions of your marketing and sales function. But trying to get someone who doesn't want to post is, long-term, impossible.

RA: Agree. There's something to be said about experimentation, and then there are ways to include people that doesn’t requiring them to be the authors of the content or the creative direction; maybe a member in the content. One company that does this really well is Attention Seekers. Notion, as mentioned, also does a really good job.

RS: If you had a direct line to the CMO of a big corporate company what would you tell them?

RA: I would say stop thinking about TikTok as this platform where high school students are dancing. That is just such old news but it’s still such a prevalent view. Yes, social media has all these pros and cons, but it is a place where people are learning and educating themselves. It’s multidimensional.

RS: In theory, with TikTok, it's not social media, right? Because you don’t aim to build a social graph, because it’s based on a content graph. You are served up your own experience and whether that’s fast cars, watches or tennis. Everyone gets their own diet.

RA: Exactly. Look, you can still choose not to be on TikTok as a strategy, but it should be an active choice not to be on there and it shouldn't be because you think it's only high school dancers on there.

RS: That’s a great place to stop. Rashad - thank you!