Why B2B Needs Its Own Social Media Platform– Adi Krysler – Oktopost
Oktopost’s VP of Marketing, Adi Krysler, joins the podcast to discuss how the platform is reshaping the way B2B companies approach social media. She explains why Oktopost was built specifically for the needs of B2B marketers—where relationships, attribution, and measurable business impact matter most—and how its social suite unifies publishing, employee advocacy, and social listening in one platform.
Adi also shares how Oktopost empowers employees to become authentic brand ambassadors, strengthening trust and expanding reach far beyond traditional corporate channels. She explores the changing landscape of B2B marketing, the increasing overlap with B2C strategies, and what modern marketing leaders need to prioritise as expectations and technologies continue to evolve.
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About Oktopost
Oktopost is a B2B social media management platform that helps marketing and revenue teams drive engagement, measure success, and link social media to revenue growth. Trusted by thousands of marketing professionals at some of the world’s leading B2B technology and professional services companies, Oktopost offers a comprehensive suite of solutions for social media publishing, employee advocacy, social analytics, social listening and marketing intelligence, all in one platform.
About Adi Krysler
Adi is a seasoned marketing leader with an MBA and over 15 years of experience driving impactful marketing strategies in both corporate and startup environments, with companies like Wix.com, SAP, and Oktopost.
Skilled in building go-to-market strategies, product positioning, and brand growth, she combines analytical insight with creative execution to elevate business outcomes. With deep expertise in SaaS and B2B marketing, she helps shape high-performing marketing initiatives, fostering cross-functional collaboration and bringing visionary leadership to the tech marketing landscape.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 –Â Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:02:49 – Overview of Oktopost’s Services
00:05:58 –Â Measuring Impact of Employee Advocacy
00:07:30 – Oktopost’s Unique Position in B2B
00:11:24 –Â Balancing Organic and Paid Social Strategies
00:15:47 –Â Influencer Marketing in B2B
00:19:14 –Â Future of the VP of Marketing Role
00:20:36 –Â The Importance of Choosing the Right Tools
00:21:12 –Â Best Marketing Advice Received
00:22:11 – Advice for New Marketers
Quotes
“In B2B, every relationship counts, every conversation has weight, every touchpoint can influence the buying decision.” Adi Krysler, VP of Marketing at Oktopost.
“We founded Octopost with the belief that B2B companies deserve their own dedicated platform that is built for these longer buyer journeys and for the multiple stakeholders.” Adi Krysler, VP of Marketing at Oktopost.
“The experiences that B2B buyers are looking for are getting more similar to the B2C, where everything is very fast and it’s visual and it’s personalized.” Adi Krysler, VP of Marketing at Oktopost.
Follow Adi:
Adi Krysler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adikrysler/
Oktopost website: https://www.oktopost.com/
Oktopost on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oktopost/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Transcript: Interview with Adi Krysler at Oktopost
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Adi Krysler
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Adi Kreisler, who’s the VP of Marketing for Oktopost. Welcome to the podcast, Adi.
Adi: Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.
Mike: It’s great to have you on. We always like to understand a little bit about our guests first. So can you give us a little bit of background about your career and why you’re currently at Oktopost?
Adi: Sure. So my career started by fulfilling a childhood dream of being a journalist. I did that for a few years until I moved into PR. And from being a PR consultant where I worked with marketing managers almost every day, it was a very natural shift to go into marketing, which is what I’ve been doing in the past 15 years. I’ve been leading marketing in different companies, startups, also big companies like AppsFire, SAP, always focused on connecting the creativity with real business impact. And over the years, I realized that I’m much more passionate about B2B marketing than the B2C. And that’s why I felt very connected to Octopus, really felt like a perfect fit because it’s the only social media platform that is built specifically for B2B marketers. For me, it was the ideal place to bring my expertise and everything I learned into what defines B2B marketing.
Mike: And I mean, that leads on to an obvious question, because, you know, I think us in B2B, we sometimes feel like the consumer marketers get all the shiny toys. So why is it Octopus decided to go after B2B? Was there a reason in the history or was it just they saw an opportunity?
Adi: Well, the consumer marketing is definitely much bigger in volume, but B2B is bigger in value. And in B2B, every relationship counts, every conversation has weight, every touchpoint can influence the buying decision. And we founded Opposite Bows with the belief that B2B companies deserve their own dedicated platform that is built for these longer buyer journeys and for the multiple stakeholders. And we saw a need in the market for customers looking exactly for that. Looking for clear attribution from awareness into revenue. That’s what our customers are looking for.
Mike: So, I mean, that sounds interesting. Could you just maybe break that down a bit? I know you talk about, you know, different sections of the tool that have different functionality. Do you want to just talk a little bit about what Oktopost actually does for your clients?
Adi: Sure. So we have a unified B2B social suite. So we help companies manage every aspect of their social presence from publishing and engagement and employee advocacy, social listening, analytics, We start with the social publishing. It’s the platform where you can easily plan and schedule and analyze all the campaigns you’re running across the different channels. With our employee advocacy product, we turn employees of the company into brand ambassadors. The marketers provide them content that is curated and approved by the marketing team and provided to the employees in a way that is very easy to share, but it also lets them share their own voice. And lastly, we have the social listening product. That’s where marketers can track mentions of their brand. They can track competitors, influencers, industry trends, and do it all in the same platform.
Mike: So I’m particularly interested in the employee advocacy section, because a lot of people talk about this, and it’s actually much harder than you think. So I guess the first question is, how do you actually get employees to engage and start posting about the company? I mean, what does Octopus do that makes that more likely?
Adi: Yeah, it’s definitely become one of the highest growth engines in the past few years. And when we built advocacy, we built it with authenticity in mind, because people, they don’t want to post something that they don’t feel connected to. And what OptiPost does is makes the sharing easy. But it also personalizes everything for each team member so that every region, every product group, every person within the company, each one can find the content that they relate to. And then they can either post it as is or use AI to polish it and have it even more personalized. And that encourages employees to share more. And for the marketers, manage the employee advocacy, the balancing between having the structure of what is approved and curated by marketing, but also giving them, the employees, the freedom to share their own voice. One last thing that really encourages employees to share is the fact that we give visibility into how employees’ posts actually make an impact. So if you’re a sales manager, for example, you can see how a post or different posts that you’ve created actually brought new business into the company.
Mike: Oh, so that’s interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about that? So what are you doing? How are you providing that information?
Adi: Sure. So unlike other platforms that usually focus more on the likes and the impressions and the follower count, our focus is on connecting social activity to real business outcomes. And we integrate directly with the different CRMs and the marketing automation systems. So marketers and also the employees can see how posts or campaigns and advocacy efforts can contribute to lead generation, to pipeline and revenue and also retention. We do that by providing very deep analytics. So you can segment performance by content type, audience, campaign channels, and that way the marketer can understand which tactic or which campaign draw real results. So it’s basically focusing on aligning the social media with the business KPIs. And that’s what marketer, especially the marketing leaders are looking for, is actually how to tie the social into the company’s KPI. And in that way, social media is not just a branding channel or communication channel, it’s an actual growth engine.
Mike: And that’s interesting, and presumably that’s really why Oktopost excels, is because you’ve built it around the needs of B2B customers.
Adi: Yes, exactly. So most social platforms, as I said, are built for B2B, where the main goal is to drive awareness and followers and also the focus is on B2C channels, such as TikTok, for example. But in B2B success, it looks very different. You need to engage these multiple stakeholders. You need to see how you turn influence, social influence into pipeline and do that in the right channels, which is First of all, LinkedIn, of course. LinkedIn releases new features very often. And most platforms, they struggle to keep up with all these new features, partially because they’re focused on different channels. And Octopus has built a very close relationship with LinkedIn so that we have access to the new feature through APIs. And we also work together through different lunch and learns and webinars that we do together so we can support our customers’ needs in the B2B space, which is very much in LinkedIn. And every aspect of our company, from product design to customer support, everything is built on their understanding of how a B2B organization works. And our account managers, our solution consultant, product managers, all they do is work with B2B companies. So when a customer needs advice or want to build their planning for the next year, they’re talking with an expert who’s been working with similar companies only in that space.
Mike: And I mean, I’m interested, you know, you’ve talked about a lot of powerful features. So who are your customers? Are they typically very large enterprises? Is it in particular markets or is it all the way across the B2B space?
Adi: So we work with global B2B organizations. So from the legal and professional services, we have manufacturing and tech industries. Some of our customers are Monday, demand-based, Fujitsu. And what all these customers share, and I make sure to have conversation with the leaders of these companies every once in a while, is that all of them really understand that excelling in social media, it’s not optional. And they need to become a social organization, not just within the marketing team, but every single employee. And what we do is help these customers basically turn their organization into a social organization.
Mike: Oh, that’s such a positive way to sum up what you do. I really like that. Let’s look at pivoting a bit and looking about your marketing strategy for Oktopost. So I’m interested as someone who runs the marketing, how do you approach the strategy and what’s your approach to actually building your business?
Adi: Well, you won’t be surprised that our strategy is about leading with social, actually doing what we help our customers do. And we treat Octopus as a living example of how do we see B2B organization work. And that’s why our focus is very heavily on the thought leadership, social selling, employee advocacy, because our people, they’re our best storytellers. And every post, campaign, event, everything that we run, we make sure there is a clear narrative that goes across all of these channels and campaigns. And that’s where we see the results.
Mike: And I’m interested, I mean, obviously, Oktopost as a business is very focused on growing the organic social. How important is paid for you on the social platforms?
Adi: Within Octopus platform, we focus on the organic side, of course, that as a marketing tactic, paid campaigns are part of our strategy. I think a struggle for every marketer is how to balance this demand gen with the brand awareness and the more organic side. And what I keep in mind and also have multiple discussions with my CEO around it all the time is the fact that demand gen is about being visible today and building the brand. it keeps you visible tomorrow. As you know, it’s very hard to link attribution into brand awareness campaign, but we make every effort to tie these brand awareness campaign also into the pipeline, into conversion as much as we can. Obviously, this is not something that any marketer is able to do at this point.
Mike: Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s very difficult. So I’m interested when you’re building your marketing plans, how do you balance between that brand building and the lead gen side? Is it an allocation of budget or time, or is it really about building the best campaigns and then seeing how that works out?
Adi: I think it’s a combination of both. So first of all, my marketing team is built in a way that we have some of the team members are more focused on the Dimension efforts and others are on the brand awareness efforts. And of course, we all understand that all of these efforts have to work together and need to feed each other. So every campaign that we build, and not only campaign, also our day-to-day work, It’s always a combination of working together within the team. So if we have a campaign, then we will map out the different brand elements of it and then how DemandGen will support these efforts. while always keeping in mind our narrative and how do we want to be heard and to be seen when we’re out there, whether it’s on social and also in other marketing assets or events that we do.
Mike: That makes that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I’m interested, actually, you know, we’ve we’ve talked about social employee advocacy. There’s clearly this merger between B2B and B2C. And a lot of people are talking about that. How do you see that evolving over the next few years? I mean, do you think B2B marketing is going to become much more like B2C? Or do you think there’s still a difference?
Adi: Well, we do see the B2C coming into the B2B world. The experiences that B2B buyers are looking for are getting more similar to the B2C, where everything is very fast and it’s visual and it’s personalized. And we do see corporate channels also shifting their their narrative into a little more of a storytelling style. And mostly we see marketers embrace influencer marketing, you know, video snippets, interactive formats that make you feel they feel a little bit more of a consumer friendly. But in this case is they do have a data-driven backbone. And I think the challenge here will be how do we maintain trust and depth, which we do a lot with our thought leadership and it’s necessary for the B2B. So how do we maintain that while keeping the speed and the creativity that goes into B2C space? It’s an interesting ride and we’re already starting doing that. We also embraced influencer marketing campaign recently, so we’re experimenting with that as well.
Mike: Oh, that’s interesting. So, you know, influencers, I think, are quite a challenge for B2B because it’s still quite new. And, you know, from our point of view, there’s not a huge number of influencers that are really B2B focused. Is that what you’ve seen? And, you know, I don’t know if you can announce stuff that hasn’t been developed in the product, but do you see Octopus potentially helping influencer campaigns in the future?
Adi: Well, I can say that we’ve experienced with influencer campaign recently and it was a challenge to understand how exactly to work with it because you’re right, it’s not like the B2C space where you have the influencer with the coupon codes and It’s a very, very different style. And in LinkedIn, which is our main channel, of course, the influencers are thought leaders and no one will talk about a product that they don’t actually believe in. So a campaign that we did a few months ago was the Octopus B2B Social Rising 30. It was an amazing idea that our content marketing manager came up with. And the idea was to celebrate the new voices that are shaping B2B social media. So what we did is spotlight in-house marketing, the people that are behind the brand, but they’re also building their own personal brand and their career on LinkedIn. And these people are amazing marketers and they inspire people and they spark conversation. And some of them are really funny and it’s like people that it’s great to follow. And when we built it, the whole campaign, it was very community driven. So we invited people to nominate those rising 30. And it was very quickly got huge, huge organic engagement. A lot of people got involved. We got 250 nominees. It was very hard to choose. As Octopus, we focused on not necessarily those with the biggest number of followers, but actually those who really engage with their audience. And it became into like a real organic and inspiring influencer campaign. All these people, these Rising 30, they’re on our website. We just released this guide where each one of them gives their own tips on how to become this influencer. And it’s a great read for every marketer. I invite you to check it out.
Mike: That sounds really cool. This is probably a bit mean asking you to do this off the top of your head, but was there a particular influencer in that Rising30 that really stuck out to you as doing an amazing job?
Adi: There are a few. It was amazing to see where people took the direction that they took with it. So as part of the campaign, when we chose the Rising30, each one of them got an award. like a very nice box with the word and in a letter and in our Octi and what almost all of these winners said is they created a video of them unboxing the award and some of them took it into crazy like directions we we posted of course most of them actually all of them on our LinkedIn page some of them are you know beautiful to watch
Mike: That’s amazing. I love that. I think that’s an absolutely fantastic campaign. You’re VP of Marketing. You’re in probably one of the areas where things are changing most quickly B2B social. I mean, how do you see the role of VP of Marketing changing over the next few years?
Adi: Well, I see the role already becoming much less about campaign management, but more about getting everything to work together and work smoothly, such as connecting data, finding the right tools, building teams around shared insights, It’s really about taking all of these things and combining them together to a smooth operation. And while we see AI progresses, and of course we’ve implemented it into Octopus and also into our own marketing tactics, So I see it taking more and more of the execution side. Us as marketers, we have more time to be, you know, more creative, more strategy. And I see the role continuing, growing into be like VP marketing as like part technologist, but a part storyteller and, you know, someone who can translate the data and the vision into decisions and actions.
Mike: That’s fascinating. I think that’s really exciting for people in marketing to see that, you know, you believe there’s such a good future for marketing leaders in terms of spending more time on the creativity and strategy. And I think in recent years, maybe we’ve spent a lot more time on just getting the tools to work with all the new tools. Do you agree with that?
Adi: Definitely. There are so many tools out there and I admit that we spend quite a lot of time into just picking the right solution for us. And I’m sure our customers, you know, they did the same before choosing OptiPost and we do the same thing now that we’re evaluating new tools that will help us improve, especially with emerging AI tools that, you know, there’s a new tool every day. So yeah, we need to keep up, but eventually I see the time that we’re spending on choosing the right vendor is very crucial to our success.
Mike: Absolutely. This has been fascinating, Abby. I really appreciate your time. Before I let you go, there’s a couple of questions we’d like to ask all of our guests. And the first one is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice that’s ever been given to you?
Adi: I don’t think it will be anything new, but I’ve heard more than once in my life the fact that, you know, people don’t remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel. Even in B2B marketing where, you know, technically we’re marketing to businesses, but at the end of the day, it’s still people to people. And now, you know, people with wants and with needs and emotions. And if your message makes someone feel inspired and understood and confident, then they’ll remember it long after they forget the details.
Mike: That’s great. I love that. The second question is really advice to people starting out in their career. So what would you tell someone if they’re just beginning in their marketing career to help them be successful?
Adi: Well, that will be something that I think when I started marketing was not as much applicable. Right now, marketers, they need to learn how to speak the language of business very early in the career. Creative skills are crucial, but the real impact comes when you connect your ideas into revenue. or your ideas into retention or reputation. And the other thing will be to stay curious. If you’re not curious, you won’t able to adapt to everything that is changing so quickly with marketing.
Mike: That’s great advice. I think that’s really important. Abby, thank you so much for this. If people are listening to the podcast and they’re interested in Oktopost, want to find out more, maybe try the product, what’s the best place for them to go?
Adi: Well, of course I’m on LinkedIn. You’re welcome to visit our website or find me on LinkedIn, send me a message. Me and my team are always happy to speak with fellow marketers.
Mike: That’s great. Abby, thanks so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Adi: Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
