How Lickly Used Its Own Audience Research to Reposition Beyond Influencer Marketing

Seven audience segments changed the launch message and helped shape a new website, content program and sales demo strategy...

Lickly was preparing for its public launch with an emphasis on audience discovery and creator selection. Then its own audience research gave Chief Marketing Officer Nita Patel a reason to broaden the message. The marketers she wanted to reach were also wrestling with pipeline, positioning and the pressure to justify where their companies spent money.

Patel was building Lickly’s marketing and sales organization practically from scratch. She had to develop the strategy, assemble the programs and prepare the launch at the same time. To understand the audience for that launch, she used the platform she had been hired to market.

The analysis identified seven distinct audience segments. Two in particular, Revenue Architects and Commercial Storytellers, brought the business decisions behind campaign execution into focus. Their priorities helped shape Lickly’s Decision Intelligence positioning and its brand promise, “Marketing decisions you can defend.”

That choice carried through to the website, multichannel campaigns, marketing assets and the way Lickly planned to demonstrate the product. Influencer marketing remained part of the offering, within a wider proposition about understanding audiences and making better-informed investments.

A public launch with room for a broader product

Lickly had started with audience-first influencer intelligence. Its February beta announcement described a platform that connected audiences and micro-communities with creators, content and campaign planning, including testing messages before committing budget.

When Patel’s appointment was announced in July, she was taking responsibility for positioning, demand generation, sales and the public launch. Lickly was building its self-service software business around technology from parent company RAD Intel, whose RAD Amplify business served enterprise clients through managed services.

The product was also evolving. Lickly 2.0 was being prepared with additional capabilities intended to support more functions across the marketing organization. A launch centered primarily on creator selection risked establishing an identity that would be too narrow for that direction.

Patel wanted the audience research to inform the launch before that identity took hold. She also recognized herself in the market Lickly was trying to reach.

Nita Patel, Chief Marketing Officer, Lickly

Two segments brought investment decisions into focus

Lickly’s segmentation explored the business challenges, motivations and priorities of its target audience. The seven groups gave Patel a more differentiated view of marketers whose responsibilities could otherwise be obscured by the same broad industry label.

Revenue Architects were experienced B2B growth marketers focused on pipeline, attribution and demonstrating marketing’s contribution to revenue. Commercial Storytellers were senior content, product marketing and demand generation leaders focused on positioning and building a persuasive business case.

Both groups needed to influence decisions beyond their immediate work. For Revenue Architects, that meant connecting an investment to commercial outcomes. For Commercial Storytellers, it meant making a recommendation persuasive to other people in the organization. Audience discovery and creator selection were relevant tasks, but they did not capture the full responsibility either group carried.

The pressure was familiar to Patel, but the segmentation made the differences between those priorities more explicit. It gave the team specific needs to address in its messaging, rather than treating everyone interested in audience intelligence as if they wanted the same outcome.

Budget accountability was also a wider concern across marketing leadership. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that 56% of respondents lacked the budget needed to deliver their strategy. Only 30% reported mature or fully developed AI readiness. The survey covered 401 marketing leaders, predominantly at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. In that environment, an AI proposition had to address how an investment would be used and justified.

Leadership chose a broader promise

Patel took the findings to leadership at Lickly and RAD Intel. They considered two directions for the launch, continuing to lead primarily with influencer marketing capabilities or introducing Lickly as a broader Decision Intelligence platform.

The audience findings favored a message about the business decisions behind a campaign. Leadership weighed those findings alongside the market, the current product and the capabilities planned for Lickly 2.0. They chose Decision Intelligence because it could address the broader audience needs while accommodating the product’s direction.

Lickly unveiled the new brand and positioning at UNBOUND in Boston on September 16. “Marketing decisions you can defend” gave the launch a promise that extended from selecting a creator to explaining the reasoning behind a marketing investment.

The company describes its M³VR reasoning framework as a process for defining a decision, grounding analysis in data, evaluating it across models and signals, and validating the output. That emphasis on reasoning sits alongside the more familiar audience and influencer applications in Lickly’s broader product proposition.

The research changed what Lickly published and demonstrated

The team used Lickly to explore the topics its audience was engaging with and identify relevant creators and communities. Patel says those insights informed positioning, content development and influencer marketing strategy, then carried into a new website, digital multichannel campaigns and a library of marketing assets.

The website retained specific routes into audience intelligence, influencer intelligence and campaign management. Those functions gave the wider positioning concrete applications. Someone interested in finding creators could still recognize that use, while someone evaluating audience intelligence could approach the product through a different problem.

The content program addressed the judgment involved in making marketing decisions. October posts covered explainable AI, the conclusions marketers draw from campaign performance and the relationship between a CMO’s accountability and authority.

Those topics gave the team ways to discuss the pressures identified in the segmentation without making every conversation about product features. They also addressed questions a potential buyer might have to answer internally before committing to new software.

Internal persuasion matters in B2B purchases. 51% of hidden decision-influencers rated strong thought leadership as important in helping them persuade C-level executives to support a vendor choice. The study surveyed 1,934 US business executives, including people who helped evaluate suppliers without holding final purchasing authority.

Patel applied the audience findings to demos as well. The goal was to move away from giving every prospect the same presentation. A discussion about creator selection would emphasize a different problem from one about audience intelligence or marketing investment, even when each began with the same platform.

That approach let the sales conversation start with the responsibility the prospect needed help fulfilling. The wider positioning could introduce Lickly; the demo could then concentrate on the specific work that made it relevant.

Prospects brought different questions to the launch

At UNBOUND, Patel heard directly from potential customers about what they wanted to do. Some already ran influencer programs and wanted to improve creator selection. Others asked about audience intelligence, competitive insights or how influencer marketing could work in a B2B environment.

Those conversations gave the team customers’ own language for the problems it was trying to address. They also brought several entry points into the same launch, from an existing campaign task to a broader need for audience understanding.

Patel reports early validation in prospect conversations, particularly with agencies. The broader message was resonating around understanding audiences, making more informed recommendations and demonstrating the value of marketing investments.

The rollout remains early, and Patel says it is too soon to attribute revenue or campaign-performance results to the research. So far, its impact has been on the positioning and the marketing and sales programs being built around it.

Lickly plans to test multiple ideal customer profiles and use HubSpot lifecycle data to examine lead qualification and pipeline by segment, according to a RAD Intel filing. That work will connect the audience groups to the accounts entering and progressing through its sales process.

The repositioning has given Lickly more ways to begin a customer conversation while keeping creator selection within the offering. The commercial task now is to establish which of those needs produces qualified opportunities and customers. Patel’s team has built the launch around the pressures its audience described; the developing pipeline will test where that broader promise earns a place in their budgets.