Your Brand Page Got Deleted. Now What? (with Katie Parkes from Apollo.io) | Ep. 18

About this episode

Most B2B brands treat social as a channel they own. Then something happens that makes them realize they don't own it at all. What they actually own is trust, and trust lives with people, not pages.

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David Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with Katie Parkes, Director of Social, Community & Customer Marketing at Apollo.io, to talk through what it actually takes to build a social program that compounds. You'll walk away with a concrete framework for customer advocacy at scale, a measurement structure worth stealing, and a sharper view of where to stop spending.

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Katie came into her role at Apollo.io two weeks before the company lost its LinkedIn company page. Rather than treating the loss as a crisis to manage, she used it as a forcing mechanism to rebuild the entire social strategy around individual voices. She's been running that playbook ever since.

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Guest Bio

Katie Parkes (Katie Jane Parkes) is the Director of Social, Community & Customer Marketing at Apollo.io, the AI-native go-to-market platform used by 600,000+ companies worldwide. Before Apollo, she was a founding member of Shopify's enterprise marketing team, where she led social media and then video, growing Shopify's social audience by 270% in a single year. She has built creator programs, scaled Slack communities, and run influencer campaigns that track all the way to paid customer revenue. She's based in Canada and will happily talk shop on LinkedIn.

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What We Cover

• Losing the LinkedIn company page: Apollo's page was removed two weeks into Katie's tenure. She explains what it meant for the brand and how it forced a channel strategy rethink from day one.
• Diversifying beyond LinkedIn: Katie pushed into Instagram, X, and an owned subreddit. GTM operators were already there; she built awareness from scratch.
• Individual voices over brand pages: Company pages still matter, but trust gets rebuilt through people. That's where she put her budget first.
• Finding advocates in a 4-million-user base: Three signals: Slack community activity, UserEvidence survey hand-raisers, and social listening for unprompted mentions.
• The reciprocal relationship: AI can surface advocates. It can't replace commenting on their content and making the relationship feel real. Most teams skip this at scale.
• What she's cutting from the budget: Legacy social tools that haven't built genuine AI functionality are getting dropped at renewal. She walks through her build vs. buy framework.
• How Apollo's marketing team uses AI: A brand agent inside Cognition drafts copy and routes it to a human reviewer. Her team uses Claude Skills for content repurposing and weekly performance pulse checks.
• Four measurement buckets for social: Growing influence, growing engagement, growing demand, and growing pipeline. Every channel and campaign ladders into one of the four.
• Tracking influencers beyond impressions: Unique links, session data, and beta signups told her which creators drove demand, not just reach. Those are the ones she renewed. YouTube creators run through PartnerStack and tie directly to paid revenue.
• The three-bench employee advocacy system: Exec content via a contracted writer. A second bench of employees with audiences or product expertise. A third bench tied to talent acquisition and employer brand. All three activate for major moments.
• YouTube as a demand channel: She's seen it drive 30% of PLG signups. Apollo's channel has underperformed. A dedicated hire and a clearer strategy are coming in H2, with LLM indexing adding a new reason to take it seriously.

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Resources Mentioned

Apollo.io: the AI-native B2B go-to-market platform where Katie leads social, community, and customer marketing.

UserEvidence: the customer-evidence and advocacy platform Apollo uses to identify hand-raisers for co-creation and creator programs.

PartnerStack: the partner and affiliate management platform Apollo uses to track influencer-driven signups and paid revenue, particularly on YouTube.

Cognition: the AI-powered campaign management platform behind Apollo's brand agent and cross-team content calendars. (Could not independently verify the vendor's full name or website; confirm with Katie before publishing.)

Claude Skills (Anthropic Agent Skills): Anthropic's repeatable AI workflow feature Katie's team uses for content repurposing and performance reporting.

Limelight: David Walsh's B2B influencer marketplace, referenced in the context of launching AI employees for influencer, social listening, employee social, and customer advocacy.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.