A handful of LinkedIn posts from mortgage brokers generated over 12,500 impressions for a B2B property intelligence platform. One ambassador's recruitment post hit a 21% engagement rate. The total paid media budget behind this? About $2,500.
If those numbers make your performance marketing dashboard look a little sad, you're not alone. But here's the kicker: the team at Teranet's PurView didn't manufacture these results through clever ad targeting or influencer outreach. They found them hiding in plain sight, inside their own customer base.
The Trust Gap That Branded Content Can't Close
PurView, a property intelligence platform serving Canadian mortgage brokers, had a problem that will sound familiar to anyone running B2B marketing in 2026. Their social strategy was almost entirely dependent on brand-authored content: product pages, sales collateral, direct outreach. The kind of stuff that looks great in a content calendar and performs like a wet newspaper in the real world.
The issue wasn't the content quality. It was the trust deficit. Nielsen's research has consistently shown that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. And as Maria Policelli-Sohrabi, Digital and Social Media Marketing Manager at Teranet, put it: there was no reason mortgage brokers would be any different.
The marketing team identified three specific gaps: no formal advocate program existed, social listening wasn't being used to identify high-affinity users, and there was no content pipeline built around social proof from real users. Left unaddressed, the cost was predictable: over time, without a trusted voice in the market, customer acquisition would get more expensive and harder to scale.
Finding Distribution Channels That Already Trust You
Here's where the story gets interesting. The distribution channel PurView needed wasn't something they had to build. It already existed inside their customer base.
Using Sprout Social Listening, the team started looking at existing PurView users through a social lens. They tracked LinkedIn activity, Instagram and TikTok followings, industry award nominations like Canadian Mortgage Awards Broker of the Year, and speaking engagements at events like the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario Exchange.
A pattern emerged. A subset of PurView users were already respected, visible voices in the mortgage broker community. Several were already talking about PurView without prompting or brand support.
The dots connected when the team realized these were not just satisfied customers, but untapped distribution channels with pre-built trust that brand content could never replicate.
Maria Policelli-Sohrabi
This is the part where most marketing teams would nod along and then do absolutely nothing. Building an ambassador program sounds great in a strategy deck. Getting budget approval is another story.
The Business Case That Actually Got Funded
Convincing leadership to fund a formal ambassador program meant translating insight into a business case. The team paired the credibility argument with a concrete ROI model, including broker onboarding targets by province and a defined revenue goal.
The budget was modest: roughly $2,000 in paid social and $500 in boosted posts. When layered with in-kind benefits like free reports and conference registration, leadership could see the math. The program wasn't asking for a moonshot budget. It was asking for permission to activate an asset the company already owned.
The PurView Ambassadors program now features mortgage brokers like Carey Benvenuti, Sadiq Boodoo, Meaghan Hastings, and Christine Xu, all of whom are described as "hard-working, influential individuals who are dedicated to helping Canadians achieve their goal of home ownership and advancing our industry."
That language matters. These aren't paid influencers reading scripts. They're practitioners who use the product and have credibility in their professional community. The difference shows up in engagement rates that most B2B brands would struggle to achieve with ten times the budget.
What Social Listening Actually Looks Like in Practice
The tactical execution here is worth unpacking. Most B2B companies treat social listening as a reputation monitoring tool: track brand mentions, flag complaints, maybe catch a competitor doing something embarrassing. PurView used it as a talent identification system.
The team wasn't just looking for people who mentioned PurView. They were looking for people who had influence in the mortgage broker community, regardless of whether they'd ever posted about the product. Award nominations, speaking engagements, follower counts, engagement patterns: all of these became signals for identifying potential ambassadors.
This approach inverts the typical influencer marketing playbook. Instead of starting with reach and hoping for relevance, you start with relevance and let reach follow. A mortgage broker with 3,000 LinkedIn connections who's respected by their peers will outperform a generic business influencer with 100,000 followers every time, at least when you're selling to mortgage brokers.
The program earned Teranet a 2026 Social Intelligence Awards finalist spot in the Social Synergy category from Sprout Social. Policelli-Sohrabi's LinkedIn post announcing the recognition described it as "what happens when authentic voices become part of your marketing strategy."
The Uncomfortable Truth About B2B Trust
Here's the part that should make every CMO a little uncomfortable. Nielsen's 2021 Trust in Advertising Study found that trust in advertising is lowest in North America and Europe, up to 20% lower than in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. And 88% of global respondents trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel.
We've known this for years. The data hasn't changed. What's changed is that the tools to act on it have gotten better. Social listening platforms can now identify high-affinity customers at scale. Ambassador management software can track content, measure engagement, and attribute revenue. The infrastructure exists.
The question is whether B2B marketing teams are willing to shift budget from channels they control to channels they influence. That's a harder sell than it sounds. Paid media is predictable. You put money in, you get impressions out. Ambassador programs are messier. You're betting on relationships, on people who might say something off-script, on outcomes you can't fully control.
But the trust gap isn't going away. If anything, it's widening. As AI-generated content floods every channel and buyers get better at ignoring branded messages, the premium on authentic voices will only increase.
What This Means for Your 2027 Planning
If you're building next year's marketing strategy, the PurView case offers a few concrete takeaways.
First, audit your customer base for influence, not just satisfaction. NPS scores tell you who's happy. Social listening tells you who's happy and has an audience.
Second, build the business case around acquisition costs, not impressions. Leadership doesn't care about engagement rates. They care about whether this program will make it cheaper to acquire customers.
Third, start small. PurView's budget was under $3,000 in paid media. The in-kind benefits (free reports, conference registration) cost something, but they're costs you can control. You don't need a six-figure program to prove the concept.
Fourth, measure what matters. Ambassador programs are notoriously hard to attribute. Build tracking into the program from day one: unique URLs, promo codes, direct attribution where possible, and survey-based attribution where it isn't.
The mortgage broker who posts about PurView on LinkedIn isn't doing it for the free reports. They're doing it because the product makes them look good to their clients. That's the kind of alignment that no amount of paid media can manufacture.
Marketing is like dating, remember? You don't propose on the first ad impression. But if your customers are already wearing the ring, maybe it's time to let them tell the story.
