Ursula Ringham [00:00:00]:
You have to not have them be these zombies that are just regurgitating your messaging. They take your messaging and they put it in their words. They put it in their vision of what their audience would want to see.
Heather Cole [00:00:14]:
This is Go-To-Market Magic, the show where we talk to go to market leaders and visionaries about those “aha!” moments they’ve experienced and also the pivotal decisions that they’ve made, all in the name of growth.
Steve Watt [00:00:25]:
And we don’t just mean revenue growth that goes up into the right.
Heather Cole [00:00:28]:
But that’s nice too.
Steve Watt [00:00:29]:
We’re talking about how they improve their teams, their industries, their careers and their lives, because growth isn’t quite what it used to be.
Heather Cole [00:00:37]:
I’m Heather Cole.
Steve Watt [00:00:38]:
And I’m Steve Watt.
Heather Cole [00:00:39]:
Let’s uncover some of the magic that makes it happen. So, Steve, who are we talking to today?
Steve Watt [00:00:46]:
Oh, I’m really looking forward to this one, Heather. We’re speaking with Ursula Ringham. She’s SAP’s Global Head of Influencer Marketing. Ursula and SAP are pioneers, innovators in this space, doing something that most B2B companies are not doing at all. We’re going to dig deep with Ursula about why they’re embracing influencer marketing, how they build it, how they measure it, and a whole lot more.
Heather Cole [00:01:14]:
Great. So let’s jump right in.
Steve Watt [00:01:18]:
Ursula. Welcome to Go-To-Market Magic. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. Ursula and I met in Sydney, Australia. We were both speaking at an event and we actually came together to do a leadership session around social selling, employee advocacy and influencer marketing. And it was a really interesting process as Ursula and I meshed those topics together and really kind of fleshed out where they crossed over and where they’re unique. And we had a good time with the session and the audience loved it. And at that time, I said, you got to come on Go-To-Market Magic. And here we are.
Ursula Ringham [00:02:03]:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited. Thank you.
Steve Watt [00:02:05]:
Speaking of Australia, and before we get into the meat and potatoes here, I think you are the most global professional that I know. And if memory serves correctly, you have a home in California and a home in Germany. But I don’t think you spend a lot of time in either one of them, because every time I see you on LinkedIn, you’re in Singapore, you’re in the Nordics, you’re in Australia, you’re somewhere around the world. Is your life as global as my perception of it is?
Ursula Ringham [00:02:39]:
Yes, it actually is. And the funny thing is, I graduated with a degree in International Relations and, boy, I never thought it would actually live up to what I am doing right now. But I’m Global Head of Influencer Marketing at SAP. And my job, it’s not so much that I travel a lot for the job, but my personal life. SAP allows us to flex, work where we can travel and be where we are. And so, yes, you’re going to find me sometimes in the middle of the night, typing away and communicating and on meetings. But my lifestyle, I like to be global. I love like, I just got back from Singapore and Bali, and I loved connecting with people. I love talking, finding out what’s going on. How do they view United States, how we view know? And it’s all this learning and a byproduct is then I subtly ask, what social platforms do you use? How do you get information? Who influences your buying decisions? And that’s just a natural part of me. And so, yeah, it’s a lot of work, but, yeah, I’m all over the place. I live between California and Germany, and life is pretty good right now.
Steve Watt [00:03:49]:
That is wild. And you speak at a lot of conferences around the world, too. Singapore, was that a conference?
Ursula Ringham [00:03:56]:
Yeah, Singapore is a conference, and obviously we met in Sydney, and I do conferences in the United States, but it is really nice that people are recognizing what I’ve been doing at SAP for ten years. When you look at B, two B, influencer marketing programs, we have one of the best ones in the industry. And that’s why I’m excited that I can come on and talk with you about it, because I love speaking to audiences, and especially, like, in the region I just was in Singapore, it was an AHA moment. I had people coming up to me going, I never thought we could work with influencers because their perception is the B2B, Instagram TikTok selling lipstick, Kendall Jenner people. And when I show them examples of what we’ve done, and I actually show them, here’s a video, here’s this LinkedIn post. They will I had no idea. And so it opens their minds. And that’s why I always like to help people. I’m always there. I’m like, connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d love to help you get started, because I started and we’ll get into this, but I had, like, no budget when I started influencer marketing, and I just made my way through, and I’m happy to share lessons of what I did to get to where I am today.
Steve Watt [00:05:08]:
Oh, this is going to be fantastic. And I do want to go there. I really want to get into the how do you build this? How do you measure this? How do you sell this to senior executives? We got a lot of places to go, but before we go there, let’s spend a little bit of time on the why, and you kind of alluded to it there. When you hear influencer marketing, you don’t think enterprise software no, you don’t think a company like SAP, I mean, that is not where anyone’s mind goes to. And I think mean, even a lot of people are kind of even allergic to the word influencer because it seems like it’s become overrun with people trying to get free stays in hotels and taking photos of their ice cream cones. So tell us a little bit about where influencer marketing fits in modern B2B and why?
Ursula Ringham [00:06:01]:
Yeah, so that’s a really great question, Steve. And I’d say, like, the first thing to do is disassociate the word influencer. Think of these as thought leaders. They’re practitioners, they’re industry experts. So opposed to someone who’s great at creating a video, and they’re in a bikini hawking an ice cream cone, as you would say, these are people that probably have been in some kind of tech space for 20 years, 1020 years maybe. They were leading the HR efforts at a company, and they actually implemented some HR software, but now they’re out. They have a successful podcast or a blog series that people follow to find out the future of work and what’s going on. And so they are seen as trusted advisors, trusted voices. Likewise, like with data analysts, right now, people are just hungry for AI. But the crazy thing is, these are like data scientists that have been doing this for years. You don’t just become overnight an AI sensation. And so you have to look them as thought leaders. These are actually people that are serious in the business. And so why started this? This was gosh, I think it was like almost actually ten years ago or eleven years ago when I first started off with SAP. And not to get too much in the history, but I was a stay at home mom for a while, and I had worked at Adobe and Apple. But to get back into the industry is very difficult, and I just took a job that a girlfriend had through the back door. I started writing customer success stories for this company, SAP. No idea what SAP was. And long story short, after working there for about a year as a contractor, they left my work, and their VP called me in and said, we have two interns that are managing our social media channels. Do you think you could do that? And I said, of course I can. I had never done it. But I’m like, let me try. And the first thing I did, I started researching and talking to people. This one gentleman cannot remember his last name. His name was Tom. He told me, you need to work with these thought leaders. You need to work with these people that maybe are seen as influencers. And what they can do is they can validate anything you’re talking about. So it’s not coming and saying, hey, buy SAP software. It’s not saying buy s for Hana. No one’s going to even know what S for Hana is. But if you talk about the business challenges, if you start talking to people about, oh, where are you keeping all of your data? Is it in disparated areas? Is it in an Excel spreadsheet? How are you accessing it? How can you predict? How can you use. AI right, if you start talking about business challenges and what solutions are out there, maybe throw in a customer that gives an example of what they’ve done. And then the end result is, hey, if you want to find out how your business can be successful like these other businesses, check out what SAP has. And so that’s how it started for me, was very gradually. It was ten years ago. And there’s Brian Moran out there. He is an influencer for small businesses. And I started working with him, and we just started writing some blogs. That’s all we did. That’s how we got our start, is just writing blogs around different small and mid sized business challenges and what people could do to solve these challenges.
Heather Cole [00:09:07]:
Now, sometimes people hear influencer, too, and they think, oh, there needs to be a budget to pay these folks. Is that true in B2B too? I mean, are you actually compensating influencers in the same way that you would if they were hawking ice cream cones?
Ursula Ringham [00:09:22]:
Well, yeah, because guess what? Software, you can’t eat it, you can’t lick it, you can’t taste it, you can’t touch it. And the thing is, with our influencers, we’re asking them to do work. Can you write a blog if you’re a writer, you should be paid for this work, right? If a reporter is writing something or review. So, yes, we absolutely do pay them. And the one thing I want to emphasize, though, is I never go in to working with an influencer. And the first thing, how much do you want to get paid? I want to build the relationship. I want to figure out who this person is. I want to figure out do I like their content? And the great thing is, over time, we have some influencers we’ve been working with for years, and we do some package deals because we can kind of see in the future, oh, we’re going to be doing this or that, and because they want to continue working with us instead of a one off, right? We get some good deals there. But, yes, you need a budget. But let me tell you, other times, like, we just had a situation where The Wall Street Journal is going to be coming out with doing a campaign with us, and they wanted some quotes from people. We went to our influencer base and said, hey, do you want to be part of this? They’re not going to charge to do a quote because they’re like, gosh, it’s The Wall Street Journal, my name’s going to show up there. So every situation is unique. But Heather, just to let you know, yes, you need some type of budget. Just like if you’re doing any marketing campaign, you need something.
Steve Watt [00:10:39]:
And let’s talk channels. You mentioned sort of pulling people together for published articles, wall Street Journal or what have you. I presume there’s a podcasting element there, and I’m quite sure there’s a number of social channels there. Take us through kind of your landscape of all the different channels that you are collaborating with influencers or thought leaders on, and which of those channels you find to be most important, easiest to start, hardest to work with.
Ursula Ringham [00:11:15]:
Yeah, Steve, great question about different channels. So the first thing you have to do is I obviously work with enterprise software, but out there, B2B is bigger than that. It could be financial, it could be medical, it could be healthcare, it could be so many different things. So the first thing you have to do is figure out where’s the watering hole? Where’s that area that your audience congregates around? Where is it? And so there’s lots of different channels. There could be blog sites, there could be different communities out there. I mean, there’s so many things depending on the industry for what we do. LinkedIn is a great platform, and it’s interesting because of all the craziness with X Twitter right now, I just read an article that suddenly people are moving over to LinkedIn to be like, wow, there’s actually content here. That’s interesting. And maybe there’s influencers. And so LinkedIn is the best one because people there are not scrolling through, looking at cat videos and whatnot. They’re actually maybe they’re trying to enrich their career. Maybe they’re doing some research for their boss on software products. That’s where they go and look for majority of the time. So LinkedIn kind of validates us because, to be honest, right, it’s the serious platform. You have to set up your account. You have your job information there and whatnot.
Steve Watt [00:12:31]:
It’s your real name, it’s your real job, it’s your real photo, unless you’re faking it with a…
Ursula Ringham [00:12:37]:
Yeah, there can be some fake stuff, but in general, it’s when you look at all the other platforms, I think it’s the best one for that.
Steve Watt [00:12:43]:
I like to call LinkedIn the greatest ongoing business conversation that the world has ever seen. I hit that note a lot and I truly believe it. And yeah, you’re helping or work collaborating with people to enrich that conversation with some really valuable content.
Ursula Ringham [00:13:01]:
Absolutely. And for me, I’d like to be organic with my posts. I know I need to post like at least once or maybe three times a month, but it’s always organic where there’s something I saw and it’s interesting. I think my audience would like that. And so influencers on LinkedIn have to do the same thing. You can’t go to an AI influencer and say, oh, can you talk about the cloud over here with SAP? It’s like, no, it’s got to relate. How does AI relate to that? Because their audience is going to know immediately, right, that it’s a paid content. Anytime we work with influencers, they do disclose if it is paid. So we have like a hashtag or they say, I sponsored by SAP or whatever. But getting back to the channels. LinkedIn is the best one. Twitter is still very good with events. People were using X because it’s the event. They want to talk, they want to get in. So Twitter is still X. God. I cannot say x here. X is still good for that. But on a regular basis, I don’t see our type of influencers using it as much. It’s more like event focused. They need to figure out what they’re doing there. Instagram, we’re having really good success, but once again, it depends on the topic. So I’m not going to necessarily go and find an Instagram influencer that’s talking know, we have this business technology transformation suite that SAP has. It’s around cloud development, not going to find someone. But if you’re talking about human relations, future of work, if you’re talking about, I want to be a programmer, I want to do some learnings, we’ve had huge success because these specific influencers, their channel knows that they’re talking about, hey, I’m a developer, I’m a programmer. This is how you can get started here’s, the different programming languages. And so we kind of insert ourselves into that to be like, hey, if you’re looking for work right now, have you thought of SAP? And people go, what’s SAP. And it’s like, oh, you know that if you know programming languages, you can write for SAP. And so Instagram, we found some really good short snackable content that people resonate with. And it depends on if it’s a story, if it’s a reel. YouTube, we’ve had success. YouTube is definitely longer format content where we have someone review a product that they’re using or whatnot. And then TikTok, the interesting with TikTok is, no, we don’t go out and look for it, but Instagram and TikTok, usually the people have the same content. And so by a byproduct, sometimes our Instagram people will take it over to their TikTok. Not that it’s like we’re tracking it for huge success, but there’s lots of different platforms out there. But I have to emphasize, Steve and Heather, you have to know your watering hole, figure out where your audience goes. Like, we had a conversation on my team call today about Pinterest. Is it still relevant? Well, if you have a B2B company that works with like do it yourselfers or crafts and different projects and who knows what, that might be a great channel for you, right? And so the main thing is finding that watering hole, that channel that works for you, and then going all in on researching it and figuring out what content resonates and that’s where then you find these influencers and you see how much engagement they get on their content.
Heather Cole [00:16:04]:
One thing that I heard you say too, which is surprising to me, is that it sounds like you’re still fighting the awareness battle, like you’re still trying to get people to understand who SAP is. And in my mind, everybody knows who SAP is.
Ursula Ringham [00:16:15]:
Heather no, people still don’t know SAP. I’m in Silicon Valley, and let’s say I get into an Uber or Lyft. Ultimately someone talks to me, oh, where do you work? I’m like SAP. And they go, that’s so cool. Do you get tickets to the hockey games? Because SAP Center is where the so people it’s funny. Like, people in the know that are in high tech, they get it. But in the Valley here, people are so focused. I got to work at Google. I got to work at Facebook. They want to work with these name brands. And, like, for example, Chuck Schumer in Congress is going to have the top tech companies come meet with him to talk about AI. Well, SAP is not part of that because we’re German, and I’m like, Ah, but we have such a North America presence, and we are doing things with, you know, Heather, you might recognize SAP, but we still have a perception problem, right? So that brings up a really good point.
Heather Cole [00:17:06]:
So if awareness is still a huge part of it, what you’re doing? How are you measuring it, and are those measurements you’re looking, obviously, at outcomes, and how are you measuring to those outcomes, and how does that play? You’ve been very successful in a large company. Obviously, it’s playing with the senior level, and so how have you done that? And I’m sure people really want to know that because that is what makes it stick, and it gives it the longevity.
Ursula Ringham [00:17:32]:
Great question about impact and reporting and how do you show success. So that is something that I always say. Each campaign is unique and different, and it is just like, different platforms. So, for example, if we’re at an event, we probably want to see the amplification, how much reach we’re getting, how many impressions we’re getting. Right? We want to just blast it out there, and that’s really cool, right? We can see that. We can measure that with different tools out there to see our reach. So, for example, we had our big once a year event called Sapphire in Orlando, and I think the entire conference over three days had 144,000,000 reach, which, you know, that’s huge stats. Guess what? 20 of our influencers made up 47% of that huge numbers. This was we jumped up. We were three years ago, 25%. Then we went to 35%, 47. And it shows you that the influencers out there, they were using Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And mind you, Twitter has a bigger because it’s an event, it has more impressions that are going out there, but that really shows impact. So for that, we were just looking at the impressions. Then if you’re having a campaign where, let’s say we want people to go to a webinar or we want people to watch a video and look how many video views you have to kind of look at benchmarking that with the influencer. So you look at, like, past campaigns they’ve done, how many views did you get on this? How many clicks did you get? And we can come up kind of with our own benchmark. And so what we do with each team is we meet with them individually, we talk with the influencer, and we all agree here’s the KPIs, we all agree on them, and then we just let it happen. And sometimes it’s a miss, sometimes it’s hit it out of the ballpark, sometimes it’s right there. But what you do with the influencer is then at the end of each campaign, we meet with the team, with the influencers. How could we? We can always improve, right? Always improve. And maybe it’s like a simple fix for certain things, but impact is so important because executives want to see that. And it’s interesting. We had this one campaign with an executive and we had set KPIs and then they came back and they’re like, oh, we thought there were going to be more views. And we’re like, what are you talking about? We had an estimate of 5000 views. We got 12,000. And they said, Well, I saw something else that got 20. And I’m like, let’s bring it back in. This is what we all agreed upon based on the research, and they were looking at something totally unrelated. And so you have to set the expectations. And once we went back and told this executive this is a situation, they went, oh, you’re right. And so set expectations at the beginning of what are those key performance indicators KPIs. And then everyone’s going to be on the same page and there’s not necessarily benchmarks out there, like in LinkedIn. How many views should I get on a you know, you can look at engagement rates and look, know how many followers they have and there’s a calculation you can do, but in general, there’s no set benchmarks out there. It’s individual based on the influencer.
Steve Watt [00:20:34]:
I have a question for you, Ursula, about the nature of the content itself, whether it’s written or video or social posts or anything else. And I’m imagining a spectrum where on one end of the spectrum, it’s entirely about SAP. It’s like, oh, SAP is so awesome, and here’s a new product release and all that kind of stuff. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s entirely about the problem, the industry, the challenges that customers are dealing with. It doesn’t mention SAP at all. I have to imagine that The Right Place is a little bit somewhere in between those. And as you said, if you’re just talking about your products, nobody’s going to pay you any attention. But if you go fully to the other end of the spectrum, no one’s going to know it had anything to do with SAP. It’s like, okay, well, how does this help us? How do you navigate that spectrum and such that you’re working in some SAP to make it work for SAP without alienating your audience or alienating your influencers who don’t want to be advertisers. How do you navigate that spectrum? And is it different channel by channel, campaign by campaign?
Ursula Ringham [00:21:46]:
Great question about not turning your influencers into salespeople. Right? Because that’s the first thing, is whenever we meet with influencers to talk with them, my first thing is I want to protect your brand as much as I want to protect ours. And the first part of their brand and mind you, we’ve had in my ten years doing this at sales, eleven years doing this in SAP, I’ve had some situations where there are teams that go, Ursula, we know better. I’m like, okay, let’s let the house burn, because and I have the emails to back it up, saying, I want to help you. I know how to do this. No, ursula, we got this. We know how to work with the influencer. Mind you, I’m there helping them. And they came out with a scripted content, and the influencer was like, okay, they’re paying me. I guess I’m going to do this. And they did it. And it was so horribly received because you look at all the comments, everyone’s like, oh, they got paid to do this because they were talking about the product. And you can’t do that. So people have learned from them, and what you have to do is protect the influencers brand. And so you have to not have them be these zombies that are just regurgitating your messaging. They take your messaging and they put it in their words, they put it in their vision of what their audience would want to see. And so, for example, we have this one influencer, and he had a really great interview, and he created on his own, kind of the teasers to get people to look at it. And it’s totally awesome. It’s like a 1530 minutes teaser where it’s got some graphics and music, and it takes little comments that are made in the interview, and it appeals to that audience that maybe is just flicking through, maybe on Instagram or who knows where, that maybe they’re only watching something for 15, 20 seconds. And so the content, you always have to you never have them sell. And that’s what I’m saying, Steve. We don’t go to an influencer and say, talk about this product release. It’s more like, what are those business challenges that the product release helps now? And then if people are more interested, hey, go over here and read about that. So it’s more cutting through the noise, catching that person’s attention, which can be difficult, right? And it depends on the platform. As I said before, LinkedIn is really good for all of our solutions. Not so much with, like, Instagram. I would never, as I said before, go with a very technical conversation.
Steve Watt [00:24:04]:
I think we all understand your philosophy in that regard, and it’s obviously smart, but do you subtly weave mentions of SAP and SAP’s product or ask your influencers to weave that into their piece or it’s not just bolted on at the end. Like, this was brought to you by.
Ursula Ringham [00:24:24]:
No, no, it has to be appropriate. And so, yes, they weave it in like, yeah, we had one of our products, Datasphere and the Influencer wrote a great blog and obviously was talking about all these different challenges and said, hey, look, I just was included in this briefing and found out that SAP is doing X, Y and Z, right? And this is like their new data sphere product, blah, blah, blah. But in general, it’s not a sales thing. It’s like, hey, if you check this out for yourself and by the way, yes, this is Sponsored. And so we make sure the Influencers are comfortable with how they let their audience know. And it’s interesting, LinkedIn, my team, just told me this today. They just came out with a new feature that there’s some kind of new tagging that you can automatically tag to say that this is Sponsored Content. So now people can look and see. When you do a Google search, the first five things that come up Sponsored, right? So there’s going to be similar things on LinkedIn. Now, Instagram automatically can do not automatically, but our influencers easily can say it’s Sponsored Content. But I think, Steve, I’ll have to send you some examples after. But it’s just the subtleness of adding SAP into the conversation. But it should never be the forefront because then to Heather’s point, you think everyone knows what SAP is, but not everyone does. And it comes as like, oh, that’s a surprise. Let me go research. What is this SAP? What are they doing?
Steve Watt [00:25:45]:
Hey, Ursula, question about your team. You lead a team. Are they responsible for different regions, different channels, different types of content? How is your team structured?
Ursula Ringham [00:25:58]:
So we’re a small but mighty team. There’s a total of seven of us, and we predominantly do our work in North America and EMEA. But then we spread out. We can go anywhere. And mind you, in a real world situation, I would love to have maybe some dotted line, have some other teams that report to me. Got to build my empire very slowly. So we got to take our time with that. But we manage all the line of businesses, all the different products within SAP. And so that’s quite a bit. And mind you, some are more important than others, but we have like six or seven different specific topic areas for the technologies. But then understand, there’s sustainability. That’s a very big topic now. AI kind of permeates everything. And the cool thing that I love, sometimes you’ll have these teams that are very siloed in, hey, I’m doing HR, I’m doing cloud development, I’m doing whatever they need to cross pollinate. And we help connect the dots. So right now, we’re working on a really cool campaign. I can’t talk much about. It, but it’s around all these different moments that will be happening over the next four months. And they’re like key events, key, we call them moments, key things around the different technology. And where I’m like, let’s do an umbrella campaign, where then our influencers who focus on this, they can be part of all these little conversations, but it’s a continuous drumbeat of conversation around this one topic, but then it can dive. So, you know, we love to connect the dots and our know, we keep up. Like, for me, as I said, I travel, so I see what are being done in different you know, we’ve had campaigns specifically in India, we’ve had campaigns specifically in APAC, as I said, in Maya, in the Middle East, down in Lac. But as I said, the predominance is in North America. And EMEA, that’s where we are.
Steve Watt [00:27:49]:
And your individual team members, did I get you right, that they’re not so much tied to a channel or a region, but are they more tied to a business unit, a product family, a solution within SAP?
Ursula Ringham [00:27:59]:
Solutionary line of business, Yeah, definitely. And that I found, and mind you, some of them pair better than others. But right now, that’s kind of what works well, because then the great thing is they can go in and become an expert on that area. And last year I made a change to change it up so people could get better experience. Because what it takes to do influencer marketing, you have to be a project manager, no content, relationship management, and then dependent on your topic area. So once someone was becoming this huge expert on this, I’m like, you know this too well. Let’s move you over here. And they were happy about it because that’s going to help their career. Now they have the expertise behind the scenes and then they can also connect the dots when necessary with that other technology they use to manage.
Heather Cole [00:28:45]:
I have a final question for you. I think that one of the things that we see a lot. And obviously, Steve and I work with a lot of sales teams, and when they’re doing social and they’re promoting content that’s coming out of an official channel from the company, what you start to hear is these repeaters, and you’re getting all the same posts all the time. Do you have any recommendations or any tips or tricks to keep that from happening on a consistent basis so you’re not putting the same stuff from different people to the same channels over a period of days?
Ursula Ringham [00:29:19]:
Yeah. So Heather, it sounds like when you have a primary company and their channels, right, they’re putting content out. It seems kind of repetitive. It’s the same thing. I would say take your influencer content and repurpose it. Retweet it, reshare it, whatever it is. Because the one thing is, companies can unfortunately get into a situation where it becomes an echo chamber, right, where they’ll come out with some content, and then you look at who’s engaging it’s, all the employees for that company, which is great, but you need to have other people. And so that’s why I say the power of the influencer is that they have this audience that maybe is not even aware of what SAP is. And so I encourage companies get out of the echo chamber, start partnering with these third parties, whether it’s influencers analysts, the press, all that stuff, because it’s going to get stale Heather, real quick, right.
Steve Watt [00:30:09]:
One final question for you, Ursula. I feel like I want to talk to you for hours but we do have time limits on these things. If I’m just starting in this, I don’t have the team, I don’t have the budget, I don’t have the credibility. Senior leadership is almost scoffing at the idea of influencer marketing. I can’t try to boil the ocean and do everything that you and your team do. Obviously, I got to focus somewhere. Now, I’m sure you’re going to say it’s going to depend on the industry, the company, the product, the value, all that stuff. But as a general statement, would you say pick one lane and get really good at LinkedIn, get really good at podcasting, something like that first and then expand? Or would you take one product suite from your company and focus there and try to be on six different channels? How do I start if I’m just one person?
Ursula Ringham [00:31:05]:
So you need to start small. I always tell my team, less is more. Right? And what you have to do is, as you said, like, pick that channel, do your research, figure out who are these influencers you want to work with. And I think the easiest thing to do is do like a blog people still read or just a LinkedIn post, right? It is so easy to do that. When I started out, I had no budget, I had to TINCUP from various teams. And the one thing is, I did a lot of research. I went to different conferences, I did a lot of research on the web, just looking at what are other people doing. And so I put together presentations that I would go to my stakeholders and say, look, we need to do this, we need to do this. I just need like $5,000. Can you please help? And so you have to be a salesperson to start off. Sometimes you can work with influencers and depending on your brand, like you’ve mentioned, maybe you don’t need initially to have to pay anyone because sometimes maybe you have a really good thought leadership website that you have. And now you’re like, let’s add an influencer because we’ve been only having our executives blog on it. Let’s bring an influencer in. They might go, oh, I want to be associated with that brand. And you could say, hey, can you first start off writing two blogs for us? We’ll see how that goes. And then if it proves itself, we can look at then monetizing this and getting you paid for the work that you should be compensated for. And so you have to start small, research the heck out of your market where’s the watering holes and just pick like one or two influencers. And here’s the other thing. You can reach out to as many people as you want to. Like, I tell my team, they’re like, oh, but we don’t have budget for this. I’m like, who cares? Reach out to this person because they’re in our topic area. You just want to get to know them, you want to network with them. No one’s going to be like, I’m not going to talk to you. It’s like, hey, I just want to know who you are, what you do, tell me about your content, what have you done with other companies? And sometimes influencers will share that information. They’ll be like, sure, I’ll share some information with you that can help your case. And so the main thing is just connecting with people. And it’s so funny you look at this younger generation right now because I have a gen Z on my team. They don’t like to call people. It’s so funny. It’s all done through DM and stuff and I’m like, the best thing you can do is have a conversation. Like we are literally just be like, can I get on a zoom? If you live in the area, let’s go get a cup of coffee. Just want to talk to you because it’s a relationship. Once you build that relationship, then that influencer might go, you know what, let’s take a chance on this. I’ll help you out this one time. Let’s see if we can get the pilot going and then if you prove it, please, let’s look into monetizing it right?
Steve Watt [00:33:37]:
Fantastic. Ursula, thank you so much. You’ve lit a fire under me about influencer marketing. You started that fire back in Sydney and you fanned the flames today and I hope you lit a fire. There are a lot of other people, either people who never even thought this might be within their realm or really didn’t know how to start, how to measure, how to scale or anything like that. Thank you for being such an open book and sharing your wisdom and your experience in such a compelling Ursula. Really, really appreciate that.
Ursula Ringham [00:34:10]:
You are welcome, Heather. Steve, thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation.
Heather Cole [00:34:17]:
That was such an interesting conversation. Ursula always has so much insight into this topic.
Steve Watt [00:34:24]:
She’s great, isn’t she, Heather? From the first time I met Ursula in Australia, I was just kind of blown away by her expertise in the space, her passion for the space, and I knew this was going to be a good episode. I’m so glad that she was happy to join us. And I got to say, one of the first and most important things that she hit on, I believe, is the fact that influencer marketing, especially in a B to B context, not only is it possible, but it’s a strategic initiative. It’s not a tactic, it’s not something we’re going to do for a quarter. It’s not a magic wand that we’re going to wave and go viral. It’s much more strategic and longer term than that. And she talked about really understanding your audience, really researching the thought leaders and influencers that have credibility for that audience. She talked about the fact that you’re going to need a budget. People with real credibility aren’t just going to do this for free in most cases. And you’ve got to have KPIs that align with the real things that you’re doing here. And you’ve got to have a horizon, a time horizon that’s going to allow these relationships to flourish and everything else to come together. Because I can only imagine that there are B, two B companies out there saying, AHA, that’s it in Q two, we’re going to do influencer marketing and they’re going to fail. Ursula approaches it in a much more strategic way.
Heather Cole [00:36:00]:
Yeah, and you know what caught my ear immediately is when she said you have to protect your own brand and you have to protect the influencer brand. And protecting your own brand sometimes is about not talking about yourself, not talking about your product, talking about the focus, which is the customer, their challenges, the outcomes that they’re looking for, the environment and things that are of interest to them. And when you start just talking about product, it becomes very obvious that this is not something that is valuable to the listeners and to the readers. So by not talking about product, you’re actually protecting your own brand, which could be counterintuitive, but it makes a ton of sense in the way that B2B buyers are thinking.
Steve Watt [00:36:43]:
So right. It’s respecting your audience, I think, first and foremost. And it’s also perhaps equally important, respecting these influencers and thought leaders and partners and collaborators, that you’re not respecting either of those groups. If you try to jam product pitches in there, if you try to turn it into a thinly veiled sales pitch, absolutely everyone is going to see through it and it’s going to fail. And I’m sure that people like Ursula who are building these programs have to fight that battle internally. I’m sure that they are all faced with people in various parts of the business, including senior leadership, saying, we need more product talk, we’ve got a release coming up or we won an award. You got to get this in there. And I got to imagine that Ursula and others in roles like hers are kind of playing defense sometimes to protect the integrity of the entire program that they’re building.
Heather Cole [00:37:45]:
Well, I’m just in awe that she can balance her house in California and Germany and not be too jet lagged to come on and talk to us after she did a side trip to Bali.
Steve Watt [00:37:55]:
As one does. Yeah. So glad she joined us today. I wasn’t kidding when I said I wish this could be a two hour long episode, but I hope everyone had as good a time with this and learned as much in our short episode as I did.
Heather Cole [00:38:12]:
Absolutely. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show on YouTube or your favorite podcast.
Steve Watt [00:38:17]:
App and check out gotomarket/magic.com for show notes and resources.
Steve Watt [00:38:31]:
Want more conversations like these, but live and in person. Join us at Shift. Shift is the annual conference for go to market leaders in San Diego this year. It’s October 23 to the 26th, and it’s going to be fantastic. Go to Seismic.com/shift for registration and more information.
