John Cass: Hello, I’m John Cass, SVP of Marketing at McDougall Interactive. Welcome to the Authority Marketing Roadmap podcast. Today’s podcast features Al Biedrzycki, who works in Partner Marketing at HubSpot. Today, we are going to talk about Influencer Marketing, and how you get the best results.
Welcome, Al.
Al Biedrzycki: Great to be here. Thanks for having me, John.
John: It’s great to have you. We’ve been talking for a while about the idea of Influencer Marketing and some ideas around that. Today’s discussion is going to be more of an open discussion where we’ve got questions, and we both attempt to answer them.
Let’s get started. First question we came up with was “What is Influencer Marketing”? What do you think of that question?
What is Influencer Marketing?
Al: We were talking back and forth about it at the Authority Marketing Seminar, way back in November. It was funny because I had started talking about some of the channel marketing stuff that I’ve done, and how it ties into some Influencer Marketing stuff that you’ve been working on.
What it is, to me, at least, is working with individuals, and call them “influencers,” who have a specific connection to an audience that you’re trying to tap into. For instance, a good example here is, say that a product that you want to sell to a group of individuals, there’s somebody, maybe a thought leader in the industry, who writes blog posts or creates content around that particular product or service that you’re offering.
This person would be considered an influencer. Influencer Marketing, in this case, is if you’re having ways to leverage them as a marketing channel. That’s how I see it. How about yourself, John?
John: It’s a term I’ve thought about for a number of years, although I’ve never actually…When I first started using it, I think I’ve used different terms over the years. I actually remember a big discussion back in 2005 between myself and Shel Holtz, who’s one of the principals of the podcast “For Immediate Release,” talking about the idea of blogger relations.
That particular term was a term that I think came up in the industry partly because the PR companies, PR industry, came up with that. They’re used to the idea of public relations, and blogger relations is more this idea of pitching people, where you pitch them an idea and say, “Hey, would you like to write about it?”
Whereas, the concept as I thought about it at the time was less about pitching people, although you could certainly use that term, and is really more about how you have an organic conversation with people, and through that process of back and forth, and talking about ideas, you actually start to influence people.
I eventually gave up on the idea that blogger relations meant that, because I think so many people went with the idea of blogger relations being more along the public relations concept, with pitching. It encompasses, really, or as time has gone on, influencer marketing has been kind of the other term.
Part of that is you’re going through this process. You are pitching people, but it’s also perhaps this process of how you build relationships with people through that organic process. Also, as you suggested, realizing that if you’re connecting with particular influencers, and they share your ideas and concepts, or even content, then you’re working within their networks as a result. It’s very much an organic process, still, as well.
Al: Totally, and for us here, speaking for HubSpot in general, we consider our influencers like thought leaders in the marketing industry, because we’re selling marketing software. To kind of piggyback on what you’re saying, it’s about us developing those relationships with those folks.
Either we pitch them, or we already have established relationships through somebody we know at the company. It’s building and developing those relationships, then figuring out the marketing communications and plans that you could use, through them. Leverage them to further your marketing message.
John: Yeah, and that makes sense, although one other thing that I would say is that if you’re in the process of pitching, although I think it’s certainly OK if you know somebody, you could send them a quick email and ask that. If you are pitching someone, I often think it’s better coming from the PR Department, rather than another influencer who is building a relationship with another influencer.
You’re pitching, so you’re asking for something to be done. If you have an easy, casual relationship, I think that’s sometimes pretty easy, but if it’s more of a straight pitch, then there actually is a good role for PR people, and PR companies, in that instance. What are your thoughts?
Al: Definitely. You keep bringing up the term PR a lot, and it’s like how PR has evolved, where Influencer Marketing is now. It’s almost a hybrid of PR and content marketing, when you think about it, because as content is becoming more streamlined on the Internet ‑‑ people can read it, digest it, produce it a lot faster.
PR has absorbed those qualities and figured out, “OK, how can we take content marketing and what it means for businesses, put a PR spin on it by connecting with these influencers, and making the two practices meet”, in a way. It’s almost like a crossroads where PR and content marketing meet, like Influencer Marketing in a way.
That’s how I’m visualizing and how I usually talk about it.
John: Yeah, I think you are absolutely right, Al. Crossroads is a good term there between several disciplines ‑‑ PR, journalism and so forth. What happens, essentially, those different disciplines provide different aspects of how you are successful in your Influencer Marketing efforts.
I’d say PR influenced things, I think journalism especially in ethics and the approach to things and also perhaps the discipline. Then SEO throws in some stuff which comes into marketing, really, in how you approach this whole idea of building connections that then have another influence on top.
If you build those relationships with people, that then results in link back to your website, that’s actually going to have an indirect effect because it may up your search engine rankings and therefore you’ll get additional sales as result.
That was one of the most interesting things that I found when I was doing the corporate blogging survey back in 2005, where I was talking to people that Macromedia and that sort of companies and learning that the product managers in those early days were getting direct sales results out of the indirect organic work that they were doing.
Al: That’s interesting.
John: Yeah, I think product managers were the first people. There’s another discipline that, partly because they’re evangelists, and they are also trying to figure out the model for how you actually do marketing. They were some of the first people to figure out how to get blogging and social media.
And in essence, what they were doing is Influencer Marketing. They may have been doing it with customers or their influencers, but especially in the early days, a lot of those companies were technology companies and their customers were on the Web. They were influencers and so those relationships had a huge effect for companies like IBM and Macromedia.
Role of Influencer Marketing
Al: The next question we have here, and I think that we sort of both answered it, John, that we talked about. What is the role of Influencer Marketing in your work? I can go first on this one and dive in. I got a pretty good answer to this one. [laughs]
John: Yeah, go ahead.
Al: You mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I work with the HubSpot partner program, I do Partner Marketing. It’s almost like a micro version of Influencer Marketing that I leverage through our channels. There are a lot of partners in our communities, over 2,000 partner agencies work with HubSpot.
There are a lot of different campaigns that I run that tap into our partners, for instance. What sparked this idea in my head was when you mentioned product managers being evangelists for the products that they are trying to launch, trying to market and such.
We sometimes lean on our partners to help promote something that we are releasing. They’re our influencer community in a way, which is pretty interesting. We have a lot of different partners all across the world that have different resources and reach that we do.
It’s interesting that we tap into them to get their extent of reach on something that we’re releasing ourselves too. Because, they are reselling it, they obviously want to talk about it too, and they have a reach that we don’t. That’s how Influencer Marketing plays a role in what I do.
John: Yeah, it’s a really interesting case study for what you do and using Influencer Marketing and how it’s executed. For ourselves here at McDougall, I’d say principally, it’s one of two ways. If it’s for ourselves, we run a couple of podcasts, the Authority Marketing Roadmap for example, and we use the podcast as a way to reach out to influencers and have ongoing discussions about what’s going on in the industry.
That’s one of the ways that we build relationships with people.
We also have another blog called “The Legal Marketing Review,” where we’ve used that to ask a series of questions and build a survey. We are just about to launch an eBook on that.
Then for our clients, often we are just talking with the clients when we are doing podcasting with them. Increasingly, we are also looking into opportunities to…perhaps either us doing a podcast with the influencers in their market places or have the client perhaps consider doing a podcast where they’re interviewing someone.
I think those are some of the good opportunities that we look at.
Al: Question for you on what you just said. You said McDougall, you guys will approach influencers yourselves when you’re running the said podcasts or some piece of content. How do you convey to the benefit of them participating in whatever you have in mind?
John: Really what it is, is that we’re promoting them in our channel. We approach them and we say, “We’d like to do an interview together, a podcast. We’d like to promote your ideas and discuss them with our clients and the people that we deal with through our own marketing.” I think that it’s more about how we can help them and that usually works.
I don’t think many people turn us down for those sort of interviews because it is easy to do for a short podcast. Also, we’re helping them. We learn a lot from it and they get promoted in either the podcast or also the blog posts, and we perhaps eventually turn them into an eBook.
Al: It’s interesting. I don’t think anybody really turns down an opportunity for them to share their voice on the Internet in any shape or form on their expertise. Especially if you are approaching them and saying, “Hey, we think you’re super great. Would you mind sharing your ideas, thoughts and insights on this podcast for instance and talking about it?”
I don’t think a lot of people would turn something down like that. I’m wondering though, say it’s like if somebody is trying to sell a proprietary product or service and they’re reaching out to an influencer who maybe they’ve never ever talked to before but it’s very well-tuned in the industry.
How would you go about conveying the value to that particular influencer? What do think is in it for them in that situation.
John: It is certainly still good that you’re…It is more about the influencer’s content. It’s less about your own. You’re not having a discussion about your own content or your ideas and concepts. But you are really discussing the concepts of the influencer and you really bring that up. I think if you make that clear, you are much more likely to have people understand the value.
Especially if they’re going to a site which has already built up quite a lot of great content.
That’s another factor. It is a lot easier for us now. We have been running the Legal Marketing Review for a while now. We can just point to those interviews and say, “This is what other people have been doing,” and also list the type of influencers that had been in those podcasts. It makes it very easy for people to see that we’re really trying to learn from the industry and give that knowledge back to the industry
Al: I think you’re right. Giving context by sharing one’s past examples is good. It’s a good way to get the influencer bought in, so to say. It’s interesting that you mentioned the blogger relations before. Before I was at HubSpot, I worked at a marketing agency where one of our clients they sold…they still might be in business, but it was like an online website where girls could customize their own clothes online and buy them.
The person who would purchase these for the kids would be the parents. We’d want to influence the parents, which were typically moms.
What we did was we did a mommy blogger campaign where we reached out to very prominent mommy bloggers. It was basically an email outreach at that time. We didn’t have any established relationships with them. Sort of like a cold email to them saying, “Hey, we have this really cool product coming up for the holiday season.
If you would write a review and try it out on your site, we’ll give you a gift card so you could buy some for your children as well.”
But that was Influencer Marketing when it was first starting out, the blogger relations during the day. It almost felt like, a little bit of a cold call, in a way, in terms of Influencer Marketing. But I think it definitely changed today with the ways you could reach out via social media. You could Tweet at somebody, get in touch via LinkedIn introductions or stuff like that.
John: Yeah, it’s a lot easier in some ways – sending an email, it’s probably going to go in the spam folder. It’s better to Tweet somebody, even if you don’t know them and say, “Hey, would like to do an interview?” then you’re probably going to DM if you’re on Twitter or something and then follow up from there.
It is much more likely to happen.
Al: I remember we reached out to about 20 to 30 mommy bloggers and a couple got back. I would sign all the email signatures at the end of this canned email. I would send out Al, just my name, but for some reason, I guess because it was the line of business, they just assumed I was a girl.
When they would write back to me they would talk in the context of me being a girl and they…one of them even called me Ally or something. I was like I am not going to even correct it. I will just keep on going. [laughs]
Who should you target as an influencer?
John: That’s funny. Next question, who should you target as an influencer?
Al: Good question. It’s one of those things that you really need to sit down and make sure that your whole marketing plan is mapped out in your whole strategy. Think of who your audience is. Either what you’re trying to sell, promote, convey via your marketing. And then think of who are the thought leaders or the people in this space that have quite a large following that would be interested in promoting this messaging in a unique way through their content.
I think you need to just take a step back and think about what you are trying to promote and sell and say, “OK, who talks about this frequently?” or “who posts about or produces content about it?”
John: That makes absolute sense. It reminds me of a couple of case studies. USA is a good example of one that focuses on military bloggers and they reach out to people. We just did a podcast this last week which is not published yet but it was with Jim Cahill who’s an amazing blogger, been doing blogging for 10 years at Emerson Process Management.
They are a multi-billion-dollar company. He started off by focusing on the journalists that had blogs in his trade industry and ended up helping to spark off the entire blogging industry in his particular field. It is sort of the conduit for the community.
That is one thing that I think about, which is, social can be so broad. It can take up so much time. I think it can be very overwhelming to people. When I think of who you should target for an influencer, part of it should be also thinking about the resources that you have and what you are capable of doing.
If there is an opportunity to target a very large group of people, then maybe narrow it down so that you are actually capable of doing something within the scheme of things because, I think, sometimes social media can be just too overwhelming for people.
Al: Exactly. Sometimes you might pick an influencer and the message might fall on deaf ears. You really got take a look who their audience is and if their following is legitimate to that as well. Some people, they could have large followings, but are you sure that that following is part of your audience, or it’s the right type of person you are targeting?
While a big number of followers or connections or something of this influencer might look very attractive, I think it also warrants a critical look into if this audience is actually going to resonate with this message.
John: At HubSpot in partner marketing, how do you target influencers and leverage some of the relationships that you have for getting the word out?
Al: There’s definitely a couple of ways that we could define Influencer Marketing through the way we do partner marketing at HubSpot. To broaden that topic a little bit, there are two ways we run the partner business. One is we bring on new partners. We create content around agency specific content. Building retainers, selling new business, branding, stuff that agencies are interested in, and then connect it to Inbound Marketing, so they become a new agency partner.
Then there is the other side of partner marketing that we do – that when our new agencies become partners, we work with them to drive more business for them. It’s sort of a two-pronged approach, one, we are bringing in new agency partners, and two, we are helping our existing agency partners generate more business.
On the first part where we are trying to bring on new agency partners, our influencers in the space are basically people from the big agencies around the world. People who have been in it for a while, understand what it takes to grow an agency, building retainer business, even merging with other agencies to grow your agency or sell the business as well.
Those are like thought leaders because that’s what taps in with the prospects that we are trying to attract to the partner program. Those thought leaders in the agency space.
John: What’s the mechanism you use for targeting particular agencies and how the whole content process works with your program there?
Al: It comes in all flavors too, in that regard. At our annual conference, Inbound, that we have in Boston, we have a lot of speaking sessions from those types of influencers out there, like Brent Hodgins is one I can name, David Baker. Well known people in the agency world that will come to our conference and speak, because that’s sort of a way we’ll get agency prospects interested in other partner programs just by basically having those influencer speak at our conferences.
Contributions from Influencers & Social Content
John: That leads me to our next question. What are the best ways to make social content by asking for contributions from influencers?
Al: Good question. The best ways to make social content is that in the way of saying how do I make the content in‑house that then an influencer will promote. Or how do I make that content with the influencer, it’s like a mutual effort.
John: Making the content with the influencer is a mutual effort. For example, Toby Bloomberg who’s a colleague of mine down in Atlanta. She has for many years been with the American Marketing Association and has run the forum for the AMA on interactive marketing, and a well-known blogger. She and I, a couple of years ago, wrote this post together where we interviewed 35+ influencers or agency people on the issue of agency transparency for content for social media.
We wrote this horrendous post but it had a huge impact in the industry at the time. It was a bit bad, but it was a lot of fun to put together. It took about a month or two for us to get all the answers back and then correlate everything and then come back with the opinions, which were for and against. There was a definitely a lot of debate in the industry after that post.
Al: Some of the best ways are obviously to make it easy for the influencer to contribute while maximizing what they put into the piece of content itself. Their time is valuable and you want to make sure that you are optimizing it as much as possible. If you are putting together an eBook and you want to co‑author it with an influencer, it might make sense to figure out a way that you could do that without taking away several hours from their time to do it, whatever that may be.
Maybe they write the intro of the eBook or something, or they help approve of some of the social messages that you push out. I think asking for less is a lot more in this type of situation.
John: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. There have been a couple of good examples that I can think of recently. There was one in the SEO industry where 20 or 30 people were asked one or two questions about “how do you build good link bait?”. The answers were quite amazing. The other thing I think of is Chris Brogan, remember that example a couple of years ago when he did the Twebinar with Radian6 and the video?
I think it shut down Twitter at the time. [laughs] That was a great example of where Radian6 built a relationship with Chris Brogan as a celebrity blogger and he goes out there, he gets all that content, and he puts out this piece that not only projected and put Radian6 in the marketplace but it also helped Chris as well at the time…That was a great event I recall.
Al: There are a couple that you could probably reflect on too, whether it’s thought leaders in the marketing space that have partnered with a software company, or something that’s launching something new. Radian6 is your example here, where they have taken somebody who knows a lot in the space and ensure best practices, and then will tie it back to whatever they are trying to promote or market.
That’s Influencer Marketing gold right there, if you can make it work very well.
John: I like your case study in the channel marketing. My background started over 20 years ago in channel marketing, so I’ve got a soft spot for that as well as being a VAR and of course working at agencies and here at McDougall over the years as well. It’s interesting to hear about your model for partnering with your partners, for working with the partners and how you help them to get the word out about their great content.
Al: Yes. That’s another thing that we do here too, as well. That second part of the partner marketing model I was talking about before is we help our partners generate more traffic, visitors and leads; so we have initiatives around that, whether it be through social sharing, or through having them guest blog on HubSpot. It’s like an inverse way of looking at Influencer Marketing.
We are sort of the influencer for them in this case, where they tap into our reach and our channels to generate more leads and business. Everybody wins in this case because more business for them is more business for us, and it’s a mutual relationship.
John: Right, it’s just great. How should we track results from Influencer Marketing?
Al: Good question, it’s the last one, it’s probably the hardest one to answer because right now there is no real easy way to track it effectively. There are some tips that I can share if you are thinking about running an Influencer Marketing campaign.
One thing that comes to mind is whatever that piece of content that the influencer is sharing, whether it be a downloadable eBook or a webinar that they would be attending with the influencer as a panelist on it – figure out a way to set up some link tracking or conversion tracking on people who are taking part in that.
You could always tie it back to that influencer’s marketing efforts on your behalf. If it’s a webinar signup or an eBook download, ensure that if they are promoting it to their channels or they have somebody on their team promoting to their channels, that they get a specific trackable link that you can then track back to whatever conversion analysis you’re doing. That is the more technical approach to tracking the effect as well.
John: We talked about this before, which is, there is a way of – maybe especially within SalesForce — to actually identify who the influencer is and what URLs they’re using. Then mapping those within SalesForce so that if you get any traffic from those particular URLs from other people, obviously not the influencer, then you can track that ongoing relationship with the influencer or any engagement that you are doing with the influencer over time.
There are ways to track that. It’s a little bit more complicated to set up, but I think there are definitely ways to do it.
Al: You could set up UTM codes in the URL for instance, that track into, as you mentioned, SalesForce or any CRM using campaigns so that you can see that on the backend and show ROI for your efforts. I’m sure for folks listening in, if you are thinking about Influencer Marketing campaign as a part of the overall campaign that you are running, you are going to want to see “did that influencer actually make an impact on the bottom line?”.
This is where segmenting out different channels such as the influencer, if you are doing an email campaign alongside it or other social promotion on your own social channels, you want to be able to differentiate between that to see if it actually makes an impact against your other marketing efforts.
John: I think that’s definitely a great way to do it. Especially if you’ve got an easy relationship where it’s possible to give a link that is trackable, but I think there are also circumstances where it’s not always appropriate to give that trackable link. An influencer comes along just because of their relationship with you over time and they grab a link and put it into their blog post or website or something.
Al: We love it when that happens but then we can’t track it. [laughs]
John: Exactly, it’s untrackable. But that’s where you can use marketing automation to identify those influencers and those long term relationships with them, that engagement strategy that you are using, and identify which URLs they are using, either Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is. They have Twitter, or a website or something, and any traffic that came from those URLs we want to track.
We also want to correspond that with the level of outreach that we do with that particular influencer.
Al: Totally agree.
John: This has been a really good discussion, Al. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about these issues today.
Al: It was great to be here, thanks for having me.
John: Tell us how people can get in touch with you?
Al: My Twitter handle, it’s kind of hard to spell my last name but I am sure we can put a link in wherever this podcast is eventually embedded. [Editor: @albiedrzycki] It will be up on Twitter. I’m very active on there. I respond to tweets. Make sure you follow me, I’ll follow you back.
Find me on LinkedIn and within the HubSpot community as well. We just launched something called inbound.org which is an inbound marketing community. Be sure to check that out. I’m active on those forums as well.
John: That’s great, Al. Thanks very much for joining me today.
Al: Likewise, John.
John: Check out workingdemosite.com/authority for more interviews and information on Authority Marketing and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. I’m John Cass, see you next time on the Authority Marketing Roadmap.
