Is people-centric digital marketing just a buzzword or can it actually play a key measurable part in your marketing activities? 

That’s what we're going to be covering today with a man who is a University Instructor at Rutgers Business School and UCLA Extension, the author of The Age of Influence, the definitive guide redefining influencer marketing. And, if that's not enough, he's also a Fractional CMO.

A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Neal Schaffer.

You can find Neal over at nealschaffer.com.

Topics discussed on this episode include:

• You say that people-centric digital marketing requires a combination of employer branding, employee advocacy, brand advocacy, and influencer marketing. Let’s pick that apart a bit.
• What do you mean by employer branding being part of a people-centric digital marketing approach?
• How does employee advocacy fit in?
• What about brand advocacy?
• Influencer marketing?

What is people-centric digital marketing and why does it matter? - with Neal Schaffer.

The Strategic Marketing Show is brought to you by Insights For Professionals: providing access to the latest industry insights from trusted brands, all on a customized, tailored experience. Find out more over at InsightsForProfessionals.com.

Hey, it’s David. Is people-centric digital marketing just a buzzword or can it actually play a key measurable part in your marketing activities? That’s what we're going to be covering today with a man who is a University Instructor at Rutgers Business School and UCLA Extension, the author of The Age of Influence, the definitive guide redefining influencer marketing. And, if that's not enough, he's also a Fractional CMO.

A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Neal Schaffer.

David, thank you so much for having me. I am quite honored to be here.

Well, thanks so much for coming on, Neal. You can find Neal over at nealschaffer.com. So, what is people-centric digital marketing, and why does it matter?

You know, we were just talking. I just came back from a B2B marketing event in London and I just want to share with you my summary of that before we go into the story, because I think it will really add a little bit of flavor and context.

This one-day event, talking about a lot of things that I'm going to talk about today, reminded me that B2B Marketing is about relationships and not followers. It's about collaboration and not ego. It's about truly making organizational and societal change, and not chasing after the next trend. I believe, for B2B marketing to mature, it requires this people-centric approach. And, when we talk about people-centric, we talk about the things we're going to talk about today: employee advocacy, influencer marketing (from a B2B perspective), employer branding, and brand advocacy.

These are things we've talked about for the last decade. I think there are a lot of companies that have tried them up to various successes, but if we put them all together, thinking more in terms of people and relationships (the relationships we have with them, the relationships that they have with social media, etc.) I think we begin to uncover some truths.

The world we live in today is very different than what we lived in 10 years ago, when a lot of companies created their first digital marketing/social media marketing strategy - or their first digital marketing strategy that includes social media marketing. We've come quite far since then. We have to remember that, when we began this journey, we ourselves were only social media users for a year or two. Now, we have millennials that have used it throughout their entire working life, and therefore they use it more deeply and more intensely. I think that, if we do not understand that - and we sort of think of social media as being 10 years ago, and we still do marketing the same way - we miss out on these people-centric marketing opportunities.

To define it, the people that I talk about here are, number one: employees. Number two: partners and distributors that often, in B2B ecosystems, are also your customers, and also what we would call external influencers. If we call employees internal influencers, there are external influencers. Those are those people that you see at these tech events that don't work for the tech company yet get invited to speak.

An interesting case in point: there's a gentleman (maybe you've heard of him) in London called Mr. Bingo. Mr. Bingo is an illustrator and artist who got invited by Adobe to speak at their recent Adobe MAX presentation in Los Angeles. I loved Mr. Bingo’s presentation, I met him at his studio in London, and bought some of his art. And I will be sharing about that on my social media. Mr. Bingo is not an Adobe customer, per se, but he does have influence in the world of art, and he has quite a lot of fans. I think that's a great example of how we sometimes think, in the B2B perspective, of influencers as being, “Why would we want to pay irrelevant people that have lots of followers?” but it's not that at all. These are really, in terms of influence with B2B, we're talking about subject matter experts.

Some of them are internal, and we want to bring their voice out, right? Because, offline, these are the people that our clients want to see. It is the people that are speaking at the events. How do we bring them more into the digital world? And then, who are those people that are already subject matter experts that are speaking about our type of industry that already have a big community? These are the external influencers.

When you think in terms of people, instead of in terms of social network or content type, and you do realize this value of relationships, whether it's internally or externally I believe that really is the key. I know David, I don't want to jump too much into the subject, but I did mention that, when we talk about employees’ internal influencers, we have employee advocacy. With external influencers, we have influencer marketing. Brand advocacy - we could also consider them influential. These are more external influencers, because they're not our clients yet. Then, we have the others.

We have the employer branding. These are the people that decide whether or not they want to join your company based on your social media - based on your digital reputation, for lack of a better word. The stats are incredible about the number of people that use social media to find a job and to vet employers. The best way for brands to have a better employer brand is to get their employees out there as their word-of-mouth advocate army, which really taps into this employee advocacy.

To me, these things are all aligned under the term “people-centric marketing”. I don't know if it's a term that a lot of people use, but I think if we invest in people and those relationships - instead of the Zuckerbergs and those external factors that we have no control over. These are all people. We don't have control over them, but we can invest in those relationships and we know we can deepen them. I believe that it's going to be, in the long run, potentially a very much smarter and more impactful way to invest our precious marketing budget.

I think it all makes incredible intuitive sense to most marketers to say, “build better relationships and focus on people”. That was a wonderful introduction you gave, and we’ll dive slightly deeper into those four key areas that you highlighted as well.

Just before we do that, you talked about the value of relationships. Can you actually define the financial value of relationships? Or is that more of something that you have to trust your gut to realize that there is that value that will happen in the future?

As with marketing, if you want to measure anything and everything you could - the funny thing about marketers is, often, they have these double standards where they're not measuring the success of their print ads or TV ads, yet they require excessive micromanaging of digital campaigns because it is trackable.

One of the beautiful things, in terms of digital activity, is that this is trackable. Working with external influencers, you'll find that (if they are true fans of your brand) even though you might have some sort of contractual commitment for a speaking engagement, or a piece of content, or whatever it might be, they will often speak about you when they're not required to. It's because they're a true advocate of your brand. They truly love your brand and they become a natural speaker, naturally sharing information and talking about you on social and what have you.

That is an example of something where, yes, you could measure how many times they mentioned your brand. You could put a number based on the number of impressions that you might get coming from their account versus a digital marketing campaign. So, I think this is all measurable.

There are things like Net Promoter Score. What's the ROI of a high Net Promoter Score? Intuitively, we know that it is extremely important, but how do you put a monetary value on that? I think, in terms of employee advocacy, that is obviously one clear metric, but another one is just pieces of content, right? How many of our employees are talking about us on social? Which is not only a great indicator of a positive Net Promoter Score, but also, every time our brand is talked about there is inherent value. We can replace that with: “Well, if we had to advertise for this, how much would it cost?”

Obviously, when word-of-mouth comes from a person and not from an advertisement, it is more authentic, it is more relatable, and, ultimately, it will have better impact than that advertisement that is on today and off tomorrow.

I think that, if we want to measure these things, we have the ability to. I think it's very much, “Why should we invest in a LinkedIn channel? In a Facebook channel? In a Twitter channel?” We can measure these things by: How many engagements did we get? How big is our community growing? How many website visits did we get? How many leads did we generate? How many sales? But, on the other hand, it's something that we know intuitively we have to do.

Everything I've talked about here, David, some companies are already doing some, if not all of it. But, at some point, we have to get to that intuitive stage that we have to do it. How much ROI do we get from it? We have to obviously pursue excellence in our marketing and in ROI, but these are things that I believe you cannot ignore today. If you are not doing them surely your savvy, innovative competitor - or the startups, where they don't have this legacy of traditional marketing to deal with - they're going to be a lot quicker. I do think that your brand will be left out of the conversation, literally and figuratively, going forward - in the place where people spend most of their time which, today, is social media.

When you're talking about ROI, sometimes an easier way to actually measure the impact is to look at what you're doing that is potentially negative - what's having a negative impact. Because you can see when visitors leave your website, when people don't engage with you or don't buy from you at all.

Maybe looking at employer branding, can you think of an example of something that businesses are doing at the moment that are actually having a negative impact on their target audience?

Well, I think the biggest negative impact is just not being in control of the narrative. We cannot control our brand, in social media. Everybody will have their own perception of it. But, there are things we can do to try to showcase the positives. Number one, obviously, is to somehow have your employees talking about how great of a place your brand is to work at.

Obviously, the savvy, high-tech companies are always first to market with these things. If you go to Instagram - you go to accounts like Life at IBM (@lifeatibm), Life at Google (@lifeatgoogle), or Microsoft Life (@microsoftlife), I forget the exact handles of these channels. These are brands that have channels dedicated to the stories of their employees. The posts are the employees talking. There are things you can do with your LinkedIn Company Page to include this sort of employer-branded approach.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to: take yourself out of your company. If you were to search up information about your company online, in social, what would you find? Obviously, there are sites like Glassdoor and what have you, but I've always been a fan of: if there are negative things about you online, you need to flood them out with a tonne of positive things from the people that know, like, and trust your brand.

I think the negative impact, for instance, of not having a positive employer brand, is you don't attract good candidates. Often, these candidates are trying to decide between you and someone else. They will go to the other company, even if there's a similar salary involved. You'll also find that the retention is worse, for lack of a better word. They stay at your company for less time. In fact, the ones that you want to stay longer stay less, because people always want to grow. They want, more and more, to work for a brand that is aligned with their values.

I think a lot of this comes into this “company culture”. This is the opportunity you get from really investing in this employer brand: to rediscover your company culture, talk about it with your employees, and make sure that everybody is aligned on the mission. With that, I think you will become a very, very powerful employee brand, where your employees are more tied into the culture and the mission, and they're talking about it more. And you will attract others with similar values.

That's one of these things we talked about beforehand, “What's the future?” We know, more and more, that people want to buy from companies that they have aligned values with and, obviously, they want to work for companies they have aligned values with as well. In fact, when I was in London at this influencer marketing event, we had a number of B2B influencers on a panel. We asked them: “What is the number one most important thing when you consider working with businesses from an influencer/external influencer perspective?”, and they all agreed the number one thing was really brand value alignment.

Even me just talking about this hints that, if you were to invest in this type of employer branding exercise, these are the conversations that it brings out. I think it's a very healthy thing for any organization - which really is a living, breathing entity that has to evolve with the times.

From an employee advocacy perspective, you gave great examples of progressive firms that have “Life at X”-type social media accounts or blogs, where perhaps potential employees can go in there and just get a feel for what their organization is about.

But, from a customer perspective, sometimes it's also perhaps even more effective to have a look to see what employees are saying about the company they work at on their own social media accounts - on things like Twitter and LinkedIn. Is that something that a brand should also be encouraging? And, if so, how should they go about doing that?

I like to tie all these into what I call influencer marketing. I talked about the external influencers. When we talk about the internal influencers, there are a few different ways of looking at it but, in between, we have our customers. This is the brand advocacy part.

Imagine if customers were to go to your blog, and read case studies of how other companies are leveraging the company's technology that they’re considering purchasing. That is a very, very powerful thing. This is why, often in B2B, customers really are influencers. My background before digital and social was B2B sales and biz dev. The credibility and social proof that goes with every customer that you can say is your customer is huge. When these customers now, in a human and relatable way, talk about how they're using your technology, what type of a company you are to work with - in terms of a blog, in terms of a YouTube interview, maybe speaking at a conference, maybe a webinar - these are obviously huge types of influencer marketing.

When we get to the employees - yes, include your employees in your content as well. Having a dedicated channel is great, but it can also be included in one organic channel that you have, or on your blog. It's always going to be a positive thing, but, when your employees can truly talk about your company on their personal social media profiles.

Now, not everybody says they work at a company on their profile, with the exception of maybe LinkedIn. But, even if you're at a company event and you post it on your Instagram, this social media branding, will mean that people will associate your brand with that person's experience with your brand. In this case, it is an employee at an event.

Very, very recently I often get asked to speak to B2B - often sales teams. It's not about, “publish more content about our company”, it's more about, “just be more active on social media”, right? I will always say, yes, they obviously should - ideally, if it resonates with them - post more about their company, but they should also talk more about their own personal passions and their own personal interests.

Inevitably, when we talk about employee advocacy, we also talk about personal branding. But, if you can encourage the personal branding of your employees, you now begin to build this army of nano influencers, with various passions, that are also talking about your company. You can imagine how powerful that is. Obviously, you can leverage tools where, if they talk about your company, it'll be a customized link and, therefore, you'll be able to track the number of clicks and what have you. But I don't even think you have to go that far to realize the potential impact that all of this can have.

On the employer branding side of things, I believe that you have a case study that you can share with us?

Yes. This is my favorite case study. I'd say the two things that I get asked to talk about most - well three things. Influencer marketing, obviously, because I wrote The Age of Influence. This sort of social selling employee advocacy: let's raise the social media intelligence or IQ of our employees, and me being almost a cheerleader for getting them more active and helping them see the benefits from a personal branding perspective.

The other one is employer branding. It's funny because, when social selling came around, we were all saying, “Marketing is becoming more like sales and sales is becoming more like marketing, with the advent of social media.” If you dig into employer branding (which is primarily, obviously, managed by HR), they will say that HR is becoming more like marketing. They have to market the company in order to attract employees.

A great example I give (and it’s the one that has the most impact) - it just happened to be that I found this video when doing research for a Japanese client - is actually a Japanese company. Now, TikTok is less popular in Japan than it is here. In fact, social media in general - the average time spent on social media, by the average person in Japan, is much lower than it is in the UK or in the United States. So, the impact is a lot less, but this company decided on TikTok and they're a very small business.

They are a security company, I believe the name is Daikyo Security. They provide security services for building security or whatever it is - people that stand out there, in uniforms, to help secure things. When you look at this video (which you can find on YouTube, or it actually came out of CNN business), you see these older people - the executives that are in their 50s and 60s - yes, there's a little bit of dancing, there's a little bit of entertainment. But, basically, they're showcasing that they are a fun place to work out. They interviewed the CEO who says “Yes, we'll have some of my subordinates mock me as part of what we do on TikTok.”, almost like it's hard to believe that this is a Japanese company, it's hard to believe that this is a place that people can actually work at.

They were so successful with these videos, that they were able to monetize the account and, with the ad revenue, hire an editor to be able to do more sophisticated videos. But, most importantly, they say that whenever they put out a video that goes viral (which happens quite often with their TikTok account), they will literally see more inquiries. “Do you have any job openings?”, “This looks like a great place to work at!”. That is the ultimate employer brand.

If people look up this brand on social, they're inevitably going to find those TikTok videos. This is one case in which they're able to control that narrative, because they're not that big of a brand, right? People are going to see what looks like the executive team themselves, looking relatable, authentic approachable. There are a lot of companies that we can't say that for, which is why, in an employee advocacy program, ideally we'd like to start with the executives.

Interestingly, though, in most companies, the people that we relate to and trust the most are just the average employee. So, employee advocacy is not just about the salespeople - the social selling - it's not just about the executives, it's not just about the subject matter experts, it’s, as you questioned before, “What's the benefit of getting all the other employees on?” Because they are the most trustworthy, relatable people - the most authentic people. That is where you will see this tremendous impact.

That's a very, very simple case study that, when I have shown it on recent occasions as part of my presentations (together with everything else I'm talking about), it just has an immediate impact. Maybe we'll have to get you the link to put in the show notes for this.

Yeah, sounds good. Well, I'm wondering if you're going to advise that the listener should incorporate what you've just said there as part of their future strategy. Maybe we'll find out in a second by moving on from what works now to planning for the future.

In your opinion, what's the biggest marketing trend or challenge for marketers over the coming year?

I like to say that I really believe that we are in the middle of the changing of the guard. This is not an analogy because I just came back from London, but it is the fact that we're coming out of COVID and certain trends have accelerated more than others. I think, just comparing to pre-COVID, the way that we create and consume content is very, very different than it was before.

I think that this is going to challenge a lot of companies. This one-way type of advertising that most marketers feel very comfortable with, traditionally - people, more and more, can read through ads. I've posted stuff myself on Instagram of just products I love, just because I feel good about them. They didn't pay me to do it but, inevitably, I'll have people say, “Neal, is that an ad? Did someone pay you to say that?” These are Gen Xers and Boomers saying this to me, not just Gen Z and the millennials.

We've come to a place where social media has become - I mean, my kids are on social media probably for an hour before they even go to school. They’re on their Instagram, on their TikTok, and these are high school kids. We've gotten to this point where people really crave the raw and authentic. I think that COVID definitely influenced and affected this, but it's the raw, the authentic, the relatable, and “Is it aligned with my brand values?” These are all things that, more and more, large companies have to put into consideration in how they engage with people. Obviously, digitally, how they engage with people, but also how they engage with their employees.

That's why, even though employer branding is not a marketing-specific topic (it really is this HR topic), I think it blends really, really well together because it affects marketing as well - in terms of the younger generations particularly. Even if you're targeting B2B executives, more B2B executives are becoming millennials, especially for startup companies. It's a conversation I think we can't ignore, and I think it challenges our way of thinking. Social media already required marketers to think very differently. I think this is a new iteration, and a very, very important iteration.

How can we create short-form videos around these B2B topics? How can we resonate more with our audiences and resonate more with our employees? If we begin to uncover: what are our brand values? How do we align them with our employees, and with our constituents? If we begin to think about these things, now.

We don't have to go out there and think, “A year from now, we're gonna have a million followers on TikTok.” It's not about chasing the trend, but it is about having a collaborative exercise internally, to take a deep dive into these questions and begin to create your own thoughts around them, your own strategies, your own implementations for this changing of the guard - changing of the generation - and everything that comes with it. I think it's going to be critical

I think that those brands that get this and start doing it earlier - Daikyo Security is one example. Duolingo, they're a public company now, if you go to Duolingo on TikTok, you'll find a number of videos that are just of their employees. Yes, they also have a mascot which is all cute and funny, but it's also their employees in their work environment. These things are extremely relatable, and it's a brand that's well-known by this new generation. It might be as well-known as some very, very famous brands because they've done so well on TikTok.

Just a few things to think about as we go forward here. Every year we try to shake things up, but I do believe - coming out of COVID and just seeing these different trends in the demographics - it's really going to require us to do another, I'm not going to say a “reset”, but just rethink and enhance the value that all of our companies have. Just find new ways of expressing it through more people, more brand values, and more creativity when it comes to the content.

Certainly a few things to think about there. I've been your host, David Bain. You can find Neal over at nealschaffer.com. Neal, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

It's been an honor.

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