Activating Internal Influencers

Today's post is about activating internal influencers. I did this starting at HubSpot back in 2012. We did it mostly through Twitter (RIP) and a little bit on LinkedIn. It was when I was just starting the HubSpot Academy team.

I decided to call people on the team who were teaching inbound marketing and HubSpot topics, Inbound Professors. They were part content marketer, part community builder, part instructional designer. We started our influencer marketing strategy, not knowing what that really was then, by congratulating and engaging with people who shared their certifications online.

We then started posting content and tips that each Professor was creating within HubSpot Academy. A simple content amplification play. From there we had Professor go on speaking tours, speak at Inbound, write books. It became a big deal

Fast forward to my days at Drift starting in 2019, we were super deliberate about cultivating internal influencers. The most extreme was our podcast network strategy. We did an open call for talent and ended up with five people who each produced a different podcast show. One of these shows is still active today with more than 100 episodes, Operations by Sean Lane.

The middle approach was identifying people who wanted to represent Drift and grow their personal network but needed a bit of help. We gave them access to design resources and some training to help them be better at creating content. It wasn't a lot, just some guidance, motivation and amplification of their posts by other Drift team members. That worked really well.

The simplest approach was creating prompts and posts for people to share directly or with minimal editing. This also worked well because we shared with the whole company how much impact all of this activity was having on lead generation and pipeline. All the way to revenue. We could track how much our influencer work on LinkedIn was generating pipeline by scrapping LinkedIn engagement and uploading it and pivoting it against the contact engagement data within our marketing automation system. It was A LOT.

The most important reason why both were a success was because many other senior leaders in both companies were also doing it. It was contagious.

So the tip today is to guide and empower people to become influencers in ways that make sense for them and your business. You don't have to have a multiple level approach, but you do need to give them guidance and lead by example.