How to Prove You’re a Thought Leader (Instead of Just Saying It) This episode unpacks…
Thought Leadership for Digital Marketing | Mike Kleinemaß
Using digital marketing to grow your thought leadership
An interview with Mike Kleinemaß about the growing changes to sales and taking advantage of digital channels and communications.
Today’s guest is Mike Kleinemaß, Digital Marketing & Communications Expert at ThyssenKrupp, a company that deals with engineering and construction of plant technology.
Mike discusses how he came into thought leadership while doing other research and how it fits into his role in digital marketing. Bill and Mike converse about the place of platforms like Linkedin in B2B sales. Then, they talk about why building a following and creating truly useful content for your prospective clients is important.
In addition, Mike speaks about the importance of building a relationship in which you are open and available to answering questions. He explains why you need to have conversations, and engage with your followership instead of just pushing out a message.
Mike helped create a task force at ThyssenKrupp and explains how that came to be. He discusses the purpose of this task force. And explains why those involved need to understand their value within the organization and the impact they have.
As a digital marketing and growth expert, Mike shares some incredible knowledge that can be applied to any company or organization seeking to understand how to be successful in the digital space.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- As more digital transformations happen, thought leaders need to understand the new journey their customers will undertake.
- Thought leaders can gain a great deal of insight from examining the analytics of their social media and website. That information can be used to create targeted sales strategies.
- Becoming a thought leader for your organization will mean understanding the purpose and goals of the company, then building a strategy to convey that to the right people.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. We talked with the people who are creating, curating and deploying thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. How do you get more people within your organization to become active in thought leadership in an organization with many thousands of employees? What can you do to accelerate the spread of ideas across the organization and to your clients and customers? Today we’re talking about that process of scaling thought leadership. And so I sit down with Mike Kleinemaß. He’s a digital marketing communications specialist for autism Industrial Solutions, specifically in the mining technology business unit. And I’m eager to talk with him about how data analysis helped him understand where thought leadership nodes already existed within his organization, and then how they use that information to take thought leadership to scale. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Mike.
Mike Kleinemaß Hi, Bill. Nice to meet you. Happy to be part of your Thought leadership podcast.
Bill Sherman So let’s start with a very simple question. Everybody gets into the world of thought leadership in organizations a little bit differently. How did you get here?
Mike Kleinemaß Well, I came across thought leadership actually two years ago when I was writing a concept about CEO positioning on LinkedIn. And yeah, then I came across thought leadership.
Bill Sherman And how do you define thought leadership at this point? What if you had to explain it? What is it these players ship and what do you do in thought leadership?
Mike Kleinemaß Well, thought leadership for me is authority that is demonstrated and recognized through expert ship by deep domain knowledge in a certain field. And that is something that has actually always been there. Also, before digitalization has given us much more opportunities to Leveraging Thought Leadership. It has always been there, but I think thought leadership in the last years has become more and more relevant to a lot of corporations.
Bill Sherman So let’s talk about the work that you’re doing in terms of B2B marketing and because you’re working in a B2B marketing environment for just one group, right?
Mike Kleinemaß Exactly. Yeah.
Bill Sherman So let’s talk about what you’re doing.
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah. Well, we are actually an engineering company that is into the plant technology business that we are constructing. We are doing the whole work about the deep sea. That means engineering, procurement and construction of huge plants. So that is a real heavyweight business. And in these fields, you need a lot of experts and our experts, our engineers, engineers that stand for a deep domain knowledge and roots and engineering of over 200 years. So we have a long tradition and history in engineering, and this is something that we always try to demonstrate. And thought leadership is a really good possibility to leverage. What we are doing is that we, of course, in the past were participating in conferences. We were also writing articles and participating and in interviews the classical way. However, in the last years, with the digitalization and social media and the Internet, they have come many more opportunities to demonstrate thought leadership and also to reach your target groups and stakeholders in a in a new way. So as an expert for marketing and communications, I do consult our sales engineers and our sales colleagues on how to leverage their thought leadership on digital channels and especially on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn has become the place to be for all B2B companies.
Bill Sherman Let’s talk about that, because I think one of the things that you and I have talked about is whether you’re a subject matter expert or salesperson or a sales engineer. Digital is a little bit of a transformation as well. And then you doing thought leadership work online is a bit of a transformation as well. And I know that you’ve done some effort to try and get people to be comfortable in that space. Let’s talk a little bit about that.
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, exactly what I was doing, and particularly, Larry, in the past weeks and months was to empower our sales organization in terms of social selling and thought leadership. This means to give them help, how to leverage such channels like LinkedIn in order to establish social relationships or business relationships with potential customers. By demonstrating they are expert ship, they expertise in their field of business and they are they are engineering field, our product field. And this works by several possibilities. Like writing articles. Yeah, doing post writing posts that are beneficial. That that after actually tackling tech, tackling the common enemy between you and your customer. Because if you are writing useful content, if you are crafting content that tackles the challenges of your customers, then you’re definitely helpful and then you become the person to go to. When people are having problems or challenges in their respective business field and then you become relevant and then you can really establish relationships and followership on LinkedIn that later, sooner or later will turn into business.
Bill Sherman Well, and you’re in a business where the sales cycle is long. It’s a big ticket sale. No one is jumping out and saying, okay, we need to do mining engineering today, right? It’s a deal that takes a while. And I’m assuming there’s also a trust component to those relationships as well, that you don’t want to just show up once and say, hey, buy from us. It’s about nurturing a relationship. Is that correct?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, definitely. It’s all about establishing a social relationship. It’s all about engaging with your contacts and prospects and the people on Linked in. It’s not just one directional communications where you just pushing out messages or trying to hot sell something. It’s more about maintaining a relationship there and demonstrating that you are helpful to your network. And if you’re capable of doing that, of demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about and that you are tackling the challenges of your contacts, then you just become the thought leader of a relevant person to them in order to talk about business problems.
Bill Sherman And I think you key into something that is very important. Old school thought leadership was you stood on stage and you gave a speech or you wrote a book or a white paper. You put information out there and then people read it. Now it is two directional, right? You’ve got to listen. You’ve got to ask questions and you’ve got to respond to what others care about. If you’re simply putting content out there and hoping others read it, it’s a busy, noisy digital space and you’re unlikely to get noticed, right?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And this is really interesting is that kind of parodic shift that is actually disrupting the whole media industry because years ago the journalists were the gatekeepers and were just writing articles and maybe got some feedback by post analog messages. And now they actually are receiving feedback comments within seconds. They are on the digital channels and this also gives them more possibilities, but it’s also more work, actually a more democratic approach to the media business and also to communications. And this is really interesting because you as a thought leader, you need to be yeah, you need to engage with your with your followership and be reachable also for potential questions and comments. And yeah, everything got so much more dynamic.
Bill Sherman You’ve gone through where to send up a bit of a transformation and helping people because learning these new digital skills isn’t something that happens overnight. Let’s talk about that journey and some of the work that you’ve been doing, because there’s some stories that you’ve shared with me that I think are really applicable for others who are trying to guide either a sales force or sales engineering team. How have you been helping people through this digital transformation? What have you been doing?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, well, first of all, it’s important that everyone in the organization understands that the customer journey has been shifted from the traditional journey to a more digital journey, especially since Covid 19, but also before, and that the classical platforms like trade fairs and magazines and brochures and also in-person meetings have become less relevant and limited. So it is important to understand that the touchpoints have become much more digital even in B2B, and that it is important to be there. And it is a journey that has, especially in B2B, has more than one touchpoint. It’s not like, okay, people are Googling something and then they are buying something. It’s like, okay, they maybe they see an advert on LinkedIn and they click on it and see, okay, to some purpose doing this and that. And then they get another impulse and then they are fading away. The interest is fading away. And then a week after they remember, okay, this couple is doing something interesting, like they have something about decarbonization and then mining some kind of solution there. And let’s Google on it again. And then they reach a landing page, maybe then a reading through it and then they’re fading away because they have some other things to do. And then maybe they go into YouTube or to research again. And in the end, they got in touch because they are convinced that maybe it’s just an. Might help them to solve this problem. So it’s a multi multitouch journey. And yeah, people had to face this new reality by a lot of examples and proof points and cases that I that I did with searches that I did. And I also build pilots where I showed how.
Bill Sherman Let’s talk about that. Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about.
Mike Kleinemaß Exactly. Yeah. Well, for example, we, we crafted a microsite for a certain product where we did also lead in advertising for and on the one hand side, we received really interesting insights from the companies that clicked on the advertisement that then engaged with our advertisements. And then also we saw how they got to our landing page and what they did there. We also introduced a heat map on the on the microsite to see, okay, people from which country are doing what, for example. And then we saw like, okay, people from Asia-Pacific are directly clicking on contact. For example, whether people from the United States are researching more the content or doing this and that. And then we saw like, okay. And we also recognize, okay, people from this country do show an interest in this product or this application in particular. And then we took this information for our business development department because we recognized, okay, there might be a market for this product or this application in this country. And this is really interesting because we use these insights that we gained from digital marketing for our business development, for example. And if you can use this data, you can also address your target audience with messages that address problems in certain countries or to advertise or promote products. This is a really interesting thing because, for example, we advertised on Linked in more or less in India because in India there was a lot of. Smoke in the air because of farmers burned down. For example, a certain crop. And we had a biomass boiler that could use these material without burning them on the fields. And then we did advertisements with smoke in the air and addressed this problem. And then we saw, okay, this is obviously receiving a lot of attention in Brazil. And maybe let’s try to market this in Brazil because there seems to be a need for this problem as well. And yeah, so this is a really interesting thing how you can generate data and use it for marketing. Love on B2B challenges later on.
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Bill Sherman Well, and this creates an interesting intersection where an idea that may you think might have traction in one part of the world or with one audience. All of a sudden you’re seeing from data and information that it has traction elsewhere as well. And I think one of the things that you’re pointing to is that connection of when you have the idea, you have marketing and you have sales working together, then you’ve got the capacity to spot opportunity much more quickly and much more effectively. And you have to break down those barriers within the organization. You were talking previously about finding champions within the organization that are doing fun leadership and celebrating and sort of helping others see how this works. Can you tell us a little bit of that story? Because I think that’s an important way that you found some success.
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, as I as I told you, I came across this thought leadership topic two years ago, and I ultimately have run a series of webinars to empower the sales organization. And then we also research who of our sales team is already pretty active on LinkedIn to found a task force. And then I found somebody who was already a very successful networker on LinkedIn because he was a world traveler who was continuously traveling in several countries for 15 years, working from project and project, who completely understood the principle of networking and linked in and understood that it’s not just about collecting business cards, but also engaging with the people you added there. And we partnered up to run this series of webinars in order to demonstrate. That already somebody of our industry is successful using this challenge and has collected like 30,000 followers and it’s a lot and in a in a business like mining. And we did this for other industries as well. But it is still a lot it’s a huge number. And we partnered up to do this series of webinars so that our sales colleagues could see that somebody else in our organization is already leveraging it. And they were able to ask him directly all the questions they had because especially people in Germany tend to be a bit critical about the usage of data and what happens if there are competitors online. If you are, for example, adding or if you’re engaging with clients or what the competitors see from it. And especially when you are in an industry that is about engineering and tech and maybe high tech as well. So it was really good that they could ask him directly. And what I also did was I did research on how many of our customers are already on that platform. So I made a top ten ranking to demonstrate. Our industry is already there. And if you get on that platform, if you become active on that platform, you have the chance to actually. Yeah. Establish your relationship on, on LinkedIn besides your CRM system, of course. But you can also create like sales events from it because are you are able to recognize the behavior of your customers and partners over there and then you can see what challenges are they talking about or what they are facing, what they are posting, And then you can use this information to get in touch with them. So it was that was really, really useful to, on the one hand side to find people within the organization to create a task force in order to bring that topic really on the agenda and to be able to convince more and more people and empower them to leverage the huge potential of thought leadership and social selling on LinkedIn.
Bill Sherman Let’s go just a little bit deeper on this. So you did the research and you said, who within the organization is already doing this and doing this? Well, who’s using thought leadership to engage customers? So you made that list, right? Let’s talk about recruiting those people to help you. How did you go to them and say, help me show what you’re doing to others? Were they willing to share? Were they saying, no, no, no, this is my secret? Don’t share it? What was the response and how did you build that task force? Because I think having that task force was critical to the success that you’ve been seeing. So let’s talk about building the task force.
Mike Kleinemaß Well, actually, this works pretty well when you approach people by telling them that they have done something already outstanding and they’re what has the huge value to the organization that they obviously have reached. Something really, really important and something really valuable to the organization. And so that they see their own value to the whole organization and that they feel also that they have an impact on the whole market activity that and in the process and that they feel and kind of pioneer part of the team that wants to bring something forward so that they feel part of the game and part of a kind of pioneer program.
Bill Sherman So was this the first time they’d been recognized for doing some of this work within the organization to say, Hey, you’re doing this on social selling and it’s valuable and we noticed it? Is this the first time anyone came to them and said, This is good? Thank you.
Mike Kleinemaß Indeed. Indeed. I mean. Thought leadership in B2B is not that old. Right? Right. Exactly. So that and they were actually happy. They were convinced that they are doing the right thing, but they have not been recognized within the organization before. And so they were happy that all the effort they put in was recognized because they were personally already convinced that this is the way to go. And now they were happy to get a lot more intense attention within the organization to be a kind of pioneer. And yeah, that make them that made them also really proud to participate.
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s one thing that I’ve seen in terms of using thought leadership. For many people, it’s not part of their job description. It’s not part of their responsibility. And so you get a few people in the organization who understand thought leadership and its power, and they choose to do it even though it’s not part of their day job. And so they may be doing it, you know, evenings, weekends, they may be doing it because it’s a passion for them. And squeezing it into around the rest of their work. Right. And that recognition that this is work and it’s important and it’s not just an extra that you do, but it’s core to what you do, I think becomes important, especially if you’re going to try to signal to others this is something they should do because everybody’s going to say, I’m a salesperson, I busy, I need to go talk to more people. Right.
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, exactly. I mean, normally salespeople, it really depends. Somebody on the industry. Normally salespeople. Yes. Are hunters and farmers. But when it comes to technical sales, it is a bit different because engineering or B2B heavy weight goods tend to be developed by engineers that are developing solutions for global challenges. And the solutions normally sell right away because they are tackling a common challenge in comparison to other organizations that are just developing products that they’re trying to sell. So they need more sales. And there has been a shift in the recent. Years and B to B when B to b A got more into the need of doing marketing that they haven’t been before. So this leads to the fact that in many B2B organizations you don’t have this. Farmers and hunters when it comes to sales, but technical experts. So there’s a big difference. And you still have some original sales hunters and who are passionate about finding new ways to. Fill. They say it’s pipeline, but it’s not that all the people were natural born hunters. So it is really good that if you find those people that help you to leverage that that potential and to bring on the change through your organization.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think you make an excellent point. When you said you looked within your organization, you said, wow, we’ve got someone with 30,000 followers, which in our organ, in our industry is amazing. How do we replicate some of that? And get more of our people right? There are probably, within most organizations, someone who’s already doing this that has the expertise. But if you have ten, 20, 100,000 employees, do you know who that person is? And are you holding them up as a role model to be celebrated? Right. And that’s I think one of the discoveries that you did is you said we have people already here that are doing it.
Mike Kleinemaß Exactly. Yeah. And it was quite funny when I came across this person because I was actually researching the reach of a certain post and I was seeing some numbers that I couldn’t explain to me because why this post got so many use and then a research. Okay, just didn’t make sense to me. And then I had a deeper look inside and then I recognize, okay. Who like this post. And then there’s this colleague who has some followers, okay. He has like 30 K followers. And maybe that’s the reason why this post has been seen by so many people. And then I recognized and that was quite, quite funny, actually.
Bill Sherman Well, and there’s a long tail for that because you can’t build 30,000 followers overnight. But once you do have 30,000 followers on that. And they trust you and they know your expertise, then you have a competitive advantage because people are going to listen to you, whereas other people who aren’t going to be heard to the same degree. And so I like how you found that answer by looking at the data and saying, I can’t explain what’s going on. Why? Why is this one post all of a sudden getting so much attention? That’s the power of someone who’s invested in thought leadership. Over time. Right. So I want to turn and as we start to wrap up, I want to ask you about your journey. Imagine there are many people who are starting into roles similar to yours responsible for thought leadership at their organizations. You’ve been doing this now for a couple of years. If you had advice to someone who is new, starting as head of thought leadership or a manager of thought leadership. What suggestions and advice would you offer them as they’re trying to figure out this role for themselves?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, first of all, of course, it’s all about the purpose of your company. You know, what your company stands for and what your goal is actually. What do you use purpose and what you would like to stand for and who your stakeholders do. This the first thing you should analyze and once you have this information, then you know what you would like to address to your target audience. And then you can make a concept how to become a thought leader for a certain topic. And this has to be aligned with the purpose of your business. And then you can create a strategy, a strategy that is based on useful information, like all actually, it’s all about the things that we as B2B marketers do or should be doing. It’s about researching your target group and the respective target groups within the buying center that are relevant to influence on decisions. And once you know your buyer personas, you can create content that helps them to tackle the challenges of their business. And this information you really should use to build the strategy, your content strategy. Which you can perfectly leverage via LinkedIn by writing articles. Writing posts. Being there become the go to person for first hand knowledge from this business field to be the person to talk about innovation in a in a certain field and the person that that answers questions on this matter.
Bill Sherman Well, and you’ve said it a couple of times, but I want to call it out. Be that person who responds to questions and engages rather than is just pushing content out there. And you have to listen. You have to engage and you have to be answering the questions that your buyer cares about, not the ones that you want to talk about. And I think that becomes so important not only through social selling, but thought leadership. You’ve got to you’ve got to be willing to step into their world rather than to pull them into yours.
Mike Kleinemaß Exactly. And I’m calling it also the triple E strategy. It is all about entertaining, educating and engaging to be active in the field that your customer is really caring about, not just what you want to push out. It’s also important to listen, to listen and care. And sharing is caring, sharing the right information. It helps adding value to your network that adds making your network happy, your customers, and then you become the go to person for certain topics. And then you’ve become a thought leader. And then this will make you more successful in your business.
Bill Sherman Mike, I want to thank you for joining us today and talking about how you’re using thought leadership within Tizen Group to really re shift the way people are thinking about engaging with clients and customers. I think you provided some great examples. Thank you for joining us.
Mike Kleinemaß Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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