The Power of Influencer Marketing in the Oil and Gas Industry

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practices. Visit TGS.com to see how TGS drives success in the energy sector. Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this!

Hey everybody, welcome back. Matt, you and I took a little hiatus and we forgot to tell our audience ahead of time. So apologies, that's been a couple of weeks with no episodes going out. We also had some technical issues with Mikey and Beatrice. Their episode audio got really messed up, so we have to re-record that. But anyway, we're back and today's subject is influencer marketing and oil and gas.

What a strange group of words to stick together. Well, the times are changing. Times are changing. Times are changing and no egos involved, but we've had many people call you and I influencers in the oil and gas industry, so I thought it would be a cool thing for us to talk about, especially since it was your idea.

But when she came over, I thought it would be a great thing to talk about. So influencer marketing, Matt, what is it? Well, these were spokespeople. So spokespeople or celebrities or whatever used to endorse a product. If you've seen how content has changed and where people get their news from, like Joe Rogan, for example, is one of the biggest influencers out there, if not the biggest,

which eclipses all the news stations. So he is influencing the human experience to a certain degree and driving what's on people's minds. You take that and you were talking about in the pre-interview, we're talking about the Kim Kardashian component of it. The ultra big influencers.

We know that reality TV is the most popular type of show that there is, and that is kind of translated into social media, social media influencers, and then micro influencers, which are people that in their local community or in their online communities are influential in what they do. And you got so much noise out there, Mark, of everybody talking about this and that and you don't know which way to look and reviews.

That's why reviews are so important. That's why testimonials are so important. But having a trusted voice, a trusted advisor, someone that you know, like, and trust that can help you guide you through a process or knowledge is becoming big. And that's why podcasts are becoming big. And that's why social media and YouTube are becoming big because people want to follow

a particular person and let them curate that information and trust what they're saying. And I have actually some really, really interesting data from a podcasting standpoint of the number one way people search for podcasts is through SEO and then search engines. And then the second is by another trusted host that they're listening to recommends another podcast. And it's so, so powerful.

It's extremely powerful. And in our space, there's a lot of, you mentioned micro influencers, a lot of micro influencers. Think of the subject matter experts out there that you've worked with in the past that you know they understand what they're talking about. And to your point, that establishes trust and credibility. I did this actually this morning.

I needed to buy a part. It's actually a gun part. Instead of me doing research or anything, I have somebody I follow on social media. He recommended a part. I just bought it because I trust him even though I've never met this guy. I trust him.

So that's a direct correlation to that trust and credibility leading to a sale of something I could have researched for hours and found the cheapest one or whatever. But instead, I'd listen to somebody that has all that expertise because they're right about stuff and it happens the same thing in our industry. I know we're going to get some pushback on people saying, well, nobody buys a tree or a plet or whatever on social media.

If you go on Facebook right now, Marketplace, Facebook, Marketplace, National Oil Well is selling old rigs on Facebook. So don't tell me that social media doesn't work in oil and gas. It does. Well, I think social media is about generating demand and reaching your target audience. So if you have a message that you're trying to get out there, you can use the power of

the algorithms to find the right person, to reach the right person, to find them actually in market. So they're maybe doing other things off the website based on that IP address that might show that they're ready to buy a car or they're ready to move jobs or they're ready to do whatever it is that you're looking to do and then get that message. Build a pipeline.

Build a pipeline. Get in front of them at the right time with the right message and get the sale because if you look at actually, Google's done a number of these case studies and how people search, I got to pull up the graph for you, but man, how people search is they go, they look at something, they kind of figure it out, they kind of stop, then they go on the search again and then they might come up to a different solution.

And that's really one of the strategies with content marketing SEO is every time they go through that, if they keep finding your stuff, there's a higher likelihood that there's going to be brand awareness, brand recognition, brand lift that people are going to actually go, okay, these guys are trusted experts and you want to catch them at each step of that customer journey. But what you're doing is you're influencing them, right?

That's where the word comes from and you're guiding them in a direction because they trust what you're saying. And let me tell you something else. If you're in this industry and you're struggling with what Matt just said, brand awareness, trust, one of the best ways to establish that credibility and trust is to partner with an influencer.

I've seen it over and over and over again where somebody that has that name recognition partners with the company and that company goes from nobody ever heard of it before to not only people have heard of it, but now they trust it because of the influencer. So if you're listening to our podcast and you have a new company that doesn't have an established brand and oil and gas, think about working with an influencer. It's going to speed up your time to build that brand awareness, to build that credibility.

Now Matt, one of the things I want to talk to you about that a lot of people kind of blow out of proportion, literally is cost. We're not hiring Kim Kardashian, which I have no idea how much she charges to endorse a product, but in our space, a lot per tweet, per tweet. Okay, so we actually have a deal with a big boxing person and I can tell you I can't give the exact number, but it's six figures per tweet.

Isn't that crazy? So we're not there yet, but in our space in the oil and gas space, especially the service part of the oil and gas industry, if you have those people that the industry knows and trusts that are experts, it's not that much money. It's a very inexpensive way to establish your brand, to use an influencer that is cost effective and this helps you quickly position your company and what you sell to the audience that has

the problems that you solve. It's a very inexpensive way to get stuff done. If you wanted to sponsor our podcast, this podcast right here, if you had a sales and marketing tool, it's not as expensive as you think to sponsor this podcast and then you would have two micro influencers endorsing your product. I think it's one of the overlooked things in marketing oil and gas is using the influencer.

I also think maybe the name itself has picked up a kind of cheesy connotation, but I don't think it's cheesy at all. It's literally getting experts to help establish what your company does. Well, I think it's about identifying the right influencers for your brand. That's important. Yep.

Also understanding that relationship and having transparency in that relationship because I can tell you on my other podcast, the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, I actually stopped doing sponsorships because I couldn't vet some of the brands. I worked with some of the biggest software platforms out there and then there was a lot of other people coming to me and I had to try the product first or I had to hear about it first and there was more steps that had to happen and some people or marketing budgets

are just looking for a number of people as tool in the tool belt to create additional watches. I was concerned about, well, if I'm putting my name on this because I'll give you an example. We pushed a software that was coming from actually Ukraine here into the US and they were on Ukraine pricing. It was just a heck of a deal.

It was a killer piece of software. I was talking to their team. I was saying, hey, price wise, like you're way under the market. They didn't step it up in the pricing and I wasn't involved in a lot of the conversations, but they went right out there and kind of jumped over even what some other competitors do.

So I have podcasts out there saying, hey, this is a great tool and it cost this and this and that. There's a lot of things to be aware of, but I think it's really identifying the right influencers that align with your brand. Yes, you get the halo effect of the other brand and it can pull you up and there's some channel partnerships that you can do, but you got to understand what is the message you're trying

to get out there? What is the core brand promise that you want to say and does that carry the message for it? I mean, you look at Disney or whatever, the Disney experience versus Six Flags, right? It's just the summer, so everybody's got kids. Why do people pay $10,000 plus dollars to go to Disney and then Six Flags has trouble

keeping its theme park there? So one of the components of it is, well, Six Flags is like thrill riding and then Disney, they have experiences at all level for everyone and it's about interacting with the characters. It's like, what's happening in the line? So there's a lot that goes into it, if you know what I mean? And I think really focusing on the brand first and what is that core promise and then who

else out there aligns with that? So it becomes, in digital marketing, it's called like JV partnerships or you partner with people that share a similar belief and you build a community and the voice gets louder. Now, Matt, a lot of people that listen here, especially if they're in marketing, are going to say, well, influencer marketing is just for B2C. The Kardashian sell makeup or credit cards or whatever, it doesn't work in B2B and that's

not true at all. You and I both have experienced it ourselves personally with our companies that B2B influencer marketing is strong and it's growing. In oil and gas, it's relatively new, so it's a lot of opportunity for businesses to capitalize on something that, like I mentioned earlier, is not that expensive to establish that trust in the industry.

I think of this, imagine, we have 20 different podcasts at OGGN. One of my hosts for the 3As is Scott Angel. He's a former Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, former head of Bessie, huge government agency that regulates the offshore oil and gas industry. Do you know what would happen if I had Scott mention a product, an offshore product on his podcast?

The phones would light up, people would just buy it because it's Scott Angel endorsing a product for offshore and they know that he's the former Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana and he's also the former head of Bessie. Our industry is primed for companies to use influencer marketing and sales people. I'm not leaving you out. You know what influencer marketing does?

It drives extremely high qualified leads, like they're ready to close by the time that you connect with those people. So this isn't just a marketing point, this is also a very strong sales angle to have the right people talk about what you do in front of the right audiences. We got to remember people buy from people. OK, and I would tell you that influencer marketing and B2B is even more targeted

because if you have a B2C product, you have a lot of different target personas that you're going after and you actually are trying to find a spokesperson that can speak to all of them in a way, right? So if you look at like the phone companies, for example, or something like that, you got to find somebody that touches so many different broad segments and doesn't alienate anybody. When you get laser focused on who you're trying to go after, one of the things that we do

in our workshops is I say, let's niche down. Who's your target audience? OK, what's the subset of that? What's the subset of that? OK, where do you need to be advertising? It becomes absolutely clear what conferences you need to be at, what publications you need

to be in, who do you need to connect with, who's an influencer in that space, building rapport with that person or that community of thought leaders. And if you look at how powerful social media is, here's an interesting fact and I might have shared this on a previous podcast, but LinkedIn, I think it's like 4% of everyone on LinkedIn are actually generating content and everybody else is consuming it. And I would tell you, like now with the new scrolls, that was a pro tip that someone

left on one of the podcasts that we had. I've been watching those videos and they are not optimized. Let's just put it that way. I'll use the word not optimized for LinkedIn or the business experience to just scroll through them and create that messaging. So anybody that's putting out content, is it on brand for your personal brand?

Is it on brand for your company? What is the message you're trying to get out there? But social media creates demand. You're getting in front of people that you never been before with a message and you have a couple seconds to share something with them in a short form content that you could roll them into a 10 minute piece or a pod or something like that, or even drive

into the website and white papers. I mean, it's just a new medium to sell where you get leverage of what a salesperson is doing when you leverage the automation, you are SEO, the paid ads, all the different kind of content pieces you have. I mean, a lot of CEOs, what I'm seeing and we're doing some corporate training now. I mean, I wrote a book like six years ago is like build your brand mania.

I was seeing where this was going. Okay. And I can tell you that if you can get out there and people get to know you and the data says it's roughly like seven hours. Okay. That's what we've actually seen seven hours.

So you're trying to get a potential customer to consume seven hours of content. How do you do that? How do you get people to look at your website, look at your sales material, engage with you? That's why these long lunches were so important because you're trying to build rapport with that person.

And until someone knows, likes and trusts you, they're not ready to do business, especially in oil and gas, because if you mess up, there's dire consequences. People could die. You want people that can keep you out of a ditch. So you're trying to build that connection, I guess. To your point though, Matt, if you hire the right influencer, you shortcut that

seven hours, right? A hundred percent. If not only do you shortcut that seven hours, but you're now in front of that influencer's audience. One of our podcasters is a Joe Patier. He's a doctor or PhD in geoscience.

Imagine if you sold a geoscience tool and you hired Joe Patier as your influencer. His audience is all the people that would use your tool. Well, now you're in front of an audience of buyers for your product that it would have taken you years to build. To Matt's point, each one of those people that Joe Patier would bring to you that would have an interest in your geo tool, it would have taken you seven

hours of content per person to develop that relationship with them. However, by hiring Joe as your influencer, if you sold geoscience tools, you immediately get in front of those people instantly without having to worry about all of that. And they trust Joe. This influencer thing is much bigger than a lot of people think. And I'm telling you people in the oil and gas industry right now in 2024, it

works unbelievably well because nobody else is doing it right now. You want to think about the right influencer for your brand and for your audience, but also how that engagement looks and what are they going to do for you on the programming side, on the content creation side? Cause I can tell you what you're saying is these influencers, whoever you identify has a target audience that they've already built that's established

that already trust them and you're going to shortcut that. You're going to piggyback on their experience and they're going to basically give you the nod and you're going to be in the circle like they're in the circle. Well, I got asked by a software platform to do some trainings. So they want to reach the US market. They want me to help doing some of their trainings.

I actually did one of our first podcast, their first podcast that they ever launched on AI, I was the guest because they were leveraging the audience that we had on a trend that was where they were targeting as far as like AI was on the rise about a year and a half ago, two years ago, like in a big way and they were reaching the US market. So it hit a couple of different components.

And then we were having additional discussions on building out SEO trainings for them of me teaching it because of my reputation in the digital marketing space or SEO space and they looked at that and they said, oh, let's do this. And it wasn't just I did a tweet or I did a post or something like that. It was a long term engagement where there was a relationship built and I was introducing somebody new into my audience.

These are some of the things that you should be looking at on establishing these relationships of how to build these things because it really is you're looking at a spokesperson and we haven't even gone into a bunch of people that just buy followers and bots and junk that's out there and you're looking for people that really add value to a community that you want to reach. Yeah.

And you brought up a really good point that you probably aren't even aware you brought up, but if you're going to follow this influencer strategy, if you're going to implement it both from a sales and marketing point of view, you still need to have a plan. You need to still need to have a strategy. You need to understand your goals.

Like Matt said, you understand your audience down to the as niche as you can get it. You need to identify which influencers also have that audience. You need to do research on the influencer itself. I mentioned earlier how to buy a gun part. Imagine if I hired an influencer for something else that was anti-gun, but I didn't know it. That would really mess up my brand.

So you still have to do your research on your influencer. I talked about how it's very inexpensive, but that still means you need a budget and then you still need to track and be able to equate results with your influencer marketing plan. So you don't just hire somebody that's going to endorse your product. There's more to it than that. But I'm telling you people, OGGN does this all the time.

In fact, if in a kind of a big 30,000 foot level, if you look at the sponsors of all our podcasts and what we're doing, it's sort of influencer marketing on steroids because you're having these expert podcast hosts bring on other experts that are niche to that exact audience and the audience learns and appreciates. So they want that content like the people that are listening to us right now, you want to listen to Matt and I, this is actually a perfect example

of how well influencer marketing works. And I'm telling you, it can really elevate what you're doing. Once again, nobody in all the gas is really doing much of it at all. So it makes it very easy for you to pass your competition up by finding the right influencer. Let's niche down even and look at a specific example. Let's use a pipe company or a valve company or somebody that has a commodity

and they're trying to put that commodity out there in the space. They're trying to win bids. Again, I think you got to zoom out and like, what is your brand promise? How are you different? Okay. Everybody says that they're great at customer service, but unless they know you, they don't know that. So now it's about storytelling of things that you've done for other customers like that. And how do you get that story out

there? And also it's the third party verification of someone talking about that, but let's just talk about it. I don't know. You usually bring up pipe companies as the example because it's so commoditized, but let's go through an example of how this could help. And I think that this could lead into another podcast. I know one of the things that you and I wanted to talk about was the overall sales funnel and how marketing and sales lays on top of each other and

how they help push people through that buying experience or the consideration experience, because the transaction experience, there's a lot more research and consideration that happens before someone gets down to the transactional like 3% of people, whatever the number is ready to buy. There's so much more that's happening at the top that are shaping the customer experience. I think it's really important to look at those sort of things.

Yeah. So here'd be a good example. Let's take all of this, the rapid growth of AI tools in drilling operations to optimize your drilling performance in lower lost time instances and lower costs. Everybody out there that has a technology company that's sold all I guess right now has an AI tool that they're pushing to help on the upstream side of the house. So what would you want to find? You'd want to find an influencer that understands drilling operations,

that understands the upstream industry from a business point of view, not just drilling operations, that has an audience of drilling contractors and operators. These are the targets for your drilling software and somebody who has, by the way, that audience does not have to be huge. Don't necessarily look at numbers of followers or anything else. They could have a small group of followers that are the exact people you need to get in front of.

And you'd want somebody that has a good industry reputation. I'm not trying to promote OGG in here. I just know our team. So our upstream podcast host, Elena Minhart, is a 30 year veteran of Department of Energy. She regularly has coffees with CEOs of Exxon, BP, Shell, blah, blah, blah. She's a degreed engineer. She got her start in the upstream side of the industry. She understands drilling operations immensely. She understands the business of drilling. She also understands the regulations

because she worked for Department of Energy and she has a small but extremely loyal following. Like I said, of CEOs of the major operators, she would be the perfect influencer if you had drilling optimization software. You could hire her. Once she understood your product, she could talk about the problems that you solve. Now you vault it yourself to the forefront and nobody else know your competition has that type of trustworthiness almost overnight because they hired the right influencer. And people, I'm just telling you, this thing works really

well in our industry right now. I'll give people the people don't change scenario, okay? I can tell you from what I have heard that I've done a lot in the oil and gas industry from a recruitment standpoint. There's certain people out there that everybody knows that everybody respects that are on rigs and have been around a long time and their names carry weight. Those people might not be visible online. They might not be posting. Good point. Some of these people, like I have somebody in mind that has flipped a oil and gas parts company three or four times

and they've hired them back every time to be a salesperson when the new person bought the company based on his relationships that he had, okay? So this person is not online. He's not visible. But if you're in the oil and gas industry in this space, you've heard of this guy and he carries weight and he carries influence. Well, there's a reason that the company keeps hiring him back as a sales person to maintain certain relationships and to get certain things done. And when this guy talks, people quiet down and listen. If you are trying to push something forward in that space,

having one or two or three of those voices, okay, even if they had no social media presence at all, again, it's the right influencer for your right target audience. That person is going to move the needle for you based upon what other people think about him and then what he says. I think that they're called connectors, okay? I mean, or how you look at it is they're connected to a lot of people and a lot of people look to them as subject matter experts. If you can find these people and you should, if you have a pulse on your industry and build a relationship to them

and let them understand what you do, some of it will happen just organically and naturally and they will share that. Sometimes you have to pay money to be part of their network or you have to pay money to go to a conference to get to know that person or you might have some kind of direct relationship or you might invite them on a podcast. There's a lot of different ways to approach this, but it's all about connections and humans are humans like Facebook is just the party. You can go talk to people or Twitter is just random people talking. You can talk to anybody on Twitter and

anything they said on Twitter, you can use in a quote. I see it in pitch decks all the time. People are like, this person said this publicly. If they said it on Twitter, it's public. LinkedIn, it's the business networking and these kind of platforms have just transformed how you connect with people. If you think about video before COVID, after COVID, people are able to have face-to-face conversations with people. If you get a little trippy like me, I'm actually not looking at you, Mark. I'm looking at avatar of you that's rendered and you're actually on the other side of it. So

we're actually in virtual reality right now. I know I'm a dork, but I knew I felt something different. Did you see how powerful this is? Extremely powerful. Unfortunately, we got to wind down the show. What? We're just going to start it, Mark. I know. Speaking of influencer marketing, I'll be doing a keynote at Pacific Fuels and Convenience Summit September 35th. I'll be at the American Frozen Fruit Institute to figure that one out

doing a keynote February 22nd, 25th. I'll be at the SBE Gulf Coast section, Electrical Submersional Pumps, supposedly another keynote. And then OGGN will be at Image, which is next week here in Houston. We'll be at the National Association of Land and Title Analysts. We'll be at GasTech September 17th and 20th and at SBE, ATC in New Orleans, September 23rd, 25th. If you're going to any of those conferences, find our booth, come say hi. Matt may or may not be there, depending on your timing, but would love to see you, love doing these type of live events.

The other thing the audience is that Matt and I are thinking about putting together a social event, so think light bites and drinks. And we're going to invite some of our past sales and marketing guests. So we have Kevin from IBM who's on a couple episodes. We'll probably have some other CMOs, some other VPs of sales. And we're doing this just to try to start building more of a community around this podcast here in Houston. So if you're in the Houston area, if you're into sales and marketing and you'd like to network with other sales and marketing professionals

in the oil and gas industry, pay attention to what we're doing. Follow us on LinkedIn, so you can see when those date comes up. But just want to let you know that audits, we're trying to do more than just the podcast. And it would be fun to meet some of y'all in person. So we're playing a social event, which by the way, sales force, because I know you listen to this, if you'd like to sponsor our marketing and sales event, so you can get from a bunch of CMOs and oil and gas, give me a call. If anybody else would like to sponsor our

event and get from a bunch of sales and marketing leaders and oil and gas, let me know. It's going to be a blast. It's going to be very casual, be a lot of fun. As usual, we have our two events, newsletters, our two newsletters, our events, newsletters and our Sunday update in the show notes. If you haven't been paying attention to Sunday update, my team thinks it's really funny to stick my face in other people's bodies. So two weeks ago, they stuck me on Taylor Swift. Last week, they stuck me on all of the cast from the office. It is funny, but it is kind of weird.

But check it out, the Sunday update. All of Matt and I social channels are also in the links in the show notes. It's time for a LinkedIn failure tip of the week. Do you have one, Matt, off the top of your head? I do. Well, we kind of addressed it in the podcast earlier, but really those videos of the scrolls, if you're putting stuff out there now, understand that this is the new format that people are watching them in. And so think about how to format them in a way that is going to reach and engage with people. And I think you'll find it a great channel to get in front of a lot of

people that are in your network and maybe one connection away. And to Matt's point, do a little bit of research before you do the video. I accidentally found this out, actually here in Riverside. The actual video size for LinkedIn scrolls is slightly different than what LinkedIn is. Now, it's not the vertical thing that you would use for Instagram or whatever, but just a slightly different size. Any size will work. But if you really want to optimize it, do your research and size it to fit the scrolls. Great tip, Matt. All right, guys, we've got to get out of here.

Remember, make a difference, not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.