Empower Your Team to Turbocharge Your Brand. Olga Andrienko (Semrush) Shares How

TRANSCRIPT

Grow Your Brand Without Breaking the Bank. Guest: Olga Andrienko

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B growth show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond and I am joined by Olga Andrienko. Welcome to the show.

Olga Andrienko: Thank you very much for having me. I'm super excited about this.

Michelle J Raymond: Me too. Now, we have clarified this upfront, it's Semrush, not S.E.M Rush, just for anyone who might be curious.

But before we dive into all the formal questions, I always love to ask my guests, tell me, what has your journey been like on LinkedIn? How did you get started? How quickly has things happened? And yeah, tell me your favourite parts.

Olga Andrienko: So we started when I joined Semrush 10 years ago, almost. So it was a platform where you just have to have the profile.

If you work in, marketing or anywhere. And then I realised that I needed to also see whether the audience was there. And I also needed to build my own personal profile because I was a social media person, [00:01:00] so I explored all of the channels and I started discovering our audience in them.

And also I wanted to see the profiles of the influencers in our field. And my profile was just basically empty. And then I was chatting a lot through email, even with other software providers and then with our influencers.

There was a feature, I don't know if it's still there. So I just downloaded the emails and I added them to LinkedIn and then I had more profiles to work with.

So that's where I actually had my first, maybe like 1000 or 2000 connections. But it was like 500 plus. So that's what I was going for. And from that point on, actually, I still went further to work on Twitter and Google plus at that time. LinkedIn was just my, business card.

And then because I started speaking and we have Semrush then whenever I was speaking, then people added me on LinkedIn and that's how [00:02:00] during eight and a half years, I grew up until 19,000 followers.

I rarely posted. And I was just there, but my presence was like on other channels while actually my LinkedIn audience turned out to be the hugest one out of all. I had Twitter, but Twitter is 11 or 13, 000. And then Instagram is very small. It's like mostly private. I was not leveraging the tool that I had.

Last summer, I started being very intentional about LinkedIn and in a year I got to 10,000 more followers. So like really accelerated growth compared to previous eight and a half years. And yeah, like I built a community for myself that is larger than Semrush.

And I think this is what truly also helps me and excites me. And also the reason why I started being intentional is because I needed to change my[00:03:00] closest circle from SEO professionals to brand marketing experts and also Founders and CMOs to ensure that LinkedIn and my feed is the feed where I get inspired. I get information on what brand campaigns are working for their brand.

So, ultimately LinkedIn for me is the network of my peers in brand marketing. So I could understand and learn how to do better marketing for Semrush.

Michelle J Raymond: I love the word intentionality that you've used in there, because I think that's where you get the most out of LinkedIn. And I had a conversation today, I was presenting on a panel at an Conference face to face.

And someone asked me the question, you know, when I log onto LinkedIn, I just see the same stuff from my company and not much else. It was like your future's in your hands, my friend. So you have a lot of connecting or unfollowing, whichever one's going to help you most.

I appreciate you telling us your story because I like the way that you've been talking, not just about building personal [00:04:00] brands, which you do a lot of content in that space, which I enjoy, but also building the Semrush brand on LinkedIn as well and how the two play together.

Now, when you're building the business brand on LinkedIn, do you find that it's different to building a personal brand or have you found over time, there's not really that much difference. I'm curious how it's played out on your side.

Olga Andrienko: There's a huge difference even from how Semrush brand speaks and I speak as one of the main spokespeople. So Semrush is about educational material, like in niches like in content, SEO social media. And we have infographics, and it's always branded and we also put memes and we have the formula entertain, educate and engage.

We also ask questions and we have a very specific distinctive tone of voice, but we don't share a lot of like expert posts and thoughts and we don't [00:05:00] share our values that much. And what goes behind the scenes.

And I think that's where all personal brands of all the spokespeople come in. I share how we built the campaign that we've built. Like, why are we talking how we're talking?

And I also used it to celebrate my team. There's a lot of mentions on how Semrush social media team is great and then how they enjoy the content but that's praise from the community, which we consider is number one, but also if my team sees that I also share their success, that's another kind of motivation.

I think those really need to compliment one another. And maybe there's a big difference also Founder versus other employees because I think people look at those profiles differently. Our Founder is not that active but we also contribute to HR brand. So we really want to work with the best people in the [00:06:00] industry.

So how do we do that? We put ourselves out there and also we need to connect to them because people want to work with interesting people. So if we share this message that okay, Semrush hires interesting people, Semrush hires talented people And I want to work with them so that the probability of us getting better talent is also there.

There's also expert blog and personal blog. Probably for individuals but I really support the personal blog more. There's a formula that I like for my posts and that I recommend. So what's happening, how I feel about it, how I think about it and what happens next.

So whatever you share, it doesn't have to be like, okay, here are 10 ways to use ChatGPT. This is the content that will get you the audience, but they will not stay unless you share your thoughts and your feelings and where you're going and where you've come from.

This is not a typical company content and people stay [00:07:00] with personal profiles because they trust people more. They connect with people easier. And They want to understand their journeys. So that's where it's really personal profile would amplify whatever brand you're working for.

Michelle J Raymond: I think the amplification both ways, the company amplifying the employees and the employees amplifying their company. That for me has always been the, gold star formula that we all should be working towards is how do we use both to, really shine a light on both sides because it's just a win for everybody.

And so I love that you're always shouting out your team and telling them how great they are and what they're up to. And I have no doubt that probably inspires them to keep going and try a little harder and whatever the next thing is and just keep bringing it.

And it's, almost like I'm not going to play down their roles at all, but I feel like it's like lots of little clones and mini me's everywhere.

So now it's all amplified even more, the more that they're [00:08:00] finding their own voices in their own space and now starting to shine, in their own rights, thanks to the spotlight that you and the team all work on each other. This is why I guess I've been so interested in watching what you've been doing. And I watch from afar most of the time and just analyze like, how do the two play together?

And you mentioned about Founder's brand. Tell me why a Founder that might be listening to this podcast, why is it important for them to build their brand so that they can leverage it on LinkedIn?

Olga Andrienko: I think for the startups, that's crucial because this is where you will get even media mentions, you'll get people connecting to you, get into the spotlight easier because it's a lot easier to differentiate your company, if you are the voice of the company and the connection is easier.

And also if you talk about the clients that you have, if you talk about the purpose and because you've built the company for some reason[00:09:00] it's easier to connect to a company that has purpose now. And even like the people want to work with company that has purpose. People want to purchase things that were built with purpose. So there's a lot of value based needs or like connections that that happen.

If Founder has a voice, that's the easiest way to accelerate the company that doesn't have any presence. You need company profile, even like for tagging that, and then for existing on LinkedIn, but I would much rather hire someone like for social media department who would help the Founder create content then really focus on the company profile.

And the Founder is the person like if they leave that meant that company had great success and they sold it, but by that time the company profile would be very strong or the company would just not exist if the Founder's not there.

If, for example if we focused too much on my presence. Then [00:10:00] there's always this risk of like employee leaving, right? So when Semrush was small, betting on someone that is not the Founder is risky, but betting on the Founder's profile is not risky because Founder is I guess the major driver.

 Even like the Richard Branson's of the world, like they still post, they still are active because they also want to, it's the Founder's profile and Founder's content is also the easiest way to shift the perception of the brand because if Founder says, okay, now we're doing this, now we're sustainable And then people think, okay, now they're on this journey.

If the company's doing this, everyone sees it as just an press release, but if Founder always explains their thought process. I think even in terms of branding your company into the future that's a very smart way. And even for PR crisis if you have crisis, then managing it from the personal profile also would be much easier and kind of a bit [00:11:00] safer even than from a company.

It's invaluable and just in lead generation and trust in media presence and also in getting employees because they would feel like if people would want to follow you, then they might take I don't know, some pay cuts, they might sacrifice something in the short term because they believe in what you're building.

Michelle J Raymond: I think founders have the ability to inspire and lead by example. Often, one of the first questions I ask when I'm working with a new client and they come in it's to find out, if it's the CEO or the Founder, depending what kind of business it is, are they actively involved, or at least on board with being involved in the future on LinkedIn?

And if they're not, I hold grave fears for the future of their social program on LinkedIn, because eventually people go, it's not good enough for them. Then why should I, or then there's not enough attention or resources go towards it. But the thing that I think is more [00:12:00] important is they don't have the ability to acknowledge and engage what's happening on LinkedIn.

And I think it's that acknowledgement that's really powerful. That is what you're leveraging in your team so well is just when someone notices the effort that people are making, it's really amazing to see just how much that builds the momentum faster. And so Founders that are listening to this podcast, you don't have a choice anymore and nor should you have a choice.

It's time to change. It's time to get out there. And I know that you're busy. I know that there's lots of reasons and lots more important things you might think, but I think being the face of the brand is really important. I love what you've shared on that one.

But one of the other cool things that I love that you guys do is what we call user generated content. And how does Semrush and how do you use this kind of content to build the brand?

Olga Andrienko: That's actually something that we are discussing a lot internally now because I want to build [00:13:00] this more and people share our dashboards and that we would consider user generated content that it's just natural, but I want to 10 X this and for B2B brands, that's difficult for anybody who doesn't have the tangible product, that's difficult.

One of my favourites is how Spotify does that, with Spotify wrapped, but also I loved another way of how they did it. So they incentivized to create like my own festival at some point. So I create the festival have all sorts of music and feeling that I can combine this is amazing. I use nature content and people are obviously sharing this a lot.

One idea that I really loved how we did it five years ago. And whoever has the dashboards, then probably this would be for you. We have keyword data, so there was a release of another season of Game of Thrones [00:14:00] and our development team came up with the idea of Dothraki QR database and we released it and it was obviously gibberish, but it was fun and it also told a lot of people that we had QR data.

The message was that we have all QR data in the world and for any country, any language. And it was just, it was cool and everyone was sharing that because it was just fun. And there were a lot of Game of Thrones fans.

Another one, we did the Easter egg hunt. So that's something that any website can do. You just put the Easter eggs somewhere on the website on the target actions. And people would go and also we had a pop up sharing that, okay, you uncovered another Easter egg. There were very cute animals and eggs. And then it was the share button. So we actually had a lot of people sharing that. And it was yeah, it was a really nice interaction with more than a thousand people. So that's that was great.

[00:15:00] It really depends whether you can, like your product exists or some virtually, but what you could do, you can collect the data on how people were using products on how many purchases, and then you can send them the annual report and like really to do it in a nice way.

So they would share it on social and always remember that people tend to share it on Instagram more And don't forget the vertical one, but also like for LinkedIn, if that's a B2B product, then a horizontal one. Yeah, keep in mind of the formats, but I really like anything with the names.

So the Starbucks is a great example where everyone takes photo of the cup, Coca Cola had one with the names as well. And Snickers has always some wording on their bar. So that's like a big corporations that can afford that. But even the small one, if you only have a website, then you can still embed things, somewhere for people to take screenshots [00:16:00] and share it.

Michelle J Raymond: I was talking to Jess Cook on a previous episode, and we were talking about the ability for brands to surprise and delight people again. I think we got so heavily involved in adding value and how to's that somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to have fun and do things a little bit different.

It seems to be cookie cutter. Everybody does their version of the same thing in a different set of brand colours.

So it's cool to see and start to think about how can we do things differently. At the conference today, there was a lot of talk about hyper personalisation and how we can really speak to the audience and really have those personalised touches for people. And we were talking about the crossover from B2C to B2B and vice versa.

And it's really cool. Cause I feel like marketing and building brands in general at the moment is going through this kind of phase of let's try something different. [00:17:00] We've done what we've been doing for a while now, and now's the time to change things up. So it's really exciting, but another word that always gets talked about at the moment in the research that I do is the word community.

Now, what are your tips for building a brand community? Cause building a personal brand and a community around a person is one thing, but how do you think that people should be, or what kinds of things could people be doing when it comes to building a brand community?

Olga Andrienko: I actually think that a community that is built around the brand and not the person is more sustainable and is more long lasting. Because if you build community around the brand, then it's quite likely about the values that the brand has, or it's about brand caring about their like fans and the brand just creates the network or the place for people [00:18:00] to interact.

So this is the best type of community. So it's not about the brand. It's about all of the audience. And then if you give either it's the Facebook group, Slack community, or it could be on your website as well.

So just give people the space. They already know that they're connected within the topic, and then they use the product, but give them the freedom to discuss whatever they want, and make it about them, and then we're caring about them, starting with replying to every mention that you have from anybody, to ensure that there is this I see you, I care about you, thank you for being here And inviting them to the space to interact with others.

And in terms of the community around personality, I feel that there is too much focus on the person. So people do not interact with one another. They always are eager to hear this one voice. And I think that these communities, like they're missing out on the [00:19:00] interpersonal connection because it's always like one to many.

And I really love this like many to many approach that like brand is building. So how to build it? We started replying to everybody that mentioned Semrush. So you start with people who already know you, who care about you. You start also replying publicly to negative mentions and not like shying away from them.

So what a lot of brands do, they say well, I sent you like the info in DM or please DM us. And you take it either to email or you take it to direct messages. So what other people see is that, okay, you reply to customer, I have no idea whether the customer was happy afterwards or not.

And having the public dialogues and explaining things and how, so the company is not always wrong. What you need to say is that I feel you like, I see that you're upset. I'm very [00:20:00] sorry that you're upset. But it doesn't mean that I'm very sorry that we decided something that we decided. It also really, you need to find a way also to explain things. Your way of doing business and other people will see that and they would then decide whether they would want to follow or they would want to use the product.

And in a lot of ways, people just want like attention. They want explanation and they want you to fix things. If you don't, you just explain why you can't. So some would leave, but you win so much trust with that. And people would really want to connect to brands that are more human in that sense.

That's the great way to start.

Michelle J Raymond: Couldn't agree more. I made a whole YouTube video dedicated to a particular brand whose products I love and use and heavily promote to my audience, but their presence on LinkedIn drives me crazy. They pay money for ads to show, [00:21:00] which keep getting shown to me. And then there's all this interaction with fans like me that love it.

And people that have had customer service issues that weren't resolved or had some issues and they pop in as well. And there's no response to any of us. So there's no response to the people that are going, yes, we love remarkable. There's no people going, Oh, we're sorry. Here's how we'll sort it. We'll be onto it.

It is just silence and I made a whole video. This is how much it drove me crazy. To say, it's literally burning money. There are people on there saying I'm on the fence. I'm thinking about buying the products that I would be having some kind of trigger going, if you buy it today, here's what we'll give you.

It's such an opportunity to after you've spent that money on paid campaigns, no less to literally just come in and ignore everyone that responds to it. I was just scratching my head so much. I was like, what are you doing? I was tempted to send it to their head of marketing or their [00:22:00] CEO and say, I can help you. I don't want them to miss out because it is a great product, but this experience is just so weird.

And the things you've spoken about today, none of these things are going to break the bank. None of these need huge budgets. None of these need people to sign off 10 layers deep to get projects off the ground. Responding to people. This is how low the bar is for a win. Just respond to comments and mentions.

I can't believe that we have to keep reminding people, but I appreciate you bringing it up because it's just such an easy way to stand out in a sea on LinkedIn where most brands aren't, they just ignore people.

So I love that, but there's probably something that I'm curious. And I did, get to see some of your talk with the marketing meetup, cause I do love Joe, always a shout out to Joe, but how do you help employees talk about the brand. [00:23:00] So I'm pretty sure that forcing people to do it is not a good idea, but what can we do to entice them? What are some of your secrets?

Olga Andrienko: So we started with a closed group of 30 people that would be on middle management and senior management as well. And we had an interview with all of them created topics for them, and I shared my Videos in the free course on LinkedIn presence that I did and templates for hooks and we provided them with the education on how LinkedIn worked.

And what I see around every one in four posts is about Semrush. Because if you write on your expert topic, then you mentioned the examples from the company you work in. Even if you don't have to encourage, you have to encourage the high quality content.

And thoughts and feelings and just also more of a [00:24:00] personal content still about your work, but not just, okay, here are the 10 things on I don't know, the cheat sheets on Excel. That's what I also see on LinkedIn sometimes. That's how we built it and we really created a personalised topic suggestions for each and what really changed things also that we have hired the freelancer who is searching for commenting opportunities.

So we have the table with all of the topics for for a specific person. And then so she searches for the topics and then sends that via message in Slack to someone who would be the best person to comment. And that's to ensure that LinkedIn algorithms push their own content up and we grow our network in all sorts of ways.

That made our team feel that we really want to empower them and we don't restrict them and we [00:25:00] want them to grow. And for example, we have earnings goals, then we share the information with them. And then it's an easy Reason for them to post about the company. And now whenever we have like big news, but that happens very rarely that we would ask them maybe once a month where, okay, there's a study that went out or there's earnings goal. We hit a hundred thousand paying customers.

So that's something that we would just give them it's their choice to post it or not. And we also are mindful that if everybody posts the same thing and like across 30 profiles, that probably is not a good idea. So everyone chooses the topic that they feel most comfortable with.

But also, if you take even one study, everyone now shares their personal thoughts on it. And it's not okay, here's the link and here's the report, it's out. Like it's always another angle based on whether it's the director of organic search, [00:26:00] whether it's me from brand, whether it's a content person.

So the secret is not restricting that much. Educating, giving freedom and also support. I don't see anybody really like over using this and we got more speeches. We got more exposure. We hired people also from LinkedIn. There are a lot more benefits and right now we calculated that we got around 2 million extra reach for Semrush on the posts that mentioned Semrush, within um, five months or four months.

Michelle J Raymond: Wow. That's like a spike. That's a big impact in a short amount of time. Did you find other employees almost had FOMO and wanted to be a part of it when they saw these things happening. Did get an influx of people saying, I want to be a part of this now? How did you manage that?

Olga Andrienko: So far we released the second cohort, but with HR Team, because these are the strongest advocates. We have people from HR brand and they need to [00:27:00] post. So we also first education, personal, like development of topics. And we have requests. Okay. How do I choose this program?

Now we discussed that we will have a Google forum. So I want to know like how much time anybody can dedicate or is willing to dedicate. What the personal goal would be what struggles now, why they're not doing it personally. And where they are now, like the metrics that we would gather.

And I discovered that if you even ask certain questions, like any questions, then people are suddenly also like taking it more seriously. If you just say yeah, join the program, they will not really value it as much. So even the simple Google form, then it makes them more committed. And we'll see what we have, but even there are a lot of people who saw that, okay senior leadership is posting, then it's okay to spend time on LinkedIn. Nobody really would think that I'm looking for a job.

So I think the two biggest fears that [00:28:00] everybody has is okay. Like they will ask me what I'm doing on LinkedIn while I need to work on other stuff. And if I'm active, that means that I'm looking around. So those two fears is the first ones that need to be tackled, but if senior leadership gives the example then and we had an influx of posts from marketing. And even that we're not part of the program, we saw that they're starting posting, but it's just, it's the consistency is key.

And that's where everybody just like stops posting because it's a lot of time. I was happy to see that it was like 30% increase in other people posts, but then it died down because you need also the community that exchanges ideas and you also need help from the company to support this intent.

Michelle J Raymond: So much good stuff in there. I am mentally making notes going. I love that idea. I love that idea. I'm sure the [00:29:00] listeners are as well, but I'm going to stretch this friendship one little bit further. Do you have one actionable tip that for a company that's out there looking to build their brands through their employees?

Is there one last tip that you'd like to leave the listeners with? To get them taking action and hopefully get some of these great results like you guys are getting.

Olga Andrienko: Make it as easy as possible. Gather very few people in a private group and Slack if you use Slack or anywhere and help them as much as possible.

And also even with the post templates and anything that makes their life easier to start and once they are more productive then you can expand it, but do not start with a wide range of employees. That's not going to work.

Michelle J Raymond: Start small, go big, stay consistent over time.

Olga, you've shared so many things today, which my brain is [00:30:00] ticking over and I am going to continue this conversation and follow your content.

All the listener's if you go to Olga's Profile, I will have the links in the show notes, go to a profile top right hand corner, there's a bell click on that so you get notified of all of her content and you can do the same over on Semrush and see what kinds of things they're trialing so that you can always emulate that in your industry, even if it's something unrelated, try things, learn from other people that are having success.

So I appreciate everything that you've shared today. And I'm sure the listeners have too. So thank you so much for joining in.

Olga Andrienko: Thank you very much for invitation.

Michelle J Raymond: And until next week, listeners, it's been great to have you all join us again.

We'll have some more great episodes next week. Cheers.