Can thought-leadership content from Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) drive sales?

For HP, the COVID-19 pandemic came as a real blow to their tried-and-tested B2B Sales initiatives. Health restrictions put an end to face-to-face networking events. But HP still needed a way to foster relationships with prospects. And as IT decision-makers across HP’s target industries re-evaluated their use of technology, HP quickly realised they needed to fill the gap.

Delivering meaningful impact amid a sea of competition wouldn’t be easy. So, we challenged HP to rethink their usual B2B approach. Where competitors were hosting webinars, we wanted to host conversations with KOLs.

Our objectives were simple. Use thought-leadership content and KOLs to keep HP top in market share in the Education and Corporate space; grow their customer database; maintain engagement levels despite the lack of face-to-face meetings; and keep HP top of mind with their customers.

For the ‘HP Speaker Series’ to be successful, it needed to address the real-world challenges facing IT decision-makers amid their ‘new normal’.

Rather than push product benefits, we decided to recruit Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to drive the conversation. We positioned the ‘HP Speaker Series’ as a genuine thought leadership platform – no HP sales push, no plugs, just content from KOLs that delivered genuine value.

We split the content into two mini-series to ensure maximum relevance to our audiences’ backgrounds. Education and Government sector experts spoke in the ‘Future of Learning’, while leaders from the UN, Members Order of Australia, and Cybersecurity spoke in the ‘Future of Managing’.

Our audience is time-poor. So, we let viewers choose to either attend the 15-minute sessions live to enjoy an interactive 45-minute Q&A, or catch-up on the ‘HP Speaker Series Portal’ – an on-demand streaming platform with every episode in one place.

Before we could start putting together content, we needed to identify the right talent.

We knew that our target audience was IT decision-makers in the Corporate, Education, and Government sectors. So, we developed a proprietary approach to B2B KOL identification that used AI and insights to align our opinion leaders’ demographic, psychographic, and behavioural archetypes to HP’s audience.

The behavioural attributes of a sample target audience were assessed against eight-core behavioural scales:

- Risk-tolerant vs. Risk-averse

- Trusting vs. Sceptical

- Optimistic vs. Pragmatic

- Forceful vs. Accommodating

- Deliberate vs. Fast-paced

- Matter of fact vs. Expressive

- Autonomous vs. Collaborative

- Supporting vs. Dominant

Potential opinion leaders were chosen on how well they ‘fit’ our audience’s psychographic profile. This allowed us to put together panels of experts whose delivery and interactions would resonate with the audience and each other, without being too similar in profile.

We developed the ‘HP Speaker Series’ to engage decision-makers with the insights they’d usually get at live events. Our end-to-end campaign strategy was built on audience research, creative direction, opinion leader/influencer strategy, and media strategy – allowing us to pivot our topics according to audience feedback.

Having split the Series into the ‘Future of Learning’ and ‘Future of Managing’ tracks, we recruited over 40 KOLs to drive user-generated content on social channels. Series episodes featured interactive Q&A sessions in which attendees could exchange ideas with our thought leaders, acting as a conversation starter for HP’s B2B Sales team.

HP could track prospect accounts’ engagement and activity in our purpose-built ABM Customer Segmentation Dashboard – pulling in data feeds from our CRM, marketing automation systems, intent signals, content consumption data, first-party web data and leads, all in one view.

By adopting our proprietary approach to opinion leader identification, the ‘HP Speaker Series’ delivered:

- 172% Increase in Social Engagement from Opinion Leaders

- 9.02% Average Social Engagement Rate on highest performing Opinion Leaders

- 3.59% Average Social Engagement from Opinion Leaders across the program

- 8,266 Video views from Opinion Leaders

- 850% increase in total social interactions

- 3,117 Total Registrations

- $611.99M in opportunities

- 874:1 ROI

Over the course of the campaign, we’ve helped HP reach thousands of potential clients in our target audience across 14 events. Our online interactions are up 850% above benchmark, open rates are 138% above the standard, and attendance continues to grow with each event.

The success of the campaign has led HP to run the ‘Speaker Series’