Countless retail marketers are wrestling with how to make influencer marketing work for their specific location and their customer base—and that’s exactly what our guest today is here to help with.
In this recap episode of Social Pulse: Retail Edition, powered by Agorapulse, Chief Storyteller Mike Allton talks to Lindsey Naber, the senior director of brand marketing at Rawlings Sporting Goods. Lindsey leads national marketing efforts while working directly with B2B customers, including retailers, team dealers, and catalog internet accounts to ensure proper brand representation across all channels.
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Tell us a little bit about your role at Rawlings and how you actually work with retail partners on their marketing efforts.
Lindsey Naber: Yeah, sure thing.
So, as the senior director of brand marketing, I am responsible for our brand, both in a retail setting and a consumer-facing digital setting. So I am the cog of the wheel that is interspersed between our digital and social teams, our e-comm teams, and our sales teams. So I’m managing the message of the brand essentially and how our brand shows up in those spaces, be it retail or digital. So I’m going on Year 20 in the biz. I’ve seen the industry—the sports industry—change quite a bit over that time.
And I love working with the retailers just because we have so many differences, segments of retailers, whether it’s a team dealer, a one-off mom and pop shop, a large mass distro retailer, or your standard big box retailer. They all have different capabilities and personalities, and ways they market our brands.
So, it’s always something new and catering to their various audiences, which all differ just a little bit. So it keeps things interesting.
Tell us a little bit about Rawlings. What are some of the products that you guys offer?
Lindsey Naber: Yeah, so we are the number one baseball brand in the world, and we’re primarily known for our baseball gloves, but it’s so much more beyond that. So it’s bats, balls, helmets, protective wear, and apparel. And it’s not just baseball—it’s fast-pitch softball as well, which is exciting.
And while we’ve dabbled in other sports historically, we are primarily focused on those two in the current landscape. So it’s been a long history for our company. We began in 1887 here in downtown St. Louis. We’ve been a part of the game, so to speak, for a very long time, but have always used somewhat of an endorsement model to market our products.
From the very first baseball glove that was developed with Bill Doak in the 1920s to where we are now with some of our professional athletes and some of our influencers as well.
Mike Allton: And I ask that question because I teach brands how to do influencer marketing, and I often talk about how Mark Twain was one of the first true influencers, but before Twain, the people who were being paid to endorse products were professional athletes, Babe Ruth, and so on.
And when you talk about the influencers that you’re working with from micro influencers up to big brands, that’s what you’re talking about, right? Professional major league baseball players.
Lindsey Naber: That’s right. And some of our old catalog archives, it’s crazy to see some of the ads with, say, Stan Musial and they’re hand sketched. And then you would see a similar picture of Stan Musial advertising cigarettes in his Cardinals uniform.
So, it’s just crazy how far things have come, but it’s always the product being used by someone integral to the game. So whether that’s a pro, whether that’s just a recreational athlete using it for the first time, whether it’s user-generated content, it’s all fitting and important to the brand.
What is the biggest challenge is that you see retailers facing when it comes to local marketing, engaging with their community, and that sort of thing?
Lindsey Naber: Yeah, so I found that working with the retailers, a lot of them are very buttoned up with their brands as they should be, which I respect. But when it comes to working with influencers and ambassadors, our team at Rawlings is somewhat hands-off. We let them do what feels natural and authentic to them, and then it translates well in the content they produce. Whereas a lot of our retail partners have, like I alluded to, just very particular standards, which is great. But they might be trying to guide the message a bit too much.
And, oftentimes, these retailers are selling a wide array of products, so they might not be as attuned to some of the specialized athletes and their messages. Oftentimes, they’re going to rely on their partners or brands that they carry, such as Rawlings, to help out with that.
I think that that’s probably the biggest challenge is trying to be a little too prescriptive in what they’re attempting to accomplish with their influencer or ambassadors.
How did you figure out that micro-influencers might be a way to go?
Lindsey Naber: I think over time, the consumer has become pretty savvy, and they understand that endorsers are paid a lot of money for their advertising efforts.
And we wanted to find something a little more authentic to the younger athlete. And we knew they’re spending so much of their time on their phone and social digital media. So why not get someone a little closer to their age group?
Not to say that certain pros wouldn’t be relevant to them, but the no names essentially might carry more influence with them. A lot of these content creators are very specialized, but they’re younger. They speak the language.
It reads more authentic to the younger athlete who might be a little distrustful of an ad with a professional player giving the message, delivering the message.
What should retailers be trying to spot or think about when they’re evaluating micro-influencers as potential partners?
Lindsey Naber: Yeah, so I think it’s easy to get caught up in the likes of the following, just the baseline numbers. But for us at Rawlings, we look at so much more.
We’re looking at how many partners. They are within their portfolio. We don’t necessarily make these content creators or influencers work just with our brand exclusively, but we also know that if it’s not as genuine, if they’re taking direction from not only our brand, but all of our competitors, too. We look at: How are they respected amongst their peers? Some have better reputations than others and are known just to again, take a check from whatever brand wants to hand that over. So we spend a lot of time digging deep into previous content relevance amongst a particular age group and just how intrinsic they are to the game.
For instance, I say that because we got a lot of people reaching out to us wanting to test the product, to create content with it. But they may not be in the position to be offering advice, having that they haven’t played at a high level or been very selective in their career. So, those are the things that we look at.
And at the end of the day, it just has to come down to authenticity. Is it going to translate to our end user? And Rawlings has historically been the good guy brand. We let our products and our performance do the talking. We want to make sure that our ambassadors reflect that as well, and it will resonate with our audience and their audience as well.
Mike Allton: I think that’s a huge point. Rawlings has a stellar reputation, and for a brand that’s a hundred years old, that’s incredible.
And it’s also important to consider, because as you mentioned a moment ago, you’re just going to let these people create whatever they want to create (within reason). You’re trying deliberately not to put a bunch of guidelines and guardrails on top of an influencer, which is smart, but at the same time, we have to make sure that they’re accurately representing their brand. So, that’s why you had to put so much time upfront, vetting them, carefully pouring over the content they create. Who else do they work with? What’s their tone of voice? How do they respond to comments?
Let’s make sure they’re going to reflect our values as much as you possibly reflect that.
Lindsey Naber: 100%.
Are you only working with influencers directly on behalf of Rawlings, or do you coordinate with retail outlets?
Lindsey Naber: We do a little bit of both. So we have our own, and then we work with certain retail partners to leverage some of their existing influencer base.
It’s always a matter of vetting for us. And oftentimes, though it’s us bringing a partner or an ambassador to the retailers, they rely on us for our expertise in the sport.
When you’re working with all these retailers, how do you help move them to sales-driving partnerships with influencers?
Lindsey Naber: Great question. So a lot of these retailers have carried our brand for years and years, so I think both of our objectives aren’t necessarily to build brand awareness, but to move a particular item. So it gets very specialized.
And say, for instance, there’s a $400 glove that was released on a certain day. It takes a certain athlete to be able to break that down in a realistic, believable way.
So, it’s not necessarily about the person with the most followers who just speaks about the sport. It has to be authentic: a high-performing, highly regarded athlete. And so again, they’ve been a lot of ours; most of our retail partners have been great about letting us take the lead and providing those options for them.
And again, coming back down to does it resonate with the person that would be buying, say a $300, $400 baseball glove?
Are there any other kinds of campaign structures or collaboration models that you found working well with your retail partners?
Lindsey Naber: Yes, I would say. We tend to be at a lot of baseball events, so sometimes our retailers have us capture the content, have us handle the content from soup to nuts, from start to finish.
And then we just package it up and do a collaborative post with them. That seems to be the easiest. Again, we take as much of the logistical planning and execution off the table for them, and they tend to appreciate it because it’s then pushed out in lockstep with their brand, and they have their name on it.
But we are the experts at obtaining some of that content and getting it out of our subject matter. So they have us handle all of the pre-work, so to speak, before it ever hits social media or their digital channels.
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When working with retailers, how do you measure success with smaller audiences?
Lindsey Naber: It is always evolving, and I think you’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask on our team.
So I have to be very strategic when I’m sharing some of the campaign results because let’s face it, our executive team [ask] How much money did you invest? In paying this influencer? Or is it just a product trade?
So they may be looking just at the high-level baseline metrics, likes or follows, whereas my social team may be looking at it from how many new followers we gained for subsequent opportunities to market to these athletes.
Our sales team is going to be looking primarily at, did this move any product? Are there any sort of sales ROI figures attached to the posts? And then some are just, I hate to say it, but a lot of times, the feedback that’s most important is the anecdotal feedback. We get comments from younger athletes saying, Hey, I can’t believe you guys work with so-and-so, and sometimes that feedback carries more weight than any metric could ever carry.
So it is a mix of different ROI components and metrics that we use to gauge success. It is hard to have a centralized ranking, though, or a metric that would seemingly appease everyone.
And also we have to be careful, too, when we work with third parties or influencers, ambassadors, because we’ve been a bit early on when some of our partners were fudging follower numbers, and so oftentimes we’re having them provide the insights.
So there has to be a level of trust there with our partners. That’s another reason why we are so selective.
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