Today we talk to Ainhoa Gómez, entrepreneur responsible for up to three companies. One of them is a consolidated agency with more than ten years of experience focused exclusively on LinkedIn. For the last four years she has also been running an industrial marketing agency.
How has LinkedIn changed our lives? How did you get Top voice recognition?
I’m focused on the sales and marketing side of LinkedIn and I think it’s not the first thing that will come to people’s minds, because in the old days, many years ago, people thought of LinkedIn as human resources. Today it’s already clear that it has other areas, other objectives and so on. In fact, I’m going to talk a little bit more about sales, which is the area I’m in, and marketing because I think it has brought us something that has been very good for us.
And the thing is that more and more, in sales we have problems to talk on the phone, problems to get an email…. LinkedIn is opening up opportunities for us, especially people who are more and more open to talk within the platform and it’s giving us opportunities that otherwise I don’t know how we would do it right now, so it’s complicated.
About the famous blue Top Voice badge, because right now the golden ones I think it is easier to get them, in fact I myself am with managers there helping them to get them. But the blue one, well what do I know, I guess it takes a lot of work. I am the only person in Spain who has it as a LinkedIn consultant. And one person in Madrid, one of my big competitors, traditional competitors, was telling me, “Jo, I thought LinkedIn would never give this badge to someone who is a LinkedIn consultant.”
And of that I am the only one in Spain. And I said, wow, I never thought it was impossible, I thought it was an option and it came.
How important is innovation in the companies you have created? Is LinkedIn becoming more and more of a lever?
At Biwott they looked at me like cows on a train in 2014 when I talked about LinkedIn for sales. That different vision of the LinkedIn tool, of the channel, of that medium, was a total paradigm shift in the heads of many people. Almost today there are still times when, with sales teams and so on, well, they are a little more focused, but it was a change and it was a different way of thinking about it. It was a way of using the medium in a different way, it changed it a lot. In Spain we don’t talk about this at all, so…
And if we talk in Ismark, in terms of industrial marketing, to make companies think that traditionally they are buying from them, many of them are referents, to make them understand that you can make a cross sale and a cross sale of things that maybe your customer has already stabilized, that is, the importance of this marketing in the industry, this must be internalized now, because they no longer come to buy from us, we have to sell.
Felipe Rebollo and Ainhoa Gómez.
How much does it cost to introduce new concepts or ideas in traditional sectors?
Here, like everything else, it depends on the people, that is to say, there can be a very hermetic company, very traditional, from many, many years ago, like “we have been in Spain for 60 years with this subject and so on”, and suddenly someone comes along, a general management, who suddenly changes the paradigm and surrounds himself with a marketing director and they change a lot… And there can be one that is less years old, which is supposed to be more open because of what it sells… You’re supposed to be understood for a number of things, and it turns out you’re not.
In other words, there are surprises and it depends on the people. And the ones that don’t, are fears, etc., etc., it’s complex. You have to go with numbers. Maybe it’s my way of thinking, because I’m a mathematician, it’s my way of thinking, but sometimes going with numbers is what counts. I mean, look, you’re having this, the potential you have is this, and what you could achieve is this.
And it’s the only way, because if we talk about medium-term investments, brand recognition, brand perception, things like that, a lot of management, industrial engineering, things like that, it doesn’t convince them, it costs a lot.
What do you see in the trends for the near future?
When I talk about LinkedIn, a lot of things come. There are short videos, like Reels, like TikTok, all of this comes to LinkedIn. Suggested posts come, the famous For You from TikTok, or well, what we have on Instagram of what they suggest to you, which are not people that you follow. However, the algorithm suggests them to you.
Some very interesting things are coming to LinkedIn. Let’s see how we use them in the company. I, for example, remember the Stories on LinkedIn, I think I was the only person who used them. Strategically, my clients used them, because we did use them, we gave them a strategic character of life in the company, we gave another nuance to those Stories, which were very good, and they disappeared. So, many new things are coming, many things are coming, we are going to see how we are going to fit them in, and especially for B2B companies, for my clients, to see how we use them strategically, which is the important thing.
Regarding marketing in industry, it is moving little by little, at least too little for me, but it is moving. It is already easy to talk to companies, it is easy for them to have their marketing automation tool and then they have to qualify those leads to pass them to Salesforce or Dynamics or for sales people.
That is to say, conversations are starting to take place, they are starting to talk about lead more, they are starting to understand that more things have to be done and that there are good ways, that it is not enough for a salesperson to receive just any e-mail from a study of his competition. In other words, qualification. Things are coming and I see them starting to take off, we are trying to implement them in the companies and make them see them, so I would go a little bit that way, marketing automation, to see if in 2024 we manage to consolidate it.
Tell us about your podcast.
The podcast is bringing me a lot, I mean, I am delighted. The truth is that the podcast is called LinkedIn on the Right Track, it is true that the name is in English because it is associated with the Biwott brand, but it is a podcast that I am doing in Spanish, at least for the moment, and well, I started last summer. We are in the first season and well, I have learned a lot, I am learning a lot, because I had to learn about podcast marketing, which was not my medium. I’m very used to LinkedIn, to other series of channels and, also, I had the challenge of talking about a tool and talking about it in audio form, without teaching anything, because I don’t do video podcast, I do only podcast. So it was a challenge and it’s working very well and it’s bringing me incredible things, so very good, very happy.
