Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Tom Kerkhof, global head of social media at Navico, on effective social marketing strategy:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone. I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Tom Kerkhof, global head of social media at Navico, which is a leader in marine electronics. Tom works between his hometown of Amsterdam and London where Navico is based. Tom, so your passion for sailing has opened up a lot of doors for you and your career, your first position was doing social media for the Volvo Ocean Race, if I’m not mistaken, that’s a sailing race sponsored by the talent placement from Brunel. Can you tell us about that experience and how you got your foot in the door there?

Tom Kerkhof 0:42
Yes and to make it even more sailing related, the reason why I got in touch with Brunel was that I was a Skipper. I worked at a rental company in Greece and Brunel a sales company, they try to place people in projects. When people perform really well, during a year, they get a bonus, in this case, a trip to Greece and I got to know Brunel because they were on my boats two years in a row and I said, well, I really like these people and this company, don’t you have a job for me? At that time, I was studying history, the economy was having a very bad time around 2011 or 2012. So I didn’t see a lot of work coming towards me in the history department. So I pursued my options with Brunel. They said, well, you’re a nice guy, we’ve seen you work as a Skipper, we think you’re responsible as a team player, why not? Then pure luck, they started to sponsor the Volvo Ocean Race, and then it all fell into place. Like you rightly pointed out, the sailing part was a big part of it because if I was a football player, I would never have landed that job because I could say, well, I don’t know that much about marketing but I know all about sailing. So if you teach me marketing, I will teach you sailing, but if I had any other passion, then that trade off would never have worked. So it was actually my sailing background that led me to whatever came after that.

Shaheen Samavati 2:24
Yeah, interesting. So that goes to the point of content. The fact that you’re a subject matter expert, I imagine allows you to create content that really relates with your audience, if your audience is people who are interested in sailing, right?

Tom Kerkhof 2:38
Yeah, absolutely. That was the sole reason why they initially hired me and why I pushed to be in the project because in the beginning, it was like, well, these are all very highly experienced professionals so we’re not sure yet what you can deliver. But then I said, well, you don’t know anything what I talk about so let’s try it. Then they liked it and like you say, it was just because they couldn’t write what I could write because they literally didn’t know. Sailing language is so particular, it’s not something you just take out of a book, luckily for me.

Shaheen Samavati 3:15
So could you tell us how that led to your current work at Navico? What does Navico do, can you tell us a bit more about that?

Tom Kerkhof 3:22
So Navico is a specialist marine electronics company. We provide instruments around navigation, to find fish, there’s sonars, depth sensors, wind sensors, there’s technology that connects all these units and in the end, we make sure that every type of data that’s coming from a boat is reflected on the units that we build and that comes to sensors in all shapes or forms. We do that for recreational and commercial marine sectors. Our biggest focus is on the recreational side of things, you can find us on a small rig around five metres but you also might find units from us on a ferry.

Shaheen Samavati 3:23
Okay, so how does social media play into the marketing mix for Navico and who is your audience on social media? Who are you trying to reach?

Tom Kerkhof 4:29
So that’s fairly complicated in the sense that Navico is sort of a parent company. There’s big accounts, big companies, that only talk to Navico because they sell all brands, but we have four brands under Navico. So that’s Lowrance, Simrad, B&G and C-MAP and they all have different audiences. So Lowrance is aimed at fishing, so we help people to make units that help them catch more fish. We have Simrad that’s basically for every boat that has a motor, we help them enjoy the day more easily, by having units that make it easy to enjoy your day. Then we have sailing equipment that helps people make the most out of a sailing day, leading towards the more competitive side of sailing. That’s where the background to that brand lies. Then connected to all those brands is C-MAP, because that’s the charting side of things. So in all these units, obviously, you have charts, it’s almost the most important thing on a boat, know where you’re going and know where you shouldn’t be going. C-MAP makes the photography for all these things. What social does for all these brands is make sure that people know that we exist, that sounds very straightforward but for example, this last year, we have seen a huge boom in new people coming to the industry, because people have time to spend around the house. So they might go to a lake rather than step on a plane and fly to Greece to rent the boat there. Especially in the United States, which is a very outdoor focused country, people actually went to lakes, they bought fishing boats, and they want new kit on their boats. Well, if we’re there, we show that we’re there, we’ve got the solutions that they’re looking for. Then they start considering our brand and they start buying it. Further down the road, we hope to help them with tips and tricks on how to use the equipment. So we also have a lot of pros and pro staff, as we call them, so people that are very knowledgeable that can help people or have made content to help people be a better angler, or sailor or boater. So basically awareness, but also education.

Shaheen Samavati 7:10
I see. So you’re reaching all kinds of boats like recreational, boaters, sailors, as well as professionals, right?

Tom Kerkhof 7:20
Yes. Before this year, I’d say 99% of the focus was on end consumers. Although a lot of what we sell is in the end to what we call customers. So that could be a store that sells our equipment, but now we’ve started to add B2B to the mix more and more, as we also want to use social media to talk to them and to market them. So that’s a switch of focus, if you will.

Shaheen Samavati 7:55
So as head of social media, what’s your day-to-day like?

Tom Kerkhof 8:00
Well, it’s very broad obviously, because we’ve got four brands. So the first thing I do is look at numbers. I do this because our company is so regional, we’re split up in three regions. So APAC, Asia Pacific, is very important to us, as is the Americas. Whenever I go to sleep, their day starts or is still in the middle of the day. So when I wake up, the first thing I want to do is see what has happened over the course of the last half day or full day, depending on the region. So if there’s any fires or things that I think we should act on, because it could be negative but it could also be positive. So someone might have posted something that is doing really well. How can we make more of it? Or why something is not going right, I would like to quickly change it, because it might be damaging or just customer’s money. From there I’d say it’s very hard to say the typical day as I’m working with all these brands, which are also in different phases. So it could be a content meeting, which happens quite regularly. Also, currently we’re working a lot on being smarter with data. So a lot of integration of data and verifying of data. So a big chunk of my time is always there. Also reporting, we are a very regional company and we try to make it more global and with global we mean one way of doing reports, one way of looking at the world rather than every region having their own.

Shaheen Samavati 10:03
I see. So it sounds like you’re managing and you’re overseeing the teams that are managing the pages, right?

Tom Kerkhof 10:10
Yes, that’s correct. So we’ve got a social manager in every major region and I’m responsible for them, especially on the performance side of things.

Shaheen Samavati 10:23
I see. So you’ve been working in social media for a while now, I think seven years or so. So I was curious, how do you think the role of social media has evolved over the last decade?

Tom Kerkhof 10:38
Yeah, so when I started I think it was already seen as something that has had a lot of potential. But I feel it was still seen as a talented Footballer of 18. So it was nice to look at but we still don’t know if he’s here to stay, or whether he’s just had a good day, we’re not completely sure what he can bring us. So social media was like, something that typically most young people did and now you can really see, with the view in my company at the moment, you can see that it’s a platform, which is able to reach the most people possible. It’s the most influential and it’s the most measurable. That’s the way my company values it at the moment and that goes right up to the board. Even more due to COVID-19, it’s seen as the most important way of reaching people. Especially because it’s also measurable. So it’s the most impactful, most measurable tool we have to engage with people basically. The easiest to reach them and to know how valuable the fact is that you reach them.

Shaheen Samavati 12:15
Absolutely. I think every company has really grown their teams dedicated to social and put a lot more emphasis on that, like you said it’s kind of everything right now. It’s the face of your company, right?

Tom Kerkhof 12:31
Yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 12:32
I wanted to ask you, what’s your personal favorite social media platform? Then also, which is the most important for Navico?

Tom Kerkhof 12:42
I like the fact that you’ve split it out because I was writing it and only when I wrote it down, I saw you also asked for which one we use the most professionally. Personally, I like Instagram. I grew up with Facebook, but then for some reason my entire generation landed on Instagram. For me, I just like pretty things. So I like to look at design, cars, boats and Instagram provides that place where you can dream away. Personally, I favor Instagram much more than I do Facebook.

Shaheen Samavati 13:31
But for Navico which one’s the most important?

Tom Kerkhof 13:35
Yeah. For Navico it would be Facebook at the moment. It’s the biggest platform we have, so we have a total of I would say 250,000 followers now. Instagram is gaining a lot, it’s growing a lot faster than Facebook but if I look at the nature of our industry, then Facebook is always more geared to delivering what we want out of a social platform than Instagram because this industry or the people that are in here are different by passion. So you buy a boat because you like it, you go sailing because you like it, you go fishing because you like it. People love to talk about the things they like. So something like Facebook is really a place where people continuously interact with one another. So for example, Facebook groups is an amazing invention for the type of audience we have because people are constantly talking about how was your fishing day? What can I do different? What kind of tools do you use? What kind of tricks do you have? And that just goes on and on. There’s Facebook groups with over 25k followers that has hundreds of conversations every day. That’s something that’s not possible or a lot less possible on Instagram, for example, and even YouTube and Twitter. So from a community sense, Facebook is the most important tool we have.

Shaheen Samavati 15:14
Yeah, to expand on that, how are you using communities to engage with your audience? Do you have your own communities or do you work with others?

Tom Kerkhof 15:23
Well, that’s also a shift we have to do connected to the involvement of social. We’re currently in the process of hiring people for service specifically for social and one of the plans is that they will proactively engage in conversations. So then the plan is that they will also start to interact, for example, in these Facebook groups. They are not belonging to us but we have these people that are connected to us which have started these Facebook groups. So I wouldn’t say that we own them but we are very closely related to them. So we want to use them more to help people more. Partly because they are asking questions on Facebook and they’re not doing it accidentally, but because they want to be there. But also we like to bring down the volume of phone calls and hope to educate people before they start asking questions. So hopefully, we end up with people that are more educated by seeing content so that they don’t have to ask questions that can also be found in these communities. So education would be the main focus of these communities, both in making sure that they don’t have any questions left, but also making sure that they can make the most of their equipments. If they learn from a pro how to use it, they will be much happier customers than when they get it and they have no clue how to use it.

Shaheen Samavati 17:03
I’m a big fan of Facebook groups. I’m an addict. I’m admin of a lot of groups including The Content Mix group and they’re really powerful, you can do a lot with them. I also wanted to ask you if you have an example of something that’s worked really well for you on social media besides the groups?

Tom Kerkhof 17:25
Well one thing I learned during the Volvo Ocean Race is that often you just have to give what people want. That sounds fairly odd, I guess, but what I saw is that we in the middle of the race were far behind, and from the middle on, we started to pick up the pace, and we really did a catch up towards the leaders. There’s birds around the fence and the followers came and the news that we brought was doing better, ever doing better, ever closing the gap. So everyone was getting really pumped up. At one point, I started to up the amount of content we put out and I started to become a little bit leaner and meaner. But in the end, when we started looking at what content did the best, that actually was the content that performed the best and even in the top three, I remember a screenshot, I just took my phone, which was basically just a screenshot of the current standings, because during a race, these boats are obviously chasing each other and I made a screenshot of where we were 0.1 kilometre ahead of the previous number one and I just posted that and people went absolutely nuts on that. So every now and then you have this discussion, should it be polished? Can we make it more branded? Can we really put this out? And every now and then you just have to go with it and feel the flow I’d say. Know what your audience wants as well, because you could also do it and people feel like you’re really downgrading this brand. But I really learned that every now and then you just have to go with it and give the people what they want. You can’t do that weeks on end or five times a week. There needs to be a situation, if you don’t, you might miss that moment. Just like when you win a championship, there’s only one perfect minute where you can post it. If you don’t do it then because your design team is not ready yet and the photo is not perfect enough, you’re gonna lose half of your reach just because someone else will put it up or the news is already fading.

Shaheen Samavati 19:49
Yeah, that’s interesting. So it sounds like timely content is important in your industry?

Tom Kerkhof 19:53
Yeah, I would say that translates as knowing your audience, as in what makes them tick. You have to know that in particular brands or particular accounts that you have, in this case, sporting, it’s about time. So if someone scores a goal, you should report it then and there. You can’t say after the game, here’s a very polished video of that moment. Maybe when it’s a fantastic goal, you can, but typically, the only value lies in the fact that it’s here and now.

Shaheen Samavati 20:26
Yeah, and I guess if it’s breaking news your audience is going to understand that it’s going to be more raw content.

Tom Kerkhof 20:32
Yeah and this is difficult, especially for corporate companies to accept, because it’s not a polished press release. It might even mean that there’s a spelling error because it needed to be up as quickly as possible, rather than as perfect as possible. Bigger companies tend to be more risk averse, so they don’t like that.

Shaheen Samavati 20:59
Yeah, that makes sense. So your role is global, meaning you work with markets around the world, how do you make your content resonate in different geographies?

Tom Kerkhof 21:08
Yeah, good question. Always one of the biggest problems, is people in the global office sitting high up in the towers thinking they know how the world works. Then the region’s come in and say, well, that’s not actually how the world works. So we are also very aware of that challenge so we work closely with the regions. Since the region’s always have been the starting point, and they are the stronghold of our connection to the markets. So what we typically do is we work with them in creating content, so we might come up with a concept and they might also shoot it down. But also in the actual creation of a video, they might say we need to have a different background and then we plan in the US, because in the US people are fishing on lakes, for example. Here people are fishing on the sea so you can’t come to us with a video that shows people fishing on lakes, because we don’t have people fishing on lakes. So that’s a continuous conversation that needs to happen and a lot of that race sits in making early plans. So we already know that the complete market at any time is focused on a particular type of fishing, a particular type of sailing. Then I have social managers in every region so they help with wording it in that market because they also have different words. So in the US, they talk about anglers, in Australia Pacific they say, for example, fish hooks. So even just those words show to an audience that this company knows what they’re talking about, because they refer to me, as I’m referring to my fellow anglers or fishers.

Shaheen Samavati 23:13
Yeah. Interesting. There’s so many details you don’t think about if you’re not in the context, so it’s super valuable to have those local people on the ground. So I wanted to go to the recommendations part of the interview. Could you tell us what’s your favorite app at the moment and why?

Tom Kerkhof 23:32
My favorite app would be YouScan. It’s a tool that we started using in September, it tracks all conversations across the internet and social media. You use a query to find them and what they then do is use AI to determine the sentiment of these conversations. So meaning that whenever there’s a conversation, the AI will be able to say people are being positive about your brand and people are being negative about your brands and they have a lot of nice tools to even categorise it. So the AI is smart enough to say, this is a complaint about design or this is a complaint about customer service, and they will categorize it. So once you’ve collected enough data, you will be certain to say, we need to invest more in customer service because 80% of all the negative comments are about customer service and only 5% are about design. So, if you were then to say how do I spend my money as a company, then we might advise well don’t hire an extra designer but do hire someone for service. That’s a perfect tool for this.

Shaheen Samavati 25:06
I know there’s a lot of software companies trying to figure this out. So that’s super interesting if there’s one that’s actually doing it well, social listening and drawing conclusions.

Tom Kerkhof 25:17
Yeah, we just switched to them. I have to say they are also very good in tracking even across languages. So I have now started to learn a little bit of Russian, although Google Translate helps me with it. But even a country like Russia is a big market for us, but they also tackle it. So the biggest advantage is that they track a whole load of channels.

Shaheen Samavati 25:46
Awesome. Definitely going to look into that one. Then what’s a source of professional inspiration for you or inspiration in general?

Tom Kerkhof 25:57
Malcolm Gladwell, I find very inspirational. I guess partly because of my background as a historian, and he has a podcast about things that have been misunderstood or overlooked in history called Revisionist History. He really deepens out things that you would have never thought about. He challenges public opinion, he changes the way you look at certain events. He humanizes particular events in history and I really like that because at any point he’s looking at the world differently than most people. So even if you don’t agree or find it far fetched or whatever, he always looks at it in a different way. So you always have to stop or think about what he’s saying, because he is bringing forward something that you haven’t thought about, typically. I find it very refreshing to provide a new perspective and in the end, he is pretty scientific and that’s what I like, especially in these times. I like people that have really dug into their research and come up with, dare I say, facts and teach me more. So that’s my big inspiration.

Shaheen Samavati 27:30
Yeah, I’m a fan of Malcolm Gladwell as well. I’ll definitely have to check out the podcast, I’ve read some of his books. Lastly, I just want to ask you if you recommend any industry group or events?

Tom Kerkhof 27:43
Yeah, so in the Netherlands, although it’s aimed at EMEA, and this year, possibly global due to it being digital. It’s The Next Web. It’s a very big event where all types of industry leaders, inspirers around digital content, also IT, gather and share their knowledge. It originated in Amsterdam so that’s why I’m familiar with it. They challenge the way these events are typically done a little bit, so it’s not so stiff as some of these events can be where it feels more like a lecture, this feels a little bit social and a little bit more engaging.

Shaheen Samavati 28:39
Yeah, they’re definitely known all across Europe. I haven’t been to the events, but I’ve heard of them. They have a great website as well with news and information.

Tom Kerkhof 28:49
Yeah, they’re supported and driven by one of the biggest marketing agencies in the Netherlands. So I think that helps in bringing their message forward. I think it’s really well organised.

Shaheen Samavati 29:03
So we’re reaching the end of the interview, but just wanted to ask if you have any final parting advice, or final takeaways to share with other marketers in Europe?

Tom Kerkhof 29:12
My advice would be make sure that you’re always familiar with the latest updates and trends because in the end, there’s so many people in the company, especially if you work in digital, where people don’t understand what’s happening, it’s going too quickly and once they have absorbed what has changed, we might be two steps ahead. So we have to bring that knowledge typically to the company and say, this is happening now. This is an opportunity. So if you’re read up then you can lead or influence where a company could be going from a digital perspective.

Shaheen Samavati 29:50
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Tom, for sharing your insights with us today.

Tom Kerkhof 29:57
Thank you for having me. I enjoyed being on your podcast.

Shaheen Samavati 30:01
Yeah, it was our pleasure and thanks everybody for listening in. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com and keep tuning into the podcast for daily interviews with content experts. See you next time. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai