MarTech Interview with Sterling Jackson, Head of Marketing at Aspire

How will video trends impact the future of influencer marketing? And as marketers try to tighten their process, what can they do to re-evaluate the usage of their martech to drive ROI? Sterling Jackson, Head of Marketing at Aspire weighs in:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Sterling, tell us about yourself and your marketing learnings and marketing journey through the years: what inspires you about being a modern day marketer?

Thanks for having me. I didn’t realize it then, but my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology was a perfect foundation for marketing. It taught me why people think, feel, say, and act. Later, after I finished my MBA, I got a job as a researcher at P&G, where I went deep into shopper and consumer understanding. I think research will always be at my core, not just because it’s where I started my career but because I realized early on that it’s the foundation for consistently good product design and effective marketing. But after four years in the CPG world, my curiosity got the best of me, and I found myself at Microsoft doing product marketing, learning all the ins and outs of GTM strategy and execution. I fell in love with B2B SaaS and kept raising my hand when there were opportunities to try new specializations like customer marketing, growth marketing, and content marketing.

While at Qualtrics, Intuit, and UserTesting, I was surrounded by intelligent, helpful people who pushed and inspired me. I guess you can say that I went from T-shape to Tree-shape—growing deep roots in one aspect of marketing only to branch out somewhere else later, always taking what I learned and reapplying it. My path hasn’t been straight, but I credit the marketing discipline for inspiring me to keep learning and have genuine empathy for the human experience.

As head of Marketing at Aspire: we’d love to hear about your core marketing processes/strategies and of course, the martech that helps drive all of it?

You can strike Marketing gold once or even a few times, but without good people, processes, policies, and tools, those lucky strikes might as well be lightning strikes—exceedingly rare. For me, I have to organize the world into frameworks and systems. It’s just the way my mind works.

When I joined Aspire, one of the first things I did was to go around and understand what’s working, what’s not, and why. That led to a list of gaps to close that would drive my roadmap. It would have taken way too long to address them all at once, so I gathered a cross-functional team to tackle them. We prioritized them based on a 0-10 relative impact score that each might have on our CX and business performance, plus a 0-10 score on the ease and speed for which they could be implemented. The result was an index that was easy to plot on a simple 2×2 graph.

It revealed what needed to be prioritized immediately, later, or not at all. With clear priorities, my team felt energized to develop “gap-closure options” and apply undistracted attention toward specific work-back plans to execute. Speaking of execution, my father always told me to “use the right tool for the job.” And with marketing, it’s no different.

Most design thinkers know that when you’re starting something new, it’s better to fall in love with the problem than the solution. So as a principle, I tell my team to go slow to go fast. That means starting with a solution-agnostic mindset and spending the necessary time upfront to fully understand your customer and business problems before spending time and money on new tools. It should be unnecessary to say this, but

I’ll say it anyway: don’t expect marketing software to do your job for you. Software can improve effectiveness, efficiency, and ROI, but only if you know when and how to use them properly. That’s part of mastering your craft.

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How have you been seeing influencer marketing trends reshape the digital marketing industry and what thoughts would you like to highlight on the future of this segment?

Influencer marketing trends have been shaping and reshaping the digital marketing industry for years. For many marketers, keeping up is a challenge.

The fact that two out of three brands are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets this year tells me that there’s both an increasing realization of value in the channel and plenty of runway for future growth. In recent years, we’ve seen the shift from followers to authenticity, mainly from smaller nano and micro-influencers. They are the ones who consistently deliver higher engagement rates versus mega influencers.

That remains true across all social platforms. Smaller influencers quickly realized this, and that’s why you see their rates continuing upward. Instagram continues to get the lion’s share of usage, but TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are still highly relevant. As this trend continues toward finding more targeted influencers with smaller and more devoted followers, the need to manage influencer campaigns at a grander scale with purpose-built technology and experienced agency services will only continue to rise.

The future of this segment will be built on leveraging the power of targeted, video-based influencer commerce while creating genuinely positive experiences that add meaningful value to people’s lives. We must think longer-term for this industry to continue attracting innovators, future investments, and sustainable profits. The future won’t tolerate short-term value ‘extraction’.

For B2B marketers / technology marketers: what are some of the best practices that you feel ought to be followed to ensure better marketing ROI across the organization?

Always start with a campaign brief. It should clearly outline your influencer marketing campaign objectives, expectations, guidelines, and deliverables to the influencers you’ll be working with. And it’s one of the best ways to ensure that your influencer and brand goals are aligned for success. Another best practice is to keep up to date on best practices. The blogs, webinars, podcasts, events, reports, and other resources from Aspire.io are a great place to start.

Aspire even has a community where over a thousand influencer and performance marketers share ideas and networks in dozens of slack channels. Those are all free resources too. I can’t stress enough how important it is for marketers to dedicate weekly time to sharpen the saw. It’s nice that Aspire makes it so easy in a single ‘knowledge hub’.

What do you feel about the future of the B2B marketing and martech industry?

Technology is an enabler in our digital world, but empathy for the human experience must ALWAYS come first. I think about those martech maps that categorize hundreds of companies into all the various types of marketing technology. It’s mind-boggling how many tools marketers have at their fingertips. But for today’s technology to be here tomorrow, it has to prove it has differentiated value. Influencer marketing is proving that kind of ROI and value.

I see it becoming a business-critical part of every company’s go-to-market strategy. I’m looking forward to the continued innovation and growth in the sector and am happy to be at a company leading the charge.

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