When you think of influencer marketing, you likely think about Instagram beauty gurus or YouTube health and fitness enthusiasts. You think of content creators like makeup artists, athletes, bloggers, vloggers, and wannabe social media stars. However, influencer marketing is so much more than that.
It’s a $16.4 billion industry that can be just as profitable to B2B companies as it is to B2C ones. You just need the right strategy to make it work.
Partnering with industry experts and top influencers who display thought leadership can help you establish authority within your field and reach clients you could never have otherwise. It helps you cut through the noise, outshine the competitors, and boost your brand awareness.
However, you need to remember that, like any other form of digital marketing, influencer marketing differs between B2C and B2B brands. You’ll need to develop unique strategies that speak to all your client’s decision-makers and make a lasting impression on them. So, let’s get to work on that.
Paid advertisements can be effective, offering an average 200% return on investment (ROI). However, they’re not nearly as effective as they used to be. Your leads and potential customers no longer trust paid ads and self-promotional content. What they do trust is social proof – and that’s what B2B influencer marketing offers.
Influencer marketing for B2B brands involves partnering with independent, successful influencers and having them promote your company, products, and services. The influencers would use their social media platforms to convince their audiences of your brand’s value and ultimately help you make sales. Most commonly, however, they’ll only do so after testing your products and services for themselves.
Influencers aren’t like traditional celebrities or household names. They don’t simply serve as the face of your brand. They have their own reputations to manage, so they must ensure trust and inspire loyalty among their followers. Therefore, the best influencers will work only with companies they believe will deliver value to them and their audiences.
That’s what sets them apart from celebrities, which is why they enjoy such great respect from their audiences. They collaborate with brands that make sense for them and their followers, offering the social proof that their audiences need to start doing business with the brand.
A carefully thought out B2B influencer marketing campaign can be a powerful tool that helps you distinguish yourself from competitors. Some of the benefits you could enjoy include:
B2B influencer marketing assists with boosting brand awareness, improving your search engine optimization (SEO), expanding your reach, increasing engagement, and ultimately increasing your sales. Of course, to enjoy these benefits, you need a B2B influencer marketing strategy that works for you.
In many ways, building an influencer marketing strategy is similar to developing a social media marketing or content marketing strategy. However, it’s a bit more nuanced, requiring the utmost dedication and commitment.
As with any other marketing strategy, you’ll want to start by outlining your goals and defining your key performance indicators (KPIs).
How will you know whether your campaign is effective? How will you measure your success? What do you and your chosen influencer have to do to achieve the results you’re after?
Keep your goals clear and concise, and focus on more than just quantitative KPIs such as the number of sales or precise revenue you receive. Keep an eye on your qualitative performance indicators, such as audience engagement and loyalty, customer lifetime value, and more.
The next step will be determining your budget. How much you’ll need to set aside for influencer marketing B2B depends on several different factors:
Most companies set aside around $10,000 annually for their influencer marketing campaigns, but some spend well over $500,000.
With your KPIs set and a clear budget in mind, it’s time to start searching for the best influencers for your needs. As a general rule of thumb, it’s always best to find an influencer who your target audiences are already interacting with. Someone who is well-respected in the industry and who commands attention.
Though there are many ways to identify who your audience likes to listen to and watch, conducting a survey is the simplest thing you could do to find out.
Ask your existing customers whose content they enjoy, why, and how much they trust it. After all, influencer marketing is the most effective when you partner with those individuals who enjoy a great deal of trust among their followers.
As previously discussed, B2B influencers aren’t like traditional celebrities. They don’t want to simply be the faces of your campaigns. They want to promote products and services they themselves enjoy. Otherwise, they risk losing the trust of their most loyal followers.
That’s why it’s in your best interest to focus your marketing efforts on building relationships with the influencers you’ve chosen and their audiences. Don’t simply reach out to them to sell your products and services. Offer valuable partnerships that will ultimately benefit you, the influencer, and your common audiences.
Boosted sales will come as a natural result of productive collaboration.
With B2C influencer marketing campaigns, it’s easy for brands to simply send their product to the influencers and have them inform their audiences about it. There’s often no need to go into details about the brand voice and persona, goals, objectives, and more. With B2B campaigns, things are a bit more complicated.
Considering that your campaign needs to resonate with multiple decision-makers within an organization, not just a single customer at a time, your chosen influencer has to be well-informed about your brand.
They need to understand your brand voice, persona, unique selling points, brand values, goals, and missions. Therefore, you’ll need to set some time aside for influencer training and onboarding if you want your campaigns to be effective.
Finally, you’ll want to develop long-term plans and combine your influencer marketing with other strategies, such as account-based marketing. The reason is the same as the one above – you’ll need to resonate with multiple decision-makers.
It takes longer for B2B influencer campaigns to reach everyone they need to. A B2C company could have an influencer post a single Instagram photo with their product, and they’ll almost immediately see a spike in sales. A B2B brand will need to take a longer road to get there, offering more content and more social proof that will eventually push a lead into becoming a buying customer.
As an unwritten rule, you’ll want to spend at least six months to a year on your marketing campaign with a single influencer.
B2B influencer won’t be of much help to your brand without plenty of high-quality content. Whereas it’s usually enough for a B2C influencer to share a few photos to their Instagram page, a B2B influencer needs to offer more value. They can do so through content types such as:
While in B2C environments, the focus is on short, quick content that prioritizes entertaining the audiences, in B2B environments, the key is offering high-quality information and educating the audiences. That’s why over 81% of B2B marketers prefer using webinars, for instance, in their influencer marketing campaigns.
The key to a successful B2B influencer marketing strategy is finding the right influencer who can match your brand’s approach. You’ll have the best chances of finding a perfect influencer partnership by:
Though most businesses often believe that partnering with the biggest influencers is in their best interest, it’s not always so. Though influencers with millions of followers can expose your brand to the biggest audiences, they don’t always inspire as much trust as some smaller influencers. In other words, they aren’t as influential.
As a general rule of thumb, influencers with smaller audiences often enjoy more trust and loyalty. They can interact directly with their followers more often, building stronger relationships and better engagement.
Therefore, if you want greater success with your campaign, it could be in your best interest to partner with nano or micro-influencers – those with a following of 10,000 to 50,000.
As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is generally considered the best platform for B2B influencer marketing. It has well over 822 million registered users, making it the biggest professional network you could join.
It enables you to connect with your audiences and build relationships with both white-collar employees and key decision-makers. It allows you to target highly specific audiences and identify the best influencers for your needs.
Though it’s possible to use other social media platforms for B2B influencer marketing, LinkedIn has proven to be the most effective choice.
There are countless examples of lucrative B2B campaigns that show just how valuable influencer marketing can be.
When promoting its IBM Watson, an AI business solution, IBM partnered with the designer Gaurav Gupta, who created an AI sari gown. Equipped with LED lights and paired with IBM solutions, the gown could change colors to fit the wearer’s personality.
Microsoft partnered with National Geographic photographers to promote careers for women in STEM, while SAP had industry experts as keynote speakers during its 2016 Sapphire conference.
There’s no shortage of examples of how lucrative B2B influencer marketing campaigns can be. The key is partnering with the right industry leaders and developing a long-term campaign that focuses on building relationships.
Regardless of how you want to approach developing your influencer marketing strategy, you’ll need to determine how you want to manage it. You’ll have two options – hiring a B2B influencer marketing agency or working directly with influencers.
Having your marketing teams or managers working directly with influencers could be the best course of action for companies with plenty of experience with digital marketing. As long as you have a team of experts, you’ll enjoy many advantages:
Needless to say, there are some disadvantages to working directly with influencers:
That’s why some companies prefer working with an influencer marketing agency. Agencies have their own influencer pools and plenty of experience running viral campaigns. Some of the benefits you’ll enjoy with an agency include:
Of course, working with agencies presents some challenges as well:
Working directly with influencers and hiring third-party agencies comes with unique pros and cons. The better choice for you depends on your needs, budget, and campaign goals.
Alongside SEO, content marketing, ads retargeting, and more, influencer marketing is one of the best B2B marketing tactics – you can read our previous blog post if you want to learn more about the top practices for B2B marketing. The key is developing an effective strategy and finding an influencer who meets your needs.
You’ll need to ensure that the influencer you choose makes sense for your niche, has a loyal following, and understands your brand’s value and overall customer approach.
For more help with building your marketing campaign, building your brand awareness, and generating leads, rely on OneIMS Solutions.