How to Get Started with a B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy

December 7, 2022 Ian Kirk

Influencers have become a staple of consumer-facing marketing plans. Now they’re becoming prominent in the B2B space, as well.

If you baulk at the thought of dancing for likes on social media, you need to take a second look. For starters, influencer marketing campaigns are not limited to social media!

Instagram or TikTok influencers work well for some brands, but you might find a more natural fit with webinars, guest blogs, podcasts, or interviews. You could split the difference and go with more professional social media platform, like LinkedIn. LinkedIn saw a 4% increase in brands using social media influencers YoY.

No matter how you slice it, influencer and creator marketing is becoming critical to B2B brands who want to be competitive. It is easy to get started if you know a few key components.

What is Influencer Marketing?

The Venn Diagram of influencers and creators has a lot of overlap. While both share content online about how they live and work, and either might share reviews, product tutorials, or simply and endorsement of your brand, each has a slightly different focus.

Creators focus on the content they create and how it engages or informs their audience. They are often building their own product or service and “learning in public”. By sharing the process online, they gain influence.
Influencers focus more directly on influencing the purchasing decisions of their audience.

Keep in mind, a standard influencer or creator’s audience is likely looking for ways to improve their day-to-day life, not necessarily their professional lives. B2B focused creators and influencers remove that ambiguity.

Why Should B2B Brands Care?

A generational shift is changing how B2B buyers engage with marketing — the consumerisation of B2B. Influencer marketing in the B2B world works on young buyers for all the same reasons it already works in the B2C world.

Organic reach is also harder and harder to come by. Over the years, social media companies have diminished brands’ organic reach on their platforms. Recent Google updates, although helpful for the consumer, have rattled the old SEO strategies of several companies.

Influencer marketing is an effective way to fight back. It offers a way to reach your audience authentically, in a way that feels less like traditional advertising and more like word-of-mouth.

Another factor to consider is the demise of third-party cookies. B2B marketers need to shift their focus and find new ways to reach their target audience.

First-party data is one solution. Influencers give brands access to their network of contacts. They can help to connect brands with their buyers and gather more first-party data to keep potential buyers in their funnels.

The Promises and Pitfalls of B2B Influencer Marketing

There are a handful of guarantees from any influencer marketing program that many brands — both consumer-facing and business-facing — simply can’t afford to miss out on. There is, however, a risk assessment that brands have to calculate.

The Promises

Influencers and creators have built-in trust with their audiences. 61% of consumers trust influencer recommendations, as opposed to only 38% who trust the brands themselves.

You’re not just borrowing the influencer’s audience or their data. You’re borrowing their authenticity and authority.

Influencers can open doors to new customers. B2B sales have always relied on recommendation, and influencer content is a natural progression of that concept.

This form of marketing also allows you to tap into conversations your customers are already having with each other. This means you can create promotional content that is more relevant for their audience and therefore has a better level of engagement.

In working with creators, your brand will gain new perspectives. They offer fresh feedback, both from the new partners themselves and from their most engaged followers.

Using an influencer also gives you the opportunity to interact with your audience in new ways. This is the space where you can test new marketing approaches and messaging. You may find prospects respond to a tone of voice that is off-limits in your brand guide.

Potential Pitfalls

There are always negatives to consider. There are risks in influencer marketing that don’t exist in more traditional paid top-of-funnel marketing efforts, but sometimes you can’t know until you try.

A large following is not indicative of a good fit for your brand. They may not have any experience with the product or industry you’re targeting and end up doing more harm than good. Alternatively, their audience might not resonate with your brand, or there could be a lack of chemistry between your team and the creator, leading to lacklustre campaigns.

If it’s early in your influencer marketing pilot, a poor choice of talent can make you want to scrap the whole idea.

Conflicts of interest are another potential hurdle that B2B should consider. The influencer or creator might work for another company with a non-compete clause. There can also be a concern with brand safety. Your partnership would be seen as an endorsement of the views of the influencer. If they say something controversial, this could be a problem.

Another watch out is fake accounts and engagement. Comments that are single emojis or generic niceties can suggest a following made up of bot profiles. At best, it indicates that the influencer’s audience is not really that invested in the relationship. Look for comments that are more specific and questions that solicit advice. Look also for a back and forth between the influencer and their followers.

The bottom line is that you need to do your due diligence. Make sure that your influencer or creator can deliver on their promises.

They should have a following that is compatible with yours and interested in what you offer. They need to be able to create content that resonates with their audience and drives action. Ideally, they’ll already have established relationships with other brands in your industry so they can help open doors for you when needed.

Working with an experienced agency can also help to prevent any kind of misalignment.

What are the First Steps of B2B Influencer Marketing Campaign?

First, you need to know what you want to achieve. If you start an influencer campaign purely because a digital marketing strategy trends report said it was the next big thing, you’ll miss the mark.

Don’t start campaign planning until you have marketing goals that you can evaluate performance against. Go back to your strategic business goals. Then see if there are ways an influencer can help you achieve them… not the other way around!

Are you looking to increase your brand awareness and reach? Do you want your influencer to help with lead generation? Knowing this will indicate the KPIs you need to track. It will also help your sales and marketing team to prepare a customer journey that makes sense to new users.

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Build Relationships

Once you have your aim in mind, find influencers and creators who fit your brand and start building a relationship with them.

One great approach is to look for the “rising stars” of your user-generated content. That is how Leila Gharani got started: she made tutorial videos about Excel to help other professionals and wound up a frequent spokesperson for, and collaborator with, Microsoft.

You should also research which creators are already followed by a lot of your target market and enjoy a lot of social influence. If you find pre-existing follower overlap with an influential person, it only makes sense to partner up. Research tools like SparkToro can help you find talent.

While well-executed influencer campaigns feel organic, behind the scenes this is a professionalised industry. Plenty of influencers and creators have talent agents. There are also influencer marketing agencies that can help establish the perfect fit for both the brand and the influencer.

This means influencer campaign aren’t the cheap solution some people think it is.

You can reduce costs by scaling back follower counts and focusing more on social strength. A mico-influencer is someone with a relatively small audience. They are seen to be trustworthy and authentic, and have an outsized influence on their followers.

CRM platform Introhive took the micro-influencer approach when it sought to appeal more to law firms. The brand worked with influencers specific to the legal field and compiled their viewpoints in an ebook of expert advice.

It ticked the box for lead generation, with 8% of the customers who downloaded the “playbook” becoming leads. The brand also saw an immediate spike in social followers and engagement.

B2B brand Cisco demonstrates another approach. They let influencers come to them by encouraging their loyal fanbase to apply to be a part of their Influencer Hub.

The program has become the backbone of Cisco’s B2B social media presence.

Members of the Hub collaborate with Cisco to produce guest blogs, social media content, podcasts, interviews, and more. Some of the members are indeed ‘Influencers’, others are just enthusiastic customers.

Provide Support

Since influencer campaigns aren’t always the quick, cheap solution many assume, you need to know what kind of resources your team can dedicate to the campaign to help it succeed.

You can't just leave it to the influencer if you want maximum impact. You might need to support the creator in-house.

Educate the influencers on your product. Even if they are already an existing user, you’ll want to build confidence with your product and enthusiasm for your brand.
Build landing pages that align with the influencer’s messaging.
Create social media content that supports the influencer campaign thematically, so it appears within a broader context or conversation.
Write blog posts or other engaging content that will appeal the influencer’s followers when they visit your online platform.
Echo the same messaging across your channels so there is consistency for new visitors.
Brief your employees and provide assets or messaging so they can feel confident engaging with and amplifying the influencer content.

The campaign content itself should also be a co-creation. As a B2B brand with liabilities, you probably don’t want to let the creator build the content without supervision. However, this needs to be finely balanced.

When you’re partnering with a creator or influencer, you’re not just hiring a freelancer to produce content for your brand. If you’re not clear on the distinction, it can be easy to overstep and diminish the person’s genuine voice and vision. Those authentic elements, after all, are what made them appealing partners.

1827 Marketing