To win over business customers, B2B companies need to develop solid marketing strategies that build trust and recognition. If you take the right approach, B2B influencer marketing is a highly effective means of building connections with target audiences and efficiently converting them.
In this blog, Ignite Visibility’s Senior Social Media Strategist, Josh Rohr, will explain the advantages of influencer marketing for B2B companies and how you can build the perfect strategy for your business.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Are B2B Marketing Influencers Essential for Your Business?
- Where to Find B2B Marketing Influencers
- Tools and Platforms to Help Locate B2B Marketing Influencers
- Effective B2B Influencer Marketing Examples
- How to Measure the Success of B2B Influencer Marketing Campaigns
My Expert Insights on Influencer Marketing for B2B Industries
In recent years, influencer marketing has developed as a highly effective social media channel for all types of businesses, and B2B verticals are no exception.
B2B marketing has to work extra hard to connect with audiences and gain their trust, but the right relationships with influencer partners in your industry could make all the difference. By locating an influencer in your niche, nurturing a healthy long-term relationship with that influencer, and promoting your brand and offerings through influencer videos and other content, you can shorten the distance between initial engagement and sales.”
Action Item: Conduct a thorough search for reputable influencers who share your audience. Also, don’t shoot for the big influencers with millions of followers, as there are plenty of nano- and micro-influencers with loyal followings who offer more cost-effective partnerships.
Now, let’s dive into B2B influencer marketing and how you can develop your next strategy.
Why Are B2B Marketing Influencers Essential for Your Business?
Because of the big investments that B2B customers make, businesses in these industries need to do more convincing when building trust among their audiences. Social media influencers in this space have already earned many businesses’ trust, which can make it easier to engage your audiences when connecting with these personalities.
Business customers want to ensure that the purchases they make are worthwhile, which is why recommendations from thought leaders and authorities in their industries are so powerful. If an influencer with a good reputation directs these audiences toward a particular business or product, they’re much more likely to take action—certainly much faster.
Through guest blogs, review videos, case studies, and other influencer-produced content, the right partnership can significantly shorten the sales cycle. B2B influencer marketing can ultimately help boost the rest of your B2B social media marketing campaigns to optimize efficiency and ROI.
Where to Find B2B Marketing Influencers
So, how do you find B2B marketing influencers?
First, consider what defines a B2B influencer. These personalities are popular on various social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and YouTube. They could also have relevant industry blogs or other publications across the web. The right influencers will have loyal audiences who perceive them as trustworthy and knowledgeable industry experts and thought leaders.
There are four main types of influencers based on their followings:
- Nano-influencers: These are the smallest influencers, with under 1,000 followers.
- Micro-influencers: At the next level are micro-influencers, who have somewhere around 1,000 to 100,000 followers.
- Macro-influencers: These influencers have grown their audiences to anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 followers.
- Mega-influencers: The highest level sees mega-influencers or celebrities with over 1,000,000 followers.
While maximizing your reach across millions of potential customers may seem ideal, you’ll find plenty of opportunities at the nano- or micro-influencer level. At these levels, influencers target more niche markets and tend to observe more engagement among their followers.
You can also save a lot more money by working with multiple smaller influencers while still gaining more overall awareness and conversions.
Generally, it’s best to start looking for influencers who already like your brand or offerings, but if you’re just starting out, you can identify influencers based on your industry and the personalities your target audience follows.
Tools and Platforms to Help Locate B2B Marketing Influencers
Once you’ve determined which niche you want to target, there are some key tools you can use to identify potential partners for influencer marketing in B2B spaces.
Some of these tools and platforms include:
1. LinkedIn
Many B2B influencers build their followings on LinkedIn. With your account, you can look for any influencers based on current brand mentions, or seek out influencers in your target niche. For instance, many reputable sales trainers use this platform to recommend various B2B products and companies that can help businesses with their sales cycles.
2. YouTube
Another popular B2B influencer platform is YouTube, where many influencers in B2B industries produce video content to give advice and product or brand recommendations.
3. X
Formerly Twitter, X is good for many B2B influencer campaigns, especially when it comes to video content and brief promotional posts that drive engagement.
4. Industry Forums
Find popular forums in your industry, which could be industry-specific websites or platforms like Reddit. Many of these spaces have authoritative personalities who can connect audiences with your brand.
5. Tagger by SproutSocial
This tool allows you to easily identify influencers that SproutSocial has vetted based on your niche, following, and other filters. It can connect you with as many as thousands of popular, trusted influencers across the web.
6. Heepsy
Using Heepsy, you can find influencers across various industries based on location, engagement, audience demographics, and other factors. It also gives you convenient outreach tools to begin connecting with the ideal partner.
7. Julius
Easily search for influencers across platforms and find the right match for your company. One of the added benefits of Julius is the ability to get a feel for influencers as people through curated profiles that Julius’s analysts put together.
8. Buzzsumo
Use Buzzsumo to track your branding based on mentions, updates, and trends, or engage in journalist outreach based on specific industry topics.
Effective B2B Influencer Marketing Examples
There are many ways to engage in influencer marketing in B2B industries. The specific type of influencer you target, and the content you use, will vary depending on your niche and goals.
To give you some ideas, consider the fact that 75% of marketers using B2B influencer strategies focus on posts that people can easily find online, including videos and guest posts on blogs. The second most popular type of influencer content includes podcasts and events. You can also connect with influencers through webinars, case studies, and whitepapers, among other content types.
Ideally, you want to develop long-term partnerships that help you maximize engagement and profitability. One-off promotions could be helpful in the short term, but those well-developed relationships will go a long way in establishing a foothold among your audiences. People will come to associate influencers with your brand and vice-versa, giving your brand a distinctly human touch in the process.
Here are some successful B2B influencer marketing examples that showcase the power of these campaigns:
SproutSocial Brand Partnership
One example of an effective brand partnership on LinkedIn involves Rachel Karten and SproutSocial. Her posts succinctly and effectively promote this platform.
Here is an example post promoting an event:
Monday.com Video Collaboration
In an example illustrating the power of video influencer marketing, CEO Janell Roberts talks on TikTok about how the project management platform Monday.com has made her life easier.
Bosch Power Tools Micro-Influencer Campaign
Power tool manufacturer Bosch took advantage of micro-influencer marketing on YouTube. This company created the hashtag #BuiltWithBosch, which connected videos of professional influencers using and reviewing their many products.
For instance, videos show various experts testing their tools to show their effectiveness, convincing other professionals to purchase them.
HockeyStack’s “The Flow” Entertainment Campaign
One brand that decided to have some fun with B2B influencer marketing was HockeyStack, a platform that helps streamline businesses’ marketing and sales.
HockeyStack teamed up with entertainer Todd Clouser to create content promoting him as “The Worst Marketer in the World.” Effectively, this campaign demonstrates how even the worst marketers can benefit from using HockeyStack.
How to Measure the Success of B2B Influencer Marketing Campaigns
To ensure your campaigns’ success, you need to be able to effectively measure your influencer marketing efforts.
Measurement will entail selecting the right influencer marketing KPIs based on your goals.
The following are some specific metrics to track for each goal:
Increase Brand Awareness
Want to boost brand awareness for your business? Some key metrics to track here will include:
- Followers: Consider the number of followers for both your influencer partner and your brand. Growth in both areas can indicate a healthy partnership as more people begin following your social media profiles.
- Impressions: When launching influencer videos, ads, or other content, the number of impressions will tell you how far your videos are reaching. While they don’t account for views, impressions will indicate the number of people exposed to your brand.
- Total Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement metrics can tell you how well and frequently people engage with your campaigns.
- Web Traffic: You should also see a boost in traffic to your website from links and calls to action that your influencer partners promote.
Expand Your Reach
If your main goal is to reach more audiences, the following are some critical metrics to measure:
- Reach: Tracking impressions and the number of followers your influencers have can give you insight into what kind of reach you’re getting across platforms.
- Engagement: Keep track of likes, comments, and shares that posts get, which will indicate whether people are connecting with your influencer content.
- New Followers: Track follower growth for both you and your partner to see if your reach is expanding to larger audiences.
- Web Traffic: The more people are visiting your website from influencer content, the more this indicates your overall reach to target audiences who are likely to engage.
- Promo Codes: Influencers could include promo codes that give new customers discounts on products or services, which you can track for each campaign.
- Trackable Links: You or your influencer partners may also include links to your website, which you can track using unique links and corresponding landing pages.
Drive Sales
Increasing sales is another essential goal to set if you want to maximize your campaigns’ ROI. Here are some metrics to track to measure sales efforts:
- Sales Qualified Leads: Once people move from Marketing Qualified Leads into SQLs, you can track them to determine how likely people are to reach this level with your influencer campaigns.
- Calls Booked: If you want people to contact you, keep track of how many calls you receive from calls to action in your influencer content. This could also apply to demos, appointments, and other forms of contact that can lead to conversions.
- Sales: Ultimately, track the number of sales you’re getting from people who engage with your influencer strategy, as this will let you know how profitable it is overall.
Supercharge Your B2B Influencer Marketing Efforts With Ignite Visibility
If you would like to harness the power of influencer marketing for B2B industries, Ignite Visibility has the expertise and resources to get you started on a powerful campaign. In addition, we can provide you with a comprehensive solution that includes other forms of social media marketing, as well as search engine optimization, paid media, and much more.
With our solutions behind your brand, you can:
- Find the influencers who are the perfect match for your brand
- Build content in collaboration with your influencer partners
- Measure the results of your efforts based on your goals
- Continually optimize your campaigns for better results
To get started on a campaign for your business, reach out to us today and learn what Ignite Visibility can do for you.
