B2B influencer marketing has become one of the most popular marketing strategies in recent years, and it’s no wonder. In a world where the business environment is increasingly saturated with competition, collaboration with influencers can be a crucial factor for success. Companies large and small are looking for ways to get influencers involved in their business to increase their visibility and attract new customers.
However, although B2B marketing influencers are a very effective and influential tool, their application can be complicated and confusing. So how do you determine who is a b2b influencer in your industry? What approaches to working with influencers will be most effective? How to distinguish a successful strategy from a failure?
In this article, we’ll look at the main aspects of B2B influencer marketing, give you tips on finding and selecting the right influencers for your business, how to make it easier to work with influencers using third-party services, such as an email extractor for Chrome, and provide influencer marketing examples that can help you increase your visibility in the industry and attract new customers.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing in B2B is another bridge between your brand and the potential customer. The main goal of this partnership is to expand your audience and make the influencer believe in your product and collect leads from Facebook group. The opinion leader should enjoy working with you because you present a quality business tool and stand out from the competition. It just won’t work any other way. Coming up with metrics to further evaluate the effectiveness of such cooperation is quite tricky, so at the planning stage you need to decide what you will consider success criteria. Influencers can also be a great crowd puller and often humanizes a product hence you might have noticed many brands often embed Instagram feed on website, as they showcase Instagram posts by influencers using a particular product.
Benefits of influencer marketing for B2B
1. Influencers give content authenticity and credibility
Correctly identifying topics important to customers where the brand should have more influence leads to finding people who already have the desired influence. Collaborating with experts who are respected authorities in the industry creates content and sets up communications. It also engenders trust from the audience the brand is trying to reach.
2. Influencers partnering with executives allows a brand to break out
Collaborating with external influencers with internal executives to work together on content, video conversations, virtual events, and similar idea-sharing can validate a brand’s key leadership ambitions. Whether it’s a webinar on the results of the latest brand research, a white paper, or a series of live video broadcasts or podcast interviews between key executives and external influencers, connecting trusted industry voices with brand messaging can boost customer confidence.
3. Influencers can co-create better content for customers
A growing number of b2b marketing influencers have both expertise and intuition. This means being able to create video content, podcasts, or graphics and text content that meets customer expectations and that a brand may not have the resources to produce.
How to find B2B influencers
- Analyze Hashtags
If your product is a niche, the hashtags should be unique. Run through topic words from your industry, such as #InternetMarketing #SaaSservice, and so on.
- Search for similar bloggers
Similar users can be found manually – you subscribe to a person on Instagram, and the social network offers you accounts that may be of interest to you.
If a certain blogger is already in mind, you can find similar bloggers in trendHERO, for example.
- Explore competitor integrations
Competitors in your industry may have already done the analysis and found working channels.
Even if you don’t follow them directly, look at who they are using to promote their services on social media. Why they chose a particular blogger and what activity their integrations have shown are major questions to ponder.
B2B influencer marketing strategy can boost the business level of companies that engage their target audience and create engaging content. With the right strategy and the right influencers, your business can succeed in the B2B sector.
- At themed events.
Speakers usually include people who are opinion leaders in some way, but we need not only them but also their circle of communication. The easiest way is to look at who the conference speakers are subscribed to on social networks. A more complicated way is to look at who the speakers’ subscribers follow.
B2B influencer marketing examples
Example #1. Microsoft
In 2017, Microsoft partnered with National Geographic to run a unique Make What’s Next marketing campaign. The goal of the campaign was to encourage young women to work in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Microsoft timed the campaign to coincide with International Women’s Day.
To do so, it enlisted a number of popular travel photographers. They posted 30 photos to five National Geographic Instagram feeds*. The results were phenomenal: the photos garnered over 3.5 million likes in a single day, with a reach of nearly 91 million people.
Example #2: IBM
IBM has B2B customers in banking, education, science, and many others. Consequently, finding an opinion leader who can influence such a diverse audience is difficult.
The company solves this problem with the help of its employees. IBM is one of the most successful players in engaging employees as influencers in its marketing campaigns.
The basic principle here is that employees are the ones who know the company’s products best. While some employees are actively involved in creating those products, others are involved in selling and promoting them. So if you can encourage them to talk about the company’s products on social media, it will influence a huge number of people.
Example #3: American Express
American Express launched the Love My Store marketing campaign to attract small businesses. Its goal was to let customers know that even small businesses accept credit cards.
The company began selling stickers for small business storefronts, designed by Grace Bonney of the Design Sponge blog. American Express invited Emily Henderson, an anchorwoman with HGTV, to promote the product. She helped produce a series of instructional videos that told entrepreneurs how the stickers would help attract customers. The campaign received 5 million interactions on various social media platforms, resulting in the sale of more than 400,000 stickers.
