Influencer marketing is everywhere.
The global market for influencer advertising was worth $21 billion dollars in 2023, and is predicted to grow to $52 billion by 2028.
When you think of influencer marketing, you may think of internet celebrities making sponsored posts on Instagram to sell perfume sunglasses. However, B2B is a much bigger market. The global B2B eCommerce market alone is worth 5X that of the B2C market.
B2B influencer marketing is a strategy of partnering with influential figures in the industry to boost your brand's reach and credibility. The most common benefits to influencer marketing is brand visibility, high ROI, warmer leads and more engagement.
75% of the B2B companies already use influencers according to a 2023 Ogilvy report, and 93% planned to use them more in the coming year. If your B2B marketing strategy does not include influencers, you are missing a powerful tool for reaching new audiences.
Understanding B2B Influencer Marketing
Having a B2B influencer marketing strategy is absolutely essential in 2024. While folks might happily gamble $20 on a pair of sunglasses they saw on TikTok, B2B deals are worth many (million) times more, and require more stakeholders to sign off. B2B sales are also made based on trust and relationships.
How B2B brands partner with influencers can vary enormously, from direct endorsements to co-authored content. The most effective strategy is putting your brand in the orbit of influential people with the same focus, growth trajectory, and target audience. Ideally, companies build long-term partnerships with like-minded influencers, and grow both brands in tandem.
Benefits of B2B Influencer Marketing
Effective B2B influencer marketing leverages the oldest and most powerful marketing strategy we have: word-of-mouth, particularly the mouths of industry experts.
And if you want to get it right, you need to build relationships with the right people before your competitors.
Amplifying Brand Reach
When you partner with influencers, you are not just tapping into their networks. You are leveraging the influence of both sides of the partnership to grow. Almost 60% of brands say that building more interest in their product or service is their top priority for influencer marketing.
LinkedIn algorithms are designed specifically to prevent posts from "going viral." The platform looks at engagement signals to figure out what posts to show to more people, even those who don't follow you or the influencer. Having a top contributor commenting on your company's LinkedIn posts extends your reach not only to their followers, but to other users asking questions or engaging on posts in the B2B space.
Algorithms for search engines, social networks, and marketplaces work the same way. The more people who engage with your content, the more other people will get to see the content. Influence begets influence.
Boosting Brand Visibility
Research shows that parasocial influence is a powerful driver on "brand credibility and purchase attention" according to a recent study published in Nature. Leverage influencers' expertise and authority in your industry by asking them to help you create helpful, hilarious, or otherwise value-adding content—and then amplify it across all your and their networks.
Who are the B2B influencers?
While anybody with clout can be a tastemaker, B2B marketers are typically established thought leaders and experts who have:
- employees, customers, journalists, policy makers, or industry leaders with credible expertise
- talented content creators
- been recognized in their field
- are subject-matter experts
- have dedicated followings
- are some of the most relevant and trustworthy sources of information and advice in their field
The place to look is often among people who are already fans of your product. Find existing customers, business partners, and employees who are already talking up your brand, and explore how you can grow those influencer relationships.
If they're mentioning you on social media, it's usually either customers, or folks who are brand-aligned in another way. These existing influencers will naturally be more receptive for you to reach out and ask for a 15-minute call where you can:
- Jam about how to create content together, amplify each other’s posts, swap engagement, or push your brand.
- If your long-term goals are aligned, offer them equity so they’re bought in.
- Add them to the affiliate program, so anyone they refer get 20% of ACV.
- Bring them onto a podcast to give them a platform. You can then cut that content into clips and amplify it across your socials.
- If they’re a customer, turn their testimony into a case study.
Building Your Influencer Strategy
According to a study by TopRank Marketing, the most effective B2B influencer campaigns:
- Use consistent, ongoing or "always-on" campaigns with professional influencers and niche experts
- Compensate influencers with payment, product, equity, or more.
- Measure and track performance.
- Leverage technology and AI
- Get outside help from an influencer marketing agency or influencer marketing platform.
Establishing goals and objectives for your influencer marketing campaign
Is your goal to build brand awareness, generate reviews, or drive more leads to your pipeline? Social listening tools like Brandwatch and Sprout Social can help you figure out where your brand stands now, and the delta from that to where you want to be.
Use the information you gather make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive) goals about what you want to accomplish with your influencer marketing efforts.
Goals and KPIs
Increase Brand Awareness
- Potential KPIs: Followers, impressions, total engagement, web traffic
Reach
- Potential KPIs: Reach, engagement, new followers, web traffic, use of promo codes and trackable links
Drive Pipeline
- Potential KPIs: SQLs/SQOs, calls booked, sales
Increase User Generated Content
- Potential KPIs: Product reviews, testimonials, social media posts, hashtag, usage, influencers/brand advocates
| Goal | Potential KPIs |
|---|
| Increase Brand Awareness | Followers, impressions, total engagement, web traffic |
| Reach | Reach, engagement, new followers, web traffic, use of promo codes and trackable links |
| Drive Pipeline | SQLs/SQOs, calls booked, sales |
| Increase User Generated Content | Product reviews, testimonials, social media posts, hashtag, usage, influencers/brand advocates |
Creating Detailed Buyer Personas
The first step of any marketing campaign is creating detailed buyer personas. That will help you figure out what influencers hold clout in the spaces you want to—well, influence.
If you're doing account-based selling, you will already have an idea of specific businesses you're targeting and what they're doing online. Who are the people your stakeholders engage with the most?
Many people who are targeting the B2B space will immediately think of LinkedIn. Surprisingly, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are more common influences on B2B purchasing decisions according to a 2023 study by Gartner. An omnichannel approach will expand the body of people who might be able to help grow your brand.
Unlike B2C influencer marketing, B2B tastemakers are not just great content creators. They are subject matter experts that provide real value to their followers. The most influential marketers narrow their content in on one subject they know well and become known for that niche.
Becoming an influencer yourself (by posting original, helpful content on your specialty) is an organic way to find and attract the types of people that align with you in value.
Selecting the Right B2B Influencers for Your Brand
Influencers don't need to be mega-brands that will command high fees for a sponsored post, but have no real commitment to your business. B2B transactions are built on trust. A clear advertisement without overall alignment can easily backfire. Brands looking to leverage influencers need to find people that align on long-term goals for the same audience.
56% of CMOs interviewed believe that the best way to optimize use of B2B influencer marketing campaigns is to "build long-term relationships that show true brand advocacy."
The right influencers are not necessarily the ones with the most followers, but who are most attuned to your goals. As they build their own brand and narratives, your brand's influence will grow organically alongside them. Smaller influencers (sometimes called micro-influencers, or even nano-influencers) may also have higher personal engagement—and therefore more direct influence on purchasing decisions.
Collaborating with Influencers
More than half of B2B purchases are influenced by word-out-mouth, according to Forbes in 2018. Since 2020, B2B buyers increasingly reach out to peers and do their own research before reaching out to a sales team. That means most of the work of convincing the prospect will usually be done by the time they talk to a sales rep.
The content you put out should therefore enhance brand loyalty and trust, prove use case and effectiveness through testimonials, and expand reach.
Building Relationships with B2B Influencers
As with any other relationship, approaching B2B influencers is about building trust. While you may need to cut a check, a influencer partnership should always create mutual value.
If you or other employees are budding influencers , it will be easy to sell the mutual benefits of co-creating and cross-sharing content. Sharing equity is another way of long-term alignment on co-growing your brand.
When you partner with an influencer, their brand is essentially "picking a side" in your industry. Warmly's influencer partnerships include advisors like Josh Norris. When someone in his circle is looking for a revenue orchestration platform, he already has a brand that he uses, loves and trusts to recommend. Influence can also grow like a tree. Other influencers will see what side your brand partners have picked and reach out to work with you, too.
Create Compelling Content with B2B Influencers
There are limitless ways to leverage an influencer partnership:
- Co-creating engaging and authentic content.
- Cross-amplifying content across both your networks to increase engagement
- Having them engage with your brand's social media posts to increase reach and engagement with their followers
- Guest blog posts
- Podcast interviews
- Co-hosting webinars
- Attending industry events as an ambassador
- Endorsements
Content can be product-based, narrative-based, or build "top-of-mind awareness." For example, Warmly's goal is to establish ourselves as the number one media go-to-market in our space. We post (and cross-post) authentic content about the technology we're building, so when people think "revenue orchestration platform," Warmly automatically comes to mind.
Successful B2B Influencer Marketing Examples
There is nothing that says B2B influencer marketing has to be staid. The people you're targeting are professionals, but they're also people. A great B2B influencer marketing campaign will entertain as it sells. For example, HockeyStack's The Flow—including their popular comedic "The Worst Marketer in the World" series—and Lavender's Lavender Land channel are the "B2B-equivalent-of-HBO-and-Netflix."
Obaid Durrani and ToddClouser are the masterminds behind the Easy Mode Framework that helps brands build media empires. Their success implementing the framework with Lavender and HockeyStack have put them on the map as master B2B influencers.
Common Pitfalls in B2B Influencer Marketing
PR Disaster
Working with influencers is not all upside. There are risks associated with co-branding, like Disney's famously disastrous partnership with PewDiePie. That's why it's more important to find influencers who have a similar long-term brand trajectory, than to hire the biggest megaphone you can find to amplify your brand.
Misattributing Results
With long lead times and buying cycles, it can be hard to tell which part of the marketing puzzle to credit. Unlike B2C, B2B influencer marketing is less about a direct line from influencer-to-deal, but staking out your part of the market and partnering with brands in that space that will grow with yours. Overfocusing on content that drives sales directly similarly misses the point.
Controlling Influencer Content
When you partner with an influencer, you ideally trust them as masters of their brand. Trying to control the type of content can backfire, as can paid branded content. "69% of consumers trust influencers, friends and family over information coming directly from a brand," according to agency Matter Communications.
Conclusion
The ROI on B2B influencer marketing is staggering. Companies report a return of $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing in 2022.
Influence is the new currency. It's no longer enough to just buy ads to promote yourself, because anybody can do that. Ads also don't have the same credibility as seeing the face and presence of a recommendation by, say, Scott Leese.
The best way forward for B2B brands to boost brand reach and credibility is to find the right B2B influencers and gather as many of them as possible into your company's orbit. Then build long-lasting, mutually beneficial brand partnerships.
All you need are 60 comments to go viral on LinkedIn. The more people you get talking about you, the farther your message will reach. It quickly becomes a virtuous cycle, or an influence flywheel.