In the massively crowded world of B2B marketing, a lot of B2B companies are often inundated with options for executing marketing strategies – namely SEO, organic marketing, influencer marketing, creator marketing, affiliate marketing, and many more. So how do you approach efficient B2B marketing, while taking advantage of completely free and available resources?

B2B influencer marketing has become one of the fastest ways to grow an organic social presence and drive qualified traffic to websites. According to TopRank, and outstanding 85% of B2B brands are leveraging influencer marketing in their marketing strategies. That said, influencer marketing spans a wide variety of strategies and so we will break down what we think are the most viable strategies for brands to begin with.

The main benefits for B2B businesses to use influencers is to enable trust with their customers by allowing third-parties to engage with the brand. Part of the B2B sales process is developing a relationship where customers can be open and transparent about the problems they are trying to solve. In return, they expect brands to reciprocate that process – and by having influencers and creators talk about the product from their lens – you’re able to bridge that gap faster.

Your first goal with a B2B influencer strategy is to develop a content strategy with influencers. The most powerful thing influencers and creators can do for you is create a vast library of unique content that you can leverage across your marketing strategies, sales collateral, and other public facing channels that underscore your brand. Additionally, it is important that you find creators who will really understand the problem you are trying to solve, as they will be able to authentically relate to that problem in the content they produce.

Finding B2B influencers is one of the biggest challenges brands have. Not only do you need to find influencers who will produce relevant and engaging content for your brand, but also you want to make sure their underlying audiences are relevant and potentially engaging customers. Most of the best influencer programs use influencer marketing tools to help them with execution. Ultimately, these tools provide agencies and influencer managers access to massive databases of influencers. Knowledgeable and skilled agencies can leverage both the brand image and goals to influencers by leveraging these tools. Furthermore, influencer marketing platforms just make the B2B influencer marketing process more efficient.

Generally, it is recommended to outsource your influencer marketing campaigns to agencies since the amount of work to properly execute a campaign is nearly a full-time job. Some of the main steps in an influencer campaign include:

1) Building an influencer strategy for your brand
2) Creating a budget allocation for your influencer marketing campaign
3) Sourcing influencers for your campaign
4) Authenticating influencers for fake followers / bots (checking for fake followers, brand fit, content check)
5) Influencer outreach, communication and negotiation
6) Creating and revising influencer contracts
7) Setting up influencer payment / affiliate links
8) Reviewing influencer content and revising content
9) Setting up a calendar for influencer content
10) Leveraging influencer content throughout all your marketing channels and creating a UGC content lifecycle

One of the most important things to do when creating a B2B influencer marketing strategy is to set a clearly defined goal of what you’re trying to get out of the influencer strategy. Most businesses try to optimize for brand awareness, lead generation, or establishing thought leadership. It is important to define this at the start of your campaign as this will drive the type of influencers you want to use and what strategies to execute.

B2B influencer brand awareness strategies

To generate brand awareness with influencers, you will want to optimize around both impressions and volume of content. Organic impressions from influencer audiences will help establish you social presence and grow your own following as long as you are using targeted influencers in your niche. By optimizing additionally for volume of content, you can leverage a wide source of content in paid media. Running the influencer / user-generated content as ads across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other channels is a great way to capitalize on wider distribution of the content. Furthermore, you can slot in specific content to different parts of the funnel if you think its appropriate. The type of content you choose should also reflect the part of the funnel you are targeting. Influencers can add call-to-actions in their content – so ask for them to use the right call-to-action based on what you’re trying to achieve.

Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit are great sources for brand awareness influencers. These are larger reach platforms that will enable you to reach a broader audience for your product.

B2B influencer lead generation strategies

Lead generation strategies for B2B influencers are extremely important for businesses that rely on getting in front of customers and explaining their value proposition. Often find expert creators in your niche helps a lot – for example if you’re an accounting firm, you may want to use small business creators who talk about their business journey on social media. These types of creators not only would be potential users of your business, but they have captive communities of prospective clients who relate to the same problems.

B2B influencer thought leadership strategies

Lastly, if you want to develop deep content through thought leadership, it is useful to leverage subject matter experts in the space to establish authority within your industry. LinkedIn, Medium, Blogs, and review sites are all important sources to dominate thought leadership in. LinkedIn influencers are one of the best ways to share your thought leadership and get influencers to create their own value-add comments to the content you are producing.

B2B influencer marketing is one of the most important strategies to implement right now. If you want a free custom B2B influencer marketing strategy built for your brand, reach out to our team!