How do over 75% of B2B brands successfully execute on their marketing funnels? Influencers.
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B2B influencer marketing is a collaboration between creators and brands to create strategically helpful and entertaining content to promote the brand’s product or services. The process of leveraging influencers is critical to the best creator marketing campaigns – both across B2B businesses and B2C businesses.

The key understanding of B2B influencer marketing is that a brand’s target audience is always on social media – albeit, the channels vary widely, but can still be relevant depending on who you are trying to influence. Buyers of your product are likely to be influenced by top-of-funnel marketing, while users of the product can easily be on social media. If you take most software products in the B2B space like Asana, HubSpot, Monday.com, etc. These products are used by young professionals who live and breath on social media. Lots of software needs to be sold from the bottom up now – users convince leadership that they need it. By leveraging influencers in B2B marketing, you can develop meaningful relationships with prospective users of your product and demonstrate the need for your product.

The complexities of finding the right B2B influencer for your product or service faces similar challenges to what DTC and B2C brands face. Ultimately, you want to find creators who can create and serve valuable content to your customers. The way you first identify good influencers is by reviewing their content. It is important that the influencer’s content matches your brand values and doesn’t conflict with important messaging you’ve created for your brand. A lot of valuable tools are used by agencies and influencer marketing managers to leverage “social listening” in effectively filtering influencers for brand safety and alignment concerns. By using social listening tools, you can be sure that your initial filter of influencers will be relevant and brand safe.

Above, you’ll see that @mkobach is a business owner himself, and so @gofast leveraged him in a campaign that made a lot of sense not just for adding value to his business, but also because he understands the pain points of fast and their need to promote their product.

Similarly, if you have a service product like an accounting firm or marketing firm, leverage other local / small business owners who have similar problems they face on a day-to-day basis. A local owner may be an expert in the product they sell but have little to no expertise in accounting. Add value to the influencer as if they were your client, and they’ll be able to communicate that value in their content.

The type of creators you use can also vary dramatically. While many brands immediately associate creators with individuals that can directly engage with audiences, there are many “faceless pages” that exist that have highly relevant audiences for businesses. Faceless pages can be “meme pages” or “informational content pages”. For example: @ecomhumor is a popular TikTok page that has over 40k followers and gets 2m+ likes. The types of end users who follow pages like this are likely going to be in the e-commerce community and can relate to the entertainment. Furthermore, these types of “faceless accounts” are more flexible in terms of what they post and how they post. You can leverage them to promote your own branded content in addition to relevant “meme content” that they custom create to align to your brand.

One of the most successful B2B companies is HubSpot, a customer and sales management platform. They have consistently succeeded in their marketing campaigns despite being in one of the most crowded spaces in B2B SaaS. So how are they able to win customers and maintain their global presence? HubSpot leverages influencer marketing in a big way. HubSpot’s partnerships team focuses on two main things when it comes to executing their influencer marketing campaigns:

Culture Fit: Does the influencer believe in the same mission to grow and provide value to their customers?

Partnership Fit: Conversations matter. Are they able to speak honestly and transparently about the world?

These questions underpin the foundation of what they look for in influencer partnerships. You’ll see those questions about engagement, impression performance, and other things that many first-time influencer marketing managers worry about is not even a first-rate concern.

HubSpot knows the first important thing to build in a B2B influencer marketing campaign is good, high-quality content. If they nail that down, they can leverage performance channels to amplify the content and create a consistent message across all of the audiences they are targeting. Furthermore, they look for targeting users of their platform. Their users are young professionals, sales professionals, customer success professionals etc. While it is tempting to say “I only want to target directors, CEOs, etc.” this can be a massive mistake as influence at that level is more effective when it comes from the actual users of the platform.

B2B influencer marketing can be a powerful new marketing tool for you to expand your reach and build relationships with customers. The key to successful B2B influencer marketing is to understand which influencers will be able to communicate your core brand values and demonstrate how they can use your product or services. Figuring out if an influencer is a good cultural fit will also enable you to generate powerful content that you can leverage in both your organic channels and paid media. Creators are meant to be a channel for you to create unique content. Use them correctly, and you have a gold mine of content to leverage.