B2B Influencer Marketing: The Shiny New Growth Strategy

B2B influencer marketing has reached a tipping point with more adoption than ever before and more developments in the pipeline. Often run as a copy and paste of its B2C cousin, B2B marketing offers so much more. As we learn from its older cousin on the strategic use of different social media influencers, B2B influencer marketing will deliver advantages in categories awash with competitors. Halo social following won’t dictate partnerships, but real engagement, positioning and unique perspectives will.

For good reason, 87% of B2B buyers prefer credible content from their trusted industry peers vs brands. B2B influencer marketing can encompass so much of a business's strategic and tactical execution, but it’s often scattered and attributed to other parts of the marketing mix. To get the most out of your social media influencer program, you need to fully understand its overarching role, whether it’s a lead growth pillar or a supporting one, weaving together your content, paid media or lead generation strategy.

Brand awareness is often the underlying objective for influencer marketing, and for good reason. As the Swiss army knife in your marketing mix, it can play an important role across the entire funnel including brand awareness, content engagement and performance marketing. B2B influencer marketing can also play a role in Account Based Marketing (ABM), your always on content strategy, lead generation and strategic partnerships.

There are four key areas of B2B influencer marketing ripe for adoption, while not mutually exclusive they’re complementary growth components to the wider marketing mix, these include: 

1. Collaborative Content

Content creation AND distribution are equally important to maximising the success of your marketing strategy, but typically not equally given the same level of time, attention and thinking.

Distribution is often underinvested vs the time and general commitment given to the content creation itself. But both play equal weighting towards success, arguably no creative campaign can be successful without anyone seeing it.

Distribution alignment is critical, once you have content created think of how you intend to distribute it.

• Owned channels - blog | organic social | newsletter | paid advertising
• Partnership - newsletter | podcast promotion | organic social 
• Promotion - trade press (if relevant) | communities | outreach

But don’t limit the original content to one piece, instead consider how can you repurpose it.

• White paper > organic single image > organic video shorts > trade press amplification
• Podcast series > monthly social plan > thought leadership > outreach strategy

Now, thinking of what type of content to actually create.

• Whitepapers with contributions of influencers
• Mini podcast series co-hosted with influencers
• Joint webinar or fireside chats
• Intimate invite only events, co-hosted with influencers 
• Workshop for targeted selected accounts

Creativity and imagination are your B2B influencer superpowers. 

Collaborative content can start with zero budget and some out-of-the-box thinking, to more high-end productions and category leading partnerships with six or seven figure budgets.

2. Lead Generation

B2B Influencer marketing isn’t mutually exclusive for top-of-the-funnel activity. It can and will have a core objective of lead generation.

The 95/5 rule wave of thinkers tarnished and relegated the apparent out-of-date methodologies of lead generation, so lead generation became the uncool approach overnight. However, the problem wasn’t the methodology itself, it was underpinned by poor content, lazy marketing, and it was dictating strategy. Lead generation, if done right, can make absolute sense.

If your content is great, why can’t some of your content be gated? Gated content can be OK. But we just need realistic expectations from those ‘leads’ (this also doesn’t mean a five-part email follow up sequence and aggressive sales are OK), and not converting them with immediate effect. Use your collaborative content to continue to add value, focus on insightful content, unique perspectives and creating brilliant content.

When thinking about lead generation, why can’t this same playbook be adopted for your ABM strategy? Building relationships are hard, I know from first-hand experience folks are far more receptive to engaging with a stranger if there is an opportunity for self-promotion, for example by being asked to participate in the content creation, a podcast for example.  

With this approach in mind, you could create intimate workshops, inviting those key accounts along with the real influencers and recognizable faces in their category. This approach can also be very effective for founders and brands finding those first clients, but also those looking to engage bigger LTV (Life Time Value) accounts.

3. Strategic Partnerships 

Goal = to establish mutually beneficial partnerships with influencers.

A strategic partnership could simply be a commercial transaction. Similar to the traditional form of B2C influencer marketing, that is simply paying an influencer to leverage their audience to help distribute your product/service. The execution will be different, be it, content creation in tandem with the client or a straight distribution partner via their newsletters, podcast, or organic social media.

But strategic partnerships can be so much more, including: 

• Onboarding new clients narrated and supported by key persons of influence.
• Client workshop, what better way to support your clients with external influencers.
• Internal training, upskill and motivate your team by sharing the wisdom of such recognized field experts.
• Conduct unique research with the most celebrated experts in their field.
• Commit to higher-end content productions.
• Build official referral programs with more collaborative support and amplification programs. Affiliate 2.0!

What’s important with more strategically focused partners is the expectations and alignment

Ensure both parties agree on deliverables, posts, deadlines, licensing and future use, which in most cases should be supported with official documentation.

It’s about conducting the right research, minimising your exposure with pilots, testing different themes, approaches and influencers, and doubling down on what’s resonating. Underpinning all of this are clear business objectives and expectations from the partnership. Are you looking to develop a client relationship, change their perception of your future buyer, or broaden their buying consideration in the future?

4. Amplification 

This year, the bread-and-butter B2B influencer marketing tools will be amplification and distribution focused, with the goal of leveraging an audience to promote content. We’ll simply see more evidence of brands partnering with social media influencers to help promote their content or work with their brand. 

It’s an effective way to start, to learn and explore your influencer strategy. By testing and learning with influencers, you can uncover how to structure partnerships, best practice ways of working and support strategic growth plans.

There are many ways to start a social media influencer program, and it’s likely to be different for every single business. B2B influencer marketing will grow and evolve, so now is the time to start investigating what growth benefits it can deliver for your organisation.