B2B Influencer Marketing Success: Joining Forces with Industry Specialists

Friday, March 15th, 2024

Today, social media has become a way for everyone to stay in touch with trends, search for information, and gain reviews. As a result, brands are investing heavily in social media marketing and collaborating with influencers. It can be commonly seen with B2C and D2C brands; B2B is no different. Many B2B model brands are approaching influencer marketing. According to a search engine journal, 86% of B2B brands are successful with influencer marketing. Let us understand in detail about B2B influencer marketing: 

 Understanding B2B Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing refers to businesses hiring social media influencers to promote their brand, product, or service. Businesses pay these influencers to post stories and videos or talk about their product on social media. In the case of B2B marketing, influencers with recognized professional competence promote another business. For instance, a graphic designer educating about tools on the internet can promote businesses with graphic designing tools and software. The B2B influencers are generally customers themselves who promote another business. These include employees, executives, podcasters, speakers, authors, as well as entrepreneurs. 

 What Makes B2B Influencer Marketing Unique?

There are various benefits offered to businesses through B2B influencer marketing. These include: 

●    Target marketing: When B2B influencers who are entrepreneurs, employees, and executives promote a brand, they can successfully reach your target audience. Since they are customers themselves, their followers are most likely to be your customers. They often have a fan base or followers on social media that brands can use for social media marketing. Compared to B2C, they target other businesses and shareholders to use the product or brand. 

●    Drive traffic to your brand website: With instant promotion and a target audience, you can drive leads to your website. They will direct traffic to your website and by Search engine optimization you can hold visitors to your platform to encourage purchase. Thus, B2B brands can increase sales and revenue through influencer marketing. 

●    Brand recognition: B2B influencer marketing allows brands to build communities and improve brand recognition. Often product users in the case of B2B talk about them when asked otherwise brand names are difficult to pop up unless you invest heavily in digital marketing. With B2B you can reach your target audience and get engagement if not for sales.  

Types Of B2B Influencers

There are different types of B2B influencers that you can hire to promote your brand. They are majorly segmented into 3 categories such as: 

● Micro-influencers 

● Macro influencers 

● Industry experts

Micro-influencers: Micro-influencers are small influencers with followers around 1k to 10k followers. They are generally employees or freelancers catering to an industry. They post content on Instagram and have a loyal fan base. You can provide them with barter collaboration or paid collaboration to promote your brand. 

Macro influencers: Macro influencers usually have large followers ranging from 100k to 1 Million. They are often known to diverse audiences and have a high reach, reputation, and credibility online. They have a loyal fan base and a large section of the community to promote products. 

Industry experts: These are usually people who are known for their expertise in certain industries. They have high authority, credibility, and are often considered as leaders among their audiences. Such influencers have a strong influence on intellectual audiences and decision-making.  

B2B Influencer Marketing Success Stories

To give you a glimpse of some successful B2B marketing success stories that you can follow, here’s the list: 

●    Adobe: Adobe found selective influencers using Adobe Creative Cloud. These influencers conducted workshops for Adobe Creative Cloud to promote Adobe to the target audience. As a result, Adobe saw immense growth in creative cloud subscriptions. Instead of looking for influencers with high followers, they focused on influencers who are using their products to build credibility among their target audience. 

●    Canva: The popular AI-based designing tool using B2B SaaS modules opted for B2B influencer marketing with the intention of creating awareness. They collaborated with well-known entrepreneurs, creative professionals, and small businesses in the field to create awareness on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Thus, it created a buzz in social media resulting in more users. 

Similarly, there are brands like Semrush

and many more opting for B2B influencer marketing. 

How to Find B2B Influencers to Work With?

Identifying the right B2B influencer for your digital marketing is critical, as it can go wrong if not executed correctly. So, here are some steps that you can follow to find B2B influencers: 

● Define a clear marketing goal that will state what you want to achieve with influencer marketing and how it can help your brand. Some use B2B SEO Marketing for brand awareness, while some need sales. So, define your B2B marketing goal. 

● Use social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook to search for people using your products, experts in your field, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

● Evaluate how they are influencing their audience, whether they have a loyal fan base or not, whether they align with your marketing goal, or have brand loyalty. 

● Build relationships with influencers to increase credibility and value by providing free access, samples, or providing resources. 

● Collaborate with them to co-create content that will help your brand. 

Best Types of Influencer Content for B2B

The best type of influencer content for B2B is providing workshops and educating the audience about the benefits of using the products. Many influencers who consume the product can provide more credibility in influencer marketing. For instance, a freelance graphic designer using Adobe and uploading content can bring more credibility by educating audiences for the same. Usually, B2B influencers have a more thoughtful and intellectual audience, so driving them on a website is difficult unless they are convinced. When they learn about product benefits from fellow industry experts, they are more likely to purchase. 

Conclusion

B2B influencer marketing has successfully provided results to many brands. So, they are rapidly becoming part of the marketing strategy of many B2B brands. These influencers promoting B2B brands are difficult to identify, but if selected carefully can drive success. With the rising consumption of videos and social media content, the B2B influencer market is increasing and will continue to be.