All companies and brands are constantly seeking innovative ways to stand out and connect with their target audience, and B2B is no different. Still, there’s a prevailing thought that influencer marketing isn’t appropriate for this space. Influencer marketing exploded as a marketing method primarily due to B2C brands—and so most people think influencers can only be the kinds of people they see pushing energy drinks and skin care products.
But those kinds of creators aren’t representative of influencer marketing as a whole—they’re just what works for B2C. Influencer marketing is about the products being sold, but the way in which it leverages the word of mouth—and authenticity—of influential people online.
For B2B, this means tapping into the power of industry thought leaders and experts to build trust, increase brand awareness, and drive leads. Your influencer might wear a suit instead of yoga clothes, might be a LinkedIn guru instead of an Instagram model, and might have 10,000 followers instead of 10 million—but their influence is no less powerful.
What is B2B influencer marketing?
Though we said that it’s ultimately no different than B2C—and that’s true—there are still some things that are unique B2B influencer marketing. Yes, it involves partnering with respected industry professionals, executives, or thought leaders to promote your products or services to other businesses. Unlike with B2C marketing, which often focuses on lifestyle and consumer goods and relies on emotions and impulse to sell products, B2B influencer marketing targets decision-makers in companies and relies on deep industry knowledge and expertise to slowly win hearts. B2C drives sales, B2B generates leads.
Key B2B influencers often include:
- C-suite executives
- Industry experts
- Keynote speakers
- Authors and bloggers
- Podcast hosts
- Consultants and advisors
These influencers have the credibility and audience to sway business decisions and shape industry opinions.
The benefits of B2B influencer marketing
Influencer marketing offers a multifaceted approach to elevating your brand’s presence and impact. By forging partnerships with respected industry figures, you not only enhance your brand’s credibility but also gain access to their extensive networks. This collaboration opens doors to a wider, yet highly targeted audience, significantly boosting your brand’s visibility within the industry.
The power of influencer marketing lies in its ability to generate quality leads through compelling content. When trusted voices in your field recommend your products or services, it carries far more weight than traditional advertising methods, fostering improved trust among potential customers. Moreover, these partnerships serve as a catalyst for content amplification, helping to distribute your message to a broader audience than you might reach on your own.
Perhaps one of the most valuable outcomes of influencer collaborations is the opportunity to position your brand as a thought leader. By associating with industry experts, you align your brand with cutting-edge ideas and innovative perspectives, solidifying your reputation as a forward-thinking player in your field. This strategic approach to marketing not only increases brand awareness but also sets the stage for long-term growth and industry influence.
In short, B2B influencer marketing can help your company:
- Enhance credibility
- Expand reach
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate quality leads
- Improve trust
- Amplify content
- Become a thought leader
Top B2B influencer marketing challenges (and how to overcome them)
While B2B influencer marketing offers significant potential, it also comes with unique challenges:
Finding the right influencers
Challenge: Identifying influencers who align with your brand values and target audience can be time-consuming and challenging.
Solution: To find the right influencers, start by clearly defining your target audience and brand values. Look beyond just follower count—engagement rates, content quality, and audience demographics are crucial factors.
Consider micro-influencers in your niche, as they often have highly engaged audiences. Once you’ve shortlisted potential influencers, analyze their past collaborations and content to ensure they’re a good fit. To keep things efficient, think about creating a few outreach templates to speed the process up.
Measuring ROI
Challenge: Determining the return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing campaigns can be complex and unclear.
Solution: Establish clear, measurable goals for your influencer campaigns from the outset. These could include metrics such as reach, engagement, website traffic, lead generation, or sales.
Utilize tracking tools like unique discount codes, custom landing pages, or UTM parameters to attribute results directly to specific influencers or campaigns—you might have a successful campaign overall, but you need to know who your stars were.
For a comprehensive view of ROI, consider both quantitative metrics (such as conversions) and qualitative outcomes (like brand awareness and reputation)—it really depends on what your goals are.
Maintaining authenticity
Challenge: Ensuring influencer content remains authentic and doesn’t come across as overly promotional can be difficult.
Solution: The key to maintaining authenticity lies in fostering genuine partnerships with influencers who truly appreciate your brand. It’s not enough for them to be authentic with their audience. You need to be real with them—their endorsement will ring hollow otherwise.
Start by giving influencers creative freedom in how they present your product or service—their audience trusts them for their unique voice and perspective (you can provide clear guidelines about your brand message, but avoid scripting content and hijacking their voice). Encourage influencers to share honest reviews and personal experiences with your product.
Consider long-term partnerships over one-off promotions, as this allows for more natural, integrated content. Additionally, focus on value-driven content that educates or entertains the audience, rather than pushy sales pitches.
Compliance with Regulations
Challenge: Navigating the legal landscape of influencer marketing, including disclosure requirements and platform-specific rules.
Solution: Stay informed about current regulations in influencer marketing, such as the FTC guidelines in the United States or the GDPR rules in Europe. Develop a clear set of guidelines for your influencers that outline proper disclosure practices.
This might include using hashtags like #ad or #sponsored, or verbally disclosing the partnership in videos. Make these guidelines a part of your influencer contracts and provide examples of compliant posts. Regularly monitor your influencers’ content to ensure they’re following the rules.
Balancing budget and impact in B2B
Challenge: Allocating resources effectively between industry experts, thought leaders, and niche influencers to maximize ROI while working within budget constraints.
Solution: Develop a strategic mix of influencer partnerships that align with your B2B goals. Focus on quality over quantity by prioritizing industry experts and thought leaders who have genuine influence in your sector, though maybe not the biggest follower counts.
These niche influencers specialize in specific aspects of your industry; they often have highly engaged, relevant audiences at a lower cost. Consider long-term partnerships with key influencers to build deeper relationships and create more impactful, ongoing content.
Make sure to regularly assess the performance of each influencer partnership using B2B-specific metrics like lead quality, engagement from target accounts, and impact on sales conversations.
B2B influencer marketing case studies to inspire your strategy
While theory and strategy are fun to talk about, real-world examples often provide the most compelling evidence of a marketing approach’s effectiveness. The following case studies showcase how B2B companies have successfully leveraged influencer marketing. Maybe you can draw some inspiration from them.
General Electric
GE executed an innovative social media campaign aimed at enhancing its brand perception and engaging a younger audience. Recognizing the importance of connecting with consumers, GE strategically leveraged platforms like Twitter and Instagram to showcase its advancements in technology and innovation. The campaign focused on promoting key products in sectors such as energy, aviation, healthcare, and transportation.
As part of the campaign, GE invited influencers to participate in an “Instawalk,” where they explored and documented one of GE’s aviation facilities, one of the most advanced of its kind in the world. This initiative allowed influencers to create authentic content that highlighted GE’s innovations while promoting deeper engagement with their followers.
Through unique storytelling and creative visuals, Ge and its influencers transformed complex technological concepts into relatable narratives. Their approach used humor, strategic hashtags, and interactive elements to connect with a broader audience.
Impressively, the campaign was seen by 3.5 million unique viewers as a few posts made it Instagram’s Explore page. GE also saw more than 200,000 engagements for the campaign—which is impressive—and netted more than 3,000 new followers.
SAP
SAP launched the “Tech Unknown” podcast with the goals of promoting its brand and establishing itself as a leader in the technology industry. The podcast features discussions with industry experts about current trends, and offers its fair share of valuable insights. It all appeals to SAP’s target audience, but that’s not the genius of this strategy.
SAP took a smart approach by searching for guests like they were searching for influencers—because they were searching for influencers. Having on guests from the tech world, whose own followers demographically overlapped with SAP’s target audience, meant the podcast was doing double duty as a marketing tool. On its own, the podcast is a highly polished piece of content marketing that puts SAP’s thought leadership on full display. By having on guests who could credibly speak to their topics while also plugging their appearances on—and bringing their own audiences —the podcast, its listenership grew quickly.
The results were just what they’d hoped to accomplish. For the season they started approaching their bookings this way, “Tech Unknown” showed significant gains. The influencers/guests who appeared on the show plugged their appearances to a total of more than 52 million potential listeners. But that’s just potential. The number of downloads of the podcast increase noticeably, with 66% more than the previous season—and 101% over other, similar industry podcasts.
TrueLook
TrueLook, a company that makes surveillance cameras for construction sites, wanted to show off their new product. They teamed up with Zen Media to find the right people to help spread the word. They were looking to reach construction bosses and professionals responsible for security and risk management at building sites. Zen Media suggested using influencers, which seemed like a weird idea for a business that was incredibly niche. Was there even such a thing as a jobsite surveillance influencer?
Short answer: yes. Zen and TrueLook reviewed over 80 potential influencers, ultimately selecting just three—with a combined reach of 215k— to work with on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
The results were more than the brand thought was ever possible. The content reached half a million people, got 2,446 likes and comments and, most importantly, generated 548 new leads. This shows that even for specific businesses, working with popular social media users can be really helpful. TrueLook’s success proves that picking the right helpers and having a clear plan is important. By building good relationships with these helpers, companies can reach the right people and achieve their goals.
Dell Technologies is an established thought leader in enterprise tech. As part of that leadership, they produced a study, The Data Paradox, targeted toward a niche audience at the crossroads of teamwork and data in technology.
Dell came to TopRank Marketing with the goal of building excitement for the study, growing their reputation as experts in the space, and continuing to differentiate their brand voice in a crowded marketplace.
Dell
Dell Technologies, a renowned leader in enterprise technology, conducted a study called “The Data Paradox” aimed at a specialized audience in the tech industry. To maximize the impact of this research, Dell sought to generate buzz around the study, enhance their standing as industry experts, and further distinguish their brand in a competitive market.
To achieve these objectives, Dell partnered with a marketing agency to develop a campaign strategy aimed at getting as many eyes as possible on the study. This approach included data-driven content planning, the creation of an eBook centered on “The Data Paradox” findings, and finding the right influencers to help spread the word. They soon found eight experts within Dell’s target network. These influencers create their own content and promote the assets across various social media channels, including video content. Aiming for variety, they employed a multi-pronged approach. In doing so, they struck a balance between high level awareness-type content and specialized, engagement-focused pieces. These were designed with an eye toward guiding potential customers further down the funnel.
The campaign delivered: it significantly enhanced Dell’s brand awareness, reach, and engagement within their niche market—all of which was evident in the numbers: Their social channels saw 1.1 thousand clicks and 1.6 thousand engagements, all stemming from just 39 brand social posts. The campaign’s reach extended even further through the involvement of their eight influencers, though. They shared over 30 additional social posts using the campaign hashtag #DataParadox. This influencer engagement contributed to a potential reach of 1.7 million, while also generating more than 365 social engagements. The campaign’s impact was particularly notable when compared to previous benchmarks, with their pageviews surpassing 8 thousand—a 276% increase. Moreover, the quality of engagement was high, with users spending an average of over two minutes on the asset landing page, indicating strong interest and interaction with the content.
When you think TikTok, you probably don’t think “B2B.” That’s understandable—it’s a go-to destination for B2C brands wanting to advertise to younger audiences on social media. But those audiences aren’t TikTok’s customers: the brands are. The users are all there for free, and TikTok needs the advertising revenue to keep the lights on. It’s essentially a B2B company as far as its revenue is concerned, and they were looking for a way to reach new customers. The solution was to advertise the company, TikTok, on the platform itself.
Targeting small businesses, TikTok enlisted the aid of other small business owners who were already successfully marketing and selling there. These owners created videos that educated the target audience on the ins and outs of succeeding as a business on TikTok. Beyond just appearing in their own feeds, these videos were also posted to TikTok’s Small Business page for organic reach, as well as adapted into paid ads.
The videos were characterized by their authenticity—this wasn’t a brand reeling off selling points. These were real small business owners explaining how they actually succeeded. The campaign amassed over 32 million views, and 2 million likes. And, demonstrating that the content was both wanted and watched, the Small Business page picked up 400,000 new followers.
Key takeaway: There are plenty of opportunities for B2B brands to capitalize on influencer marketing.
B2B influencer marketing is a powerful strategy that can significantly impact your brand’s visibility, credibility, and lead generation efforts. By carefully selecting the right influencers, overcoming common challenges, and focusing on authentic partnerships, B2B companies can leverage this approach to stand out in a crowded marketplace and connect with decision-makers more effectively.
