The best ideas for implementing effective B2B influencer marketing strategies.
Using B2B Influencer Marketing in the right way begins with the right understanding of how it works.
What is B2B Influencer Marketing?
B2B Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to communicate your brand’s message to the target market. In this case, instead of marketing directly to a large group of businesses, you can hire or pay influencers to spread the word.
Who is an Influencer?
An influencer is basically a person, or group of people, that has the ability to influence the behaviour or opinions of others. Generally, an influencer has a significant bearing on the buyer’s purchase decision.
According to Forbes, “influencer marketing is growing faster than digital ads, with emphasis placed on leveraging an industry leader’s followers to foster growth in your own business.”
Why is B2B Influencer Marketing beneficial for your company?
B2B Influencer marketing has a lot of benefits, such as:
1. Effectively builds trust for your brand among businesses
Influencers have built relationships, trust, and credibility with their followers. People respect their content, product reviews and recommendations. Therefore, an endorsement from a trusted influencer will do wonders.
2. Increases brand awareness
Through influencer marketing, you can greatly expand your reach. This is because you can not only share the content among your own followers, but also your influencer’s followers.
3. Enhances your content strategy
Sharing influencer content can help in the gaps of your own content schedule and strategy. It also helps you come up with content ideas and some quality content to publish on your social pages
4. Adds value and credibility to your brand and offering
An influencer has an established follower base and a lot of credibility to his/her name. Tying up with one such influencer would not only add credibility to your name, but also demonstrate their trust in your offering and brand.
How to make your B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy More Effective?
Influencer marketing is definitely immensely valuable for your B2B marketing strategies. Thus, here are a few tips that will help you make your B2B influencer marketing strategy more effective.
1. Pick your influencer with scrutiny
Don’t just blindly go for the influencer who has the maximum number of followers. Remember – QUALITY TRUMPS QUANTITY. Start by jotting downs the names of the most prominent influencers in your industry. Then go through their social handles thoroughly, scanning for various attributes such as content quality, engagement with followers, retweets or shares, mentions etc. Set standards for these attributes and then rate them accordingly to decide which one to go ahead with.
2. Prioritizing Influencers
Per rankings derived through your research, you probably would have narrowed it down to the top 3 or 5 picks. Now, it is time to prioritize them and see which one you’d want to collaborate with. When you have established your target list you need to build a relationship with those Influencers. The easiest way to do this is to engage with them by establishing occasional contact through their social handles.
3. Nurturing the relationship
Now that you have been following them for a while, you would like to introduce yourself and your company to them. For this, you will have to work out an introductory email to ensure that it has impact, tells them what they want to hear and what is in it for them in any kind of collaboration with you.
4. Making influencer collaboration easy
If your choice of Influencers were good ones, you will have selected a group of very busy people, because to be a high-profile expert in any market requires a lot of work in terms of market research and communication, before you ever get to the self-promotion required to stay on top. That means the quickest way to work with them in order to get what you need and to ensure these time-poor individuals remain attracted to the collaborative relationship is to offer possible sector topics, then draft outline material for their review and for them to shape and edit for you.
5. Keep the relationship fresh
Communication and feedback are key in any relationship. This holds true for an influencer marketing arrangement too. When you post content contributed by your Influencer partner, be sure to thank them for their work and make and recommendations or suggestions that you’d like. Similarly, be open to feedback from their end about your offering.
B2B influencer marketing is incredibly beneficial for startups and small businesses. This also helps those who are struggling in gaining traction in their social media marketing. However, only with a clear understanding of how B2B influencer marketing can accelerate your online goals can you commit to implementing your campaigns quickly to experience these results in your business.
