You must have heard of influencer marketing and its importance in building brand trust and awareness. While mostly used for B2C, it is also helpful for B2B brands, helping the overall customer experience and increasing engagement and click-through rates (CTR).
Unlike B2C influencers who have an existing loyal customer base and convince them regarding a brand’s credibility, B2B influencers are subject matter experts who operate within a strictly defined niche. They could be industry analysts, opinion leaders, technology futurists, thought leaders, media professionals, and academic think tanks.
Instead of promoting your brand to a wide audience, B2B influencer marketing aims to showcase your brand’s success and credibility to other businesses, preferably within the same industry, to convert them to customers and increase revenues.
Unlike general influencers, those operating in the B2B sector may or may not have a vast social media presence. However, that does not affect their credibility even slightly because brands believe them for their knowledge, assistance, and expertise rather than simply trying to build a customer base (which they usually have).
As a business-to-business brand, these are some factors you should consider before starting a campaign. Even though these are helpful tips, you should consider hiring a digital marketing agency that offers the best advice on this topic.
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Things to consider before starting a campaign
Longer timelines
The timeline involved in seeing visible results is considerably longer in B2B than B2C. With the latter, you can expect an increase in sales volume within a few days of launching the campaign.
The former has many decision-makers involved in the sales purchase process, and it takes at least weeks to enjoy a sales increase (in which other businesses contact you for purchases).
Identifying your customers
As mentioned earlier, the target audience in a B2B campaign is extremely limited. You should identify your customers by listening to them, following them on various channels like social media, and taking help from agencies to understand their buying behavior.
However, numbers alone don’t matter when achieving success in inter-business marketing. Instead, the influencer’s engagement with their audience determines the outcome.
For example, it’s better to find an influencer with a limited number of followers with whom they enjoy high engagement than with one million followers that hardly bother commenting, liking, or engaging with their posts.
Finding the influencers
In the business-to-customer process, it is not uncommon for the influencer to approach a brand to form a partnership. But that doesn’t work with this kind of marketing.
Since the onus of finding the right influencer is on you, you should initiate the search by browsing various social media platforms or taking the help of a dedicated influencer marketing platform.
Some goals
You should have several goals before starting a business-to-business marketing campaign. These are increasing your brand awareness amongst other companies in your industry, reaching newer target audiences, increasing the total sales volume, and managing your brand reputation.
Some tools to measure these goals are metrics, impressions, conversions, and sales. Choosing an influencer whose goals are the same as yours is an effective way of quickly and effectively reaching your sales target.
You should contact a professional digital marketing agency to get the best B2B influencer marketing advice. They will help you adopt the right strategy, provide helpful tips, assist you with finding the right influencer, and even help you get started if you have never tried this marketing before.