Unlocking Growth: B2B Influencer Marketing - Part 2

In Part 1 of learning more about B2B influencer marketing, we familiarized ourselves with the various types of B2B influencer marketing partnerships. In this part, let’s dive deeper into how one can actually start using it as a growth channel.

As with most marketing strategies, there is no one size fits all to get started with influencer marketing however, Kristen Sesto, Director at Custom Influence helped us put together a 3-step framework that founders, leaders can use to get started with B2B influencer marketing. The framework differs for startups vs enterprises, however, keeping the audience of the newsletter in mind, we will focus on how early and growth stage founders can get started with influencer marketing.

Step 1: Understand the W/L in your current content strategy

Influencers can help you in two ways -

1. Filling gaps (Losses) - The idea here is to take support of influencers to fill the gaps in your current marketing strategy. Eg. If you are still in the early stages of building your personal brand on social media and haven’t reached a big enough audience yet, you can partner with thought leaders / external influencers and leverage their audience to create awareness about your product and build confidence about it.

2. Boosting progress (Wins) - In this case, you take help of influencers to boost the RoI from channels that are already working for you. According to Emir Atli, CRO of HockeyStack, once they figured that product and strategy related posts by internal influencers were successful in creating visibility and demand for the product, they doubled down on this strategy and partnered with external influencers to further drive up the demand for the product through social media. This also works for paid ads - if you are already big on paid ads and have identified them as a successful channel, you can start leveraging Thought Leadership Ads to boost the overall impact from paid ads.

It is important to understand the current wins and losses in your content strategy to identify how influencers can help you. 

Step 2: Map out the nature of partnership 

Once you have identified the areas in which you need help / need a boost, you can then decide what kind of partnerships would positively impact your marketing strategy. As covered in Part 1, there are multiple ways to leverage influencer marketing, including TL ads, podcast features, co-authoring / cross recommendations on newsletters, LI posts, events and videos. Within these channels, it is really up to your creativity to decide what kind of content can be created to generate the highest impact for your audience. However, based on some observations - 

1. Podcasts - They are a great way to showcase your expertise in the field. It is great for setting context and you can talk about how well you understand the market, the problems that potential users are facing and talk about your solution. This helps in making the audience both problem and solution aware. 

2. Videos / webinars - These can be done with internal team members, customers, as well as in collaboration with non-competitor products in the market. The goal of this kind of content is to give the audience a deep dive into the capabilities of your product and make them understand various ways in which they can use your product to solve their problem. 

3. Posts - Sponsored posts by TLs and SMEs are primarily used to reach a new audience pool (that of the influencer) and build confidence / trust in their minds for the product.

You can also sponsor events, co-author newsletters, etc. to create more visibility for your product in the market. It is important to understand where your buyers spend most of their time and target those platforms for your influencer marketing programs. If most of your user base is on Instagram / TikTok, it would make sense to create campaigns for these platforms rather than focusing your efforts on LI. 

Step 3: Find the right influencer based on your needs

Based on your discoveries in the previous two stages, the final step is reaching out to the relevant influencers and discussing the terms of the partnership with them. Things to keep in mind when selecting the influencer  - 

1. Quality over quantity. An influencer with 5k followers who are relevant to your product is way better than someone with 50k followers who might not relate to your product at all!

2. Choosing someone who is a genuine user of your product and truly appreciates its value can translate better with the audience because they use organic ways to promote your product rather than an out of context plug in their content!

3. When considering the terms for the partnership, according to Amanda Branson of SaaSfluencer, entering into a multi-post contract might be more price effective than going after single posts, with an average post costing ~$1k. 

Influencer marketing → Demand Generation

The primary aim of influencer marketing is to create visibility and trust in your product. While it may seem like individual channels running different content strategies, imagine this -  

You are an early career PM and use LI often to keep up with the PM community.

One day you open LI and come across a post by a PM thought leader which talks about PM best practices and how a certain company is helping PMs achieve those high standards.

The post adds value to your work (because it is written by an experienced professional in your field) and you decide to check out the company mentioned in the post (let’s call it Acme). 

Once you start following Acme, you gradually come across posts made by Acme’s  employees, mentioning their process in building Acme, talking about its features, etc. 

You also come across webinars hosted by Acme’s team with other PM SMEs, which help you learn more about how you can do your job better as a PM using Acme.

Once you reach this level of engagement, you start coming across any and every post which mentions Acme, be it posts made by customers sharing their reviews, SMEs sharing some reports published by Acme, etc. 

At this point, you start associating Acme with the problem they are solving for, and next time you are in the market to buy a product solving for PMs, you will first check out Acme due to brand recall. 

This is how even without specifically targeting you, Acme generated a potential inbound customer for their product. 

This is how influencer marketing, when done correctly by leveraging multiple types of partnerships, can create a great demand generation workflow for companies!

PS - Feel free to reach out to Kristen Sesto -  an expert at helping brands leverage influencer marketing, for a virtual cup of coffee if you find this topic interesting and want to learn more about it!

PPS - This post is a part of the Unlocking Growth series, which aims to get early career professionals in tech and product familiarized with newer marketing strategies. Do let me know at Himani Sheth if you would like me to cover a strategy in my next post!