Who said influencer marketing campaigns are only applicable in B2C? Smart B2B brands have already entered the B2B influencer marketing arena, capitalizing on the audience of thought leaders, industry experts, and successful mentors.
Working with influencers and content creators is a relatively “new trend” in the B2B world. We’re mostly familiar with popular accounts and celebrities endorsing B2C products and services on Instagram.
However, that has changed as B2B companies seek to humanize their brands. In recent years there has been a major shift from faceless corporate communications to engaging videos and posts on social media from major B2B players.
So, if you want to do the same, social listening is a must to identify B2B influencers in your niche and come up with interesting yet relatable content ideas to bring to life together.
In this article, you’ll learn everything about influencer marketing for B2B and see how social listening can save you from a lot of pitfalls.
Table of Contents
What is B2B influencer marketing?
B2B influencer marketing is the strategy of collaborating with popular and reputable industry experts to promote your brand and thus increase awareness, build trust, and boost sales.
Usually, it’s part of a company’s social media marketing strategy.
With almost 60% of marketers increasing their influencer marketing budgets (B2B and B2C) in 2024, we can safely say that it’s a strategy that truly pays off.
This comes as no surprise since influencers have a unique bond with their audiences. People admire them and value their opinions.
Especially, if the influencers are subject matter experts and not just celebrities. So, that makes them powerful in influencing — of course! — purchase decisions.
Are they really industry experts?
Mentionlytics can tell you all about an influencer’s profile from niche relevance to performance!
For us, B2B influencer marketing isn’t that different from B2C. But it’s worth pointing out a few differences.
1. Having a lot of followers isn’t enough
B2B influencers must be experts in their niche. They have to be well-known for their success in their respective field, where their wisdom stems from.
It’s not enough to have thousands of followers or be a TV celebrity to be considered a B2B influencer.
2. Education over fun
B2B influencer marketing campaigns are mostly educational. Influencers share their knowledge and experience with their audience and promote your brand in the process.
In the B2C world, influencers’ content is a lot more entertaining. Not always, but usually.
3. The audience
The communities of B2B and B2C influencers are a lot different.
Since B2B influencers appeal to our professional selves, it’s logical that they have very targeted audiences. That makes them perfect for conveying your message to your ideal buyers.
On the other hand, B2C influencers have more diverse communities with people of different professions and, thus, needs.
So, that’s all you need to know about B2B influencer marketing in theory. But let’s get more specific about what it can do for your brand.
Why you should care about influencer marketing in B2B
Collaborating with content creators is not the first growth strategy that comes to the minds of B2B marketers. However, the benefits of B2B influencer marketing are uncanny for brands that take the risk.
We summarize the main ones below.
Increased brand awareness in your target audience
Influencers equal awareness. If you want to introduce your brand to a large but specific audience, you partner up with influencers.
People skip ads but not the latest post of their favorite creator.
Influencers’ posts get thousands of impressions and shares. So, even one single post can boost your brand awareness across the network. And of course, associating your brand name with a reputable thought leader lends you credibility.
Boosted credibility within a tight community
As we’re on the subject, B2B influencers can make you appear reliable to potential customers. How?
Well, industry experts care a lot about their reputation. So, they neither forge partnerships with controversial brands nor promote low-quality products and services. They have to protect their own credibility.
Therefore, if you do a collab with a B2B influencer, you’re brand will be perceived as trustworthy by their community. Especially, when we talk about micro-influencers who have more personal relationships with their followers.
Quality content that drives results
Basically, you can’t become an influencer without creating quality content. B2B or B2C, influencers have to know what content resonates well with their community to thrive.
So, if your brand collaborates with an influencer, chances are the content produced will be a lot more engaging than any branded content you’ve ever created. Actually, 36% of the respondents in a study by Linqia say influencer content outperforms brand-created content.
Influencers understand how to promote your offerings without sounding salesy. This is the key to a successful social media marketing strategy.
Now, do you feel like giving B2B influencer marketing a shot? Great! Let’s start from the basics: the best B2B influencer marketing platform.
What is the best platform for B2B influencers?
LinkedIn is the answer you’re looking for. There’s no better platform for B2B influencers than this.
For starters, LinkedIn is a networking space for professionals to come together, exchange experiences, and grow their careers. So, it’s more likely to find industry experts and thought leaders with a large following there than on any other social channel.
Their audience also includes like-minded professionals who scroll their LinkedIn feeds to find work-related content. Νot adorable dog videos and movie-inspired memes. That means, B2B buyers are there looking for you!
Furthermore, LinkedIn offers many features that allow subject matter experts to be established as thought leaders.
For instance, they can have a personal newsletter to connect with their community, publish articles straight into the platform, write long-form posts, and educate their audience with informative carousels.
However, LinkedIn is not the only channel that B2B influencers thrive.
Many of them also maintain YouTube channels for sharing their long-form video content. And some are also on Instagram and TikTok to tap into younger audiences.
You can see some of our favorite marketing influencers in the next section. Just a hint though: You won’t find them only on LinkedIn!
5 successful examples of B2B influencer marketing collaborations
Get some inspiration below!
Example #1: Zaria Parvez & LinkedIn
Zaria Parvez is the mastermind behind Duolingo’s tremendous organic social media growth — especially on TikTok.
She’s a marketing influencer with more than 100K followers on LinkedIn. Zaria is well-known for her social media expertise and is listed on Forbes 30 under 30 (2023) for her success in making corporate social media fun and engaging.
That’s exactly why LinkedIn itself collaborated with her to promote LinkedIn Games in a witty video and introduce this new feature to her wide community.
Example #2: Pretty Little Marketer & Veed Studio
Pretty Little Marketer (PLM), a.k.a. Sophie Miller, is a leading social media marketer with a community of 280K followers on LinkedIn, 100K followers on Instagram, and almost 200K followers on Sophie’s personal account on LinkedIn.
She frequently shares her advice on how to build a thriving social media community, influencer marketing, and all things organic social.
The interesting thing about Sophie and PLM is that, unlike most B2B marketing influencers, she has invested both on LinkedIn and Instagram with huge success. Sophie has worked with prestigious brands such as Adobe, Canva, and Hubspot.
One of her latest collaborations is with Veed Studio with an easy tutorial on its video editing platform, endorsing the tool for its ease of use.
Δείτε αυτή τη δημοσίευση στο Instagram.
Example #3: Erin Balsa & Parrot AI
Erin Balsa is a content marketing expert with a following of 41K on LinkedIn. She regularly shares her experiences and advice on how to do content marketing like nobody else.
Erin’s focus is to help content marketers (like me!) create bold content for their brands. Like many influencers in B2B marketing, she has a daily newsletter where she offers helpful tips on how to be bold in B2B.
One of her latest partnerships is Parrot AI sponsoring her daily newsletters for a month.
Source: LinkedIn
Example #4: Joe Glover & Exclaimer
Joe Glover is a marketing expert and founder of The Marketing Meetup, an educational hub for marketers to meet in person and virtually to exchange ideas, experiences, and tips.
He has more than 72K followers on LinkedIn and has been doing a great job organizing events that bring marketers together. Joe brings the crème de la crème of marketing professionals to talk about various topics and contribute to The Marketing Meetup community.
One of Joe’s latest collaborations with brands is with Exclaimer for an exclusive non-salesy lunch with their ideal buyers to build relationships and awareness.
Source: LinkedIn
Example #5: Alex Berman & Zapier
Unlike the other creators in our list, Alex Berman’s primary channel isn’t LinkedIn. It’s YouTube! With a community of 122K subscribers on his channel, Alex is a digital marketing influencer.
His areas of expertise are cold emails, growth marketing, and lead generation. He creates and uploads helpful videos, especially for business owners on how to grow their companies.
In one of his latest videos, Alex collaborates with Zapier in a tutorial on how to integrate this tool with Hubspot to save time and effort.
The key to all these successful collaborations is that all brands have chosen the right content creator for their brand.
So, you need to do the same. You have to pick fitting B2B influencers for your strategy to work.
There’s no better way to find the right influencers for your brand than social listening. Let’s see how to do this.
How to use social listening for effective B2B influencer marketing
Read this section carefully. We break down the whole process from finding influencers to measuring their results with a social listening tool.
Discover thought leaders in your niche
First things first, to launch your B2B influencer marketing strategy you have to find thought leaders — influencers in your niche. A social listening tool can help you in finding the best influencers for your brand.
All you have to do is use a social listening tool with influencer identification features. For example, in Mentionlytics you can use the Top Mentioners feature for that purpose.
So, you gather some industry keywords and hashtags. Then, you add them to the tool so that it can track mentions of them across social channels.
After that, you go to Top Mentioners and find a detailed list of the most popular accounts that create content using your keywords and hashtags.
For the example below, we’ve used the keyword “project management tool” that suits Monday.com’s industry.
Analyze influencers’ profiles you’d like to work with
Next, make sure the influencers are worthy of collaborating with. How?
For one, check out the number of followers. The higher the number, the bigger their community is.
But today with the social media algorithms weighting more the engagement than the follower count to promote content on people’s feeds, you have to be sure the influencers’ engagement is also high enough.
High engagement means their community is interacting regularly with the influencer’s content. And that indicates that their content is engaging and users pay attention to it. That’s essential for your campaign to succeed.
Then, check out the number of mentions. This indicates how many posts that influencer has done using your important keywords and hashtags.
This metric can give you hints on the relevance and subject matter expertise they have on your niche. That’s also important because you want influencers that their opinions are trustworthy for their audience.
However, these numbers can only give you a general idea of the influencer. You have to dig deeper.
Understand what topics resonate with your target audience
Now, an important aspect of a successful B2B influencer campaign is choosing the right topic to create content for. Social listening helps you find resonating topics and what’s trending in your industry to inform your plan.
For this, Mentionlytics’ AI Mention Clustering comes in handy. This feature sorts through your mentions and categorizes them into topic clusters.
That means you don’t need to read all the mentions of your industry keywords to spot trending topics. You can see all the hot topics relevant to your keywords in a list, with key metrics to understand their importance.
The more mentions and reach each topic has, the more trending and hot it is!
Measure the results of your B2B influencer marketing campaigns
Well, you’ve made a kicking influencer campaign! Good for you! But how do you measure its success?
Social listening to the rescue again! Track the reach and engagement of all the posts your influencer has created for your brand. Do sentiment and emotion analysis for the comments and mentions to see how people perceived your collab.
Also, you can measure your Share of Voice before and after the campaign to see your brand awareness growing!
Bonus: Track competitors’ influencer marketing efforts
Lastly, you can use your social listening tool to spy on your competitors’ influencer collaborations.
Track their brand name and branded hashtags to collect all their social mentions. Then, keep an eye on them regularly to see which popular accounts create relevant posts.
These are definitely the influencers you should avoid because of their partnership with your direct competitors!
Also, tracking these influencer posts will help you learn from competitors’ mistakes and get an idea of their performance to benchmark against your campaigns.
Find the best B2B influencers for your brand with Mentionlytics
To wrap up, the most important part of B2B influencer marketing is to create real and meaningful partnerships with subject matter experts. Thus, they’ll support your brand sincerely and convey this feeling to their community.
The first step to a fruitful, long-term influencer collaboration is identifying who’s the right fit for your brand. Find the best B2B influencers in your niche with Mentionlytics.
Don’t wait too long. Start today!
