B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy: Reputation By Association

Mindy Kaling recently endorsed QuickBooks by appearing last year at a QuickBooks conference as one of the selected speakers. We know for a fact that she doesn’t actually care about QuickBooks. Pop sensation Selena Gomez signed with the luxury brand Coach to promote their handbags and accessories. She is one of the most-followed people on Instagram, with well over 100 million active followers. Ever wondered why these companies pay excessively high fees to these celebrities and influencers? Influencer marketing is the answer.

For every dollar they spend, marketers get 6 to 7 dollars back in terms of marketing value when they acquire the help of an influencer to market their product or service. These companies have mastered the art of influencer marketing to get 90% results with their clever strategies.

For startups or companies new to the digital world, building a sense of responsibility is nothing short of a challenge. Collaborating with influencers is a smart way to link yourself with a connoisseur from a particular niche. Choosing and forming a beneficial partnership with high-profile people is challenging requires investment.

In influencer marketing, you shouldn’t go for someone who is having lots of clout; instead, go for someone relevant to your brand. This way, you will be able to get the most genuine crowd backing your product. Just a popular influencer with no ties to your genre will feel less personal, and you will get a generally lesser number of leads.

Continue to read more about the topic of influencer marketing, how to communicate with the right influencers and how to set up your campaign to have the best response from the audition.

Under the influence:

An influencer is someone with a significantly large social media following. In the public eye, an influencer is one of the judges whose opinion is well educated. Influencers are used to dramatically increase interactions byB2Bmarketers who predominantly are using Instagram to reach their customers. Music and fashion icon Rihanna herself played a major influencer role in the product launch of FentyBeauty with makeup videos of the pop superstar and reaching out to a range of beauty bloggers and influencers to showcase the brand’s sheer range. Notable examples of influencers for this campaign included albino beauty blogger @acondria, Nigerian-Irish beauty blogger @themsdebdeb, @kyliejenner American-Sudanese @shahdbatal. All these are mico-influencers. They have a strong influence in niche areas, and they are said to be the future of influencer marketing. Like celebrities, influencers have their place in the marketing world. For the right brands, celebrity influencers are a valuable way to get a message to a massive audience of fans.

However, in the B2B industry, you are looking for businesses to connect with instead of consumers. Your collection of consumers are drastically different from the ones B2C companies use. As per a report, content shared by influencers provided 11 times higher ROI than an average display ad.

Moreover, 90% of marketers said that influencer marketing is effective at reaching the audience. B2B IBM is known to be innovative, and they brought in the idea of influencer marketing for Ecommerce portals for bulk buying. Similarly, Prophix, which is a corporate performance management software solutions company currently aiding the finance sector. Their influencer marketing strategy got them a staggering 642% increase in engagement, relationships with top influencers and started a series of conversations amongst the target audience about the integration of AI in finance with connection to the Prophix brand.

Recruiting influencers as a strategy for marketing brings brand awareness like no other technique. Here’s why you should build your brand using influencer marketing.

It’s not riding on someone else’s success, its strategy:

There is an intrinsic hesitance to the idea of growing your brand by using someone else’s clout. According to Influencer marketing hub, influencer marketing is an incredibly lucrative strategy for a brand to spread its wings and increase conversions by as much as ten times.

Influencers are a cost-effective and fast way to increase your brand awareness and progress the leads higher up the sales funnel. Getting their support can help you a great deal as consumers go to social media to check the legitimacy of a brand and what is better than social media to get the word out about your product or service. People look up to influencers as experienced judges, which is why their review matters.

An interview conducted by Gartner stated that external consultants, including influencers and social media, are beneficial for branding.

How to find the right influencer for your niche:

There are innumerable factors to be kept in mind when you’re looking for an influencer for your product. Look for the most suitable social media channel for your customer base. Importantly, using just one social media platform is not enough. In fact, the majority of businesses use multiple social media channels, as per a report shared by Gartner in 2017.

The above illustration shows that it is prudent to find influencers across multiple social media channels. B2C brands can market their products on nearly every social media platform. For B2B, the best options are Facebook (89% engagement), Linkedin (81%), and Twitter (75%). Examples can be seen in the presence of beauty products being sold on Facebook and Twitter.

Look for the following factors in your filtered influencers you’re considering

• Number of followers
• Number of Followers engaging with content
• Demographics of their audience
• Their niche and interest.

You want an influencer with a large audience that they talk to constantly. That much is given. However, it’s more important to find an influencer with an audience that matches your target demographic. You also have to make sure that they actually care about your brand and the industry in which you work. Influencers are only as operative as their passions. Brands need influencers that regularly interact with their audience, and they care about their opinion.

How to ask an influencer to influence:

There are several different ways to bring an influencer on boars and get them to start to advertise on your behalf. The majority of them ask for financial compensation; there are some alternatives. Let us take a look at some of them:

1. Cost per click:Similar to pay-per-click advertising, this is paying the influencer for every click to your site that you get from each of their posts. This is the most used model and can be easily traced.
2. Cost per acquisition:It is slightly different than the above model; cost per acquisition is compensating the influencer for each new customer acquired through their social media post. This is more effective and a higher but less frequent cost for your company. This gives influencers more motivation to sell your product, but its progress is harder for you to track.
3. Cost per post:This method pays the influencer for each social media post. There’re very few metrics for success here, as you aren’t able to track new leads or conversions that come strictly from the influencer’s post. There’s also limited motivation for the influencer to put much effort into their post.
4. Free Product or service: Offering the influencer a free use of your product can be tremendously helpful. While it will not inspire them to create a large number of posts, it could help them better understand your product, what it can do for their followers, and help them promote your product with more passion.