B2B influencer marketing strategy: why you need one in 2024.

The B2B influencer marketing world has truly taken off in recent years, with micro and nano influencers dominating unique spaces in the market. There is clearly a hunger from B2B audiences for real, genuine content from real, genuine people. Product reviews from end-users rather than salesy, corporate product descriptions, for example. Or physical demonstrations of processes and solutions rather than links to 10-page technical documents. Of course, there has to be a balance, particularly in highly technical sectors, such as manufacturing or engineering – but the crux of the matter remains; your customers want to digest simple, authentic content that adds tangible value to them and their businesses.

B2B Influencer marketing: why you should invest.

Firstly, let’s park the idea of working alongside celebrities. These guys – the Kylie Jenner’s and the like – are mega influencers and will have well over one million followers. And although we’re working with macro-influencers in some spaces – those with 100K to one million followers – we believe there are far more benefits in working with micro-influencers – 10K to 100K followers – and nano-influencers with up to 10k followers. These smaller content creators are niche, but they all share something in common – they have built a specific and engaged community made up of your current or target customers.

With B2B influencer marketing strategies, it’s important to consider your entire strategy as a whole – what is the fundamental value proposition? What position do you hold within the market? What is it that your customers want? Influencer marketing should be an integral part of your communications, working alongside your content marketing, PR and SEO activity. The right influencer will reinforce and demonstrate your core messages in their own style, ultimately adding validity to your wider comms.

To provide a great example, we work with EGO Power+ Europe – a leading battery-powered outdoor equipment provider. As we started to build a B2B influencer marketing strategy for the brand, we came to learn that there are many micro-influencers in the gardening tool space – all of which are using tools on a day-to-day basis. These influencers had built followers and thriving communities of people that were EGO’s primary target audience.

We partnered with several content creators to promote the brand and its products through curated content and authentic video product reviews. In doing this, we have been able to produce genuine and reusable content, reach new target audiences, increase product consideration and build a team of external brand ambassadors. More on this on our influencer marketing capabilities page.

So, how do you create an influencer marketing strategy?
The first rule – like any strategy…

Define the campaign.

What are your goals? Do you want to promote a new product or an entire range? Do you have a unique manufacturing process that differentiates you from competitors? Understand what it is you want to say, this will facilitate more effective influencer research. There are many out there and it’s important to select the right people. Once you’ve found your influencers, spend some time reviewing their content and interactions – this will help you decide on the type of campaign you want to run, whether brand awareness or lead generation, for example.

Macro versus Micro influencer marketing.

We have already stated that macro influencers may not be the best option. Although the sight of all those followers is appealing, you must ask yourself the questions – will I be communicating directly with my audience? Will my content be lost or diluted? With micro and nano influencers, you’ll have the opportunity to delve deeper into the influencers channel and build a real picture of who is engaged with the community and more specifically, which content resonates.

Influencer management: briefings to contracts.

Releasing the creative reigns can be tough – but this is the key to influencer marketing success. If you’ve chosen the right influencers and discussed the right type of content – bar a request to remain in line with brand guidelines – you must give the influencer autonomy to create the content. After all, it’s their channel. This is where great briefs come in handy. It’s your responsibility to be explicit and deliver a product brief (for example) that is clear, simple to follow and lays out the key messages you want the influencer to push. Furthermore, understanding what is expected is important, which is where contracts come in. Consider the volume of content you want the influencer to produce and explore the possibilities of exclusivity with your brand. These contracts are a formality that will help at the beginning but as time passes, you’ll find that certain influencers will build an intrinsic loyalty – as we discovered recently for EGO.

Tracking results.

This is two-fold. Firstly, the hard metrics are essential – the views, reactions, comments and impressions. But secondly, what is also important is the response from the community, are they engaged with the content? Have they asked more questions? Is there real, genuine interest in your product and brand because of this video?

As a rather simple summary – an effective B2B influencer marketing campaign is reliant on great content, trust and most importantly relationships.

If you’d like to know more about building an influencer network that you can rely on, get in touch with me via LinkedIn or email us at hello@wyattinternational.com.