Build Your B2B Influencer Marketing Blueprint
Insights, Case Studies and Practical Resources to Create Your Blueprint
The world of B2B Marketing is changing. With brand trust at an all-time low, and budgets being squeezed left, right and centre, it is becoming a very difficult time for B2B Marketers to deliver a successful strategy. Queue the power of influencers… They can transform brand narratives into audience-centric storytelling by creating content, speaking at events partnering on marketing strategy. Leveraging both internal and external experts can help drive significantly greater brand awareness, engagement and leads. This resource is specifically designed to help midsize and enterprise B2B brands navigate the world of Influencer Marketing. We’ve gathered stories of B2B Influencer Marketing in action, materials to guide your way and insights from leading industry experts.
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Build Your Blueprint
The key to B2B Influencer Marketing success is understanding what may drive your program, areas to integrate into your existing strategy and how you can have measurable impact. Getting started is always the hardest part of any new campaign, so we have created a survey that guides you through the key factors that build an influencer campaign. The survey takes under 10 minutes to complete, and will provide us with the insights to help build you a comprehensive approach. This will be the start of our consultation, with tailored and bespoke details provided through your survey inputs, we will be able to create a personalised, recommended Blueprint for your Influencer Marketing campaign.
Leverage these curated resources and lean on the expertise of the marketing experts refenced to guide you through your answers and get an idea of what a successful Influencer Marketing campaign looks like.
Exclusive B2B Influencer Marketing Insights
There will be more video content coming your way soon.
Keep your eyes peeled for expert insights from more global brands, influencers and specific case studies!
3 Key Elements for a Foolproof Strategy
We have identified many challenges that brands often face when implementing Influencer Marketing and have categorised these into three key areas that are critical to nailing down a foolproof strategy. Our three key elements that are critical for success are: leading with your objectives, integrating influencers into your existing activities, and identifying the right influencer partner. Let’s dive into these sections a little more…
Lead with Your Objectives
A recent survey of B2B marketers from the team at Onalytica found that 79% of B2B marketers wanted to work more with influencers. However, the largest constraint was that marketers did not know how to activate influencers. We believe that to develop an effective strategy you must lead with your objectives, find your focus, and use this to create a business case.
As tempting as it may be to focus on vanity metrics as they feel most within reach, you must think of the success outcomes that are most important to your business and can have the biggest impact. It is important to think to yourself, ‘what are my most important KPIs’ and ‘what are my biggest hurdles’ as the answers to these should help you to develop your approach.
Objectives you can drive with Influencer Marketing include increasing brand awareness and share of voice, creating trust in your brand, reaching your target audience and improving your customer experience through personalised storytelling. By understanding what objectives are most critical for your business, we can customize the overall program strategy, recommended tactics and the target influencers to drive success.
“You must define clear objectives and KPIS to nail down your strategy. If you can find ways to tie metrics to your other goals then influencers are a clear fit for your strategy.”
“Define your goals first and then figure out what kind of program you will do. From this you can co-create to come up with the right content.”
Integrate Influencers into Existing Marketing Activities
You shouldn’t view influencer marketing as something totally new and separate; instead, view it as a tool to elevate what you are already doing. Having this holistic view cements the importance of each activity and ensures that influencer marketing is core to your overall objectives. When you’re beginning your influencer marketing journey, it’s important to deliver incremental, measurable results to show proof of concept. Often, the best way to do this is to integrate influencers into existing marketing plans as you’ll more easily present the results as you have something to benchmark against.
We recommend that you prioritise your top marketing tactics and channels and then identity 2-3 opportunities where you think influencers could work alongside this. For example, there could be an event, blog or other content campaigns you have coming up where adding an influencer activation could maximise your results and bring an exciting twist to get you noticed.
“Look at it as a holistic mindset; figure out how to best leverage ALL audiences by integrating influencer marketing into other initiatives. Identify your big initiatives and then plan out the next six months or so.”
Identify the Right Influencer Partners
Finding the right influencer to work with isn’t always easy, and it’s not as simple as just picking the person with the biggest following. Demand Gen Report has found that 68% of buyers prefer credible content from industry influencers, yet many brands are struggling to engage the B2B influencers they want to partner with. That is typically the case for two reasons: they are focused on the wrong influencer partners that don’t have a shared POV and they do not understand what matters most to the industry influencers.
At Onalytica, we have a network of over 1 million influencers in our data base and have a team dedicated to researching and finding the perfect influencer for your niche. We have developed a framework that assesses four critical elements when pulling together your target influencer list: Topical Alignment & Brand Safety, Tier Matching, Audience Breakdown and Qualitative Data Collection.
When thinking about what influencer you want to partner with, you have to picture it as building a long term, mutually beneficial relationship with an industry expert, rather than a transactional event. You should consider the channels and types of content they are experts in as well as the reasons an influencer would want to partner with you too. This will help to ensure that their audience resonates with your own and that the content produced hits all the KPIs you are targeting.
Don’t forget that some of the best influencers might be right under your nose! You may not realise but you can have some incredibly powerful voices within your organisation that are ready to advocate for your company. Make sure not to overlook this opportunity as brand messages are much more believable when they come from an employee or influencer.
“Don’t be fooled by big numbers on social as that does not convert to your own successes. Just because someone achieves huge engagement on a post does not mean that their audience is going to consume your content the same way. You have to ensure that the influencers audience aligns with your own.”
“It is important that the influencer understands and cares about the company and product so that they can be trusted to do their job and speak confidently to the audience.”
B2B Influencer Compensation Report
Offering influencers, a reason to collaborate that is beyond budget is key to creating a long lasting relationship. Despite this, the all-important question of how much you should pay an influencer still remains. As any emerging industry, there are no set rules for how brands and influencers should engage, resulting in influencer being unsure on how to set their rates, and brands not knowing how much budget to allocate. We have gathered data through our marketplace, MyOnalytica, for this report that answers those questions and sets guidelines for both brands and influencers.
Let’s Collaborate and Build Your Blueprint
Hopefully these resources have acted as a guide help you through your thought process and you are now ready to start your Blueprint.
To create your Blueprint, please fill in the survey linked below, and you’ll be on your way to receiving your recommended plan. The survey will allow our team to develop a customised approach for your brand’s B2B Influencer marketing program that is designed to help you get started, get buy-in and generate results!
Recommended Reading
The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing
This playbook, contributed to by over 250 of the leading global experts and industry influencers, is created to equip B2B marketers with all the tools and guidance needed to partner with industry influencers. It gives a step-by-step guide to run best practice programs, covering all things from how to write a business case to measuring frameworks and scaling programs.
This playbook is designed to help you address the challenges marketers face today, and to give you a clear framework on how you can implement influencers no matter your maturity.
2022 State of Social Media Marketing Industry
We surveyed 120 B2B Marketers to share their insights so that you can better understand the maturity of the industry and benchmark your strategy against your peers and stay ahead of the curve with your strategy.
As the social media landscape continues to evolve, B2B Marketers must adapt and change the way they create content. With an ever-increasing number of decision makers and social platforms available for content creation, it is more important than ever that social media strategies are cut-through and drive business outcomes.
2023 Marketing Budgets: How to do More with Less
We’ve all been there. Your stakeholders have big goals and creative ideas for moving the needle on the marketing metrics that matter most. Unfortunately, the available budget doesn’t always match what’s needed to achieve what’s been set out.
So, how do the best marketers find innovative ways to reach marketing objectives without breaking the bank? Here, marketers have a discussion and share creative ways to do more with less, finding budget elsewhere and re-directing budget to more cost-effective tactics.
Advocacy and Influence for B2B Exec Leaders
Most brands have a social presence, and over half of the global population is now on social media. With so much noise online, brands struggle to be heard and connect with their audience in a meaningful way. This is where Exec Leaders and Employee Advocates make all the difference…
The most trusted source for researching B2B buyer decisions is “peer or colleagues”. People trust and connect to people. This video series helps Exec Leaders, SMEs and Advocacy Program Leads understand how to nurture advocates and the steps to take so ensure they are supporting the, in the right way.