Improving Influencer Marketing Efforts for B2B Companies
Companies in the B2B industry are missing out on a lot of revenue and resources if they haven’t started investing in influencer marketing yet because most of the consumers in the market tend to look for solution recommendations and suggestions from other people in the industry that know more than they do. If a company decides to promote itself and its solutions on its own, a lot of these consumers are going to overlook the business and its solutions because it’s not being recommended by anyone else, or at the very least, the company will have to invest a lot more efforts in persuading these potential consumers to make a purchase. However, when a company in the B2B industry starts to invest in influencer marketing, it can improve its reach and credibility, which automatically generates more leads and consumers.
Influencer
According to many studies thus far, consumers these days tend to put a lot of trust and faith into earned media, which includes recommendations and suggestions for solutions from people they know or are familiar with, compared to any other marketing effort a company can pursue. That means companies will have to choose an influencer that the target audience is already familiar with and even trusts that person. There are many different types of influencers that companies can decide to work with, from influencers that are popular in specific and niche markets, to celebrities that have millions of followers. However, the best choices for a company in the B2B industry would be people that already operate within the market or the industry as the business, customers or employees that use the solutions from the company already, industry thought leaders or bloggers, as well as anyone that works in a field that complements the company’s own.
Communication
Most of the time, when companies invest in influencer marketing, especially companies in the B2B industry, they tend to want to use the influencers they’re working with as something of a company representative in terms of their performance. However, that’s not the main or the best way that companies should be pursuing working with influencers on marketing campaigns. The goal of working with an influencer on a marketing campaign is for the company to gain more credibility with the target audience with the influencer working as a third-party validator of the business and its solutions. That means companies shouldn’t be persuading any of the influencers they’re working with to stick to a specific script or only state previously approved comments to their followers. Instead of doing that, companies should communicate with the influencer about the company’s goals and how the influencer can help the business achieve those goals. Then, the influencer might have their own ideas on the best way to engage the target audience and get them interested in the business and its solutions, because, at the end of the day, they’re also a specialist in a particular field.