How B2B brands can leverage Influencers

With the extraordinary popularity of Influencer Marketing in the consumer marketing space, it’s no wonder that B2B marketers are taking notice and starting to leverage the strategy for themselves.

So what is a B2B brand?

A B2B brand is a business who’s customer is another business - it’s Business To Business.

Examples of well known B2B companies include:

• Xero

• WeWork

• Dropbox

• DocuSign

• Upwork

• Canva

When they are crafting their sales and marketing messages, they are trying to onboard new companies to their products and services.

With this in mind, it’s understandable that figuring out which influencers to use to attract new companies into your business might be a stretch.

But all it takes is a change in perspective.

B2B marketers are NOT in fact marketing to other businesses. There is ALWAYS a human on the other end of the transaction, and they are the ones you need to influence.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what person in what job role is your target customer.

It might be:

• The marketing team

• The HR manager

• The bookkeeper

• The social media manager

Once you identify the human you are trying to target inside the organistion, things will start to fall into place.

Now we ask ourselves, where does that person go to find their information? Where do they go to identify new trends and best practices in their industry?

Once we know this, then we can find the influencers!

Example One

Let’s take Xero as an example. One of their target customers is small businesses. The human? Small business owners.

So what does a small business owner care about and where do they go for information?

Oftentimes, they look to other business owners.

So Xero can actually use high profile ‘founders’ as their influencers.

Take our founder for example @daniellelewis.io. Her Instagram feed is full of business tips and inspiration, and in fact our business Scrunch uses Xero as our accounting software of choice. So if Danielle shared an Instagram post talking about how Xero had helped her be more productive and streamline finance admin to help grow the business, then the business owners who follow her might be motivated to check out Xero for their own business.

Want to find ‘founder’ influencers in seconds?

Simply type in keywords like ‘founder’ or ‘ceo’ or ‘small business owner’ into the search bar. Easy peasy.

Example Two

Canva is another example of a software product who wants companies to purchase a ‘Canva Pro’ subscription for their teams.

In this case, Canva is targeting the social media managers within these organisations or marketing teams.

So who does a social media manager or marketer follow for information and inspiration about their roles?

Marketing experts. If you haven’t heard about Expert Influencers you can read more here.

A marketing expert will have a blog and social channels and share the latest information on marketing trends with their followers. Canva might use a marketing Influencers like @smexaminer to share how easy Canva makes creating social posts.

Want to find 'marketing’ influencers in seconds?

Simply type in keywords like marketing or social media into the search bar. Easy peasy.

If you are a B2B brand, start thinking about where your customers go to for their industry information and inspiration and what Influencers serve that up to them!