5 Ways B2B Marketers Sabotage Influencer Marketing Success

It is the nature of marketers to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts. The problem with this approach to marketing optimization is that it assumes effective execution of marketing strategies, which we all know, is often not the case. Poor execution is as often at fault of poor performance as the effectiveness or appropriateness of the tactic.

For nearly 10 years we’ve been engaged in influencer collaboration for B2B content marketing programs and have worked with a wide range of B2B brands during that time. We’ve fielded multiple times that in inquiries and questions from B2B marketers about influencer marketing as well as conducting the first ever dedicated research study into B2B influencer marketing. This depth of experience has provided unique and far reaching insight into how B2B brands understand and implement content marketing efforts in partnership with influencers – good, bad and otherwise.

While the B2B marketing industry has evolved and become more sophisticated with influencer adoption rates on the rise, old habits and bad habits often remain. Our focus on influence as a B2B marketing discipline has enabled us to identify the best practices as well as the ways in which B2B marketers continue to sabotage the success.

Avoiding bad practices is a strong first step to ensuring investments in influencer marketing programs result in expected returns. Here are 5 of the most common things B2B marketers do to sabotage their influencer marketing success:

1. Waiting to Recruit

The best time to recruit an army is not on the first day of the war.

That’s probably not the best analogy, but approaching influencers as an afterthought vs. as part of the planning of a marketing effort is a big mistake. For B2B brands that are new to working with influencers, it is important to understand that influencer recruitment takes time (and skill). Being able to engage the right mix of influencers on a very short timeframe without pre-existing relationships is unlikely. That’s a problem if a B2B marketing effort is counting on those influencers to add credibility and promotion to the campaign.

Best practice: The time to start recruiting influencers is long before you need to activate them for a content collaboration. This is especially true where influencer engagement will be mostly or all organic vs. paid. B2B marketers need to put their empathy hats on and think about how to create value and sense of urgency for the influencer through relationship building vs. thinking influencers are simply waiting to work for free when the B2B marketer emails them.

There are ways to fast-track relationship building with influencers and we use those strategies regularly within our influencer marketing practice at TopRank Marketing. But doing so draws upon many years of experience, established processes, technology and strategy. Without that experience, B2B marketers should think about following, interacting with and creating value for influencers that they want to activate months in the future in order to get the highest quality contributions, and enthusiastic/authentic promotion.