By Joshua Nite

In case you’re new to the blog, our agency is pretty sold on B2B influencer marketing. Now, when we say influencer marketing, we’re not talking about tanned and toned Gen Z’ers sitting poolside, endorsing your SaaS solution. At least not for your first campaign.

No, influence in B2B is all about value and credibility:

• Your brand lends credibility & new audience to influencers
• Influencers lend credibility & new audience to your brand
• Both audiences get trustworthy, valuable content

As our recent report shows, B2B marketers are steadily increasing their influencer marketing sophistication. But despite the progress, many still think of it as an exclusively upper-funnel tactic.

Just like content marketing, however, influencer marketing works better with a full-funnel approach.  

Here’s how to tailor your influencer mix, topics and content types for each stage of the funnel.

Top of funnel: Reach & Attention

For customers at the beginning of their journey, influencer content is all about reaching as many relevant people as possible, establishing brand credibility, starting conversations, and building relationships. Aim to make a big splash with thought-provoking content from household names (at least, household names with established influence on your topic).

Influencer Mix:

While our research shows that follower counts/audience size isn’t as important as credibility and relevance are, at the top of the funnel you do need folks with a sizable network.

At TopRank, we call these folks “Brandividuals.” That’s not an insult — these are people who have worked hard to build their thought leadership, credibility and audience. They’re keynote speakers, consultants, podcasters and social media geniuses. For top-of-funnel content, brandividuals should be the stars of the mix.

Topic Selection:

As with all top-of-funnel content, your topics will be more high-level, aimed at showing off your knowledge of the industry and the challenges your potential customers are facing. 

Think about topics like:

• • Industry trends. What’s happening now and what’s on the horizon? How can your audience best prepare?
  • Best practices. What processes need fixing in your industry? What are people falling short at?
  • Starting points. What is the first step towards a transformation? How can your audience get the ball rolling?

Gate or no Gate?

If at all possible, keep your ToFu influencer content ungated. Save the lead gen forms for further down the funnel.

Example: DemandBase Assembles a Marketing Superteam

I use this example a lot, but that’s only because it was a) really, really cool and b) got great results for our client, Demandbase. Together, we built an animated comic book to raise awareness …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron