How the Most Successful B2B Marketers Work with Influencer Marketing Agencies

How to Work with B2B Influencer Marketing Agencies

As B2B companies look to create more authentic and meaningful experiences for digital first customers, content marketing co-created with industry and internal influencers has enabled many organizations to deliver information that is more empathetic, useful and inspiring.

Growth B2B brands are seeing the influence piece of the puzzle as an opportunity to better attract and engage increasingly distracted and distrustful customers. Many of those ambitious B2B marketers are looking for ways to accelerate their use of influence both internally and externally.

Since our first paid B2B influencer engagement in 2012 with a Fortune 500 brand that is still our client today, we’ve seen an acceleration in B2B marketers seeking expertise, technology and best practices for engaging influencers. In 2022 those solutions come in many forms ranging from independent B2B influencer marketing consultants, to software platforms that also sell services to specialist agencies with teams dedicated to the strategy, tactics, technology, measurement and scale of B2B influencer marketing programs.

For those B2B brands that prefer to have a trusted agency partner capable of delivering a full suite of services, there are questions to be answered. Just use Google to search “b2b influencer marketing” and you’ll see many of them:

What is a B2B influencer?
Does B2B influencer marketing work?
How do you do B2B influencer marketing?
Is influence a B2B or B2C strategy?

B2B marketers are searching for more than the topic of B2B influencer marketing. They want to find:

B2B influencer marketing examples
B2B influencer marketing in 2022
B2B influencer marketing case studies
B2B influencer marketing statistics
B2B influencer marketing on LinkedIn
The best B2B influencer campaigns

For our part, TopRank Marketing’s B2B Marketing Blog has been publishing answers to these questions for many years. One of the ways we bring those answers together is through our State of B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, which you can sign up for advanced access to here.

On the topic of B2B marketers working with agencies for influencer marketing, our most recent research found that only 22% of B2B marketers surveyed are currently using an agency to manage their influencer marketing program.

But not all B2B marketers are equal in their marketing maturity, sophistication or performance. We found that 44% of the most successful B2B marketers work with an agency to manage their program and 67% of the least successful B2B marketers do not work with an agency to manage their influencer marketing program.

One of the top challenges B2B marketers have with influencer marketing is finding the right influencers. So it was no surprise that we found that 56% of the most successful B2B marketers surveyed say working with an agency to source influencers is effective.

As seen by the Google questions above, many B2B marketers are not clear on what a B2B influencer is, so finding one would then understandably be difficult. And if you can find the right influencers, how can an influencer marketing program have any chance of success? Incidentally, we’ve covered …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog