How to Best Work with a B2B Influencer Marketing Agency

In the B2B world, influence isn’t determined by how you look in a bathing suit or how many exotic locales you can Instagram from. B2B influencers are subject matter experts, practitioners with a proven track record, and consultants with their finger on the pulse of a specific industry.

It’s also trickier to find and engage influencers in the B2B world. It’s not about finding someone with a high follower count and cutting them a check—B2B influencer marketing is based on building relationships with these truly influential titans of business.

In short, B2B influencer marketing is a specialized discipline that requires knowledge and experience that may be outside of your team’s area of expertise. As B2B influencer marketing gets more popular and influencers more choosy about whom they work with, it makes sense to secure some outside help.

In our 2022 B2B Influencer Marketing Report, over half of the enterprise-level respondents said working with an agency to source influencers was effective, versus just 27% who found success with software tools alone.

Here’s how your team can prepare to work effectively with a B2B influencer marketing agency (like, say, TopRank Marketing!).

How to Do Your Best Work with a B2B Influencer Marketing Agency

Getting ‘ready’ to work with an agency is about both mindset and process. Some of the homework here will be about realigning your ideas about influencer marketing. Some of it is gathering information and making preliminary decisions that will speed up your onboarding process.

Expand your definition of influence:

I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog that B2B influencer marketing isn’t about follower count alone. And I plan to keep saying it as long as marketing teams still run in terror from anyone with a four-digit follower count.

The most influential person to your niche audience might be someone with a small but hyper-specialized audience. For example, if you’re marketing to software developers, their thought leaders won’t have massive followings on Instagram or Facebook. Instead, they will be posting code to Github, participating in developer forums, and speaking at events like DrupalCon.

When your agency partner delivers a list of influencers, be mentally prepared to see beyond network size, and instead look at relevance and resonance. Does this person speak to your specific audience? Does that audience take action based on what they say? Then that’s your most valuable influencer.

Identify your internal experts:

Your employees, executives, and subject matter experts can serve as valuable brand advocates and influencers themselves. These people will be essential for co-creating content with external influencers, as well as promoting the content to their own networks.

An agency will want to put these internal experts to good use throughout the content creation and amplification process, so it helps to start with a few in mind. Look for the people in your organization who:

Source:: Top Rank Blog