How to Find Success with Influencer Marketing in 2022
What is influencer marketing?
The term ‘Influencer’ refers to a person who has an established following on various social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter and the ability to influence decisions of their audience, including, but not limited to the buying decisions. They usually have a significant number of followers who will listen to what they say and take their advice.
The objective of influencer marketing is to get customers to buy a product or service because they trust the influencer or want to resemble them.
What is B2B Influencer Marketing?
B2B influencer marketing is a method for B2B companies to reach their target audience and promote their products or services by leveraging the standing of influencers online. Influencer marketing is not a new concept and has been used in B2B marketing for many years. But, with the rapid rise of social media, it’s become more accessible to identify and get into contact with potential influencers that can help increase brand awareness.
The goal of B2B influencer marketing is to increase customer engagement and conversion rates. This type of marketing has been shown to be more effective than other forms such as banner ads and email campaigns because it targets the customer’s emotions. This is why we see many companies moving towards this type of advertising. The strategy has been adopted and proven to be successful in many different industries and has helped companies increase brand awareness and attract new customers in a cost-effective manner. For example, the management platform, Okta utilises video testimonials created by influencers for their website.
The Value of Influencer Marketing Campaigns
The use of influencers can be very beneficial for businesses because they have a high level of credibility with their followers and are able to reach a large audience organically.
The benefits of B2B influencer marketing include increased customer engagement, higher conversion rates, less cost than traditional advertising methods, and access to a large number of potential clients.
How to Utilise Influencer Marketing
Find an influencer that is relevant to your product or service:
One of the most crucial aspects of achieving success with influencer marketing is identifying the right influencers that match your service and brand values. If you’re a SaaS company promoting online surveys, for example, you’re unlikely to generate a lot of leads by using a generic influencer due to the discrepancy in the target audience.
When searching for an influencer to promote your product or service, identifying your target audience will also prove crucial to your success in influencer marketing. You need to know who you want your message to reach and what kind of channels they spend the most time on – is it LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube? This can be done by researching the social media profiles of influencers’ followers, and seeing if the profiles of those followers match the target audience you want to reach.
Think like your customer:
In order to create successful campaigns on social media using an influencer, you need to find influencers that align with your brand values, so that the influencer marketing partnership is authentic.
Then you need to check if they have a relevant following.
You can match the follower profiles against your buyer personas – this involves knowing their interests and demographics, – to check that these are also aligned.
Agree on the details of your partnership in advance:
With an increase in businesses leveraging social media influencers to promote their brand, influencer partnerships are steadily becoming an integral part of a business’s marketing strategy, but there is still a lack of clarity on how to work effectively with influencers. That is why it is important to know how to approach potential influencers you’d like to work with.
Once you have identified an influencer you’d like to work with, outline the type of content you’d like them to produce (video, posts, stories, etc.) and how often it needs to be produced, as well as the reward on offer – it will enable you to align your expectations from the partnership.
By Jason Goodma
We at Yay!Starter has seen firsthand the positive impact of influencer marketing, as we supported our client Scholarcy, an AI-powered EdTech startup by employing influencer marketing to increase social media engagement.
By utilising social media influencers on the largest platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, the campaigns we produced for Scholarcy reached over 27,000 accounts and increased sign-ups to the premium version of the Scholarcy summarizer tool by 33%.
With over half (53%) of B2B marketers citing that working with influencers increased new leads, with a staggering 90% of B2B companies expected to increase their influencer marketing budget, implementing influencer marketing in your 2022 marketing strategy is an authentic method to boost brand awareness, increase engagement and attract new customers.
If you’re looking to deploy influencer marketing in your business, feel free to get in touch with the Yay!Starter Marketing team to see how we can assist in expanding your digital presence.