Most B2B brands aren't using influencer marketing the way they could be.
Business-to-business (B2B) influencer marketing (IM) isn’t new, but a recent report from TopRank Marketing shows many companies, large and small, are still struggling with it, even after all of these years.
The 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report, the first of its kind, takes an in-depth look at brands, B2B influencers, and case studies to highlight industry best practices and offer recommendations for those working to develop their B2B influencer marketing strategies.
Digging into the results, one can quickly see a trend in B2B marketers who are optimistic about influencer marketing yet not confident about their ability to execute.
So, why the disconnect?
I had an opportunity to talk with report author Lee Odden, CEO and co-founder of TopRank Marketing, to dig a bit deeper.
Q: Why aren’t brands confident about their ability to execute influencer marketing?
A: Working with influencers is relatively new for many B2B brands. So there are misperceptions about how it works, lack of documented strategy, and low adoption rates of technology. A couple key factors include:
- Many marketers view influencer engagement through the lens of advertising, as a transactional arrangement: promote our product or service and we’ll pay you. That might work in B2C, but in B2B, influence is a relationship business. Influencers want to work with brands they can believe in and that their audiences can get value from.
- 39% of marketers say their top challenge with influencer marketing is the process is too manual. As a new discipline for many, processes are not refined and 41% of marketers are not using any technology to identify and manage influencers which creates efficiency, quality and impact challenges.
Q: According to the research you’ve done, brands value B2B IM. Why?
A: With the pandemic causing a loss of in-person B2B tactics—field marketing, in-person trade shows, and experiential marketing efforts, for example—much of where buyers focus for information are digital channels. This is exactly where influencers provide valuable and trusted perspectives.
Trust, reach and engagement are always challenges for B2B brands, and collaborating with trusted industry experts that have the attention and respect of buyer audiences has proven to be an effective solution.
Q: Do you think brands struggle with identifying influencers? What about maintaining long term relationships?
A: Influencer identification is one of the top challenges for B2B marketers—most use subjective sources like their own networks or recommendations from others without data validation. Only 35 percent are using software.
However, twice as many of the most successful influencer marketers use software to identify influencers, compared to the least successful.
Many B2B marketers also have challenges managing ongoing influencer relationships because they tend only to engage for intermittent campaigns. In fact, only 19 percent of B2B marketers are running ongoing influencer engagement programs. Without a persistent effort to build relationships, brands are at a disadvantage.
Q: We know from the report that 60 percent of marketers who implement ongoing, or Always-On, programs are very successful, versus only 5 percent who run periodic campaigns—so why do so many brands only focus on one-off campaigns?
A: Most B2B marketing planning and budgeting is around the campaign model. And that creates certain expectations about how resources are allocated and the way performance of the marketing investment is evaluated.
The problem is that the customer’s focus on solving their problem is persistent until it is solved—they’re not going to wait for a campaign to make a decision. B2B brands stuck in the status quo of campaigns miss out on being the best answer for their customers with the kind of industry advocacy and content that can only be achieved through ongoing relationship building and influencer activations.
Q: What stats in the survey do you think brands should pay the most attention to? Why?
A: 74 percent of B2B marketers agree that influencer marketing improves customer experience with the brand, yet only 19 percent are running ongoing programs.
Customer experience is a top focus for B2B brands and yet most B2B marketers don’t follow through on their confidence in how much influence plays a role. Developing relationships, community and ongoing content activations with credible industry experts serves customers by giving them the trusted information they want, creates credibility and consideration for the brand, and inspires influencers to promote and engage.
Many B2B brands know anecdotally what Odden and this report prove: they’re not using B2B influencer marketing to anywhere near its full potential. By implementing software to help with influencer identification and tracking, ditching the campaign model for ongoing influencer engagement, and continually nurturing those influencer relationships, B2B marketers can start getting the results they want from this powerful strategy.
