There is good news and bad news for companies looking to work with social media influencers for their business-to-business marketing strategy in 2020.
Let me start with the good news: B2B influencer marketing has become “a thing”; it is alive and well and available as a tactic to use as part of your marketing strategy.
The bad news: unlike B2C influencer marketing, it revolves around small and midsize influencers (also called nano- and micro-influencers) who are almost exclusively marketing-related professionals.
My analysis of the state of B2B influencer marketing looked at 1,000+ LinkedIn and Twitter posts by a select sample of 10 B2B influencers and found some surprising results. Based on that analysis, I’ve drawn some conclusions and recommendations.
Read on for some high-level conclusions and five best-practices I recommend for B2B marketers.
1. DO continue to seek the right influencer for your marketing strategy
It’s been proven again and again that your audience wants to hear about what you do from people they trust, not from you. If 83% of consumers say so about their purchasing decisions, it applies even more to corporate executives: 91% say they have made a purchasing decision based on word-of-mouth.
Because social media has become the public square in many ways, we all get some information and listen to influencers on social media to some extent. Although our attention is limited, in general, influencers do get more of our attention.