Modern marketing largely depends on social media as the instrument for raising awareness about the products and services and bringing new customers. Yet, how to be visible on social media? Does it work equally for the B2B and B2C sectors? There are multiple strategies and techniques.
However, one of the most useful and widely used is influencer marketing. If your target audience is business people, you can apply to B2B influencers. Simultaneously, if you operate in the B2C market, it can also work for large audiences.
In this article, you will learn more about this type of marketing, consider the key influencer categories and see how to find B2B influencers and B2C ones.
Why Use It?
The main reason for using influencer marketing lies in providing social proof to the target audience. Once people known in the industry promote or support your product with this tactic, it improves trust in your product, raises awareness about you, and sets the ground for lead generation.
At the same time, you can promote your content by picking to approach the right leaders in the industry. For instance, sharing valuable case studies or insights with opinion leaders can interest the audience and invite them to join your channels, like social media pages. That way, you add to your sales cycle and invite people to the customer journey set by the brands.
In some cases, especially if you reach bloggers, you can improve your SEO strategy, getting quality backlinks, where authority plays a vital role.
In the end, every placed link leading to your product or brand contributes to getting traffic to your website, meaning that you may get more conversions.
Influencer Marketing Basics
Once you define that you need influencer marketing to grow your business, it is crucial to set it right from the beginning. To have successful influencer marketing, B2B or B2C marketers must focus on the following steps.
Ensure you have great content
Before starting a new campaign, make sure that your content is good. Why? There would be no effect if you find B2B influencers or celebrities to promote your website or page and it has poor content. You should interest your audience and provide value.
Besides, influencers like to work with good vision and content production teams. It would help if you understood that their reputation and impact are at stake there. Thus, it is in their interest to work with promising brands that can support their content efforts.
Determine the goal
Always reflect on the goal you have. At different stages of your business development, you may have various objectives. You may want to enlarge the existing community, launch a new product, or enter a new market. For each purpose, you may need a different influencer to look for.
The influencer marketing examples tell us that specific plans need B2B influencers; others require approaching niche experts or just bloggers. Thus, determine what you are trying to achieve and set this as a ground.
Reflect on your audience’s interests
When you start any influencer marketing campaign, make sure that you put your audience’s interests and needs at the centre. The primary explanation is that your goal is to find people who share them and need your product to help them.
You need to study your buyer persona and look for influencers who your audience will see as an authority. For instance, marketing specialists have their leaders in the industry whom they follow for tips and advice.
Do research
It is impossible to do proper influencer marketing without investigating the trends, opinion leaders, and target audience. In this regard, you should identify the criteria for the good influencer, their influence, and the topics they cover. Besides, you should ask yourself whether your product would fit into someone’s content. So, yes, a lot of research should be done to understand whom and how to approach.
Usually, after you do the research, you need to contact influencers. The easiest way to do so is by writing them via direct messages or emails that you find via marketing tools. You can apply an email address finder allowing you to search emails by domain name or LinkedIn URL.
Yet, picking and contacting the right influencers is another significant part of influencer marketing. Let’s check the next chapter to know which one can be a git for you.
Influencer Categories: How to Pick the Right Influencer
How to find B2B influencers or thought leaders for the B2C niche? First, you need to define the category that will suit your goal and audience. The influencer categories are separated by the number of followers and the impact they produce.
Here are the main types that you may identify based on many influencer marketing examples:
Mega and macro-influencers
The first group is about celebrities and highly visible people on digital platforms, while the second group refers to people who are celebrities but on a different level; they may have less than 1 million followers. Notably, the price for publication from opinion leaders from these groups is very high. Yet, they are to boost recognition and brand image significantly.
Middle-level influencers
One can describe this category as the one that consists of those influencers who have more than 50 000 followers. This option can be an excellent starting point for presenting a new product or entering a new market for entrepreneurs and business actors.
The costs of social proof provided by them can be costly. However, the quality of leads and engagement they bring is high. Why? They know the industry and know-how to produce appealing content.
Micro-influencers
This particular group is said to offer the greatest efficiency for the brands. The reasons lie in their engagement and credibility. They value their reputation and remain the working professionals if we talk about influencer marketing B2B marketers seek.
Besides, they have more profound and more active connections within the niche they are operating in. This category offers higher chances for products to be engaged due to a more homogeneous audience.
Nano-influencers
If you are a small business, nano influencers are likely to be your choice. Why? First, they want less money, and you can create partnerships with them that will bring you long-term benefits. Moreover, their audience engages with the posts frequently, meaning cooperation can produce more quality leads and better ROI.
How and where to find influencers?
Notably, you can use different ways to find influencers. Large companies use agencies because they have funds and a brand reputation. You can use outreach based on your research if you want a less costly approach.
The research takes place within particular databases or across different platforms. The databases allow you to search by the hashtags and the lifestyle. Simultaneously, you can search targets on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok or their websites. Some marketing tools, including email finders and leads databases, can help extract their email address.
Much depends on your research ability and how you will use the available tools at your disposal. However, the outreach methods allow you to send messages in bulk, meaning you can reach a large pool of B2B influencers.
Tips on Finding and Contacting Influencers
Lastly, specific tips can help you communicate with and do research on the opinion leaders or content creators. Many of them focus on the principles to follow when approaching different influencer categories:
Be an expert. Firstly, it is crucial to be an expert to project authority and credibility when communicating. It applies to approaching both B2B influencers and B2C opinion leaders.
Hashtags and keywords. Also, use hashtags and keywords to find your influencer marketing targets. That way, you will see what trends are currently in the industry and the ones becoming popular. For you, it is a chance to identify a new self-made opinion leader.
Test your subject lines. Examples of B2B outreach show that your subject lines are crucial for the response rate. Thus, make sure you develop different templates, test them, and compare the results they bring.
Develop relations. It is essential to create partnerships with influencers that will have long-term effects. In this regard, you can engage with a b2b influencer content on social media first, comment on it, and then find the occasion to write to its author with the offer.
Don’t Be pushy. Lastly, when you do not know the opinion leader and use, for instance, the LinkedIn email plugin to extract emails, people may find your email intrusive. That’s why you need to be polite and offer value first. Keep in mind that you need to develop relations.
