Marketers like you have always been interested in buying access to someone or something’s audience to get the word out about their brand. A few decades ago, we were all purchasing spots in newspapers or on the radio in an attempt to catch our audiences’ attention. Then we started paying Google to access searchers. Next came social media. We paid Facebook and friends, trying to reach their users through paid ads.
All of these methods of reaching your audience still exist to varying degrees. But we have a new point of access, too. Influencer marketing.
When you think about it, influencer marketing is simply paying an individual to “speak” to their audience — their followers — about your B2B brand. Shockingly, one person can have more reach than an entire print publication. It’s no wonder it’s the latest way to get in front of your target prospects. And it’s growing.
Your B2B brand should definitely partake in influencer marketing. Remember: Those who adopted social media advertising before it became mainstream saw a serious first-mover advantage. The same thing could happen with influencer marketing, so you better jump on the bandwagon now.
The only problem? It’s too easy to do the whole influencer thing all wrong. Read on for common misconceptions about influencer marketing your B2B brand can learn from.
Influencer Marketing Is NOT Overly Expensive
Influencer marketing is not paying Kim Kardashian to promote your B2B brand. It’s also not a marketing tool reserved for large, affluent companies.
In reality, there are influencers who will work with nearly every budget size. And they have different numbers and types of followers.
Your B2B brand could launch an influencer marketing campaign for as little as $10,000 per month. That’s generally less than paying for a page in an industry publication, for instance. And influencers tend to have a larger reach than a niche, trade publication magazine.
If influencer marketing still seems too expensive, you can test campaigns with smaller dollar amounts and go from there. You really have nothing to lose.
Influencer Marketing Is NOT Paying a Talking Head to Robotically Promote Your B2B Brand
Subtly is typically the name of the game with influencer marketing. The influencers you work with will not simply talk about and promote your B2B brand unendingly. That would be boring and inauthentic.
Instead, you’ll find an influencer with followers who fit your target audience. Maybe they’re a construction worker with a big construction following. That influencer will then weave in information about your B2B brand in natural ways. They might film themselves working with a piece of your equipment, or doing something else on a job site with equipment strategically placed in the background.
Because influencers aren’t simply filming biased commercials about your product, you can’t expect them to steer clear of your competitors either. It’s okay for an influencer to talk about a competing B2B company. The important part is that they (subtly) get the message across about your brand, too. Their followers will decide which businesses to patronize.
Influencer Marketing Is NOT a One-Man Show
You can’t effectively roll out an influencer marketing campaign on your own. It would be far too time consuming to vet potential influencers and ensure your content reaches the right people.
What if the influencer you select has skeletons in their closet that end up hurting your B2B brand’s reputation? What if their followers aren’t aligned with your target audience? What if they portray your B2B company in a poor light?
You need access to a program like Tagger to help you answer these questions and more. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube users who wish to be influencers turn on the “content creator” setting on their profiles. Then, Tagger collects information about these influencers, confirms their legitimacy, and shows you analytics about their profiles and followers. With these analytics, Tagger even helps you find influencers with followers that are proven to match your target audience.
Tagger’s analytics also show which influencers are getting the best results for your B2B brand. You can add and/or remove influencers from your campaign based on this data — just as you would optimize any other paid media campaign.
Moreover, you have the final say in the content your influencers push out to their followers. They’ll use your strategy to create the content, but you always get to approve it. If that’s not enough, campaigns have to perform well for influencers to continue getting paid, so they’re incentivized to create effective content for your B2B brand.
Add Influencer Marketing to Your B2B Brand’s Media Mix
Tagger is an amazing — but super expensive — tool. Instead of buying it outright, you might need access to it through an agency that can offset the cost. No matter how you decide to take up influencer marketing, it’s an important new tool you should add to your B2B brand’s media mix. Be a trendsetter in the B2B space by adopting influencer marketing before your competitors.
