Why we need Influencer Marketing?

In content marketing, all we needed to focus was on what matters to our target customers.

But since the content is getting overloaded and every day each customer is deluged with numerous subscriptions, it is a time we also start focusing on who matters to them?

In general, people trust their friends, relatives and their word of mouth opinions than marketers like us. It is because they are very much aware of the fact that marketers exist to sell something to them.

In case of B2B, many believe that most important phase of your content marketing is when your targets come in contact with your content for the first time.

But it is partially true.

Usually, it happens when the brand name gets registered in target’s’ mind through the content he is consuming. To make that brand absorption remarkable, we need to have our brand message portrayed through a reliable and trustworthy source.

That is exactly where the Influencer Marketing comes into the picture. When the target is familiar with the Who of the content distribution, the trust factor will be considerably higher in terms of brand awareness.

But in Influencer Marketing, major roadblock occurs when we try to search for relevant influencers related to our B2B segment.

In case of B2C, we have fairly efficient influencer discovery tools like Buzzsumo, Topsy etc. But when it comes to B2B, the influencers we find there are pretty generic and will be out of sync with our targets.

These are the three tools which are pretty good for B2B space if effectively used can leverage greater results.

1. LinkedIn Advanced Search

In B2B, if you are not on LinkedIn you are nowhere on social media. It has 467 million users and most of them are from B2B space. Hence, I consider the primary tool for Influencer search is LinkedIn. It is preferable to have a Business Plus Feature since a free version puts a limit on the number of profile visits we can make

Using it

Before using it, make an excel of designation, companies, keywords and locations you need to focus on. For ex: If I have to search for VP of Marketing in Banking firms like JP Morgan, Wells Fargo etc who handle Marketing Operations in the United States, I have to input:

Keywords: Marketing Operations
Title: VP Marketing
Check JP Morgan, Wells Fargo etc in company list
Check the United States in Location

Once you get the results, if you are on paid version, you will be able to directly send a mail to the influencer of your preference.

2. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is one of the most efficient tools to search Influencers on Twitter. Being a product of Moz, it offers a remarkable feature of searching among your own followers on twitter.

Select the Search Bios tab and enter the keywords you want to be searched in twitter profiles. Once you get the results, it offers options to filter the profiles among your followers, profiles you are following.

Most effective feature is that you can sort the profiles on the basis of their Social Authority, No. of followers etc

3. Buzzstream Influencer Tool

Followerwonk has a very primitive UI and also it has limitations to search by the activity of an influencer. To remedy that, Buzzstream is a tool which offers deeper and insightful filters based on categories, the range of domain authority, location and activity.

One unique feature of this tool is that it has the listing of blog articles that influencer has authored. This will right away give you a context to interact with the influencers.

In B2B, the content is consumed and analyzed with the greater seriousness and the influencer will be scrutinized if the opinions and facts he shared seem to be ruinous for the business prospects.

Hence, the influencers we chose should be relevant to our target and fed with the exact details of the brand we are asking him to promote.

When an influencer receives a negative feedback on a brand he represented, ignore the fact that he will never endorse you in future.

But, you will find it real hard to secure other influencers for your brand positioning! How? Because he is an Influencer!

This article was originally published on Medium

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