Have you ever seen a food truck parked on a busy street corner, handing out samples or shouting their daily special to draw in hungry pedestrians? This is a lot like Business to Consumer (B2C) marketing — focused on grabbing attention in the moment, aiming for quick connections, and closing the sale on the spot.
On the flip side, Business to Business (B2B) marketing is more like a gourmet chef meeting with restaurant owners in a quiet dining room. The chef isn’t just offering samples — they’re presenting a detailed pitch about how their locally-sourced ingredients and exclusive recipes can elevate the restaurant’s menu. Instead of aiming for instant orders, they’re focused on building trust and forming a long-term partnership that benefits both sides.
The approaches to marketing in B2C and B2B are fundamentally different, and the influencers in each space reflect that. Engaging, contracting, co-creating content, and compensating a B2C influencer will be a different experience compared to working with a B2B influencer. It’s important to tread carefully to ensure you find success.
- Find perspective from experts: Here’s How 11 Expert Marketers Define B2B Influencer Marketing
At TopRank Marketing, we cover B2B influencer marketing extensively with case studies, campaign ideas, 2025 budget trends, key statistics and more. After 12-plus years of spearheading influencer marketing for some of the top B2B brands in the world, we’ve learned a few things about the practice. From that experience, I’ll focus on what makes for good B2B influencer experiences as a way to portray the difference from B2C.
Regardless of the desired outcome, from building brand awareness to increasing sales, best-in-class influencer marketing programs start with understanding the relevant topics of influence that both represent what customers care about and what the brand stands for.
Stand Out with Influencer Marketing
B2B influencers as long-term brand partners
Much of B2C influencer engagement is managed like an advertising buy. With B2B, it’s important to look at B2B influencers as partners, not just content creators or distribution channels. That means finding, engaging, and activating influencers with expertise and audiences that will resonate with the objectives of the business. Beginning with topics of influence, you can identify, qualify and recruit influencer partners to collaborate.
Much like in B2C marketing, output of a B2B influencer collaboration can be in any form that the brand is currently publishing content: text, video, visual, audio, interactive and even VR.
B2B influencers are different from B2C in that they are usually subject matter experts with credentials. But it is often the case that they do not have the broad social media skills or reach as their B2C counterparts.
Also, B2B influencer marketing focuses less on transactions or advertising buys, and more on developing relationships with influencers who can add credibility to the brand and advocate for purchases that involve extended sales cycles and significant investments.
Relationship-building is foundational to B2B influence
Matching topically relevant influencers with content collaboration opportunities that deliver mutual value for the influencer, the audience you’re after, and your brand is both an art and a science. Successful relationships take time to build and require time to maintain.
Brands should invest the time and resources to keep these relationships strong. That can mean utilizing an influencer marketing tool like Traackr, to manage campaigns, as well as the expertise of an influencer marketing agency, that has many years of experience and established relationships with influencers in your industry.
Now that we have a clearer idea of what a B2B influencer is, let’s explore how you can find them.
Finding and vetting B2B influencers
In B2C, many influencers are inventoried in a marketplace with detailed info on audience, performance and content creation capabilities where you can purchase services not unlike buying a sponsorship or advertising.
In B2B, there are no such marketplaces. No one influencer marketing platform has all the data used to identify influencers that might be a match based on topical relevance, resonance with their audience and reach. LinkedIn is often an important social channel for B2B organizations, and LinkedIn’s API does not allow it to be searched by the influencer research tools. Research includes reviewing multiple sources and generally includes vetting influencers manually.
Searching for seeds of a relationship
Once a B2B influencer has been identified as having the right mix of relevance, resonance and reach, B2B marketers can check to see if there is already a relationship with the influencer directly or through a first-level connection. Engaging an experienced influencer already in your network is much different than starting a conversation with someone new.
Assessing familiarity with influencer marketing
It’s also important to see if the B2B influencer is experienced with ‘being an influencer,’ whether through public speaking, writing, or content creation. A simple scroll through their social profiles and looking at how publications and brands reference them can give you a good sense of their expertise.
Many B2C influencers are already familiar with what it means to be a social media influencer, and in B2B, such self-assigned influencer status and behavior is becoming more common.
Evaluating strategic fit
In B2C, the goal is often transactional (drive product sales) and the brand might just present a project and have the influencer pitch a creative idea on how to implement. With B2B, we do see influencers taking on significant roles in shaping campaigns, but not to the level of B2C. More often, the B2B brand will have a campaign or program in mind with a narrative and structured content collaboration opportunities that influencers can take part in according to their specific areas of expertise and audience engagement.
For example, a B2B influencer program might have elements focused on top-of-funnel awareness, middle-funnel engagement and end-of-funnel decision-making. Each stage could involve different types of influencers:
- TOFU – brandividuals or macro size influencers
- MOFU – industry experts
- BOFU – customers
Priming an influencer relationship
Relationship building with B2B influencers is critical to success. When approaching a new candidate online, start by engaging subtly on their active social networks and start looking for signals — like their interactions with other brands or individuals, content sharing, or mentions by others — that indicate openness to a potential conversation.
As you engage, consider featuring the influencer in a new content piece or inviting them to contribute something simple but high-value to further establish your connection. These initial interactions open the door for deeper collaboration. This approach is what we call nurturing in B2B marketing.
The ask: It’s time to collaborate
If the influencer is clearly a pro and being an influencer is part of their business model, you can approach them directly as you would any other consultant. However, a social interaction, whether that be in the form of commenting on their social post or sharing their content, can go a long way in getting on their radar beforehand.
B2C and B2B influencer marketing are different – and changing
While there is advancing consumerization within the B2B world from software user experiences to the types of influencer content being co-created (server unboxing videos, tech hauls, etc.), B2C and B2B influencer marketing are distinctly different. Viewing B2B influencers simply as content distribution channels or advocates for hire is a misplaced B2C-centric expectation. B2B influencers are industry experts that may or may not have advanced content creation skills. They have the attention and respect of their peers and that kind of influence is very powerful for brands that want to recapture buyer attention lost to dropping trust in brand advertising and communications.
Follow B2C, see the trends unfold
What’s next for B2B? Just look to B2C for the answer. Many of the ways in which B2B manages influencer relationships, creates content, and negotiates payments today were pioneered by the more flexible and experimental nature of the consumer business world. However, as we move even further into the digital age, we become less isolated, and the once-distant consumer practices can be quickly tailored to meet the complexities of enterprise relationships.
Engage With Us, and We’ll Engage With Them!
The post B2C vs. B2B Influencer Marketing – What’s the Difference? appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.
from TopRank® Marketing https://ift.tt/4l7BVzM
0 Comments