Influencer Marketing for B2B Software

Influencer marketing is widely considered a B2C tactic. No Instagram photo of a famous person using your app is going to launch a thousand corporate account sign-ups. No B2B brand is going to take an eight percent drop in stock value because a Kardashian (or any other celebrity) made a less than flattering comment about it.

But of course, B2B businesses have always engaged in influencer marketing to a certain degree. After all, what is influencer marketing, but old-fashioned referral marketing pulled through the digital transformation looking glass?

Yet changes in the B2B software landscape may mean that getting B2B influencer marketing right is the difference between long-term profitability and drowning in your churn. What changes, you ask?

1. Increasing commodification of the software product makes brand image a key source of differentiation. Influencers have a critical role to play in establishing and maintaining brand image.

2. The growth in shadow IT (all those SaaS apps employees buy and use without formal company approval or budgeting) creates an interesting group of potential influencers for SaaS companies. Using ground-up interest from end-user employees to influence larger, official company sales can “give [a company] a full picture of the gaps in [its] current IT solutions” and help you close the deal.

This means influencer marketing is a potentially high-value strategy in your SaaS marketing and sales plans.

Starting with the fundamentals

As with every marketing campaign, start with your personas. What websites they visit and podcasts they listen to, who they follow – really understand where your audience goes for industry and business content. From these different buyer and decision-maker personas you can start building influencer personas.

However, for a B2B influencer campaign, you don’t want to just create external influencer personas. For those of you engaging in account-based marketing (ABM), try to identify commonalities across accounts of those people who play the role of influencers within their own companies. Keep these persons handy and build segmented lists in your Marketing Automation software so they’re ready to go at any time.

They may or may not be on the decision-making committee, such as shadow IT-using employees. Keep in mind that business managers increasingly have their own IT budgets and authority. In these cases, typical influencer criteria, such as number of followers, may be less relevant.

As a B2B company, you should also keep in mind that other companies and brands can be influencers for you. Joint branding campaigns or cross-posting and cross-sharing content with a related company can expand the reach of both organizations.

3 Influencer Tactics

There are three well-worn, proven influencer tactics that are powerful for SaaS companies:

• Developing a strong, positive reputation on SaaS review sites
• Creating influencer-targeted content that inspires influencer-generated content
• Actively engaging with your self-identifying influencers

1. B2B buyers start at review sites

According to a CEB survey of 1500 B2B buyers, 72% of them start their searches on Google, but it’s the Google results that typically have software review site links in the top spaces below the ads. The review sites are where most B2B buyers first start learning about what apps are out there in the niche they’re searching. This is a critical point where a SaaS company can make it to a “further research” list or reject list.

Volume and ratio of reviews is important, but written reviews are crucial as well. A Dimensional Research survey found that 90% of respondents said their buying decision was influenced by positive reviews and 86% were influenced by negative reviews. Written reviews bring personal authenticity and credibility, even without the authority of a recognizable influencer. Run campaigns that encourage both numerical and written reviews at scale.

When you do have a written review from someone who fits your influencer criteria – perhaps they have a strong social media following or publish articles on a blog or other sites – you can reach out directly and ask them to share their positive review.

2. Influencers deserve targeted content – and they’re more likely to share it

Just like you create content that targets each of your personas, your different types of influencers deserve content that meets their needs. This means going beyond just answering the questions they have or addressing their needs as you would for prospects. Create content that addresses the issues they explore and talk about. Share resources that aren’t only something they’d share, but that they’ll use and quote in their own content.

Surveys, research and industry analyses are always high authority, info-rich content that can get shared multiple times. Doing roundups of quotes from leaders or trendsetters is a tried-and-true method to get a lot of people with platforms to share your content, especially those you’re quoting. The same goes for creating content that quotes or references the influencer’s content – with attribution, of course.

Don’t leave it to chance whether the right influencers find and share your content. Put together an influencer outreach campaign that directly contacts different influencers to let them know about a specific piece of content you think would be relevant to their audience for them to share.

3. Don’t forget to set goals and measure results

Discrete influencer campaigns each have their own goals. Define your goals and do a cost analysis to determine what results will justify the spend.

Where the goal is to build your SaaS company’s brand image, you want to measure things like brand perception and sentiment. Don’t get sidetracked by focusing on impressions, shares and clicks, which may be relevant if your goal is brand awareness, but aren’t relevant to a brand goal.  Perception and sentiment are more challenging metrics to measure, but they’re more relevant to understanding the strength and value of your brand.

If the goal is more directly tied to revenue, shore up your attribution tools so you can track traffic from influencers that convert to leads, and then on to opportunities and sales.

In many ways, the marketing strategy lines between B2C and B2B are blurring, so open your mind to influencer campaigns if you’ve written them off before. There’s no need to get a celebrity and their publicist team on board – you’ll waste time and money on the wrong market. But do go after the celebrated members of your industry, and use their leverage as influence. The SaaS world is crowded, so it can be helpful to have influencer relationships in all the right places.