7 Great B2B Influencer Marketing Examples

Quite a few B2B businesses have now discovered how they can gain from influencer marketing. In this post, we provide seven B2B marketing examples of firms that have benefited from following this approach.

We recently gave 5 Reasons B2B Companies Should Be Advertising Through Influencers. These reasons are:

1. People buy from people – we all know this, so why don’t we leverage it?
2. People want to see content that relates to them, not you
3. People research, more than you think
4. People are more likely to buy if they come to you
5. People will read your content, they just have to know it exists

The key finding from this is that although these businesses sell to other businesses, it is people who make B2B business decisions.  In this way, B2B is not all that different from B2C. The main difference is that B2B decisionmaking generally requires more research. Here are seven firms that have used influencer marketing to spread their message. These firms have taken the risk and tasted success.

B2B Influencer Marketing Examples:

1. SAP

SAP develops enterprise software for companies. They do this through a combination of applications, platforms, and business networks.

At its core, SAP is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application, focusing on Finance, Logistics, and Human Resources. As such, they are very much B2B-focused.

They have discovered benefits of working with third-party influencers to help them market their services. The types of influencer they work with include independent business consultants, academics, and authors. These are people who have a strong influence on decisionmakers in the types of companies likely to appreciate SAP products.

SAP works with these influencers to create relevant content. They also coordinate with them at suitable events. The key aim for the influencer content is to work with key people to create items of thought leadership.

With SAP being a large company which works with enterprises in a wide range of niches, different marketing teams identify relevant influencers for each line of business.

SAP organizes Sapphire, a user conference held in Orlando, Florida each year. It usually attracts about 20,000 attendees. SAP decided to widen its appeal in 2016. They worked with 11 influencers to create interview-based video content of the conference. The influencers live-streamed to about 80,000 people who could not attend the event.

SAP, along with its influencers, shared this material, predominantly via Facebook. SAP was later able to repurpose many of the interviews as part of blog posts.

SAP coordinated its influencers during Sapphire, arranging strategic meetings between the influencers and the general attendees, based on the influencers’ areas of expertise. They also gave the influencers an opportunity to meet with executives to use the SAP products and give feedback.

SAP has also worked with influencers at other events. For instance, when SAP ran an IoT Launch event, they interacted their influencers to promote the launch and its event hashtag. This was successful enough for the hashtag to trend on Twitter.

2. Video Fruit

VideoFruit provides software, courses, coaching programs, and tools to help businesses build their email lists.  It was founded by Bryan Harris. VideoFruit’s target customers are small businesses who operate websites. This is another clear case of B2B marketing.

Bryan Harris decided to experiment with guest blogging on larger, more prestigious sites which target entrepreneurs. He began by writing a post for Noah Kagan’s OkDork site – Noah runs Sumo.com. Bryan kept a close eye on his analytics to see if there were any advantages generated by this guest blogging.

On the day that Bryan’s guest post was published on OkDork, 1,086 visitors came to the VideoFruit website. This compared to the typical daily average of 285 visitors. 215 of the 1,086 visitors subscribed to VideoFruit. Page views rose 500% and unique page views jumped by over 600%. Visitors spent on average 8% more time on this page. The bounce rate fell by 6%. Of the site visitors, 73% were new visitors.

Bryan Harris discovered that guest blogging can be a very worthwhile form of influencer marketing.