Influencers aren’t just beneficial for B2C companies; influencer marketing can also help B2B companies generate more web traffic. When a company can tap the right influencers for its brand with followers who align with its target audience, the paid promotional content can feel seamless and natural to viewers who are inspired to learn more about the brand.
This process feels pretty natural in the B2C world, where a lifestyle influencer promotes beauty products or household cleaners to their audience. For B2B, companies need to find the right promoters. For instance, a credit card company looking to promote business credit cards may want to work with finance-focused content creators, or a website-building company may work with bloggers for promotion.
As you can see, there are many ways to implement influencer marketing in the B2B world, but it’s all about your approach. Here’s how to use B2B influencer marketing to increase web traffic and boost brand awareness.
What Is B2B Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing refers to paying influencers on social media — or users with social influence over their followers or expertise in a field — to promote a brand and its products or services. B2B companies will work with influencers who are industry professionals, experts or other key leaders in the field to promote their company to the influencer’s followers.
The goal is to reach other companies or people working at other companies who could benefit from the brand’s products or services. For instance, an entrepreneurial influencer may post paid content for a business that sells scheduling software.
B2B influencer marketing isn’t just a trendy way to advertise a brand. In a 2022 report by TopRank Marketing, 95% of respondents who use influencer marketing for B2B said it helped achieve at least one marketing goal, particularly improving brand reputation or increasing brand awareness.
How Influencers Increase Web Traffic
How can influencer marketing have such a profound impact on a B2B company’s marketing goals? Influencer content can increase web traffic, ultimately leading to more lead generation and improved conversion rates in many different ways. From creating backlinks that improve SEO to reaching target audiences through trust and engagement, here are some common reasons why influencer marketing can increase web traffic for B2B companies:
SEO. One of the top ways influencers increase web traffic for a business is by helping improve SEO. The influencer provides backlinks to the brand’s website, and these backlinks show search engine algorithms that your site is trustworthy.
When you work with multiple influencers over different campaigns, you could be earning backlinks from several different websites, ultimately improving your website’s rank in the search engine results page (SERP). Now, when users search for certain keywords, your brand’s site is more likely to show up higher in the results, making it more likely someone will click through to your website.
This is important because the first, second, third and fourth results get 39.8%, 18.7%, 10.2% and 7.4% of click-throughs, respectively. The higher your website shows up on the SERP, the more likely you are to see improved website traffic.
New audiences. While you might maintain a steady stream of regular website visitors, reaching new users that align with your target audience is key to increasing web traffic. That’s where influencers can come into play.
When you find the right influencers to promote your brand, at least some of their followers should match your brand’s target audience demographics and buyer personas. When the influencer promotes a product or service, it fulfills a need for some of their followers, who will then check out your website and become part of your audience.
Brand awareness. If users aren’t aware of your brand, how can they find your website? Thanks to influencers, you can get the word out about your brand to the creators’ audience, and those who are curious will head over to your social media profiles and website to learn more.
The 2022 TopRank Marketing report found that 70% of respondents who used B2B influencer marketing found that this strategy increased brand awareness, and 33% of respondents found that B2B influencer marketing ultimately led to increased sales and revenue.
Trust. Users tend to trust the recommendations coming from an individual over a brand. According to HubSpot, about half of Millennials trust influencers’ recommendations, and about one-third of people in Gen Z have made purchases based on influencers’ recommendations over the past three months.
Influencers and their followers have a unique bond, and followers can feel more trusting in an individual’s product recommendations over a general advertisement they see on a website or in their inbox.
User engagement. When a brand wants better user engagement, influencer marketing is the way to go. Because influencers have built trust with their followers, they tend to get good engagement rates on their content. For a B2B company, this engagement can lead to better click-through rates (CTR) and increased web traffic.
An analysis by Harvard Business Review found that a 1% increase in spending on influencer marketing led to an engagement increase of about 0.46%. For B2B companies that work with micro-influencers (influencers with 1,000 to 100,000 followers), the engagement and subsequent web traffic benefits could be even better, as micro-influencers have about 60% more engagement than influencers with larger followings.
Ultimately, the engagement can vary by platform. These days, TikTok is the top place to spend if you’re looking for high engagement. There, micro-influencers have about 12.4% engagement rates, compared to an average 1.9% engagement rate on Instagram. This is something to keep in mind when you start searching for influencers to collaborate with your B2B company.
B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy
When you’re ready to start your B2B influencer marketing strategy, there are many methods you can take to drive website traffic. The creator will need to share content that engages and intrigues their followers to check out your website and, ideally, make a purchase.
Product reviews. One option is to send influencers existing or soon-to-be-released products or services to review for their audience. While the content is paid and positive, the influencer can showcase how the product or service works, sharing the benefits directly with their audience to persuade them to purchase it. According to Zippia, about 93% of consumers in a survey said that online reviews influenced their buying decisions. This tactic is popular because it feels natural and seamless alongside the creator’s organic content.
Video content. From Instagram Reels to TikTok, video content is a popular way to grab an audience’s attention. In the U.S., influencer videos alone made up 60% of Facebook video views in 2022, meaning many users are consuming influencer content, including paid videos, each day. Further, a Wyzowl study found that 92% of video marketer respondents said video content provides a positive ROI. Influencers can showcase a product or service from your brand and direct followers to your website in the video caption.
Blog posts. If you want to benefit from backlinking, you can work with bloggers who will share your products or services in their blog posts and link back to your website. This can help improve SEO and increase web traffic.
Finding the Right Influencers
If you’re hoping to get more users on your B2B website, then you’ll want to work with influencers who are the right fit for your brand. Each influencer’s promotional content should match their brand. If it feels out of place, followers won’t trust the messaging, nor will they give your brand the time of day. There are a few key metrics to look for when choosing influencers for your B2B marketing:
Following size. Bigger doesn’t always mean better. In fact, nano and micro-influencers tend to have fewer followers but higher engagement rates than creators with more than 100,000 followers, yet they also tend to charge less per post than macro-influencers. This can be a good way to stick to a tighter marketing budget or work with multiple influencers across campaigns while still benefiting from great engagement rates.
Audience demographics. When reaching out to content creators, be sure to ask if they have a media kit, an essential component to learning more about their audience demographics. You want to work with followers who have an audience similar to your target audience. If the audiences are too dissimilar, your brand message isn’t likely to resonate.
Industry niche. Consider your niche and creators who publish content that aligns with what your brand sells. Be sure to look through the content of potential influencers you hope to work with. Their content should fit within your niche; otherwise, paid content will come across too forced to followers.
How to Get Started
So now you know what you need to look for in a B2B influencer — but how do you strike up a conversation and negotiate a deal? When you’re ready to work with influencers, start with:
Search engines. Influencers may have successful profiles across multiple social media sites, plus blogs, YouTube channels and more. You can search online for top influencers, social media accounts or blogs within your industry to get started.
Hashtags. Remember when a #hashtag was just the pound sign? Today, the whole point of hashtags is to make finding related content on social media easy, so make use of this development. In the search bar on different social media platforms, look for hashtags related to your industry. Review the content that comes up, and consider flagging creators with posts that match the industry and tone you’re looking for in your paid content.
A database. Today, there are many tools and database services you can use to find influencers based on industry, engagement, followers and other key metrics. These services are typically paid, but they can link you to the right influencers for your brand more quickly than trying to explore on your own.
A DM or email. Once you’ve found some promising creators, it’s time to reach out! You can either send a direct message on their platform of choice or check their profile page for a website or email contact, expressing interest in collaboration for paid promotion.
Media kits. Many content creators have media kits that describe their demographic, examples of past promotional content, prices and more. When you reach out via email or DM, make sure to ask if they have a media kit you can review before hiring.
Once you’ve introduced yourself and the partnership is a go, proceed as you would with any other vendor relationship.
- Complete the paperwork. Just like with any other contractor you hire, you’ll need to draft up a contract with expectations for both parties and have the influencer complete any necessary start paperwork, like tax forms, before you can send over a content brief.
- Brief with care. The key to a more natural promotional post is to offer some value props and key points of information about your brand, products or services for the influencer to include, but let the creator do what they do best: create. Rather than giving them a script that might sound a little more robotic compared to their organic content, let them experiment with their own voice. You’ll get the final sign-off, so it’s worth letting go of strict messaging in favor of a more natural approach.
Drive Website Traffic Through B2B Influencer Marketing
From building brand awareness to improving SEO, there are many surprising ways that influencer marketing can lead to increased web traffic. That’s why influencer marketing is seeing such high growth, with the industry worth $21.1 billion for 2023, up from $16.4 billion in 2022.
Because businesses have historically seen an average of $5.20 earned media value for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, it’s clear that this marketing strategy is paying off in terms of engagement, web traffic and conversions. Of course, the key to success is working with influencers that align with your brand’s industry and values in order to produce paid content that feels organic and trustworthy. With this guide, you’ll be on track to joining many other businesses in boosting web traffic through B2B influencer marketing.
