How to partner with Thought Leaders and B2B Influencers to seed Word of Mouth
Learn how to partner with thought leaders and B2B influencers to boost word-of-mouth marketing. Enhance your brand’s credibility and visibility with strategies to leverage influential voices.
First, Want to apologize for not being consistent with sending newsletters lately. I took a break to review, analyze, and plan the next phase of StartupGTM Newsletter.
Let’s check out some relevant stats to start off -
The customer acquisition costs are up by 50% over the past 5 years.
The number of buyers who believe their latest buy was complex or way too difficult is up by 77%.
80% of buyers have changed their B2B suppliers who failed to meet their expectations.
… So, what of these stats?
The B2B Buyer behaviour is changing.
Trust is a primary factor for buyers now. It's based on basic human psychology: the need to follow those whom we trust. And who do we trust?
Authority and fellow professionals who are helping / have helped us earlier.
There are two main categories of people whom we trust.
Thought leaders and
Influencers i.e. professionals with higher followers in the same domain.
Thought leaders help their audience with valuable and exclusive content.
Influencers help their audience with all kinds of curated or created content meant for educating, entertaining, discussing, reviewing etc.
Both thought leaders and Influencers have social proof, causing everyone to want to see everything they share.
Buyers are giving first preference to products recommended by thought leaders and influencers.
Today, The buyer’s mind is already used to the paid ads, google search results, social media posts and any content by brands. They've now just become a touch-point not the decision triggers.
Even LinkedIn recognizes this and has introduced a new feature that helps promote posts by thought leaders and influencers.
Brands are already involving thought leaders and influencers for building a positive brand image, and to push the unique positioning.
Where do we go without thought leaders and influencers?
Trust is aligned to Source.
The fight for capturing attention is at its peak, as people don’t value things when they don’t trust the source.
No one wants to be sold to, when they don’t know the brand or the person who is selling to them.
Even brand stories are not trusted by people, basically anything coming from a paid channel is not trusted.
With the AI tools,
The SEO battle has moved a notch up. It is still a long term game. But the generation of SEO friendly content with the help of AI has made the SEO game harder.
The content game is getting harder as AI can generate unique content too, if someone knows the right prompts.
Distribution, on the other hand, is not easy either.
LinkedIn ads are getting popular and the cost of reaching a buyer is becoming more expensive with increasing demand.
SEO is hard, and with AI, the fight for optimization and keywords is done through automated tools, which everyone has started using
Seller partnerships and communities are also long term games, as it takes some time to build them.
Partnerships with target group influencers and thought leaders are the way to reach the audience.
They have re-wired trust and authority. These partnerships also let them check your offering.
If brands don't invest in authority building, partnering with thought leaders or influencers, they will miss out on trust.
The target audience has already given their trust to thought leaders and influencers.
Case Study
InspireBeats
InspireBeats is an all-in-one lead generation, lead research, and personalized prospecting solution for startups and larger (and even a couple public) companies with millions in revenue.
It provides monthly qualified and targeted leads, conducts research, and facilitates personalized outreach efforts.
As per their CMO,
Marketing goals at a high level were to drive more leads to InspireBeats.com that were interested in using lead generation or outbound emails to help grow influencers.
Result:
Generated over $12 million dollars in B2B leads.
They targeted influencers to write about them in blog posts. They also targeted podcasts with more than 3000 listeners on each episode.
They sent cold emails containing a pitch and a customized email to influencers. The best value they created for influencers, creators, and podcasts was providing “What We Learned Sending 1,000,000 Cold Emails This Year” Since very few people were talking about it, it got their attention.
They sent a total of around 300 emails in a month for the same.
Their success metric was to get 10 blogs, 10 podcasts and 10 guest posts to feature on in a month.
They ended up on 15 podcasts, 5 guest blogs published and 5 media features
Video Fruit
Video Fruit – a B2B marketing consultancy that provides software, courses, coaching programs, and tools to help businesses build their email databases – decided to run a guest blogging campaign.
Approach: Bryan Harris, founder of Video Fruit, was published as a guest blogger on the Okdork blog.
Result: On the day the post was published, the Video Fruit website saw a 500% increase in page views.
Guest blogging is perhaps one of the most traditional forms of B2B influencer marketing.
Video Fruit wrote a guest blog post on Noah Kagan’s OkDork, which brought in traffic and even conversion for their own site.
They planned to write the blog, and link the Video Fruit blog on Bryan Harris’ name, which led people to clicking on their website and finding it, eventually bringing traffic to their site.
They tracked the visitors from OkDork to their site, measuring the traffic to their root homepage and the subscriber increase rate, which increased by 1782 views and a 12% increase in conversion rate.
It worked because this guest post was super detailed and provided all the information needed for guest posting, which increased Video Fruit's credibility.
How to partner with Influencers and Thought Leaders step by step?
Identify → Reach → Engage → Connect → Collaborate → Partner
Follow these steps if you would like to build partnerships with thought leaders and influencers
Step 0 - Define Who are they - B2B Influencers, Thought Leaders, Top Voices, LinkedIn Influencers, industry thought leaders
Step 1 - Identify professionals (from the above category) with either 10k+ followers, or above 50 comments in post engagement.
Make a list with details, followers, avg comments
Step 2 - Keep a track of their posts and activities.
Step 3 - Engage on their Linkedin Posts, Blog Posts, and Interviews.
Step 4 - Drop them a personal mail or message with your proposition as a value creation asset / information which they can share with their audience.
Step 5 - Pick warm ines and Write something about their experience and expertise once in a week from your profiles
Step 6 - Explore partnership opportunities as an influencer or promoter.
Step 7 - Update the list and sign MOU
Step 8.- Engage them bi-weekly and check for / give updates
Step 9 - Engage once on their linkedin post (bi-weekly)
Step 10 - Measure the traffic, iterate and improve on value creation assets.
You would find that you will have a minimum of 15 influencers and thought leaders engaging with you within 30 days.
Free tools that you can try:
Dub.co - Short Links with Customized Previews
Letter Growth - Find newsletters for cross promotion
Kleo - Discover the best linkedin content for engagement
Best resources to checkout
Marketing
Leadership
Best Linkedin Posts
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