Influencer Marketing in B2B

If your buyer scrolls social media, influencer marketing could work for you

Influencer marketing is well-established in Consumer. Brands use trusted leaders of niche communities with loyal followings to tell their brand story in the influencer’s own voice. This helps brands authentically reach a target audience. These influencers usually have strong followings on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok and are paid based on the size and engagement of their audience. 

Recently, I’ve spoken to a number of B2B software founders finding success using influencer marketing to target their Ideal Customer Persona, particularly if they have a product-led growth motion where users can see an influencer promoting the product and sign up themselves immediately. For a small budget, influencers will talk about the product to their 10-20k followers. On average, founders see lower CACs than other channels, and if the post goes viral the user base can ramp quickly.

To explore in more detail, I’ve asked Vikki Tokarz, Head of Influencer Marketing at Scribe, to share her experience and tips on how to get started with influencer marketing in your B2B product. 

Can you describe what Scribe does? 

Scribe is the best tool for teaching anyone how to do anything. It's a Chrome extension (and desktop app) that captures your screen while you click and type to automatically generate how-to guides of what you just did! It's great for things like showing someone how to pull a specific report from a specific software, how to reset a password, great for help centers, perfect for onboarding etc.

How did Scribe first start using influencer marketing?

We knew early on that influencer marketing was an under-used channel for B2B SaaS. We made a bet that marketing spend on influencers could return great ROIs and went for it. We started really scrappy — 2 of us in a room for 2 hours. When we went into the room, we had no influencer marketing program. When we came out, we had an influencer marketing program. It's been about a year since that day, and we've continued to grow and scale our program such that influencer marketing is a significant marketing channel for us. 

Can you give an example of an effective campaign you’ve run?

The best influencer marketing campaigns that we run are the ones that immediately make people want to smash the like & share buttons. It's the type of content that you can't just scroll by — it's scroll-stopping. One of my favorite campaigns was one of our earliest: we sponsored a Twitter thread on 'must-have chrome extensions' that went super viral. It got over 300,000 likes and 30 million views. We immediately saw our sign-ups start to skyrocket. It was so fun to see the huge impact that a single Twitter thread could have. We were sitting around thinking, "All of this, from a Twitter thread!?" Yup.

What type of company is best suited to using influencer marketing?

My hot take here is that I think any company can do influencer marketing. The reality is, the majority of us go home and watch & read social media (for better or for worse 😂). If you think your buyer, no matter how big or small, goes home and scrolls social media (while they're in bed, waiting for dinner, at the grocery store.. you get the point) -- then you can reach them with influencer marketing. 

How do you find the right influencers to target?

"To create good content, you have to consume good content". I'm a firm believer that you have to become a resident of the platform you want to promote in order to do it well. If you're interested in running a campaign on Twitter, spend time there. If you're interested in running a campaign on LinkedIn, spend time there and follow people in your niche. Once you spend enough time and put the reps in, you'll quickly figure out who the big voices in the space are. 

The 'right' influencer is (1) someone who has the attention of the audience you're looking to target (2) someone whose brand is consistent with yours (you're going to be associated with them, after all), and (3) someone who you truly believe could do a great job creating compelling content for your product.

What kind of budget do you need to get started?

That depends on what kind of influencers you want to work with and what your goals are. The good news is that there is a wide range of influencers, very small to very big, with similarly ranging prices. Many brands start out with no budget, instead offering their product or service for free, but I personally feel quite strongly about compensating influencers directly. They're experts at their crafts and deserve to be compensated accordingly. To launch an influencer campaign, if you're crafty, I think you could start with as little as $500. 

What are the best measures of success to understand the ROI?

It depends on the platform, but engagement metrics are the north star because direct attribution is increasingly difficult to do. How many people saw the content? Are there any comments? What are they saying? Is the sentiment positive or negative?

The good news is, when you hit a home run (a post that does really well and garners millions of views) the effect on your product metrics will be unmistakable. Signups, activity, etc will skyrocket, and you'll know exactly why.

To learn more about Scribe, sign up for their newsletter here.

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