In a digital space that is cluttered with millions of posts, it has become challenging for businesses to stand out from the crowd. Consumers are bombarded with ads and promotions everywhere on the internet, and this reduces the value of brands promoting themselves.

That’s why the popularity and use of influencer marketing has risen so steeply in the past few years. In fact, it’s expected to grow at 32.4% CAGR till 2024.

Image via MarketsandMarkets

But why?

The major reason for it being that influencers are viewed as third parties who have no vested interest in promoting the brands. As a result, their promotions seem more authentic than those from a brand.

As a result, brands are increasingly leveraging the power of influencer marketing to reach out to their target audiences. If you’re still unsure about why influencer marketing is the next big thing for B2B, here are a few things you should know:

Why is Influencer Marketing Becoming Popular Among B2B Brands?

Let’s take a closer look at why influencer marketing has started becoming popular among B2B companies:

1. Better Trust and Credibility

One of the most effective ways to build trust and credibility among your target audience is by leveraging influencer marketing. Influencers are people with a relatively large number of followers on social media. They have established themselves as experts in their niches.

They know their audiences well and connect with them on a personal level. This is why they understand it and know what they’re most likely to engage with and create content that appeals to them. Their followers believe what they say because they connect and look up to them.

By collaborating with influencers in your niche, you can reach their followers and spread your brand’s message or promote your products.

2. Unique Content and Greater Reach

With influencer marketing, you can tap into your audience on various social media platforms. Right from long-form video content on YouTube to Stories on Instagram, you can choose from an array of content forms and social media platforms for your campaigns.

However, for a good influencer marketing campaign, you need to find genuine influencers. For that, you can leverage platforms like iFluenz. It helps you find Instagram influencers who are interested in partnering with you. You can choose the ones you want to collaborate with and launch the campaign. The tool also lets you track the campaign progress once the influencers have posted content online.

Image via iFluenz

Influencers tend to have a large following, and this can help you reach out to a wide targeted audience. Additionally, the content created by the influencers won’t be similar to the type of content you create. This means that you can get unique content to represent your brand, and you can reuse that on your social media account to promote your brand.

3. Better Lead Generation

Influencer marketing is a powerful method for lead generation. It increases the exposure of brands and allows them to connect with a larger audience of potential buyers through influencers.

When an influencer shares their review of your brand or product, it can have a great impact on your brand reputation.

What’s more?

The influencer’s audience is usually very specific and similar to your target audience. As a result, the chances of them finding your product or service useful are greater. This is why influencer marketing can provide a big boost to your lead generation efforts.

For example, if you sell energy drinks, your target audience may be into fitness and sports. So if you work with a fitness influencer, the chances of reaching a more relevant and focused audience are very high.

Why?

Because their audience is most likely to engage with fitness and sports-related content. You can use this to your advantage and generate better leads for your business.

4. Affordable

One of the best things about influencer marketing is that it doesn’t have to be expensive. Unless you are planning to work with massive influencers or celebrities who have millions of followers on their social media profiles, influencer marketing won’t burn a hole in your pocket. Typically, influencers charge about 1 to 2.5 cents for each follower they have.

That’s why micro-influencers can provide great value to your business as they have a maximum of 100K followers. Additionally, they have a high engagement rate as they can engage with their audience personally with ease.

But that’s not all.

Many micro-influencers may even agree to work in exchange for free services or products, or even as affiliates. This can make influencer marketing affordable for you.

5. Offers Native Ad Experience

The biggest advantage of influencer marketing is that it provides a native ad experience to your audience. Traditionally, advertising is perceived as disturbing, distracting, and non-contextual as it intervenes with a user’s browsing experience. Contrary to this, influencer reviews appear more natural and provide value to users.

All you need to do is analyze each social media platform using various tools to determine where your audience spends the most time and find influencers on those channels.

6. Highly Customizable

Influencer marketing is a fully-customizable strategy that can be tailored to meet your goals. Marketing campaign elements such as the number and type of influencers, budget, creative messaging, key performance indicators (KPIs), post scheduling and frequency, and an array of other essential variables, can all be customized to fit your campaign needs.

For instance, if you are an SMB, you can choose to work with micro-influencers, ask them to upload two posts in a week, talk about your brand in their Stories, use branded hashtags, and even host live sessions with you to drive their audiences to your brand. On the other hand, larger brands with greater budgets can work with macro-influencers on a bigger scale.

7. Boosts SEO

Due to its numerous benefits, many brands are incorporating influencer marketing into their social media strategies. But its benefits aren’t restricted to social media. It can also be used to grow your website authority and traffic.

How, you may ask?

When an influencer writes about your brand on their blog, you get a high-quality backlink. Additionally, their audience might click on your link and visit your website. This can help boost your backlink profile and grow your traffic too.

Similarly, when an influencer posts about your brand on social media along with a link to your website, their followers may click on it and visit your website. This growth in traffic can provide a boost to your SEO as well.

Final Thoughts

While influencer marketing has become extremely popular among B2C businesses, B2B companies are jumping onto the bandwagon too. Due to its massive reach, high engagement rates, affordability, and SEO benefits, many small and large businesses have started partnering with influencers. It’s due to these and many other reasons that influencer marketing is expected to become the next big thing in B2B.

Author Bio

Gaurav Sharma is the Founder of Attrock, a digital marketing company. He works closely with top marketing influencers and has helped numerous brands, ecommerce firms, and SaaS companies grow.

He is also a certified Google Analytics and Google Adwords specialist and regularly contributes to reputable publications like HuffPost, TechCrunch, and many more.

Subscribe to our RSS-feed and  follow us on Twitter to stay in touch.