Influencer marketing is an effective marketing tactic that can help you achieve a variety of marketing goals simultaneously. You can leverage influencers to improve your brand awareness and image, get more followers, drive traffic to your website, and even drive conversions.
However, Instagram still has a monopoly when it comes to the preferred channels for influencer marketing, even though LinkedIn is just as important for B2B marketers. Here’s why you should focus on LinkedIn influencer marketing.
LinkedIn Influencer Marketing Holds the Key to B2B Marketing:
Why Invest in LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?
LinkedIn is an important networking platform for B2B firms, probably even more so than Instagram and Facebook. While Instagram clearly rules as the most popular influencer marketing platform for all brands, B2B firms cannot ignore the importance of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a platform meant for professionals from various industries to share their thoughts and interact with other professionals. And, LinkedIn professionals are usually top-level executives or industry experts, unlike Instagram, where anyone with a good follower count can be an influencer.
So, LinkedIn should be a key part of any B2B firm’s influencer marketing strategy. And, yet, most marketers don’t spend as much money on LinkedIn as they spend on Instagram and other popular social networks.
Image Source: IMH
So, if you have a B2B firm, LinkedIn influencer marketing presents an untapped opportunity to gain a competitive advantage over others.
How to Leverage Influencer Marketing on LinkedIn
Let’s take a closer look at how you can leverage LinkedIn influencer marketing to get the best results.
Find Relevant LinkedIn Influencers
Before you start searching for LinkedIn influencers, you should be clear about the criteria on which you will select influencers. The first and most important thing is that they should be from your niche, with a certain level of expertise in their field.
Another important factor is that the influencers you select should have people in their connections that you want to target. After all, the whole purpose of partnering with influencers is to reach their connections, who could turn out to be potential customers for your business.
The third most important criterion for influencer selection is that they should be active on the platform and get good engagement on their posts.
Manual Search Using Keywords
The most common and simplest way to find influencers on LinkedIn is simply by searching for relevant industry keywords and phrases. When you enter a particular keyword in the search box at the top left of your LinkedIn home page, you see a list of results. This also includes a list of people related to that keyword, as shown below.
Image Source: LinkedIn
These are the first and second connections that you have on LinkedIn, so you have a chance to reach out to them with your collaboration proposal. So, just scroll through the list of people and identify people who regularly post articles and get good engagement on their posts.
The more specific keyword or phrase you search for, the smaller and more relevant your list of influencers will be.
Search in LinkedIn Groups
Another way to manually search for influencers is to find relevant industry groups and see who the prominent members are there. Anyone who is a part of an industry group already has an interest in the field. And as people usually know the other members of their groups, anyone who actively posts in a group is a potential influencer.
To search for groups, write the keyword in the search bar and select “Groups” from the drop-down menu at the top-right corner. When you search for a specific keyword or niche, you will find a list of related groups. Search these groups to find influential people in your industry.
Image Source: LinkedIn
Influencer Search Tools
There are numerous influencer search tools that can help you find influencers using advanced search filters. Using these, you can find the most relevant influencers for your brand.
Some of these tools also have the option to search for influencers by the platform. So, preferably opt for a tool that provides this option, along with other search filters like industry, location, followers, etc.
Reach Out and Develop Relationships
LinkedIn is a more professional social networking platform compared with others like Instagram and Twitter. Hence, it is tougher to find and collaborate with LinkedIn influencers as they are usually industry experts and top-level executives.
Unlike Instagram, where there is no lack of influencers who are looking for collaborations, with LinkedIn influencers, you need to cultivate relationships before you reach out for collaborations.
You can do that by commenting on their posts and interacting with them in groups. Make sure that the influencer at least knows your name before you reach out for a collaboration.
And, when you do reach out to them, personalize the pitch by first complimenting them on their recent posts or mentioning something specific about them. Do not start your message by directly asking them to collaborate.
Enter Into Mutually-Beneficial Collaborations
After you have successfully connected with influencers, you can co-create high-quality content that will be beneficial for both your audiences. There are several ways in which you can collaborate with LinkedIn influencers to generate content.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular ones.
Articles
One of the most common ways to leverage LinkedIn influencers is to have them create articles relevant to both your target audience and their connections. As LinkedIn influencers are industry experts, you can ask them to create high-quality, thought-leadership pieces.
LinkedIn has its own blog where you can directly share long-form content and articles, relevant for your audience. This can help you establish yourself as an industry expert and build valuable connections.
You can also ask influencers to post articles describing their experiences with your product or detailing your product’s features.
Company Pages
Another way you can use LinkedIn influencer marketing is to find an influential person in your own company and ask them to share content and mention your company.
Alternatively, you can ask influencers to mention your brand or product when they post on their company page. This is a direct way in which you can reach their network. And, an influencer talking about your product will add more credibility to it and may encourage people to try it.
They can do this by posting a video or a simple post. However, videos are more engaging and are an excellent way to demonstrate your product’s features. Therefore, if you choose to use this mode of influencer marketing, ask influencers to post a video about your product to get the best results.
Expert Quotes
Another effective way to leverage influencers is to use influencer quotes in your content, mention them, and give credit. This will add substance to your content and make it seem more credible.
You can also compile a list of expert quotes and tag them all to target all of their connections all at once, using a single post.
You can also promote your expert roundup post on social media and use the name of popular influencers to get more views.
Measure Results
No influencer marketing campaign is complete until you measure the ROI and see how well your campaign performed. This will guide your future influencer marketing strategy as you can learn from past mistakes.
And, if you are working with multiple influencers, you should also identify the ones who performed well and those who didn’t. You can simply check that by looking at the engagement rates that each influencer’s content gets on LinkedIn.
Also, your results should be tied to the goals that you set up for your campaign. Whether you want to drive conversions or simply enhance brand awareness, you should measure your performance based on your goals.
You also need to remember that B2B products have longer sales cycles, so if your goal is conversions, then you should wait for an appropriate time before measuring results.
You can use an influencer marketing tool to manage all of your influencers and track their performance with ease. This will save you time and effort required in manually tracking performance and measuring results. Moreover, using an influencer management tool will make running the whole campaign a whole lot easier.
Conclusion
LinkedIn influencer marketing is a very important marketing tactic for B2B companies and should be an integral part of any B2B company’s marketing strategy.
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals, so it is the perfect place for B2B companies to find their potential customers. B2B companies deal with decision-makers and top-level executives of other companies that can be their prospective clients. And, establishing yourself as an expert on LinkedIn is a great way to grab their attention.
Influencers can help you achieve that by amplifying the reach of your content and making people aware of your brand or product. Use LinkedIn influencer marketing to get your prospective clients to take notice of your brand.
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