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5 Ways To Build A Smarter B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy Lee Odden Interview

2020-06-18 12:31:11| Marketing and Public Relations - M&O

What does it take to create smart B2B influencer marketing campaigns that deliver measurably strong marketing results? How do brands and businesses begin partnering with influencers, and what kind of results can they expect to achieve? Dont worry weve got it all covered for you here. Our CEO Lee Odden joined Alan Quarry, host of AQ's Blog & Grill, and together they explored the many aspects involved in building a successful B2B influencer marketing program. Lee shared numerous B2B influencer marketing take-aways during his time with Alan, and well look closely at five helpful tactics and insights to strengthen your own existing B2B influencer marketing program, or to assist as you begin a new influencer pilot program: Where Do I Begin With B2B Influencer Marketing? Simultaneously Growing B2B Brand Influence & Business The Growing Role Of Maturity Models in B2B Influencer Marketing A More Sophisticated B2B Influencer Marketing Approach Always-On Influence & The Role of Validation Sit back and lets get right to it and take a look. 1 Where Do I Begin With B2B Influencer Marketing? Todays B2B buyers are overwhelmed with options, and are growing distrustful of marketing and advertising. How do we solve that? We solve that by connecting them with sources of information that they do trust, including peers, industry experts, and industry influencers. B2B influencer marketing can solve some of the biggest problems in terms of creating credible connections with people that are actively interested in paying attention, and by co-creating content marketing content with those who have influence. In B2B, if you think about the longer sales cycle, there's so much more content that is put out there to help buyers educate themselves, and they increasingly are self-directed. There are people who are relying on old-school tactics like SEO, advertising, and that sort of thing, but what good is something that's find-able if it's not also credible. The role influence plays in a lot of content marketing is that we can optimize for findability, but we can also optimize for credibility with external influencers, external subject matter experts, and also use those tactics to increase the influence of the brand and key opinion leaders and executives within the brand at the same time. 2 Simultaneously Growing B2B Brand Influence & Business B2B brands need to think about how they can grow influence within their business at the same time, so they can own that influence. You may wonder, will B2B ever catch up or take the lead over B2C when it comes to investment in influencer marketing? Lee said that he doesnt think that B2B is going to take over B2C from a quantitative standpoint, because the nature of consumer products and services have a greater volume of influencer activity. Unlike in typical B2C influencer marketing, in B2B you actually need to have credibility, domain authority, and earn your influence by others citing you as that expert. From a qualitative standpoint, B2B certainly has an opportunity to lead B2C because of the required validation, its legitimacy, and the lack of fake followers and blatant opportunism. When it comes to B2B influencers, you have people who are genuinely invested in making the industry a better place. 3 The Growing Role Of Maturity Models in B2B Influencer Marketing There's a maturity model we've developed over the last six or seven years that we've been implementing for influencer marketing programs with B2B companies. For brands at the beginning stages, it's experimentation sort of digitally throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. They'll only work with people for one campaign, and then completely ignore them after the campaign ends, looking at it as just a transaction, and as only an advertising buy. This short-sighted approach typically leads them to realize the influencers that they were trying to work with are ignoring them. This can lead them to begin thinking, We've actually got to develop legitimate relationships with these folks. We've got to invest in software, to think about the bigger picture, and how working with these folks can not only add to performance on an individual campaign, but by educating influencers about things we both care about, that they can become organic advocates for us, even outside of the campaign. If youre just borrowing influence by working with people who are top experts in an industry, and that's all you ever do, youre not going to get the full value and benefit of influencer marketing. If, on the other hand, youre doing that and simultaneously looking at up-and-comers in the industry, and looking at key opinion leaders within a company and helping them become more influential that investment in helping them be more successful is going to be something that they'll appreciate. Youll both have skin in the game then, and will be doing something together making the industry a better place, and that typically results in amazing organic advocacy. When you take a short term approach, you're not going to connect emotionally with influencers. 4 A More Sophisticated B2B Influencer Marketing Approach When you are more sophisticated and have more experience with this, you can hit the ground running and do certain things to help a business such as doing a pilot and youll start to see some of those metrics that will get attention from executive sponsorship, and win you more budget to roll out that program in a much more significant way. Its important to approach this as a strategic move to build the brand and to grow influence at scale, that will ultimately result in the kind of advocacy that really grows a business. More sophisticated approaches to influencer marketing are able to fix the plane while it's flying, so to speak. The counter to this sort of short-termism is always-on influence, because buyers are always on, and the internet certainly is always on. Always on is an approach to working with influencers that helps you maintain relationships and show that all-important love. The influencer has the experience of collaborating with you in an ongoing fashion, with: Interaction opportunities Earned media Mentions in your newsletter Mentions in your eBooks, blog posts, and infographics This continues to show the influencer that you're giving them attention, which is what they want, because that's how they monetize. 5 Always-On Influence & The Role of Validation There are also other opportunities that are always on. We've done consulting for Adobe, and our CEO Lee Odden has been identified as an Ado

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Webinar: B2B Influencer Marketing Keys to Success with Lee Odden and MarketingProfs

2020-06-01 17:25:24| Marketing and Public Relations - M&O

How do you create a B2B influencer marketing program that's built for success? Despite only 37 percent of B2B companies planning to implement an ongoing influencer marketing program, a full 77 percent of marketers say that prospects rely on advice from industry experts and 63 percent feel their marketing would have better results with an influencer program. Learn the keys to successfully build a truly scalable B2B influencer marketing program like those at Dell, SAP and LinkedIn by joining TopRank Marketing chief executive Lee Odden during his MarketingProfs webinar presentation, including free registration. MarketingProfs B2B Influencer Marketing Lee Odden Webinar Tune in on Tuesday, June 2 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern when Lee will present a live webinar presentation entitled "The Keys to Successful B2B Influencer Programs." What Will You Learn? Influencer marketing is all the rage for B2C products, but can it work for B2B marketing? Turns out, the answer is a resounding yes influencer marketing is a powerful but under-utilized tool for B2B marketers. Join Lee and learn how quality content makes influencer marketing an achievable goal. Even with growing optimism about how B2B influencers can deliver on thought leadership to lead gen marketing objectives, many B2B brands are not confident about their knowledge or skills to implement an influencer marketing program. Fortunately, the most successful brands are elevating the practice, creating a clear path to follow for companies looking to implement their own influencer programs. Join in as Lee Odden shares the latest research, strategies, and best practices to unlock success for an enterprise B2B content and influencer marketing program. You'll Learn: How to scale quality content with B2B influencers How leading B2B brands like SAP, LinkedIn, and Dell have been able to scale influence to directly impact B2B marketing results What to avoid and what to plan for to scale influencer content Learn B2B Influencer Marketing & Get Free Registration Free registration for Lee's 60-minute presentation is available here. Take advantage of this excellent opportunity to expand your B2B marketing program by joining Lee for this free live webinar. In the meantime you can learn more from Lee and others on the TopRank Marketing team by connecting with our award-winning marketing blog. If you would like to talk to us directly about how to improve your content marketing performance as we have done for B2B brands ranging from Adobe and Dell to LinkedIn and 3M, please connect with us here.

Tags: marketing success lee keys

5 B2B Influencer Marketing Tips That Get Results Inbound Success

2020-05-11 13:00:24| Marketing and Public Relations - M&O

What does it take to build B2B influencer marketing campaigns that deliver measurable marketing results? How can businesses get started partnering with influencers, and what kind of results can they expect? Dont worry weve got you covered here. Our CEO Lee Odden joined Kathleen Booth, vice president of marketing at Attila Security, on her The Inbound Success Podcast, and together they took a look and explored the world of successful B2B influencer marketing. Among the multitude of B2B influencer marketing gems Lee shared with Kathleen are the following five helpful take-aways to strengthen your own existing B2B influencer marketing program, or to assist as you begin an entirely new influencer pilot program. So lets get right to it, dig in, and take a look. 1 Getting Started: Topics of Influence One of the big challenges of our time in the marketing world is the growing distrust consumers have of brands. Influencer marketing is a great way to restore some of that lost trust. Lee explored this recently in How B2B Marketers Can Enter the Circle of Trust, sharing how B2B brand and influencer content collaborations can build brand trust, raise relevance, and boost credibility. Successful influencer marketing is much more than just feeding influencers a message or treating them the same as an ad buy, however thats often how the B2C world tends to operate when it comes to influencers. Smart influencer marketing programs genuinely try to help the influencers involved. To get started with B2B influencer marketing, it is important to first identify and define what marketing problem the brand is trying to solve. What primary and secondary topics represent the solution to that problem? How do buyers think of those solutions? What terms, phrases and topics are most accurately associated with the problem/solution? Once you identify the topics of influence, youll have a clear signal for finding those who are influential about those topics and the content you will co-create with them. 2 Identifying The Right B2B Influencers Finding and qualifying a B2B influencer involves finding a person who is credible around a topic, and who has an audience with which the content they share will resonate. Pay attention to a potential influencers authentic voice, because then whatever they say is perfect because it's real and that's what people are looking for. Authenticity helps turn B2B influencer marketing into an experience that is good for the brand, the contributors, and the audience that we're out there to attract and engage. Focus on organic and authentic advocacy and engagement, which is quite different from just paying people who are willing to say something nice. Their voice and message needs to be legitimate and genuine. To locate the right influencers for your brand, find and use data to look for evidence of people who may already be actively advocating for the brand and actively publishing, and who are respected in the industry. One of the biggest failures that people make when identifying possible influencers is focusing only on popularity. Once you have identified the key topics a brand is looking to address with influencer marketing, you can use a variety of approaches to brainstorm potential influencers everything from interviewing people at the brand, to looking at customer relationship management (CRM) data and social media data. It can be beneficial to use a platform that crawls the social web for data about potential influencers, such one of the platforms we use at TopRank Marketing, Traackr. Next, look at data points including topical relevance, the degree to which that individual's own content that they're publishing is a match at a relevance level to the topic of influence that a brand is after. Also look at the degree to which that topic of influence actually resonates with both the potential influencers first and second level network. Find out if they publish their own blog or on industry websites do they speak at conferences, or are they a book author? During this research phase, try to optimize and rank your list of potential influencers for findability and credibility. Make sure that the type of content you have planned is a match for what potential influencers publish, so that YouTubers deal with video, bloggers for text, podcasters with audio, and so on. 3 Engaging and Activating B2B Influencers When you have the good fortune of finding the right combination of traits which point to someone being a possible good influencer match, then reach out to them and invite them to contribute or collaborate on content. Its important to have a reasonable expectation that one of the outcomes from that content you collaborate on is going to result in some sort of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) usually in a B2B case, it's a download, a trial or demo, or something similar. Its also important to keep in mind that influence is temporal. By nature Its not permanent, and will go up and down over time. That means you will need to re-evaluate your influencers on a periodic basis. There are different types of influencers including "brandividuals," who are professional influencers that make it their business to be a thought leader in their industry. Engaging pro influencers is very different from engaging subject matter experts that have a strong network but do not actively self-promote or create content for brands. B2B brands that are new to influencer marketing might try starting off by identifying people who are influential and already brand advocates and simply invite them to do something simple such as to share a quote or commentary about a report. 4 Engaging B2B Influencers to Create and Promote Brand Content The magic of B2B influencer content creation and promotion starts in the planning. Use search data to understand what topics are in demand. Use those topics as a guide for influencer selection and content creation. When search, social, influencers and content align topically, brands become the best answer for the questions buyers are looking for. Also use additional data sources to get an idea of the questions people are asking around a topic that the brand wants to be known for. This topic was covered in detail in

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10 Top B2B Influencer Marketing Tips For PR and Marketing Professionals

2020-04-20 13:00:59| Marketing and Public Relations - M&O

With 47 percent of B2B companies planning to spend more money on influencer marketing in 2020 (Spiceworks), combined with its growing strength during times of crisis. Now is the time to implement a B2B influencer marketing plan, and here are the 10 top take-aways you need to know. Our CEO Lee Odden sat down with […] The post 10 Top B2B Influencer Marketing Tips For PR and Marketing Professionals appeared first on Newsroom.

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