Whether you’re a B2B brand trying to attract new clients or a growing company sourcing talent for your team, LinkedIn is a valuable tool for growth. While countless B2B companies create and share content with their audiences and potential employees, they often overlook influencer marketing.
Just like on any other channel, influencers on LinkedIn can significantly improve your brand’s visibility, help you earn trust from customers, and even boost your sales. The good news? You don’t need to spend a fortune on mentions. Micro-influencers currently account for 91% of the influencer market, and these voices can be just as effective at elevating your marketing campaigns. If not more.
Here’s your guide to unlocking the power of micro-influencers on LinkedIn for B2B marketing.
Why Influencer Marketing Matters on LinkedIn
Recent studies show that working with an influencer can improve customer loyalty by 87% and improve brand awareness by 89%. However, LinkedIn is often overlooked as a platform for influencer marketing. Many companies assume influencers only have a significant impact on B2C consumers.
However, we’ve seen that 78% of B2B marketers that have jumped on the bandwagon and started working with influencers have noticeably increased sales, and improved their brand’s reputation and credibility. When you use LinkedIn for B2B marketing, influencers allow you to leverage industry experts, opinion leaders, and prominent brands to boost your visibility and earn customer engagement. They can even help you attract new employees to your company by highlighting your unique company culture and employee value proposition.
Why Use Micro-Influencers on LinkedIn?
So, why micro-influencers? Micro-influencers have a smaller reach than their larger counterparts, usually boasting between 10,000 to 100,000 followers. However, while their reach is smaller, their impact can be just as big or bigger than that of larger influencers.
Studies show that 82% of consumers are likely to buy something a micro-influencer recommends, meaning you still get a great opportunity to boost conversions.
Plus, a LinkedIn influencer with a smaller following will:
- Charge lower fees: most micro-influencers charge lower rates, making it easier to invest in a comprehensive marketing strategy. You can even work with multiple micro-influencers at the same time, spreading your reach and targeting specific customer groups.
- Increase engagement: because micro-influencers tend to have a more intimate audience, they usually see a higher engagement rate. One study found that micro-influencers have a fantastic engagement rate of around 6%, while mega-influencers only have an engagement rate of around 1.97%.
- Help you reach niche audiences: micro-influencers target specific, niche communities. This makes it easier to connect with B2B buyers or employees who are more likely to be interested in your business and its services or products.
- Improve your reputation: micro-influencers are sometimes seen as more authentic and relatable than their larger celebrity counterparts. They reply to comments and behave more authentically online, which also improves your own brand’s reputation.
How to Use Micro-Influencers for Brand Promotion
The way you approach your strategy for LinkedIn influencer marketing will vary depending on your goals, budget, and other factors. Here’s how you can start elevating your brand promotion strategy with innovative influencer marketing on LinkedIn.
Step 1: Define your Goals and Objectives
The first step to using micro-influencers on LinkedIn for B2B marketing is figuring out what you want to accomplish. Your marketing goals will determine what type of influencers you pursue, the content you create, and the audience you target. For instance, you might want to:
- Highlight your employer brand to attract new employees to your team.
- Elevate your company’s reputation and show thought leadership.
- Increase brand loyalty and conversions.
- Boost brand awareness and visibility.
- Access additional traffic and leads for your B2B company.
Decide what the ideal outcome/s of your influencer campaign will be, and define the metrics you’ll use to track the success of your strategy. For instance, if your goal is to showcase your employer brand, you might monitor the increase in job applications. If you want to boost brand awareness, you can monitor social media followers, website traffic, and brand mentions.
Step 2: Find the Right Micro-Influencers for Your Brand
Next, it’s time to find the influencers who will support your brand promotion efforts. For instance, if you’re a SaaS company trying to hire new AI tech experts, you might choose an authority in the AI space. If you’re drawing attention to your new accounting software, you might choose a financial professional.
The influencer you choose should always have a strong connection with your target audience, share your company’s values, and cultivate genuine engagement for followers.
The good news is finding influencers on LinkedIn is usually easier than it seems. You can share ads for Influencers on LinkedIn’s job pages or search for “people” related to a specific topic like “Technology” on the LinkedIn search page.
A good way to boost your chances of getting a response from an influencer is to reach out to people you already have 2nd or 1st-degree connections with. If you’re struggling to find micro-influencers on LinkedIn directly, consider using influencer marketing platforms and directories like Upfluence.
Step 3: Plan Your Content Strategy
Once you’ve found the ideal micro-influencers for your B2B marketing strategy, the next step is defining what kind of content you’re going to create. Your influencer might be able to offer suggestions on relevant content that’s worked for them when promoting similar brands in the past.
Alternatively, you might have specific types of content you want to promote, such as reviews of your products, how-to demonstrations, or stories about your company culture. To ensure your micro-influencers produce the best content for LinkedIn:
- Experiment with a range of styles: explore various options, like long-form thought leadership articles published straight to LinkedIn, infographics to convey complex information, interviews with thought leaders, or how-to videos.
- Create a hashtag: create a branded hashtag your influencer can use when promoting your content. This can help you to attract user-generated content. Plus, it’s a great way to ensure you can organize your influencer content on your LinkedIn feed plugin for your website.
- Give your influencers resources: provide your influencers with access to design tools, videos, existing content, free demos of your product, and even promotional codes they can use to boost your chances of conversions.
Remember, your influencer will already have a lot of experience using LinkedIn for B2B marketing, so it’s worth giving them plenty of creative freedom and taking their insights into account when planning your campaigns.
Step 4: Focus on Storytelling and Relationship Building
One of the biggest benefits of working with micro-influencers is their existing connection with their target audience. They’re seen as highly authentic and credible, which means they’re excellent for elevating your brand’s equity and reputation.
Take advantage of this by using your micro-influencers to draw attention to your brand’s story. Don’t just constantly try to promote products and make sales; ask your influencers to share useful insights into your company’s values and culture, as well as your mission, vision, and goals.
Going beyond basic promotional posts with your LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign will help you to attract more customers and boost your chances of building deeper relationships with crucial B2B clients.
It’s good to know that B2B consumers often need more evidence that they can trust a company before they consider working with them, so storytelling can be an excellent way to accelerate the B2B purchasing cycle.
Step 5: Promote your Micro-Influencers
Once you start posting content with your influencers, don’t just leave the job of driving awareness and visibility to them. Get involved. Share your influencer’s post on your own social media channels, and include links to their top posts in your email newsletter. Reference your influencer in your blog posts and showcase them on your website’s “news” page. If you’re using an influencer for employer brand promotion, you could even post some of their content on your “jobs” page.
Respond to comments on your influencer’s posts to keep the conversation going and increase engagement on LinkedIn, and @mention your influencer frequently.
Another great strategy is to embed your LinkedIn company page or top influencer posts on your website. A LinkedIn feed plugin gives you an excellent opportunity to curate all of the best content from one or multiple LinkedIn micro-influencers into a single feed on your website. This acts as yet another form of social proof for your website and can boost your chances of earning conversions when customers arrive on your site.
Step 6: Measure, Track, and Optimize
Finally, pay attention to the results you get from your LinkedIn influencer strategy. Monitor the success of your campaigns by giving each of your influencers trackable links they can share in their posts so you can see which professionals drive the most traffic back to your website.
Ask your influencers to share their own LinkedIn metrics on things like engagement and reach so you can define which strategies are pushing you toward your marketing goals.
Monitoring metrics consistently will ensure you can make the right decisions when using LinkedIn for B2B marketing in the future. The insights you get will help not only your future micro-influencer campaigns but also your own strategies for social media brand promotion.
Discover the Benefits of LinkedIn Influencer Marketing
LinkedIn influencer marketing can be an incredible way to boost your access to new leads and traffic, improve your brand’s reputation, and unlock new growth opportunities. With micro-influencers, you can easily access all of the benefits influencers have to offer for brand promotion without the unnecessary expense of working with a major celebrity.
Don’t forget to take full advantage of your influencer relationship, too, by using tools like Juicer to showcase your top-performing influencer posts on your website. Get started with the Juicer LinkedIn Feed plugin here.
