4 Examples of the Best B2B Influencer Content Marketing

6 minute read

Upland Admin

Are you struggling to create engaging content for your B2B audience? Maybe you’re running short on time and are unable to produce enough content. Perhaps you’re facing budget constraints to promote your content. These examples of common B2B content marketing challenges may be all too familiar. They may have even prevented your content marketing from being successful.

But now you can overcome these, and other B2B content marketing obstacles, with the help of influencers.

What is Influencer Content Marketing?

Influencer content marketing involves integrating the power of influencers into your content marketing strategy. Social media influencers are a powerful channel for promoting your content. Influencer marketing may include publishing your guest posts on an influencer’s blog or website, having an influencer sharing your content with their social media followers, or co-creating content with them. Here are a few ways influencer content marketing can benefit your business:

  • Influencers Help Boost Engagement
    Your B2B content marketing strategy may not be yielding desired results because your content isn’t relevant enough. Influencers have a clear idea what their audience likes, giving you a leg up in choosing topics that will captivate your audience and increase engagement. Influencers can further help you boost engagement by co-creating content with you. Co-created content is highly effective for winning over the loyal band of followers these influencers already have. Working with an influencer also gives credibility and voice to your content.
  • Influencer Marketing Maximizes Reach and Improves Lead Quality
    Influencers have an established following and a massive reach. Having them promote your content or publish your guest post can help you directly reach their audience. Plus, it’ll be easier for you to establish a relationship or build trust with this audience since you’re speaking through an influencer they admire. Additionally, working with a relevant influencer means you’ll be reaching out to a relevant audience—an audience that’s more likely to be interested in your product and/or service. This can help increase the quality and quantity of your leads.

4 Companies that Nailed their B2B Influencer Content Marketing

Many B2B companies have already leveraged the unique benefits of working with influencers to fuel successful content marketing campaigns. The best way for you to learn how your business can do the same is to find out how they did it.

Here are four of the best B2B influencer marketing case studies:

1. TopRank Online Marketing and Content Marketing Institute

An excellent example of influencer content marketing is how TopRank Online Marketing and Content Marketing Institute worked with influencers to promote the 2014 Content Marketing World conference. They collaborated with more than 40 influencers from major brands including LinkedIn, MarketingProfs, Kapost, Facebook, and Copyblogger.

Each influencer was asked what advice they would give marketers interested in content marketing. The expert advice and insights provided by the influencers was compiled and used to create a treasury of content marketing resources in the form of four eBooks. Some influencers were also selected for long-form interviews, which were published with the eBooks on the TopRank blog.

Content Marketing Strategy eBook #CMWorld
Cover of one of the eBooks in the series. Source: Slideshare

As a result of the campaign, they received more than 200,000 total views for the eBooks by December 2014. The campaign also generated 200+ event referrals, 4,000+ PDF downloads of the eBooks, and more than 1,000 leads. Find out more about the campaign in the complete case study published by TopRank.

2. SAP

Software solutions provider, SAP, recently used influencer content marketing to promote their Sapphire conference. The event draws 20,000+ attendees annually, bringing together user groups, partners, and customers to announce new product developments and share best ideas and practices.

SAP partnered with influencers from various industries to create authoritative content for their 2016 Sapphire conference. They engaged virtual audiences with live video content on their Facebook page. The videos featured interviews with influencers, who shared their knowledge and expertise on relevant topics. The result? The event’s content reached more than 80,000 people.

You can check out the SAP blog for replays of the live video content used in the campaign.


Screenshot of live video replay from SAP blog

3. Video Fruit

An influencer doesn’t necessarily have to be an individual; sometimes it can be an influential publisher, blog, or website. Video Fruit is a business in web-based marketing consultancy. In 2014, Video Fruit Founder Bryan Harris discovered the power of influencer content marketing when he wrote a guest post for Okdork.

On the day the post was published, Bryan’s website traffic jumped from its previous average of 285 visitors a day to more than 1,000, with nearly 700 the following day. Out of those visits, 73% were new visitors. Additionally, he managed to get 215 new subscribers to the site during those first two days, meaning there was a 12% conversion rate.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s61/sh/d0740380-a277-4147-b553-341175b5dfa9/ba590514f5e17f42a9205056a0e50b9a/deep/0/Pages---Google-Analytics.pnghttp:/
Results of guest blogging on Bryan’s site traffic

4. Point Blank SEO

Point Blank SEO is a link building blog authored by Jon Cooper, who managed to increase site traffic and gain more subscribers through guest blogging. He wrote an informative piece on link building, which was published on YouMoz and later promoted on Moz.

He experienced a slight jump in traffic from the post’s publication on YouMoz. However, just one day after the post was promoted on the main blog, the referring traffic resulted in nearly 400 new visitors in a single day. The post continues to send traffic to his blog on a regular basis, showing the benefit of promoting your content through an influential website.

What Can We Learn from these B2B Content Marketing Examples?

The four case studies above highlight the importance of working with relevant influencers when co-creating content. Both TopRank and SAP did this successfully and created valuable content their target audiences engaged with. If guest posts are part of your content marketing campaign, make sure you’re publishing them on relevant and influential websites. Both Video Fruit and Point Blank SEO publish their guest posts on influential websites that are relevant to their industries. This helped them generate quality leads and significantly boost website traffic.

It doesn’t matter if you create blog posts, video content, or eBooks—just make sure you provide your audience with valuable content they’ll want to consume and engage.

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