B2B Influencer Marketing on LinkedIn: Strategies to Leverage LinkedIn Influencer Marketing

LinkedIn is the leader in the business owners’ social media landscape. It is emerging as a resource for B2B marketers aiming to expand their reach and influence. It is the go-to social platform for professionals looking to connect and grow their careers.

Many companies and their employees have a presence on LinkedIn. Understanding that this is a demanding audience is crucial, and the B2B field thrives on this professional network. How can you do B2B marketing on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn currently boasts over 770.97 million users, which continues to grow. Its user base is estimated to reach 942.84 million, with a new peak in 2028. In this environment, time is valuable, so the audience pays attention to authentic experts and leaders in their fields. 

Image Source – Statista

The main focus of the Linkedin platform has been business networking. Employers and recruitment agencies use it to find top talent, and Job seekers use the site to find employment opportunities. 

Did you know LinkedIn can also be a powerful tool for leveraging influencer marketing?  Yes, the platform now uses LinkedIn influencer marketing.

strategy to help businesses and brands grow.

This article will discuss B2B Influencer Marketing on LinkedIn and its top strategies to leverage LinkedIn Influencer Marketing.

What Is LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?

In the B2B market, Linkedin is generating huge noise, and the social media platform for business professionals has branched out from its traditional recruitment-focused model and started offering features for B2B brands to promote themselves. 

LinkedIn influencer marketing helps brands to collaborate with other businesses on the site. Brands can promote each other, expand their reach, and build brand credibility by creating these connections. This practice can attract a new category of professional influencers who promote business brands.

LinkedIn influencer marketing specialists can drive effective engagement and help B2B brands grow. In fact, according to statistics published by the professional networking site, LinkedIn generated 3.8 billion in ad revenue in 2021, which revenue is expected to increase to 7.7 billion by 2026. LinkedIn has become the perfect place to connect with influencers in your industry and leverage their reach to grow your brand.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing on LinkedIn

Reaching a Targeted Audience

LinkedIn platforms help brands and companies reach out to relevant target audiences. Choose the best influencer, and your message will reach many people and the best people. Such focused messaging helps realize your marketing objectives.

Boosting Brand Awareness

With collaboration from another prominent player in your field via a link, you remarkably enhance your company’s publicity. It means you get a chance to introduce your brand to another group of people who are related to your specialization but have not been involved in any business-related transactions with you before.

Building Credibility and Trust

Working with an influence connected to LinkedIn can change things entirely for your brand. A seal of approval comes when someone greatly admired within an industry recommends your product. Through this endorsement, your brand’s perception could be improved, giving consumers the confidence they need when purchasing from you.

Driving More Traffic to Your Website

Promoting your website through an influencer can lead to a significant increase in traffic. When an established and authoritative professional posts a backlink on your website or a particular product he recommends, it makes way for quality traffic. The first group, the early adopters, comprises people who believe in the influencer’s opinions and care about the product you sell.

Generating Leads and Sales

Quality traffic always accompanies conversion. Likes and shares are not the only things you get when your audiences engage with your brand. Instead, you will have actual leads and sales.

Top Strategies to Leverage LinkedIn Influencer Marketing

1. Search For Relevant LinkedIn Influencers

Finding relevant linkedin influencers is crucial, and you should be clear about the criteria for selecting influencers.  A successful influencer marketing and partnership campaign is to find the right collaborators for the brand. 

You need to ensure that they should be from your niche, with a certain level of expertise in their field.  The selected influencers and partners who share your values, goals, and target audience and have strong engagement and reputation in their niche.

Some of your goals might be as follows,

• Establishing yourself as a leader of a specific industry
• Building brand awareness
• Generating leads and sales
• Building relationships with  influencers

Your audience may include:

• Executives and decision-makers in your industry
• Thought leaders and influencers in your industry
• Potential customers or clients

Potential influencers and partners’ reach, relevance, and resonance can be researched and identified using BuzzSumo, Upfluence, or AspireIQ tools. 

Then, your selected influencer should have people you want to target in their connections, which is another key factor. Secondly,  the whole purpose of partnering with influencers is to reach out to their connections, who could be potential customers for your business. Finally, the most important factor for influencer selection is to be active on the Linkedin platform.

Conducting Thorough Research Through Manual Search Using Keywords

Search for relevant LinkedIn influencers by browsing LinkedIn profiles matching your brand. It is essential to know what kind of content they publish and examine the nature of their engagement. Observe how they engage with the audience, follow their discussions, and scrutinize your target market.

Manual searching: The most straightforward way to find influencers on LinkedIn is to search for relevant industry keywords and phrases. 

For Linkedin manual searching, you need to follow below steps,

• After signing in to the LinkedIn platform, tap the ‘search’ bar at the top of your screen. 
• Enter your keyword into the Search bar. 
• Tap ‘search’ to run the search. 
• Tap the People tab at the top only to see people’s results for your search.

When you enter a keyword in the search box at the top left of your LinkedIn home page, you see a results list.

LinkedIn Groups Searching

Looking through Linkedin groups is another way to find influencers on Linkedin. Anyone who actively posts in a group is a potential influencer.

 To search for influencers in the groups, you may need to follow the below steps,

• Write the keyword in the search bar and select “Groups” from the drop-down menu at the top-right corner. 
• You will find a list of related groups when you search for a specific keyword or niche. 
• Finally, Search the groups to find influential people in your niche.

Most of the groups may be private, and some might be public. Try joining the top groups in your industry and niche. The private ones require approval from the moderator to join and are marked with a lock.

Influencer Search Tools

Numerous influencer search tools can help you find influencers using advanced search filters. These tools can help you find the most relevant influencers for your brand. Searching for influencers on LinkedIn involves using specific keywords and phrases. Other search filters include industry, location, age, and followers. 

Some of these tools also allow users to search for influencers by platform, making LinkedIn influencer marketing easier and more effective.  This will save you time and effort in searching for the right influencers. Moreover, using an influencer search tool will make running the whole campaign much easier.

2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is the foundation of your influencer marketing campaign, so optimizing it for visibility and standing out from the crowd is crucial. Thought leaders and decision-makers will learn more about you through this; it needs to showcase your expertise, experience, and unique value proposition.

Now let’s see some steps for optimizing your LinkedIn profile,

• Make sure to optimize your complete profile.
• Get a great professional profile picture that’s consistent with your personal brand.
• Have a customized background image
• Write a compelling headline 
• Write an authentic and optimized summary that tells your story and highlights your achievement.
• Use multimedia content to showcase your work.
• Get client, colleague, or partner recommendations to demonstrate your credibility and expertise.
• Use relevant keywords that are relevant to your industry and target audience.

3. Outreach and Develop Relationships

Once you find influencers on LinkedIn, you should contact them and cultivate relationships before reaching out for collaborations. Make sure that the influencer at least knows your name before you reach out to collaborate, so do not start your message by directly asking them to collaborate. 

You can do that by commenting on their posts and interacting with them in groups. Personalize the pitch by complimenting them on their recent posts or mentioning something specific about them while reaching out to them or crafting an outreach message. 

While implementing your outreach marketing strategies, they must pay attention; you should craft persuasive messages.

• Your crafted messages should stand out and make them want to collaborate with you. 
• Start genuine conversations with them. 
• Converse naturally with them and provide value to them.
• You could compliment them for their success.

Your message will stand out only if it is exciting and engaging. Remember that you’re not the only one reaching out to them.

4. Develop Mutually-Beneficial Collaborations

Once you have successfully connected with influencers, creating high-quality, mutually beneficial content will benefit your audiences. 

Let’s see some ways to collaborate with LinkedIn influencers to generate content. 

Creating High-Quality Content

Creating high-quality content relevant one of the most popular ways to leverage LinkedIn influencers to your target audience and their connections. LinkedIn has a blog where you can directly share long-form content and relevant articles with your audience. LinkedIn influencers are industry experts, so you can ask them to create high-quality, thought-leadership pieces to help you establish yourself as an industry expert and build valuable connections. 

Inspiring Quotes From Experts

Taking advantage of expert quotes is another effective way to leverage influencers to use influencer quotes in your content. Give them credit while mentioning and will add substance to your content and make it seem more credible.

 Some other ways are,

• Compile a list of expert quotes and tag them all. Using a single post, you can target all their connections simultaneously. 
• Promote your expert roundup post on social media and use the names of popular influencers to get more views.

By Mentioning Company Pages

You can use LinkedIn influencer marketing to find an influential person in your company and ask them to share content and mention your company. When influencers post on their company, ask to mention your brand or product. When influencers talk about your product, it develops credibility and encourages people to try it.

5. Measure the ROI Of Your LinkedIn Influencer Marketing

The final strategy for your influencer marketing campaign is complete once you measure the ROI and see how well your campaign performed. Your results should be parallel to the goals you set up for your campaign. Measure your performance based on your goals, whether you want to drive conversions or enhance brand awareness.

ROI for influencer marketing – The ratio of the benefits you gain from your campaign to the costs you acquire.

Benefits you gained might include,

• Increased brand awareness
• Engagement
• Traffic Leads
• sales
• Customer loyalty

Suppose you are working with many influencers; you have to identify the ones who performed well and who didn’t. This can be determined by analyzing the engagement rates each influencer’s content gets on LinkedIn.

The costs in the LinkedIn influencer Marketing can consist of

• Influencer fees
• Agency fees
• production costs
• Ad spending

Calculate ROI percentage – the monetary value of your benefits and subtract expenses, then divide the result by your costs and multiply by 100

Influencer marketing offers a higher return on investment than other advertising forms. Moreover, the audience repeatedly mentions the brand promoted by the influencer, signaling the advent of the era of B2B influencer marketing in 2024.

Final Thoughts

If you’re considering incorporating influencer marketing on LinkedIn, selecting a recognized and experienced professional is essential. Use LinkedIn influencer marketing to get prospective clients to notice your brand. When you do so and integrate them into your digital marketing strategy, your business could experience significant progress.