How to partner with Thought Leaders and B2B Influencers?

6 min readJun 20, 2024

Let’s check out some relevant stats to start off -

The customer acquisition costs are up by 50% over the past 5 years.
The number of buyers who believe their latest buy was complex or way too difficult is up by 77%.
80% of buyers have changed their B2B suppliers who failed to meet their expectations.

… So, what of these stats?

The B2B Buyer behaviour is changing.

Trust is a primary factor for buyers now. It’s based on basic human psychology: the need to follow those whom we trust. And who do we trust?

Authority and fellow professionals who are helping / have helped us earlier.

There are two main categories of people whom we trust.

Thought leaders and
Influencers i.e. professionals with higher followers in the same domain.

Thought leaders help their audience with valuable and exclusive content.

Influencers help their audience with all kinds of curated or created content meant for educating, entertaining, discussing, reviewing etc.

Both thought leaders and Influencers have social proof, causing everyone to want to see everything they share.

Buyers are giving first preference to products recommended by thought leaders and influencers.

Today, The buyer’s mind is already used to the paid ads, google search results, social media posts and any content by brands. They’ve now just become a touch-point not the decision triggers.

Even LinkedIn recognizes this and has introduced a new feature that helps promote posts by thought leaders and influencers.

Brands are already involving thought leaders and influencers for building a positive brand image, and to push the unique positioning.

Where do we go without thought leaders and influencers?

Trust is aligned to Source.

The fight for capturing attention is at its peak, as people don’t value things when they don’t trust the source.

No one wants to be sold to, when they don’t know the brand or the person who is selling to them.

Even brand stories are not trusted by people, basically anything coming from a paid channel is not trusted.

With the AI tools,

The SEO battle has moved a notch up. It is still a long term game. But the generation of SEO friendly content with the help of AI has made the SEO game harder.
The content game is getting harder as AI can generate unique content too, if someone knows the right prompts.

Distribution, on the other hand, is not easy either.

LinkedIn ads are getting popular and the cost of reaching a buyer is becoming more expensive with increasing demand.
SEO is hard, and with AI, the fight for optimization and keywords is done through automated tools, which everyone has started using
Seller partnerships and communities are also long term games, as it takes some time to build them.

Partnerships with target group influencers and thought leaders are the way to reach the audience.

They have re-wired trust and authority. These partnerships also let them check your offering.

If brands don’t invest in authority building, partnering with thought leaders or influencers, they will miss out on trust.

The target audience has already given their trust to thought leaders and influencers

Case Study

InspireBeats

InspireBeats is an all-in-one lead generation, lead research, and personalized prospecting solution for startups and larger (and even a couple public) companies with millions in revenue.

It provides monthly qualified and targeted leads, conducts research, and facilitates personalized outreach efforts.

As per their CMO,

Marketing goals at a high level were to drive more leads to InspireBeats.com that were interested in using lead generation or outbound emails to help grow influencers.

Result:

Generated over $12 million dollars in B2B leads.

What they did:

They targeted influencers to write about them in blog posts. They also targeted podcasts with more than 3000 listeners on each episode.
They sent cold emails containing a pitch and a customized email to influencers. The best value they created for influencers, creators, and podcasts was providing “What We Learned Sending 1,000,000 Cold Emails This Year” Since very few people were talking about it, it got their attention.
They sent a total of around 300 emails in a month for the same.
Their success metric was to get 10 blogs, 10 podcasts and 10 guest posts to feature on in a month.
They ended up on 15 podcasts, 5 guest blogs published and 5 media features

Message Ayush Poddar

Video Fruit

Video Fruit — a B2B marketing consultancy that provides software, courses, coaching programs, and tools to help businesses build their email databases — decided to run a guest blogging campaign.

Approach: Bryan Harris, founder of Video Fruit, was published as a guest blogger on the Okdork blog.

Result: On the day the post was published, the Video Fruit website saw a 500% increase in page views.

Guest blogging is perhaps one of the most traditional forms of B2B influencer marketing.

Video Fruit wrote a guest blog post on Noah Kagan’s OkDork, which brought in traffic and even conversion for their own site.
They planned to write the blog, and link the Video Fruit blog on Bryan Harris’ name, which led people to clicking on their website and finding it, eventually bringing traffic to their site.
They tracked the visitors from OkDork to their site, measuring the traffic to their root homepage and the subscriber increase rate, which increased by 1782 views and a 12% increase in conversion rate.
It worked because this guest post was super detailed and provided all the information needed for guest posting, which increased Video Fruit’s credibility.