When it comes to B2B business marketing channels we soon hit the limited count of platforms and media sources to promote business-orientated products and services. LinkedIn is clearly one of the strongest social media platforms currently available where B2B marketing professionals can expose business content, updates and news. In addition, targeting key markets, map business development areas and engage with the potential buyers.

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There are multiple strategies and approaches to drive lead generation and brand awareness campaigns on LinkedIn, starting from direct messaging, content creation to InMail campaigns, or sponsored ads.

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In this article we want to focus on a relatively new way B2B businesses can promote their products and solutions, meaning, with the help of B2B micro-influencers and influencers on LinkedIn. In particular, we want to look at different ways to promote B2B business on LinkedIn and collaborate with LinkedIn influencers.

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Also interesting: How to measure B2B influencer marketing campaigns

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To start with, the way your business collaborates with B2B LinkedIn influencers could change based on your campaign goals.

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1. Brand awareness focus

 

In other words getting a word out of your unique solution, product or services. For brand awareness campaigns typically companies equip their influencers with plenty of value-added content they can share with their audience. Provide your influencers with good quality content they can easily share with others, can tag their connections and open up discussions with their network. Typically you would ask your influencers to lead the audience to your website or LinkedIn company page to explore content in detail.

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2. Content acquisition focus

 

This means your end goal is to get new unique content about your product or services. Typically you would give an influencer a short brief and give them the freedom to create the content in their own style and voice. This could be a blog post with a product review, video recording, perhaps a presentation or slide share specially made for LinkedIn. If the influencer is running their own podcast it could be a dedicated episode on your particular topic.

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3. Follower acquisition focus

 

In this case, the main focus of the campaign is to drive user traffic for example to the LinkedIn company page. As your goal would be to attract as much attention as possible a good method typically is to ask your influencers to use “tag someone who would like this” strategy. Maybe run a small giveaway where the first 100 users who leave a comment and follow the page can receive a special gift (eBook, a trial session, a physical goody, etc), or launch a competition where people are more naturally driven into the whole campaign and have a reason to make certain actions.

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4. Sales generation focus

 

Depending on your product your team could run a pure sales generation campaign with influencers. This typically would mean that you issue each influencer a unique discount code they can share with their followers, for example, to get a 1 month free trial of your SaaS solution. It could be a special discount coupon, a VIP voucher to a webinar, or a one-off offer to a PoC.

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The methods you can work with influencers also differ from business to business. The way how both parties find it beneficial to collaborate can be extremely varied and full of different options.

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For example:

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1. Product for a collaboration

 

Depending on your product of course you can offer the influencer a free subscription to your solution or give them access to your premium product. For example, your business might sell an email automation tool and offer your influencer to use it for 3 months free of charge.

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2. Service for a collaboration

 

You can offer services their business could find useful for the exchange of the promotional content of your brand. For example, your business team could give consultation on business acquisition in a certain market, help with business development strategy. You could offer to include the influencer in your next webinar as a guest speaker, or perhaps you can offer to give a shoutout to their brand on your company’s network.

 

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3. Pay per task for a collaboration

 

In most B2B cases the preferred way is to reward the influencer with the agreed sum for a specified task and promotion execution. It could be based on results as well as fixed per task or calculated per created content pieces.

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To summarise, there are plenty of options to find mutually beneficial ways to collaborate with skilled B2B influencers on LinkedIn and activate your marketing campaigns on a new level. For each campaign, paid or based on barter, it is very important to understand your marketing campaign’s goal. Your main goal will determine the right approach, content, delivery and execution.

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Continue reading: 5 Ways an influencer marketing agency can help your marketing team

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This article was prepared by BrandRefer, your trusted full service influencer marketing agency for LinkedIn.