Certainly one of my favourite examples of affect is within the 2004 movie Mean Girls. When the ladies at North Shore Excessive College see “queen bee” Regina George carrying military pants and flip-flops, they determine to do the identical. It’s absurd but in addition fully real looking.
Whether or not we admit it or not, nobody is proof against the power of influence. All of us have these we glance as much as and hearken to, even when subconsciously. That’s why B2B influencer advertising is nothing to scoff at.
If you hear the phrase “influencer,” it’s not unusual to suppose magnificence bloggers and Instagram fashions, however the skilled house can be ripe with impactful voices that may assist B2B manufacturers construct model consciousness, enhance engagement, earn belief, and in the end shut extra enterprise.
However the place do you discover them and get them on board? Let’s unpack every part it’s essential to know to harness the facility of B2B influencer advertising in 2025.
Desk of Contents
What’s B2B influencer advertising?
B2B influencer advertising is when companies that promote to different companies collaborate with thought leaders and revered figures of their house to advertise their services or products.
It could actually take many alternative kinds (like these under), however all of them come again to the identical aim — constructing model consciousness with a brand new or certified viewers and utilizing the collaborator’s clout to hopefully persuade that viewers to purchase.
A few of the hottest types of B2B influencer advertising are:
- Contests/Giveaways: Influencer provides away considered one of your merchandise on their platform. This may be nice for rising your following and producing social proof.
- Sponsored Posts: You pay the influencer to publish about your services or products. That is nice for reaching an influencer’s viewers and constructing consciousness, however might come off as inauthentic.
- Gifting: Influencer posts about your product in alternate for a free product. That is additionally nice for constructing consciousness.
- Affiliations: Influencers are sometimes given a novel low cost code to share with their viewers to drive gross sales in your model and, in flip, they earn fee. That is usually considered one of finest forms of B2B influencer advertising for driving gross sales.
- Collaboration: Working with an influencer to create a brand new product, service, or content material providing. This may be good for producing gross sales and consciousness.
These can be used throughout numerous mediums, however at the moment, we most incessantly see them on social media — significantly LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram for B2B manufacturers.
How is it completely different from B2C influencer advertising?
In advertising, every part is guided by your viewers. What you do, say, and so forth., is all about what they need to hear, say, or expertise. So, after all, that’s the place essentially the most important variations between B2B influencer advertising and B2C lie.
LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Tequia Burt did a fantastic job of evaluating the 2 on this chart:
To no shock, B2B influencer advertising tends to observe the character of B2B transactions.
It stretches an extended gross sales cycle and is concentrated on establishing skilled credibility and sharing skilled worth to ascertain long-term partnerships. That is what B2B consumers are sometimes in search of and what wins their gross sales, proper?
B2C influencer advertising, then again, is extra light-hearted and informal. It’s about private pursuits and targets and shutting smaller, one-off purchases. Moderately than capitalizing on an influencer’s experience, it’s about their camaraderie, connection, and relatability.
Actually, the easiest way to think about the 2 to me is your work mentor versus your work bestie (or “westie,” if you’ll).
The mentor (B2B), you’ll take profession {and professional} growth recommendation, whereas the westie (B2C), you’ll go to speak about your weekend and take restaurant suggestions for glad hour with your mates.
For followers of The Workplace, one is the David Wallace of influencers, and the opposite is extra of a Kelly Kapoor.
Study extra about influencer advertising normally in our free “Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing.”
However are B2B influencers actually definitely worth the hype?
Advantages of B2B Influencer Advertising and marketing
According to Hype Auditor, the influencer advertising trade is estimated to develop to roughly $22.2 Billion by the top of 2025, and who’s stunned?
Influencers are confirmed to foster engagement, drive visitors and clicks, and generate conversions and gross sales. For B2B manufacturers, they will additionally humanize your model and construct belief in methods different techniques and techniques by no means might. Let’s break these advantages down a bit extra.
Elevated Model Attain & Consciousness
Influencers include engaged and sometimes massive audiences which are really ready for and anticipating what they’ll say subsequent. If you work with the correct one, your model may be uncovered to many new certified shoppers.
Extra publicity means extra potential clients, which suggests extra gross sales.
Elevated Belief
Have you ever heard the expression “responsible by affiliation?” Effectively, it really works within the different course, too. Working with an influencer, your viewers respects and trusts acts as a vote of confidence in your model
Audiences give weight to the opinions and recommendation of influencers. They belief them to guide them in the correct course. So, if an influencer is comfy endorsing your corporation, then, within the eyes of your audience, it’s gotta be good.
Humanizes Your Model (Fosters a Personalised Expertise)
B2B marketing usually will get a foul rap for being chilly and company. I imply, it’s arduous to not while you’re speaking about return on funding and budgets — however B2B influencer advertising may help.
Despite the fact that they don’t really work in your firm, influencers give your viewers a human face to affiliate with it; somebody to narrate to or attain out to if they’ve questions or considerations.
Plus, sometimes, influencers interact with their audiences on a private degree.
They ask questions, reply to feedback, and work together with their followers like shut pals. This helps create the more personalized, unique experience modern buyers need from manufacturers and makes them need to purchase.
Learn: Personalized Experiences: Why We Love Them + Brand Examples
Examples of Nice B2B Influencer Advertising and marketing
Okay, this all sounds nice in idea, however what does it appear like in observe? Listed below are three examples I’ve encountered and love.
1. WeWork
For those who’re unfamiliar with him, Ali Abdaal is a health care provider turned web entrepreneur and productiveness skilled. He makes use of his platforms on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere to share mindset and group ideas backed by his medical information.
On this instance of B2B influencer advertising from WeWork, Abdaal shares insights about the advantages of human connection whereas working and positioning WeWork as a technique to accomplish that.
Sure, the video begins with a sponsorship disclosure, however the content material nonetheless comes off as useful and sound and suits in naturally with the remainder of Abdaal’s feed. It’s a really well-done instance of a sponsored video, which is, actually, to be anticipated with Abdaal.
Bonus:
On this bonus instance from the creator’s channel, Abdaal discusses six AI instruments he makes use of to enhance his productiveness.
In it, he manages to incorporate not one, not two, however three affiliate hyperlinks and mentions with out coming off as salesy. With 464,000 views and 13,000 likes as of scripting this, I wouldn’t be stunned if this video has been extraordinarily profitable for the manufacturers and Abdaal himself.
2. INBOUND
The HubSpot Creators program collaborates with unbiased enterprise creators to assist them develop by means of monetary capital and distribution to new audiences.
Probably the most outstanding is Sarah Chen-Spellings, a pacesetter in enterprise capital and the host of the Billion Greenback Strikes podcast with an engaged viewers of 20K+ LinkedIn followers and 3K+ e-newsletter subscribers.
On this LinkedIn video, our INBOUND group collaborates with Chen-Spellings to showcase the occasion expertise as she attends and speaks for the primary time.
It’s fast-paced and playful and captures precisely what it seems like really to be within the room in an attention grabbing manner.
3. monday.com
Right here’s a fantastic instance of B2B influencer that isn’t social media-based. (Advised you they had been on the market!)
I doubtless don’t must remind you, however again in 2020, in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many groups had been pressured to work remotely for the primary time ever. They had been on the hunt for instruments and recommendations on the best way to do it properly and venture administration software program firm monday.com jumped in to assist.
They interviewed a bunch of enterprise influencers like Shama Hyder of Zen Media then shared their conversations in weblog articles on their web site:
The marketing campaign exceeded its social media attain aim by more than 1,790% and greater than 300,000 natural impressions on social media.
Learn how to Construct a B2B Influencer Technique
- Decide your marketing campaign targets and timeline.
- Outline your marketing campaign viewers.
- Set your finances.
- Select your platform(s).
- Establish your influencer(s).
- Develop your plan for content material creation and launch.
- Set up a plan for measuring outcomes.
For those who’ve labored in advertising for some time, constructing a B2B Influencer Technique will appear fairly acquainted. However even should you’re new to the trade, these seven steps will set you up for achievement.
1. Decide your marketing campaign targets and timeline.
You possibly can’t know what it’s essential to do should you don’t know the place you need to go. So, what are you hoping to perform together with your B2B influencer advertising?
Are you attempting to extend model consciousness? In search of extra leads? Take what you need to do and flesh it out to be SMART—particular, measurable, attainable, related, and time-bound.
This format helps take away ambiguity about whether or not you completed what you had been imagined to and outline your success metrics. It additionally paperwork your timeline.
SMART B2B influencer advertising targets may look one thing like this:
- Enhance Model Consciousness: Get 1,000 new followers on Instagram from the Influencer marketing campaign by February 28, 2025.
- Enhance Leads: Generate 250 free trial signups through LinkedIn influencer affiliate hyperlink by February 28, 2025.
- Enhance Gross sales: Promote 5,000 items of Influencer product collaboration by February 28, 2025.
Right here’s a easy method you possibly can mess around with:
Generate [number] leads centered on [topic/product] by 2025-02-10T12:00:00Z
You too can use this free goal-setting template to summarize your targets, calculate your biggest advertising want, and set deadlines.
2. Outline your marketing campaign viewers.
Who’re you attempting to succeed in? The extra data you possibly can collect about your audience, the higher. The place are they spending their free time? What sort of content material are they consuming? Who do they flip to for recommendation or trade insights?
The solutions to those questions will inform not simply the personalities and platforms you employ in your B2B influencer advertising campaigns but in addition the messaging.
For instance, should you’re attempting to satisfy millennial entrepreneurs, chances are you’ll be higher off collaborating with the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world over the Warren Buffets.
Take this time to evaluate your buyer personas for related particulars. For those who do not have already got them or need to create campaign-specific personas, check out our free buyer persona templates.
3. Set your finances.
Like targets and viewers, finances closely impacts what your B2B influencer advertising marketing campaign will really appear like.
Totally different influencers have completely different value tags and expectations. As an example, working with a mega-influencer (somebody with over a million followers) will doubtless price greater than working with a micro-influencer (with 10-100,000 followers).
In distinction, others (like me) could also be okay with partnering in alternate totally free services or products.
Take this time to mark your monetary guardrails so you already know what your choices are.
In response to our 2025 State of Marketing report, manufacturers mostly spend 50-74% of their advertising finances on influencers or content material creators, however how a lot is that this actually?
Influencer Marketing Hub discovered virtually half (47%) of manufacturers spent lower than $10K on influencer advertising in 2024, whereas roughly 8-20% of manufacturers spent anyplace between $11K and $500K. So, the chances are very subjective. Do what’s real looking in your model and your targets.
HubSpot contributor Kinzal Jalan will get extra granular on how to set your influencer marketing budget here.
4. Select your platform(s).
As we touched on earlier, influencer advertising campaigns can happen on any platform or in any medium, however in 2025, we’re sometimes speaking about social media or digital.
The best channel is de facto dependent in your audience, so dig into your information to see the place they’re hanging out and consuming content material, however normally, HubSpot research found that entrepreneurs see the best ROI from influencers on Fb (28%), Instagram (22%), and YouTube (12%).
5. Establish your influencer(s).
Now, I do know lots of you’ll have began your B2B influencer advertising technique with a selected persona already in thoughts, however should you haven’t, now’s the time to seek out them.
Use your targets, finances, and platform to determine the influencer or influencers who match the invoice. However take into accout you additionally need somebody who suits naturally together with your model.
The B2B influencers you’re employed with ought to share your values and realistically use and luxuriate in your services or products. They need to communicate your language and be capable of supply actual, precious perception into why your providing is a sensible alternative.
If they will’t, the collaboration or endorsement will seem inauthentic and switch even essentially the most loyal viewers members off.
Give it some thought: For those who’re a industrial cooking knife producer, it could make extra sense to collaborate with a preferred chef than a crypto-coin skilled. Plus, the chef’s viewers would most likely be much more doubtless to purchase from you.
An influencer marketing platform may be useful in your hunt, however you may also do your analysis on social media. For instance, looking #entrepreneurship on LinkedIn brings up a whole bunch of people who could have the attain and voice you’re in search of.
Observe: AI influencer advertising can be turning into a scorching matter. Fellow HubSpotter Erica Santiago digs into that dialog in “AI Influencer Marketing: How Artificial Intelligence Could Change Influencer Marketing.“
6. Develop your plan for content material creation and launch.
Who’s doing what in your influencer advertising marketing campaign? Are you creating the content material, or is your influencer? Have they got artistic freedom, or have they got a short they should observe?
That is the a part of your technique the place you flesh out all of the expectations and the way the launch and promotion of your marketing campaign will really go.
We dig deeper into the best way to work with influencers (whether or not they’re B2B or B2C) right here:
7. Set up a plan for measuring outcomes.
As soon as your marketing campaign is launched, it’s essential to monitor its efficiency to find out whether or not you’re conducting your targets. This will even assist you already know if it’s essential to pivot at any level and collect information to refine future campaigns.
Relying in your targets, metrics could embrace web site visitors, the variety of new followers, conversions, and even income.
Platforms just like the Meltwater Influencer Marketing Suite aid you measure these numbers, however you may also monitor your information utilizing monitoring URLs and the marketing campaign device in HubSpot or utilizing a easy spreadsheet.
Now we have some free templates to get you began.
Suggestions for B2B Influencer Advertising and marketing Success
1. Go Micro
Getting a celeb-status influencer like Mr. Beast could also be thrilling, however our survey discovered each B2B and B2C manufacturers noticed essentially the most success with micro-influencers (10K – 100K followers) in 2024.
You see, mega-influencers like Mr. Beast have large audiences, however with their dimension, it’s subsequent to unimaginable for them to keep up the customized engagement that acquired them the place they’re and that folks crave.
Smaller, extra area of interest influencers don’t face this problem. In reality, a few of the reported advantages of smaller influencers included extra belief with their followers, entry to tight-knit communities, and the flexibility to stretch their influencer advertising finances additional.
Want extra steering on the best way to work with micro-influencers? Take a look at “My Comprehensive Guide to Micro-Influencer Marketing.”
2. Use AI to scale outreach
I’m going to be actual with you. I really like collaborating with different manufacturers and creators, however the outreach course of is the worst. There are such a lot of messages, and so many go unanswered.
Fortunately, we’ve got AI to assist as of late.
Certain, you should use automation to bulk message contacts with a plugged-in title or social media deal with, however these come off as robotic and spammy and rapidly get ignored. (Can’t let you know what number of of these are sitting in my Instagram requests inbox.)
As an alternative, as you scale your B2B influencer advertising technique, use generative AI to craft customized outreach messages.
As HubSpot contributor and director of content material at AI21 Labs Ben Pines explains, all of it begins with a immediate that features a:
- Hook: That is one thing to seize your influencer’s consideration, like a praise or a private element to point out you’ve seen their work. That is the place you stand out from different manufacturers reaching out.
- Give: That is what you’re providing the influencer.
- Take: That is what you’re asking of them.
- Name-to-action: That is what they must do to get began. (i.e. reply to e mail, name you, and so forth.)
Plug this into ChatGPT and even the Breeze Copilot in HubSpot, and you’ll get you a strong template you possibly can customise for every particular person in your record. Pines additionally recommends utilizing generative AI to study creators by utilizing prompts to summarize their content material.
Learn more about his process here.
3. Give attention to long-term partnerships
Whereas it might be tempting to forged a large web and work with many influencers without delay to advertise your B2B model, HubSpot’s Head of Creator Partnerships, Alanah Joseph, advises in opposition to that.
“My prime tip for B2B influencer advertising success is to take a position time find the correct creators and constructing lasting partnerships with them,” she shares.
“I’ve discovered that partnering with fewer creators who deeply perceive their viewers delivers higher outcomes than spreading your finances throughout many one-off collaborations. As creators grow to be extra accustomed to your model over time, the standard and authenticity of their content material naturally improves. That’s when the magic actually occurs.”
I’d additionally argue that that is when an influencer endorsement comes off as most genuine. It’s not a flash-in-the-pan video or story point out however one thing the influencer has genuinely taken the time to study. In different phrases, what they share with their viewers is far more knowledgeable and reliable.
As an example, B2B Advertising and marketing Advisor Erin Balsa is a long-time associate of Navattic. You’ll discover common posts on her platforms about the best way to use the demo device to enhance your shopping for expertise.
Beneath the B2B Affect
With 2025 in full swing, the manufacturers that grasp B2B influencer advertising would be the ones that not solely achieve visibility but in addition construct lasting belief — turning affect into actual, measurable enterprise progress. Now’s the time to harness this technique and make it a core a part of your advertising playbook.
Able to take the subsequent step? Begin figuring out potential influencers, craft your outreach, and start experimenting with campaigns that align together with your targets. The way forward for B2B advertising is social, and those that embrace it early will cleared the path.
