The changing digital environment and consumer interests are driving brands to find new ways to tell their stories.
In an ever-evolving business environment, the pursuit of sustainable growth is an ongoing journey. As an industry thought leader, understanding the dynamic needs of the market helps us stay ahead of the curve and explore innovative strategies that resonate with our audiences.
Today, we delve into an area that is gaining traction as a powerful catalyst for business-to-business (B2B) growth: strategic collaborations with influencers.
Imagine a symbiotic relationship between business and influencers, where insight meets influence and strategy seamlessly aligns with market trends. B2B influencer marketing helps embrace the new paradigm.
In this article, I’ll reveal the nuances of B2B influencer marketing growth and the transformative potential within influencer partnerships. Delve deeper into the intersection of innovation and influence while learning how we as thought leaders are leveraging the power of B2B influencers to not only expand their reach, but also build real connections and drive business growth.
I share my experiences and perspectives on my journey to foster growth through impactful partnerships.
This article is more than just a report, it’s a roadmap that will help you unpack the complexities of B2B influencer marketing and how to grow and nurture your user base while cultivating real connections.
What you will learn in this article:
- Challenges of Starting a Newsletter
- How to find the right B2B influencers for your newsletter
- Build and cultivate relationships with influencers
- Metrics for measuring newsletter success
- Mistakes to avoid when growing your user base (+ advice)
desire for achievement
My winding but interesting career journey began at ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce) in Indianapolis.
I stayed through the acquisition process and gained valuable experience in content marketing, relationship marketing, and product management. Later, I moved to the email, mobile and social marketing teams to perform data analysis, helping to build data infrastructure and strategize B2B digital marketing campaigns.
As my passion project turned into nearly four years of hard work, I was presented with an unexpected entrepreneurial opportunity – I started and grew a beer company with a friend. I helped grow the company to approximately 40 employees and was responsible for driving awareness, executing campaigns, and managing the marketing and brand experience teams.
While it was a great business, I didn’t want to pursue a career in the beer industry, so I returned to the software industry and worked at Springbuck, a healthcare analytics company, where I led the sales and marketing team.
Throughout my career, I have always had a love for content marketing.
I feel like I invest more time in content creation than content distribution. I call it the content hamster wheel, where we spend time creating content, we spend time marketing it, and the cycle continues.
It was at this time that I came up with the idea to create The Juice – a newsletter platform that aggregates all B2B content for sales and marketing professionals in one place. You can sign up for free and access handpicked content recommendations. We help brands promote their content to the right audience at the right time.
Challenges of Starting a Newsletter
I started The Juice during the pandemic, which was definitely an interesting time to start a business. It does allow us to have Zoom calls with marketing to help validate what we publish.
However, recruiting a team during a pandemic has been a challenge, given that not many people are willing to take the risk of joining an early-stage company when things are already uncertain. But we ended up putting together an absolutely great team!
Adapting to the current market and economy is also quite a challenge, but despite this, we are still growing.
The unique challenges my business faces come from two areas:
- Attract individual users to join the platform
- Earn money through brands promoting content on the platform
It feels like growing two businesses.
We ended up with a flywheel effect, but starting from scratch on both ends was a unique challenge that we overcame through various marketing campaigns and efforts. Working with B2B influencers and creators is an especially rewarding experience.
How to Identify Newsletter Influencers
B2B influencer marketing has grown in popularity over the years. Entering this market and growing a newsletter is a combination of paid and organic marketing efforts.
Since we are a content marketing company at our core, we put a lot of effort into programming such as podcast streams, virtual event series, and a lot of written content, as well as working with other brands with large audiences. That’s where our organic efforts come from.
When it comes to paid marketing, it’s a combination of social and search engines.
We’re always testing and trying different messaging and CTAs to help enhance our efforts and see what works best. Of these efforts, the most recurring channel for us is B2B sponsorships or influencer marketing, where we target individuals through large social media platforms and work by sponsoring their content. Influencers have large audiences of content consumers (which is exactly what we want).
In addition to this, we have also been conducting cost analysis.
Calculating how many users we can expect based on investment, this is the direct return on investment in this area. We are also looking for highly engaged sales and marketing audiences who will be our primary target. We work with influencers with whom we can build long-term relationships.
Overall, the focus is on working with people we find interesting. Our ideal users are just like us; if we don’t find the content interesting, our audience won’t be either. It’s about being community-driven and organic, and building real relationships that last.
Build and cultivate relationships with influencers
It’s always important to find new creators to work with, but it’s also important to stay connected with your core creators. There are several influencer marketing platforms that can help us connect with the right influencers.
Given the nature of the newsletter, we’re able to help creators promote the content they’re promoting – it’s a system where we provide value to each other. This relationship goes beyond transactions and focuses on trust and quality.
Metrics for measuring success
While building and nurturing our relationships and growing our newsletter, measuring metrics and working with data helps understand what we can do to add value to our audience.
The core indicators used are Cost per acquisition per usera very simple ROI analysis.
We’re trying to achieve certain goals, and while we don’t always see those goals achieved, we need to experiment and find out what works and what doesn’t. There are always some brand values that cannot be measured through metrics. We don’t think strictly about cost per acquisition, but we also build partnerships and connect with the right audiences and connections.
And there are always other classic, immeasurable brand KPIs that are the standard for any marketing effort.
Effective brand campaigns help retain users
Two things work well:
- One is Provide exclusive content through sponsorships. Influencers provide exclusive content to our sponsorships/partnerships through reports or content that their audience can only access through our partnerships.
- The second one is when Ads are written in the influencer’s voice and tone. We let them write the ad in their own tone of voice. Many influencers often do this because they have built trust with their audience – they understand what their audience wants and it seems more genuine coming from the influencer themselves.
We also worked with influencers to build our user base, but they drove customer acquisition for us. This speaks volumes about the trust The Juice has built not just as users, but as customers.
Mistakes to avoid when growing your user base
Do your homework. Early on, we took people at their word, but over time I learned that if they didn’t have a media kit or supporting data, it probably wouldn’t be successful.
Holding partners accountable for their numbers is an important tip. We’ve had situations where a marketing campaign was lackluster and we’d ask the influencer if the copy wasn’t right or if the subject line could be improved.
Of course, with any marketing campaign there is some volatility. There will be some hits and some total flavor – that’s okay, that’s what it is. This may feel uncomfortable, but as long as you still have some success, you can keep trying.
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