You Ask, I Answer: Predictions for B2B Influencer Marketing in 2024?

In today's episode, Caitlin asks, what are your predictions for influencer marketing in the B2B space in 2024 and beyond? How do you foresee the industry evolving and what trends do you expect to emerge? Okay, so here's the biggest thing about influencer marketing that is going to be a challenge for pretty much the entire industry. Data. A lot of influencer marketing tools have been calibrated on Twitter data.

Twitter was the most popular data source because it was an open network graph that everyone could look at that was predominantly accessible to by API. And with the recent changes, we actually let's let's call a spade a spade. Twitter is gone. We've got this new company called X that has a very different population than Twitter did back in in the old days. And a lot of the discussions, particularly for B2B marketing, are happening in places where we don't have data.

So you have the Twitter diaspora after Twitter's uh demise. You now have people on X, you have people on Threads, on Mastodon, on Blue Sky, et cetera, et cetera. You have a ton of new communities, B2B communities, tech communities, on places like Discord where there's absolutely no monitoring whatsoever, nor is it even allowed. Um you have a lot of conversations and a lot of the social media influence, if you will, uh, on LinkedIn, uh, which is a huge B2B source. And again, very little data.

There's um there's not a lot that you can get out of LinkedIn, at least not to the breadth and the depth that we get from we used to get from Twitter. So one of the big things that major players in the space are going to need to figure out is how do you calculate influence? And there isn't a clear answer. There are obviously publications, uh, things like news articles, for example, that you can you can see if someone's in, say, Martech.org or Martech Post or any of the those publications. Um, you can certainly gauge, okay, well, this person must have some influence to have even made a an a contributor.

You have things like speaking at events. Um, people who are on stage inherently have more influence than people who are not on stage, uh, at least from a visibility perspective. And if you think about it, a lot of the categories of influence that are out there. You have people who are um sort of network hubs, they're the center of their networks. You have people who are subject matter experts, you have people who are broadcasters, big mouths, right?

Uh all of those different categories, again, we're reliant on over-reliant on Twitter data. So the big question becomes, what do we do instead? How does a company judge influence? The single best way to judge influence right now, and this is going to vary from company to company, is to ask your audience, is to go to your audience and say, hey, who else do you read? Who else do you pay attention to?

Send out email surveys, ask on social media, etc., and gather that data because ultimately the point of B2B influence is to influence buying decisions, right? It's to influence awareness, consideration, and eventually conversion. So we need to ask our ideal buyers and our current buyers: who do you pay attention to at each of these stages in your journey so that we know where to spend our time and money? And it may turn out, for example, that influence is not a person anymore. This is uh a relatively infrequent perspective that a lot of people don't have.

Influence isn't just a person, right? It's only, hey, pay attention to Christopher Penn, right? It is now also at the community level. Hey, I'm a member of the Analytics for Marketers Slack community, which is 3,500 people. I'm a member of the Marketing AI Institute Slack community of the Spin Sucks uh PR community.

And these communities have influence in and of themselves. When someone's in, for example, analytics for marketers, they ask, hey, I'm looking to buy this thing. Has anyone had any experience with it? No one person in that community may be the influencer, but instead you may have a network of hundreds of people contributing their answers. And if one answer keeps popping up over and over and over again, that community has conducted the influence.

Now, here's the challenge. Many of these private social media communities have absolutely no measurement. Uh, and outsiders are not permitted to measure, they're not even permitted to see the content. So this remains a challenge for B2B brands that you need to have essentially ambassadors in as many communities as you can manage, so that just not even to participate, just to listen, just to pay attention, just to see where people spend their time and what they talk about. So those are the major trends in B2B influencer marketing.

And I think it's really important when you're when you're looking at engaging influencer marketing firms, influencers themselves, and things like that, you'd be looking at the person, the community, and what data you have to back those decisions. And it's going to be really challenging for the industry to manage all three of those, any of those three, uh, without a substantial amount of manual effort. So, good question. Thanks for asking. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.

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