How to build a global B2B influencer marketing strategy

Smiling woman interviewing female guest and recording video

While influencer marketing has traditionally been seen as a B2C marketing strategy, B2B businesses have also started recognizing its potential. A well-crafted B2B influencer marketing strategy can be a powerful tool to build credibility and trust.

By collaborating with industry experts and thought leaders, B2B companies can build meaningful connections, drive engagement and support long-term growth. However, executing a successful campaign requires careful planning—from selecting the right influencers to effectively measuring performance.

Keep reading to learn how to develop an effective B2B influencer marketing strategy.

What is B2B influencer marketing?

Confident elegant lady in eyeglasses hosting webinar

B2B influencer marketing has evolved into a strategic approach where brands collaborate with industry experts and thought leaders to enhance credibility and trust among target audiences.

Unlike B2C influencer marketing, which often emphasizes trendsetters, B2B influencers are valued for their subject-matter expertise and the trust they command within specialized communities. These partnerships enable brands to connect with niche audiences authentically, positioning both the influencer and the brand as authoritative voices in their respective fields.

In terms of actual content, there’s a lot you can do with B2B influencers. Social media posts, particularly videos, are among the most effective formats, with 75% of B2B marketers prioritizing videos that can be found using an internet search—they’re also reported to be the most effective. Other impactful formats include in-person and virtual events, podcasts, eBooks and original research.

B2B influencer marketing has seen significant growth, with adoption among U.S. marketers rising from 34% in 2020 to 85% in 2024. Plus, in a 2024 B2B influencer report, 43% of marketers using B2B influencer marketing report outstanding results, and 79% with mature influencer programs said the same.

Defining your goals for a global B2B influencer strategy

As with any marketing campaign, having well-defined objectives increases the success of your B2B influencer marketing strategy. To choose the most effective objectives, deeply understand your audience—their preferred social media platforms, the content they engage with and the influencers they follow.

Develop detailed buyer personas that define your ideal customer’s challenges, preferences and digital habits. For account-based selling, zero in on specific target companies. Research the influencers your key stakeholders follow and the platforms where they’re most active.

Common B2B influencer marketing goals and their relevant KPIs include:

Increase brand awareness: Reach, impressions, followers, mentions and share of voice.
Generate leads: Lead volume, cost per lead, click-through rate and landing page conversions.
Drive website traffic: Unique visits, referral traffic, time on site and bounce rate.
Boost engagement: Engagement rate, audience sentiment and content interactions.
Establish thought leadership: Content downloads, webinar attendance, backlinks and media coverage.
Drive sales: Conversion rate, sales revenue, customer acquisition cost and return on investment.
Build relationships with target audiences: Audience growth rate, net promoter score, qualitative feedback and repeat engagement.
Enhance content strategy: Content performance, content lifespan and content repurposing.
Expand reach to new markets or niches: New market leads or customers, geographic traffic and niche audience growth.
Improve brand credibility: Endorsement quality, audience trust metrics and longevity of influencer partnership.

Ask yourself what exactly you want to accomplish. Do you want to drive more general brand awareness, are you trying to promote a specific product or service or are you hosting an event that you want to get people to register for? Picking specific metrics will help you find the best influencers to work with and make it easier to track your campaigns’ effectiveness.

Top platforms for B2B influencers

While LinkedIn might be your first choice, it’s not the only social media platform you should use in your B2B influencer strategy. In fact, a 2023 study showed that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) were more likely to have informed a recent B2B purchase decision. While TikTok fell below LinkedIn on that survey, it can also be valuable if your business targets a younger demographic.

While this may seem like a surprise, most social platforms have their own professional communities. This can range from an industry-specific Facebook group, a particular hashtag on X, or #worktok on TikTok. Because of this, there are B2B influencers on all of these platforms, with engaged audiences following them.

YouTube

YouTube prioritizes long-term and high-quality educational content that’s informative and relevant to viewers. Working with influencers to create in-depth and well-researched videos can help you succeed.

A less-explored but valuable aspect of YouTube is YouTube Shorts, its TikTok clone. You can use YouTube Shorts to drive traffic to your longer influencer videos, or repurpose other existing influencer content like webinars and blog posts by extracting key highlights.

Facebook

In the past few years, Facebook’s algorithm has been increasingly prioritizing content from friends and family. Essentially, this means that brands are having a harder time reaching their target audiences organically, so influencer marketing may be a better bet than traditional organic Facebook marketing. With their large and/or engaged followings, they can increase the reach and visibility of your content.

Instagram

Despite Instagram’s reputation as primarily a photo-sharing app, its heavy push to video content in the last few years means that videos can get up to twice as much engagement as static posts. You can convert white papers or case studies made in partnership with the influencer to carousel graphics, videos or reels.

X (formerly known as Twitter)

X’s hashtags make it easy to find the communities you’re looking for and join the conversation. It also has a useful feature called Lists, which are custom feeds of up to 5,000 users, typically organized around a certain topic. You can create your own Lists of target accounts or subscribe to public lists to find the right people to target.

As a B2B business, it’s important to maintain a presence on LinkedIn. Content created for other platforms should also ideally be repurposed and incorporated into your LinkedIn content strategy. Influencer marketing on LinkedIn helps you better target specific decision-makers and roles in your desired industries, as its algorithm delivers content to users based on their professional interests.

TikTok

Nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers are Millennials or Gen Z, according to a 2023 survey. This can make TikTok a more valuable B2B marketing platform than you may have initially thought. Thanks to TikTok’s algorithm, it’s easy for influencers’ viral content to reach far beyond their followers.

How to find the right influencers in global markets

With so much content and so many influencers, it can be overwhelming to find the right ones for your brand. In fact, 48% of marketers said identifying, qualifying and connecting with ideal influencers was the biggest challenge in succeeding with influencer marketing, more than any other issue.

In global markets, in particular, getting the right influencers for your different markets ensures your content resonates with local target audiences. Compared to B2C influencers, B2B influencers are less likely to influence outside markets. Influencers’ recommendations may fail to resonate if their cultural values don’t align with your target audience.

Fernando Wiera, Project Manager at VeraContent, advises that when looking for influencers, you should first decide the specific audience you want to target—not just industry, but age and location.

“Narrow down what type of influencer you want. Is there a specific niche you want to target? How many followers should they have?”

There are various ways to find B2B influencers, including:

LinkedIn: Most B2B influencers maintain a presence here, even if it’s not their primary platform. If your target market also uses another professional networking platform, check there too.
Industry events: Speaker line-ups at conferences and trade shows feature respected voices in their fields. Smaller virtual and in-person events can also have good lists.
Professional associations: Industry groups may spotlight particularly engaged or knowledgeable members through publications like blog posts or speaking engagements.
Content platforms: Medium, Substack, specialized blogs and industry publications feature contributors with deep expertise in their specific fields.
Social listening tools: Tools like Statusbrew, Brandwatch and Sprout Social let you monitor conversations in your chosen field, understand sentiment analytics and engagement metrics and assess influencers’ reach and audience.
Influencer platforms: Platforms like CreatorIQ and Grin can help connect you with vetted and verified industry experts.

Once you’ve identified some potential influencers to partner with, check out their content to see if they’re the right fit. Don’t just skim the last few posts; go back a couple of months to get the full picture.

Some essential characteristics that are good to focus on to help determine if an influencer is truly right for your brand are:

Industry relevance: Do they regularly create content that shows an understanding of your industry and its challenges? Does their content align with your company goals?
Audience interaction: Do people meaningfully engage with their content? Do they generate meaningful discussions? Are they reaching the decision-makers you want to connect with?
Alignment with brand values: Does their reputation and communication style complement your brand image and messaging?
Previous brand partnerships: How have they handled sponsored content in the past? What types of partnerships have they done? Are they one-offs, or do they seem like nurtured relationships?
Authenticity: Is their messaging consistent? Can you tell they have real expertise and not just surface-level knowledge? What can you verify about their professional background?
Red flags: Have they said anything controversial or that doesn’t align with your brand? Does their messaging feel a little all over the place?

When evaluating influencers to work with, a good practice is to ask them for statistics and insights on any previous campaigns so you can see their audience demographics and determine if they’re a good fit.

“In our latest influencer campaign, we worked with three micro-influencers who worked with our brand’s specific aesthetic, allowing us to tap into three different audiences. Plus, small influencers sometimes see more engagement and have a more active community.”

– Fernando Wiera, Project Manager at VeraContent

Don’t be discouraged if this process takes some time. It’s normal to talk to even dozens of potential influencers before finding the right fit. Keep detailed notes on why you pass, shortlist or decide to work with any of them.

Building and managing global influencer partnerships

Influencer marketing thrives on genuine, long-term partnerships rather than one-off transactions. By building ongoing relationships with influencers, brands can enhance authenticity, build trust with target audiences and achieve higher ROI—just like with B2C influencer strategies.

When you’re first reaching out to an influencer, you can email or DM them a pitch that includes your product or service, why it’s different, why their audience would care, content proposals, description and budget. However, we also suggest some authentic engagement before you reach out. Comment on and share their content, and join in on their discussions. Building a real relationship with an influencer will likely help make your cold emails more successful.

Once you’re connected, you should focus on nurturing the relationship. As a B2B business, there are a few ways to do this:

Offer a smooth onboarding process to enable your influencer partners to feel connected to your brand and empower them to create the best content for you.
Maintain good communication throughout your partnerships. Give each of your influencer partners customized and relevant updates as necessary. Stay in regular contact, even if you’re not actively working together at the moment.
Share their content on your social channels. This better positions them as a thought leader and you as a source of industry insights.
Engage with their content. Comment on or share relevant updates they post, even if you’ve been working together for a while.
Offer cross-promotion opportunities. Mention or link to their content in future content you post.
Be open to the influencer’s content ideas for your partnership. As influencers know their audience well, actively working together with the influencer to create content, rather than just giving them a brief, will make them feel appreciated and probably even lead to higher engagement rates.
Work together to develop a partner referral agreement. This can facilitate mutual customer referrals, which means more inbound leads for both of you.
Depending on what you’re selling, you could start an ambassador or rewards program for influencers who reach certain milestones of views, likes or comments.
At industry events and conferences, offer to meet with them in person for coffee or other activities to get to know them personally.

One of the best ways to maintain a strong relationship with a particular influencer is to have an always-on strategy. Always-on is a seamless, ongoing strategy incorporating influencer content as a core component of your broader marketing efforts. This method involves brands creating consistent content with influencers beyond one-off campaigns.

While this can be more involved and strategic than a traditional influencer marketing campaign with a set amount of content created and a timeframe, the most successful influencer programs are always on. 81% of marketers with mature influencer programs report the highest success with their influencer programs using always-on approaches.

Working with influencers isn’t without its challenges

While B2B influencers tend to maintain a high level of professionalism, as their brand is built on a certain level of prestige and knowledge, sometimes problems can arise.

Here are some common issues and what to do if they occur:

The influencer doesn’t follow the brief

When you see the content an influencer has created for you, but it doesn’t look like what you asked of them. This can happen because the brief was unclear, you had poor communication or your brief doesn’t make sense for that influencer.

Depending on the root of the problem, there are a couple of different solutions. Make sure your briefs are easy to read, address as much as possible and are flexible enough to let the influencer make the best content they can. Include clear examples of what you do and don’t want.

After giving an influencer a brief, schedule a meeting to discuss the brief with them. Doing this allows them to ask questions, flag potential problems or suggest changes or improvements. Make sure to provide a reliable point of contact and emphasize that your team is always available for any questions or concerns they may have.

The influencer misses a deadline

Many different things can cause someone to miss a deadline or have other time constraints. Confirm that you’re setting clear but flexible deadlines, and try to build some flexibility into your campaigns as much as possible, in case a piece of content doesn’t arrive. This, of course, isn’t always possible with time-sensitive campaigns, such as Mother’s Day or Black Friday.

The influencer creates low-quality content

The influencer might have got the content to you on time, but you had to go through a lengthy process to get it good enough to post. Ensure that feedback time is incorporated into the content development process and that your feedback is specific and effective. It’s also important that the feedback process lets the influencer respond, ask questions and suggest alternatives.

Going forward, review your briefs for clarity. See if there are things that are just nice-to-haves instead of must-haves. You can even update your brief templates so critical information is always included.

Adapting influencer campaigns for regional markets

man in white crew neck t-shirt sitting on black office rolling chair

As a B2B business operating internationally, you know that culture shapes different countries’ business interactions and expectations. From platform preferences to language formality and buying cycles, your influencer campaigns must be appropriately adapted to the markets they’re being shown in. If not, they could be ineffective, misunderstood or even offensive.

Things like the economic health of a region and its level of technology adoption can change how you structure your entire influencer campaign in those markets. For example, areas with advanced digital infrastructure may be more receptive to webinars featuring your influencers. In contrast, areas with more limited technology may prefer to see your influencer at face-to-face events.

We recommend working with local influencers directly from all of your target markets. Particularly in markets where your business lacks experience or expertise, these local experts can help you better understand their audiences’ cultural nuances and preferences. Your messaging may better reflect local communication styles and feel more relevant and engaging to your target audience.

Even if you’re working in similar markets, always work with influencers from each market.

“For example, if you’re running separate campaigns in Australia and New Zealand, you should get an influencer from each market. The accents aren’t the same, and if you only get Australian influencers, the New Zealand audience could feel like they’ve been left out or are less important. It wouldn’t resonate with them or generate engagement and followers.”

– Fernando Wiera, Project Manager at VeraContent

Check out our client story of St. Dalfour, a renowned French fruit spread company, to see how we helped the brand expand its reach into Australia and New Zealand, including working with local influencers.

A great example is adapting and localizing a whitepaper you’ve created with an influencer to another market. Of course, the content should be translated to the correct language as necessary, but you should also focus on presenting the findings in that whitepaper within the context of the target region. For example, a whitepaper targeting US markets discussing the benefits of cloud computing regarding HIPAA compliance could be adapted to highlight GDPR compliance in the European market.

If you have a podcast you want to localize, identify any influencers in your target market who could record a podcast on a topic you’ve already covered in another market. For example, a French podcast episode featuring a French digital marketing expert discussing European trends could be localized in Japanese, featuring a representative from a successful Japanese startup highlighting Japan-specific marketing challenges.

Content co-creation can make this process go a lot smoother. Give the same brief to your influencers operating in different markets to produce content that resonates locally while still keeping with your global branding. Letting your influencers be creative while maintaining brand guidelines will help your content be both effective and consistent.

Working with local influencers allows you to gain insights you can use to properly localize your content. In turn, your brand can be seen as a thought leader in those markets, and you can begin to build relationships with local stakeholders and generate leads.

Evaluating the impact of your global influencer strategy

Woman Discussing Project with her Coworker

While working with influencers can lead to great ROI, it can sometimes be difficult to accurately measure their impact on your business. This can be compounded in B2B marketing, where buying cycles can be long and complex and feature multiple touchpoints. How can we confidently say if a specific influencer’s post or campaign led to someone buying your product or service? It gets even trickier when we think about in-person events that your influencers participate in.

B2B buyers conduct a lot of research online and may engage with multiple pieces of content created either directly by you or by an influencer you work with before signing a contract. Plus, the person seeing your influencer partner’s content may not even be the one making the purchasing decisions at your company, but they could be recommending what they saw to their team.

A whopping 47% of marketers working in B2B influencer marketing say measuring and reporting results is one of their biggest challenges. This is a slight increase from the previous year’s metric of 46%, so it hasn’t gotten easier over time.

Some of the specific reporting challenges most commonly faced by marketers include:

Evaluating ROI
Tracking long-term impact
Tracking metrics across different platforms
Integrating with existing campaigns
Attribution

With that in mind, here are some best practices to measure and evaluate your influencer campaign’s impact on your global B2B marketing strategy:

Be specific with your campaign goals

While defining your campaign goals is always important, with influencer campaigns, having well-defined goals helps avoid reporting challenges in the future. Don’t just set a goal of “improving visibility.” Choose specific KPIs that you want to track and set benchmarks you want to reach.

If you want to raise awareness or achieve another top of funnel, track KPIs like potential reach, engagement, and share of voice. If your goal is mid-funnel, you can track things like website traffic and time on site. Finally, if your goal is bottom of funnel, you can track things like conversion to marketing-qualified leads (MQL – people filling out forms with valid personal information) and MQL to sales-qualified leads (SQL – your sales team qualifies them as potential customers).

Early-stage influencer campaigns are more likely to measure KPIs like engagement and conversion rate, which are more likely to change soon after launching an influencer campaign. As KPIs like share of voice and MQL/SQL take longer to see changes in the long B2B sales cycle, they are twice as likely to be monitored by those with more advanced influencer marketing programs.

According to a recent B2B influencer marketing report, teams with the most effective B2B influencer marketing programs are more likely to track:

Audience sentiment
Engagement
Share of voice
MQLs/SQLs

Depending on your campaign goals, see if tracking one or more of these metrics makes sense for your campaign.

Work with the influencer

Let your influencers know from the beginning of the campaign what exactly you’re going to evaluate them on. Previously, just mentioning your KPIs verbally or in an email was enough. But now, you should speak directly with the influencer at the beginning of your partnership to agree on their KPIs and benchmarks, and integrate them directly into their contract.

There are also some metrics you may not be able to measure publicly, like post impressions or video views. Ensure you have a system to get these metrics from each influencer and incorporate them into your reporting.

Tailor measurement to each campaign

Setting up trackers for each campaign can help make your reporting more accurate, particularly if your goals are further down the funnel.

Different trackers you can use to measure your B2B influencer campaigns include:

UTM parameters and tracking links: Adding UTM parameters to any links influencers share in their campaigns can help you track many different parameters for your campaign. For each click on your links, they will tell you the campaign source, medium, name, term and content that led the user to click on that link. Adding UTM codes can help you see which influencers drive traffic and engagement the best and which parts of the campaign are most effective.
Custom landing pages: These are a little more labor-intensive, but great if you have the resources, particularly if you’re running mid-funnel campaigns. You can customize the landing page of a link to each influencer’s target audience and perhaps highlight different conversions. Adding unique tracking links to each landing page can help you measure and report your campaign’s success.

Ready to start working with B2B influencers?

Running a successful B2B influencer marketing campaign involves many moving parts, which is why partnering with experts can make all the difference. At VeraContent, we don’t just understand how to build strong influencer relationships—we know what makes content effective. With our multilingual expertise, we’ll ensure your influencer strategy resonates with every audience you’re targeting.

If you’d like help implementing a B2B influencer marketing campaign, book a free call with our team today. We’d love to chat!