95/5 Marketing Theory & Partnering with B2B Influencers.
B2B sales cycles can be long, multi-layered, disjointed or even invisible. Knowing when and who to message can be tricky. The 95/5 theory puts forward the idea that 95% of potential customers within your target market are actually OUT of the running to purchase due to timing, while the remaining 5% are IN market to buy and ready to engage with you or your competitive set.
So what does this mean for content marketing and social strategy?
Well, instead of looking to deliver content or ads that are over-produced or sales focused, more focus should be applied to creating insight driven assets and resources that help solve problems, understand the landscape and educate the target market.Below is a quick, no-nonsense guide on how to effectively integrate B2B influencer marketing into your 95/5 strategy.
Aligning 3 key pillars: Objectives, Audience and Content.
A non-negotiable at the outset is alignment. Make sure that influencer partnerships align with your overall marketing objectives, the audience that you want to engage and the content style that you want to leverage. Collaborating with influencers whose expertise resonate with your brand and who can authentically advocate for your products or services is key. Most have a content delivery style or format that the audience has an expectation of and affinity with. This could be video based short form output, long form blog style analysis, breaking news updates, podcasting or a YouTube channel. Making sure you can integrate within that channel and add value is key and requires some thinking ahead of getting into ideation mode. It’s great to get the creative juices flowing but if you can’t back it up with the right resource or personnel you are best off keeping things simple and letting the influencer be your guide — after all they know what their community wants to be presented with and speaks with them on a regular basis.
Size isn’t everything
Prioritize relevance between your brand and the influencer over their follower count. Micro-influencers with smaller but highly engaged audiences within your niche can often deliver better results than macro-influencers with broader appeal who may have gotten to a point where their initial audience has tuned out and is looking for fresh perspective. Not always the case but it’s a thing. Collaborating with influencers, large or small, exposes your brand to their followers, allowing you to reach new audiences, generate awareness and open up new business opportunities with previously untapped areas.
Social-First Thought Leadership
Ensure a value exchange is on the table for the audience. Collaborate with influencers to create content that educates, entertains, or solves problems for your target audience. Focus on delivering thought leadership that can highly valuable rather than overtly promoting your brand. Good influencers and content creators are great at positioning a brand within their content flow that makes sense, draws attention, creates a positive sentiment and doesn’t try too hard. The audience within these communities are looking for recommendation, not a sales pitch. The goal is to be seen as a thought leader within your industry. By associating your brand with reputable experts, you gain credibility and authority, which will help to attract prospects and reassure existing customers of your industry expertise and place in the market.
Know what good looks like
Establish clear KPIs upfront. Although this channel is a huge help when wanting to establish connection with a key audience demographic through the lens of an expert it is still important for everybody involved to know what the picture of success looks like so this can be either celebrated or optimised as the activation is in play. To measure the impact of your influencer marketing efforts you can track social engagement, web traffic, form fills, video views, audio listens and website conversions much like any other digital media activation to help evaluate ROMI and direct thinking around future collaborations and partnerships.
Wrap up
B2B influencer marketing is starting to trend upwards, particularly in the technology sector where having expert, sector-specific voices endorsing your brand matters more than ever. They help to cut through buzzwords and BS and speak to their audience on a level that few other channels manage to achieve. Adding influencer partnerships into your marketing mix and focusing on delivering value to both in-market and potential customers, you can enhance market visibility, credibility and reach communities that are looking for recommendation from experts. 95/5 will never look so good!
If this resonates please drop us a line and we can get you set up for success.
