Are you struggling to justify your B2B influencer marketing budget to your leadership team? Do you find yourself questioning whether partnering with industry thought leaders is truly moving the needle for your business? In a world where every marketing dollar is scrutinized, proving the ROI of an influencer can feel like an uphill battle.
How do you quantify the impact of these partnerships beyond simple engagement metrics? What metrics truly matter in the B2B space and how can you demonstrate the tangible value of influencer marketing to your stakeholders?
These are the challenges that today’s guest Sarah Fruy is breaking down Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, with our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton. As the former VP of marketing at Rockbot and having worked at Linquia, a full-service tech-enabled influencer marketing platform, Sarah brings a unique perspective on proving the worth of B2B thought leader collaborations. Her expertise in implementing agile marketing practices and deep understanding of marketing analytics make her the perfect guide to help us unravel the complexities of measuring influencer marketing in the B2B realm.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Getting Started: Influencer Marketing
Mike Allton: I’d love it if you could walk us through your journey when it comes to B2B influencer marketing and how you’ve seen some of the measurement strategies maybe evolve over time.
Sarah Fruy: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting.
I’ve been involved in influencer marketing—both the B2B and B2C side throughout my entire career when it started—and it was bloggers with their communities, and it’s moved on to social media, but in the B2B space, I think it’s kind of an interesting and sort of a different journey. When I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking about when was the first time I was really influenced, even as a buyer, as a marketing leader.
It reminded me of this dinner that I went to with Bizible, which has since been acquired by Marketo and later Adobe, but they sent me down at a table with a bunch of their customers and an implementation partner. And throughout the evening, all night long, I was being told about all the value that they were getting out of their tool. It was an expensive tool and took months to integrate. I ended up buying it because it was something that inspired me as a marketer to start thinking about how I could leverage customers to influence my own prospects to make purchase decisions and started creating campaigns around that.
With B2B influencer marketing, there’s a lot of different ways you can get going and then mature over time. And so some of it starts with looking at your own customers who have great experiences and are willing to speak on your behalf and advocate for you.
I’ve also worked with in-house influencers when I was at a company called Pantheon. We had a specific IT-like developer persona and then a marketing persona who owned the budget. We worked with a team internally to go to conferences and cradle this content and webinars and things like that to focus on the developers.
And then my job was really to connect with that marketing audience and kind of became a B2B influencer myself, started speaking at conferences, writing blogs and, and doing all kinds of things to bring people in and tout the value of what we were doing as an influencer myself for the company. And then as my kind of practices have matured and the industry has matured, start to get into paid engagements with folks who have really large audiences. You can start putting on your conferences if you have the budget to do it at your company and things like that. And then, over time, it’s just also the measurement side of it. It goes from being more anecdotal to looking at real business impact.
Are we acquiring new customers? Are we bringing in more revenue and trying to formalize that attribution model, which has been interesting and fun to be a part of over the years?
Differences Between B2C and B2B Influencer Marketing
Mike Allton: It’s funny you mentioned conferences. ‘Cause I remember seeing in your bio that you’d been to DrupalCon which stood out to me. ‘Cause I used to be a Drupal developer and it took me back for a second. Not only the nostalgia but “Wow, people are still using Drupal.” DrupalCon is going strong. I think they’ll have another conference next year. So that was super impressive. I loved the different ways that you’ve been working with influencers ’cause there are parallels to what I’ve been doing, but there are also a lot of differences.
That also makes me wonder what you see as some of the differences between B2C influencers and B2B influencers and how you see that playing out when it comes to campaign success.
Sarah Fruy: When I was at Linqia as an influencer marketing platform, we mostly worked with major brand advertisers with large budgets.
Some of it was like working with major celebrities, like folks that have agents. Then some of it was working with smaller, more niche influencers. It could be different goals—whether you’re trying to sell products or you’re just trying to increase brand awareness and things like that. It’s much more, I feel, transactional or brand building on the B2C side like clicks to cart, things like that, it’s very clear.
I was on this Instagram ad, they promoted this thing. I went and bought it in my Target shopping cart. Versus [with] B2B, I feel like it’s a lot more relationship-building and pulling in new audiences and connecting with communities on a deeper level and seeing how those relationships improve over time.
So looking at things like deal velocity, are we able to close business in a shorter amount of time? I think with. Again, B to C, it’s very transactional or B to B. It can take a lot longer to close deals. I’ve worked at companies where some of our enterprise products took two years to close a deal. That’s a long deal cycle.
You need to find ways to stay top of mind, to stay engaged with your prospects so that when they are ready and they’re able to make that purchase decision they’re going to make that choice to do it with you.
I think that having the right influencer strategy is a great way to stay connected in a meaningful way so that they trust you when it’s time to make that purchase decision at a high level.
Are there other metrics that we can look at when we’re evaluating influencer partnerships?
Sarah Fruy: I think it comes down to establishing clear KPIs at the start.
When you have a brand awareness campaign, that can be a lot more nebulous. But you can look at things like, “Do we increase our follower count on social media, our engagement? Do we drive more traffic to the website? Are more people talking about us, thinking, things like that?” You can also do brand lift studies if you have the budget for things like that.
If it’s more about you know, pipeline and revenue generation, then I look at it similar to other marketing activities.
“Was I able to hit a certain MQL number? Was my conversion from MQL to SQL, like marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads to that rate increase? Were we able to close the deals in a shorter amount of time?”
Maybe your average deal cycles three months. Can we get it down to two months or something like that? And see looking at your normal marketing KPIs and mapping it back in—but you need to do that upfront to make sure that it’s realistic when you’re trying to track these things.
Like, if you’re trying to get clicks to the site, do you have UTM parameters set up, do you have unique landing pages that you’re linking to, things like that? So you’re not trying to connect the dots after the fact, but as you’re setting up the KPIs are clear, and you have the tracking in place to measure it so that you can tell the right story when the program’s over and be accountable to your peers and a senior leadership team.
Mike Allton: That’s exactly why this conversation is so important right now. For all of you listening, you should be thinking about everything Sarah is saying, taking notes, and enacting these metrics and the systems you need to have in place to create the metrics before your next influencer campaign, you can’t attach UTM parameters to a link. That’s already been shared.
Don’t miss out on other expert advice and insight from all the latest episodes of the B2B Edition.
Deal Velocity
You talked about deal velocity. I’m wondering how do you attach a value to something like that.
I could understand improving the conversion rate from MQL to SQL because there’s a defined dollar value to that you can calculate based on the increased conversion rate, but what about velocity?
Sarah Fruy: So I mean when we’re trying to hit our revenue targets. Timing is everything, right? You’re trying to get your deals closed.
Like this quarter, for example: Timing really matters, and so if you have an influencer campaign, I think one of the interesting things with B2B influencer marketing is positioning.
If you find the right influencers who can give you new nuggets and insights in terms of how to position your product, all of a sudden, maybe that “Ah-ha!” moment happens a lot faster for the buyer. Where previously it might’ve taken two or three calls to get them to be like, “Oh, I totally get how this works for me now. I’m ready.”
If you can reduce that by one phone call or two phone calls or something like that, that can bring down your deal velocity significantly, then free those reps up to start talking to new prospects, nurturing new leads—things like that help increase your revenue numbers overall.
That’s where it’s one that I don’t think should be overlooked: If you can get to, yes, faster, you can close more deals in the long term.
Tools and Technologies
What tools are you using or have you used? What technologies perhaps would you recommend for tracking—and particularly for analyzing these kinds of B2B influencer marketing campaigns?
Sarah Fruy: I’ve spent most of my career in the startup space, so I always advocate for agency partners.
I think that if you can’t build an in-house team partnering with the right agency folks is always my first go-to, and my recommendation is to bring on experts who live and breathe this every day. They’re going to have access to a lot of software that maybe you don’t have the budget for.
So, finding the right partners or the right internal teams is the first thing is make sure that you have folks on hand to implement and then measure these campaigns. Because it’s one thing to throw things out there, but if you’re not tracking it, it’s all for naught.
- Some of the tools I use are basic things like Google Analytics, whatever kind of marketing software you’re using—whether that’s HubSpot or Marketo to sort of track some of the basic metrics traffic and things like that.
- Then there are tools like social listing tools like Meltwater, Trackur, and Buzzsumo. I’ve used Hootsuite myself to manage campaigns.
- There’s Sprout Social out there. There are a lot of different tools.
I think it’s like anything, it’s finding the right marketing mix: What’s going on with your current tech stack? Are there things that certain software you’re already purchasing? There are ones that you can use that sort of enhance your current system, or do you need to supplement it with new, new software and tools?
Make sure that you have the right internal resources to take advantage of them. You don’t want to be spending a bunch of money on something and then you find you’re logging in once a month and kind of scrambling to get it done and making sure you have the right team in place to gain those insights and make it meaningful.
So you’re getting the most value you can out of these programs.
Mike Allton: Love it. I particularly appreciate the idea of, well, why not use an agency that already has the tools and the expertise, I literally wrote that down because there are things about partnerships and that sort of thing that we aren’t doing today at Agorapulse, but I want to—but I don’t personally have the bandwidth to do that.
And for those of you listening for using Agorapulse, we’ve got some fantastic social listening capabilities built in that you can take a look at.
B2B Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Could you share an example of a B2B influencer campaign that you were involved in where you were actually able to successfully demonstrate ROI and what do you think made that particular campaign effective?
Sarah Fruy: When I was at Pantheon, we worked on a program that was a higher-ed content marketing program. It lasted about a quarter and it had a lot of different components to it. We had a social media activation, we created a white paper, and there was a conference appearance. We did a webinar and we also did a day-long training on Drupal software and how to upgrade it to meet the needs of this particular higher-ed IT buyer.
The way we built the program was we enlisted a number of different influencers—most of which were customers of ours who are very well trusted and respected within the community to help us create and sort of guide this content. They know the subject better than we do. They’re the ones out there using our tools every day and driving the most value out of it and can provide insights even beyond what our own product teams could. So I listened to them, and I worked really closely with them in terms of developing the content and the assets and then creating a really specific content distribution plan to get that content out there.
Another tool that I leveraged in that mix was at Pantheon, we had a lot of different technology partners and I pulled one of them in as a company called Site Improve, and I pulled them into the influencer campaign so that they could help us distribute the content, get signups for our webinar, things like that, and you hit a broader pool.
That’s another way of thinking about influencer programs: There are the folks that are creating the content for you, but are there other partners that you can kind of pull in to increase the impact and the awareness and generate more audience, as well on the partnership side with other companies that you have overlapped with but aren’t competitive with.
I think that’s a way to be creative today in terms of partner marketing that was successful in this program. And just being very clear about how we’re meeting a need for a very specific audience. And I think that was what was really effective about this program. Ultimately, we saw great engagement on social media at the time. Twitter was a big channel for us. We saw a 19 percent increase in engagement there. Another one that was kind of exciting to see was our blog posts were really effective for the program. Sometimes you write these blog posts and they’re just kind of out there, but this one we actually saw down funnel clicks that we could track back to purchase behavior.
So that was really exciting to see that the content was actually driving purchase decisions on the blog, which doesn’t always happen. In the end, it also just increased our connection within that higher ed community and made us a more dependable and trusted resource within that community and we really crushed our revenue goals for that quarter. It was our most successful program of the year and it was one that was, I was very proud to be a part of.
Mike Allton: That’s awesome. And I love that it was omnichannel. I mean, you had stuff going on all over the place, blogs, in-person conferences, social media. That’s terrific, so that was a great campaign.
Measuring Influencer Marketing ROI
How are you measuring that long-term impact? When you’re working with influencers over time how are you measuring beyond some of these thought leader collaborations beyond those immediate campaign results?
Sarah Fruy: I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier but one of the ways I like looking at long-term success with influencer marketing [is] like dating, right? Sometimes you date somebody, and you go out once, and you’re like, “That was enough for me. We don’t need to do this again.” And then there are people that you just connect with, and you have really great chemistry, and you want to have that long-term relationship with them.
Influencer marketing is very much—if you don’t feel like it’s a great fit, if they’re not following your brief or the posts, whatever kind of content they’re creating just didn’t resonate, etc. It’s okay! Move on. Don’t continue to engage with somebody just because they have a big audience or maybe have some overlap with your audience that you’re trying to reach. If it’s not working, cut it off and end it early.
But the folks who can be real partners are the ones that I think can actually transform your business, even beyond those typical campaign metrics.
When I talk about positioning, sometimes I’ve worked with influencers where they get that nugget, and you can pull that into a sales presentation. You can pull that into website copy. You can look at some of your demand gen campaigns and say, “Are there insights or language from this program that we created that I can sprinkle in there and start to look in an attribute different aspects of your overall marketing funnel to see if there’s the broader impact that you can sort of like pull in from what you’re learning from them?”
Sometimes you can create advisory panels with these folks not just customer-facing stuff but product internal conversations with these folks, introduce them to product leaders, and introduce them to product managers.
Are there features they’re taking advantage of that maybe they’re not aware of, are there interviews that you can do with them? Are there new features?
Maybe they have an idea. I know what would be great for you guys if only you did this. And then all of a sudden you build that thing and it becomes a new revenue driver for the company.
That’s where influencer, I think, gets really, really interesting beyond just like how you’re thinking about it in terms of engaging with prospects and deepening customer relationships.
Mike Allton: Those are terrific points. I was reminded of an interview I did with a good friend of mine Robin Dimond on another podcast that I had all last year called Partnership Unpacked. And she made the same analogy you did that, partnerships and influencer marketing are not like dating. She was talking about how the need to develop relationships long-term because you can’t go into that first date and wife up right away to quote her which was absolutely true.
Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Let’s talk about some of the challenges that B2B businesses are facing when it comes to this kind of activity.
What have you challenged or what challenges have you faced, particularly when it comes to kind of proving your worth to leadership when it comes to B2B influencer marketing, and how did you maybe overcome some of those challenges?
Sarah Fruy: I think sometimes in the B2B space, it becomes so much about getting those leads in those MQLs, that when you are thinking outside of the box, it’s like, “Trust me, if we build this thing, the leads are going to come.”
That initial hurdle tends to be some of the hardest, especially if you’re new to an organization, or they haven’t done influencer before, or they just see it as like, “Oh, you know you’re just like someone on Instagram like hacking a product.”
It’s very different in the B2B space in terms of how you can partner with these people.
I think a lot of things in the B2B space, it’s being very thoughtful about creating a business case for the leadership team and any other decision-makers that you need to get on board for your program, rallying folks internally.
Are there ways that you can pull them into the programs? They feel like they’re bought in. They’re a part of it. And then it’s like, “I don’t like eating your own dog, but I like drinking your own champagne.”
But if you’re doing all this work to create this amazing content with these influencers, you need to do the service to yourself. How do you take that and create your own story, your own case study to show the value of what you’re doing, the impact that it’s making, and make it memorable and meaningful to the folks that care and are going to be signing up for your budgets next year? Whether that’s the CEO or the CFO or who have you, be able to tell the story so that it resonates, so that they’re going to be bought in to re-up and do more of that work with you in the future.
Mike Allton: First of all, as a French company, we definitely prefer the saying on champagne. But that is really, really great advice. Being your own advocate, your own cheerleader, creating your own internal case study for what you did, the work that you put in, and the actual outcomes that you got. Just not just the outputs, but what were the results?
Influencer Marketing Resources
I’m just wondering if there are any specific resources, podcasts, blogs, or other influencers that you turn to for advice or to stay up to date on B2B influencer marketing trends, measurement strategies, or any of those things.
Sarah Fruy: Yeah. So I was a part of the American Influencer Council as an advisor and got to meet a lot of really amazing folks.
- One of them is the founder, Qianna Smith Bruneteau. She’s fantastic and does a lot of content on Instagram and is very active in the community. One of the things I really love about her is how much she advocates for influencers and how to be better partners to them because these are humans at the end of the day. We need to treat them with respect and make sure they’re getting paid fairly and being treated appropriately for the work that they’re doing and aren’t being taken for granted. I just think she’s an amazing advocate for that community.
- I also met Lia Haberman through that organization. She is also part of the council, but she teaches at UCLA influencer marketing and social media. She has a great newsletter that I love to read. Also, very active on LinkedIn.
- I follow Social Media Examiner and love listening to podcasts. I really enjoyed listening to yours as I was getting ready for it. It’s now one of my new bookmarks.
- And then Ann Handley, she’s awesome.
- David Shing, AKA Shingy. He’s somebody that I’ve gotten to work with in the past. One of the things I really appreciate about Shingy is I think that he’s 10 steps ahead. He sees through some of the fluff and what’s real for the future. What do we need to invest in? And what are some of the things that we can kind of put aside? They call him a digital prophet, but he’s really great about seeing the future and where we need to be focused on moving forward.
I would say those are some of the people who have a big impact on me when I’m trying to learn more about this space.
Thank you all of you for listening and reading! That’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends, but don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and leave us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Until next time.
