Why B2B influencer marketing needs to be part of your strategy

B2B buying is rarely straightforward. Purchasing decisions take time, involve multiple people and often come with high risk. Even when the stakes are clear, the right choice isn’t always.

Influencers help cut through that—not by selling but by showing what works in practice. When buyers see someone they trust using a product in a way that makes sense, it becomes easier to believe it might work for them too.

That’s what makes B2B influencer marketing valuable. It doesn’t simplify the decision—but it does give people more reason to feel confident in it.

What is B2B influencer marketing?

B2B influencer marketing means working with content creators who already have credibility in your industry. If you work with the right influencer, you’ll access an audience that trusts them and listens when they talk about tools, strategies or products.

In 2025, it’s become a more practical way to reach people. Organic social performance is down across the board—X is down 48%, TikTok 34%, Facebook 36% and Instagram 16%. At the same time, buyers are burned out. According to the 2025 Optimove Insights Consumer Marketing Fatigue Report, 70% of respondents unsubscribed from at least three brand email lists in the last three months—a clear sign that inboxes are overloaded.

Influencer marketing is one alternative to reach disengaged audiences. It offers B2B teams another path to awareness and trust with audiences that aren’t responding to brand posts or paid ads. According to Sprout’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, 66% of B2B marketers use influencer marketing to boost brand awareness, and 55% use it to build credibility with buyers. Sprout also revealed that nearly half of all consumers make purchases at least once a month based on influencer posts.

Below, see how Sprout partnered with Rachel Karten, a social media expert and newsletter writer on LinkedIn, to post about Sprout’s social media predictions:

She shared genuine insights. The content was clear, relevant and honest—and it got strong engagement because people know and trust her. 

B2B vs. B2C influencer marketing

When you picture influencer marketing, your mind probably goes straight to business-to-consumer (B2C). B2C influencer marketing is everywhere you look online and widely known for its ability to drive direct sales.

But influencer marketing isn’t just a B2C tactic. It also plays a crucial role in B2B social media strategies. 

While B2C sales cycles are typically short direct paths to purchase, B2B sales cycles usually take longer, are more complex and involve multiple decision-makers. This distinction fundamentally alters the approach of B2B influencer marketing, focusing its efforts on driving awareness and affinity to contribute to a longer sales cycle. 

Benefits of B2B influencer marketing

While a well-executed B2B influencer marketing campaign may not get an instant “yes” from your prospects, it has the power to cultivate a more receptive, engaged audience throughout the buying journey.

For B2B brands, influencer marketing humanizes the appeal of your tool or solution. It offers prospects a glimpse at how their workday can improve by choosing your company. 

Here are the benefits it delivers: 

It expands brand reach 

Expanding your reach is most effective when it’s about relevance. The goal is to get in front of the right people in the right context, but as many of them as possible. Influencer marketing is one way to do that.

You can expand your reach by working with creators at any scale (nano, micro, macro or even mega/celebrities) depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes the goal is visibility. Other times, it’s credibility in a specific niche. Either way, it’s a more flexible lever than brand-owned channels alone.

That flexibility matters more now because the way buyers want to engage has changed. Gartner’s latest research reveals that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a sales experience with no rep involved. But self-service alone often leads to regret. What buyers want is guidance from sources they trust.

Influencers are one of those sources. People discover products through them the same way they might through a peer or advisor. That doesn’t replace the sales team, but it shifts where the early trust-building happens and who gets to deliver it.

It boosts engagement with your brand

People engage differently with influencers than they do with brands, especially at the nano and micro level, when the relationship feels more personal. Comments turn into conversations, and reactions turn into recommendations.

If your brand is in the mix—tagged in a post, reviewed in a tutorial, included in a caption—that engagement starts to reflect back on you. You’re part of a moment that feels genuine, not promotional. And that gets you closer to your audience than you’d ever get through a company account alone. Proximity matters more than ever. HockeyStack data from 2024 shows that it takes an average of 266 touchpoints to close a single B2B deal, up from 222 the year before.

Influencers can drive advocacy and surface questions, reactions and feedback that would never show up in your own replies or inbox. You can use them to tap into how people are really talking about your product and what they care about most.

It enhances brand loyalty and trust

When B2B brands partner with influencers, they tap into their genuine audience connections. Consider your relationship with your favorite influencers. You trust them because their opinions are informed by expertise or an interesting perspective. Their consistent display of authority and insight earns your trust—a level of trust that doesn’t materialize overnight.

Audiences also believe that their favorite influencers wouldn’t jeopardize that hard-earned trust by accepting sponsored content opportunities that don’t align with their niche—their credibility is their currency. 

This built-in trustworthiness makes the right B2B influencer marketing partnership invaluable. To truly unlock this value, focus on building on an influencer’s credibility, letting it drive brand loyalty and deepen trust.

Which platforms work best for B2B influencer marketing?

While LinkedIn likely comes to mind first for B2B influencer marketing—it isn’t the only channel available to B2B marketers. The right social network depends on where your audience spends time and who they’re paying attention to. Some industries lean heavily into LinkedIn, while others have vibrant professional communities on YouTube, TikTok or even Reddit. The platform matters less than the people on it.

Most social media channels host formal and informal professional communities. These can include a Facebook group for career development in a specific industry, a hashtag community on X (formerly Twitter) or a professional niche on Instagram where creators share workplace tips or career advice. You can also explore #WorkTok—TikTok’s community for short-form workplace content.

Why is LinkedIn a go-to choice for B2B influencer marketing?

LinkedIn is a go-to for B2B influencer marketing because it’s one of the few social media networks built primarily around professional profiles. People use it to list their experience, follow industry trends and network with others in their field.

It’s also where influence actually reaches stakeholders. According to LinkedIn, four out of five LinkedIn members are decision-makers and have twice the purchasing power of the typical internet user. So, when a trusted professional, like an operator, analyst or strategist, shares insights about a tool or product, their opinions carry a lot of weight with buyers who already place their trust in their expertise.

In a 2024 global survey, 44% of B2B professionals named LinkedIn their most important social network. It was also one of the top two platforms where marketers planned to increase investment in 2025, alongside YouTube. If you’re working with B2B influencers, LinkedIn is likely where their audience is already thinking about work, evaluating vendors and asking serious questions. And with tools like Thought Leader Ads, you can extend that influence even further, amplifying influencer content through paid targeting to reach your most critical decision-makers.

Building a scalable B2B influencer marketing strategy

Just because B2B influencer marketing usually influences a longer sales cycle rather than driving direct sales doesn’t mean it’s any less tied to your bottom line. It also shapes perception, builds trust and helps buyers make sense of their options, which positively impacts ROI.

A scalable strategy means choosing the right people to work with, planning influencer marketing campaigns that align with your brand values and setting yourself up to measure your impact on revenue.

1. Establish your goals

The goal of any marketing program is to contribute to revenue. Even if your influencer campaign is aimed at awareness or engagement, design it in a way that makes its connection to influencer marketing ROI measurable.

That starts with setting goals that are likely to move in the same direction as revenue. Not every metric will. Impressions, for example, might go up without any impact on pipeline. Instead, align your metrics to specific objectives. 

Use Cost Per Mille (CPM) for awareness, Cost Per Lead (CPL) for lead generation and Cost Per Engagement (CPE) for engagement. Sprout uses Owned Media Value (OMV) to evaluate the impact of influencer and creator efforts. But if you’ve seen a pattern, like an increase in comments leading to more site traffic or inbound interest, that’s a better place to focus. 

Sprout Tip: Choose goals that reflect progress toward outcomes that B2B businesses actually value. 

2. Analyze the competition

A good starting point for any influencer strategy is to look at what’s already happening in your space. Competitor activity can give you early signals—who they’re partnering with, what kinds of content they’re investing in and how audiences are responding.

If a brand is working with the same influencer more than once, there’s probably a reason. On the flip side, low-engagement posts or short-lived influencer partnerships can tell you what’s not working. Either way, it helps you make more informed decisions before you spend time or budget.

Sprout’s social listening tools make this easier. You can set up queries to surface posts that mention specific competitors, then filter by engagement or other metrics to find the patterns that matter. 

Sprout Tip: Use search parameters to create a query that identifies posts labeled as ads. This can help you understand current trends and may reveal industry experts and thought leaders.

3. Identify your target audience’s key motivators

You won’t always know what motivates your audience to act, but you can learn what gets them to pay attention. Looking at past performance can help with that.

Patterns in your content (what’s shared, what’s commented on and what leads to meaningful traffic) can show you which themes and formats land as a starting point for building campaigns that feel relevant.

Sprout’s Post Performance Report helps you surface those patterns across your channels. You can then use that data to inform creative direction, shape briefs and make sure the influencer content you’re producing fits what your audience already shows up for.

Sprout Tip: Use the insights you find here to shape your creative briefs so any influencer’s content seamlessly aligns with what your audience values most.

4. Find the right influencers

If you’re starting without a tool, finding influencers starts with listening. Look at who your audience follows, who they reshare and which creators consistently show up in relevant conversations. When you’re ready to scale, a tool can help you go further. 

Sprout’s influencer marketing platform helps you find creators by topic. The platform uses AI to surface brand-safe, authentic influencers based on audience engagement.

Alt text: Sprout Social Influencer Marketing list of recommended creators that talk about footwear

Sprout Tip: Once you’ve found the right creators, you can use Sprout to manage your campaigns end-to-end. That way, you can organize influencer outreach, streamline approvals, track conversions with UTM links and build performance reports with customizable templates

 5. Monitor metrics and optimize your strategy

If you’re working with more than a few influencers, tracking performance manually isn’t sustainable if you’re regularly reporting your efforts to leadership. Chief marketing officers (CMOs) and business leaders expect you to focus on strategy, not chasing down screenshots or creator metrics. Piecemeal data collection makes it difficult to get a clear view of what’s working, especially if you’re working with tools like Tableau or Salesforce BI to measure ROI. 

Sprout’s influencer marketing solution eliminates scattered data and last-minute scrambles by consolidating data across all platforms and creators in one place. This view, for example, gives you a high-level summary of your campaign. That way, you can track the number of posts published, the profiles that contributed and how engagement has changed over time. 

You also get earned media value (EMV), which is useful when you need a dollar-value proxy for organic reach. Other tables, like this example, show who posted, how much engagement they generated and how that translates into EMV: 

It’s a clean way to evaluate performance without having to ping each creator individually or piece together results from different tools. Plus, you can see the individual posts. 

Here, you can see which content was published, what it looked like and who created it. These influencer marketing tools help with alignment. 

Sprout Tip: When you track from one place, you can connect your influencer program to the systems your team already uses to measure business performance.

4 B2B influencer marketing examples you can learn from

These four examples of B2B influencer marketing in practice each have a clear takeaway you can apply to your own strategy. Alongside the examples, we’ll walk through what tends to work best in B2B campaigns. 

1. Flock Freight

This example from Flock Freight is an industry-acclaimed influencer marketing campaign. The campaign won a Cannes Lion for B2B Creative in the Challenger Brand category in 2023.

The brand partnered with Steve Burns of Blue’s Clues fame to create a series of video clips for its “Define Your Load” campaign. The TV icon breaks down some common phrases in the supply chain industry. The resulting video clips are laugh-out-loud funny and educational.

 

Source: Instagram

Takeaway: What truly matters is finding a meaningful way to link influencers to your brand—even if they aren’t industry experts. Think outside the box by considering how influencers from different fields can help you promote your brand’s appeal.

2. Monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based project management platform that caters to the diverse needs of B2B companies of various sizes and in different industries.

In this influencer marketing collaboration, Janell Roberts highlights the benefits of Monday.com for aspiring entrepreneurs. Throughout the video, the young CEO seamlessly navigates her to-do list using the Monday.com app.

Takeaway: For B2B influencer marketing partnerships, you can put your product front and center as long as the content feels like an organic review or recommendation. Instead of a traditional sales pitch, focus on showcasing how your tool or service creates value for your influencer partner.

3. Semrush

Semrush partnered with Annie-Mai Hodge, a social media strategist and creator, to showcase how its social media toolkit supports professionals who need to manage multiple tasks at once. 

In her post, Annie-Mai speaks directly to industry leaders’ pain points, like constant updates, strategy pressure and the mental load of doing it all. She positions Semrush as a solution that helps her save time and stay ahead. The video reinforces time savings with a casual, relatable tone that fits her audience and platform.

Source: LinkedIn

Takeaway: B2B influencer campaigns are most effective when the creator’s voice and the product’s value align. This post succeeds by integrating the tool naturally into real-life daily challenges without overselling or stepping outside the influencer’s tone.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout scaled its influencer program from one-off partnerships to a cross-functional engine that spans social, PR, customer marketing and demand generation. The team collaborates with a wide range of creators, including social media strategists, niche industry experts and even unconventional influencers like a corgi named Maxine, to expand reach and build trust with new audiences.

Their campaigns include everything from on-the-ground influencer activations at events like Miami Art Basel and Dreamforce to evergreen partnerships with creators like Rachel Karten.

Source: Instagram

Sprout’s influencer marketing platform is key to powering the program. It helps the team efficiently source creators and track essential metrics (EMV, CPL and leads). The platform also provides reporting dashboards that tie influencer campaigns directly to their revenue impact.

Takeaway: The most effective B2B influencer programs are built for scale. With the right structure, tools and collaborators, influencer marketing can evolve from one-off wins to repeatable revenue drivers.

Turn B2B influence into measurable impact with Sprout Social

Remember: Companies don’t buy products—people do. B2B brands that tap into the power of influencer marketing are poised to build the brand loyalty and brand credibility required to win in a competitive market. If you’re looking for creative ways to outpace your competitors, this is it.

Sprout has the tools to help you find, manage and measure influencer marketing campaigns for B2B marketers hyper-focused on influencing revenue.

See how Sprout’s influencer marketing platform helps you build and manage your B2B influencer marketing strategy for the results you want to achieve by booking a free demo today.