What will it take for B2B influencers to take off?

Season 7 bonus issue! A think piece on why LinkedIn sucks so much

Apr 24, 2024

The landscape of B2B influencers to date
LinkedIn is the best placed platform to foster B2B influencers, but it’s fumbling the ball with poor product development
How I’d fix it, if it was up to me

This is an op-ed style piece and a bonus issue for Season 7, sneaking in before we’re all off for ANZAC day tomorrow! After this issue I’m going on break for who knows how long. I’m also taking an international holiday for two weeks - if you’d like to see the marketing things that catch my eye while I’m in Japan, join the WhatsApp community.

Why don’t we have B2B influencers?

If a TikTok street interviewer approached you and asked you to name your favourite influencer or content creator, how likely are you to name a B2B influencer?

Recently I’ve spent a lot of energy trying to crack the LinkedIn algorithm, and I’m not the only one. Just shy of a billion users, the platform is a theoretical candy shop for B2B advertising, networking, and even deal making. Yet with all this potential, we still haven’t seen B2B influencers break out the same way we have for lifestyle and consumer influencers.

The current state of business “thought leaders”

There is a landscape of business thought leaders and people who’ve built careers out of sharing their expertise such as April Dunford with her books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch!; or the likes of Tim Ferris, who expanded into a whole media empire with regular sponsorships. However they’re usually seen as marketing channels for:

Consumer products (like mushroom teas that help you focus), or
Their own products (i.e. books or workshops where they themselves are the product)

and not as “influencers” endorsing products with their personal seal of approval.

Some industry experts are accumulating super targeted audiences through newsletters, which gives B2B brands some confidence in advertising with them. One is Lia Haberman, a social media expert who runs the ICYMI newsletter. Her sponsorship slots are regularly taken up by software products aimed at social media marketers.

The chasm between “thought leader” and “influencer” stems from platform issues – and LinkedIn is both the biggest culprit and best placed platform to fix it.

The problem with LinkedIn

The primary ways for a brand to track an influencer campaign is through UTMs or unique links, and discount codes. LinkedIn actively discourages posting links on the site by reducing the reach of posts that contain one, and not all B2B companies have a self service checkout that allows for codes, so these two options don’t work for B2B.

LinkedIn is a platform that wants to build its own ecosystem of influential users. Its latest product updates, like the “top voice” badge, are all centred around increasing posting and engagement within the closed walls of the platform. What you as a user get from all of this forced engagement isn’t clear, but what is clear is LinkedIn doesn’t want anyone to follow a link and leave the platform.

In comparison, social media platforms and tools like TikTok, LinkTree, Klarna, YouTube, and Meta are instead building products and features that make being an influencer a legitimate career to pursue:

Posts can be co-authored, allowing influencers to share reach and audiences
Dedicated shopping and transaction features are rolling out,
There’s no punishment for links, and
They offer business accounts that come with detailed reporting!

Meanwhile, LinkedIn doesn’t report on basic engagement metrics like post saves or shares.

They should really consider that developing tools for influencers could potentially be what drives future engagement, not AI-determined topics and contributions that no one reads.

The idea of purchasing something directly on LinkedIn isn’t that difficult a thing to imagine. Digital products created by LinkedIn users could be paid for and downloaded without leaving the platform, and the ability to recommend products like business books or learning and development courses is a natural fit for the platform. A shopping integration to buy those recommendations would be a great fit for capturing attention and demand when it’s at its highest.

The rise of product-lead software products suits this buyer journey as well, meaning you could go from seeing a LinkedIn post to purchasing software pretty seamlessly. If only LinkedIn though this way…

Brands need to give business influencers a go

Business and career influencers are starting to grow on platforms like TikTok (there’s even a Microsoft Excel influencer.) Their audiences might be juniors learning career hacks for now, but those juniors will turn into buyers with time. Brands should consider partnering with them, and exploring more than just a sponsored post or two.

Luxury fashion houses use celebrities as “ambassadors”, having them appear in campaigns and at events. This is a capacity that B2B brands could engage business or B2B influencers in. The distribution of the content (for example, company podcasts, events, digital or OOH campaigns, roundtables or webinars) sits with the brand, while the influencer lends their audience, trust, and authority to the brand.

An example here is HubSpot collaborated with the cofounder of Morning Brew, paying for him and seven of his friends to attend the College Football National Championship in exchange for HubSpot being able to dress them up. While there, the group made content which was posted to the Morning Brew YouTube channel and racked up almost 20 thousand views.

The hurdle here is that audiences may not know the name of the influencer, but rather know the name of the company they work for — company logos on conference timetables do more to draw a crowd than the name of the speaker. This is slowly changing as a new generation of LinkedIn users are building personal brands independent of their employer brand.

The future of B2B influencers looks bright

While the platform gaps are yet to be filled, what we’re seeing is business-minded B2B influencers seeing the opportunities in the market and taking things into their own hands: creating their own courses and products to sell on their own terms. The juniors who are watching TikToks to learn their job are the next generation of buyers, who will trust these creators with their company credit cards.

We’re seeing baby steps towards B2B influencers (in the true definition of “influencer”) but we need innovative brands to step up as early adopters.

While we wait, we can always rewatch the TikTok of Bill Gates drinking Gong Cha with his daughter and wonder what the revenue growth was.