Influencers have an audience.
They have expertise.
But where do you find the right influencer, the one who is a fit for your brand?
Ashley Zeckman shared the pros and cons of identifying B2B influencers with her audience at B2B Forum 2024.
For Ashley’s insights, watch this clip or read the transcript below.
Ashley, CEO of Onalytica, returns to B2B Forum in Boston this November.
Catch her full session, “The B2B Influencer Mistakes You May Not Know You’re Making—and How to Solve Them” and more than 50 other expert-led presentations when you join us at the world’s best B2B marketing conference. Tickets and workshops are limited. Check out the full B2B Forum program and your registration options here.
When you’re looking for an influencer, there’s a few things that you should look for.
(There’s probably a list of 50 things my team looks for, but these are some of the top ones.)
What other brands are they working with?
It’s okay if they might be working with some of your competitors. But is it very clear that they are working a lot with your competitors? If so, probably not a fit for you.
What does their audience look like?
Because ultimately, one of the reasons to work with influencers beyond their expertise in the marketplace is, you want to capture more people. You want to drive more eyeballs to your content, the right eyeballs to your content.
So you really need to know who their audience is, what they’re interested in.
Are they aligned topically? If you’re asking someone to create content on cloud computing, but they only talk about real estate, they’re not a fit for you.
You need people that are aligned, not just because they’re big names, not just because they have a big follower base, but because they’re actually aligned topically.
And then obviously having a shared point of view with your organization as well.
Here’s an example of what that might look like.
So this is an influencer that we work with quite a bit, Helen Yu, and you can see some of the actual demographics breakdown.
What are the top industries that her audience is in? What are the titles? What are the countries that they’re located in? What are they interested in? What are the different topics that drive interest? What is she creating content on? And what hashtags is she using?
Just getting a good sense of obviously what the makeup of her profile is.
Do you stop here?
No. Absolutely not.
You need to do some further digging into the actual content creation, but this gives you a good idea for early vetting on whether an influencer might be a fit or not.
And this is pulled from our SaaS platform, but there are lots of different ways to find influencers.
You can use things like social listening tools: Sprout Social, Meltwater, Brandwatch.
The cost of these is fairly high, but you may already be paying for them.
It can take a bit more time to search for influencers and it may not be as accurate, because these tools are not designed to do this.
But you can surface influencers utilizing social listening tools.
You can also do social media platform searches.
LinkedIn is a prime example. Their content search has gotten a bit better the past few years, but it can still be difficult, right? There are less filters and kind of levers you can pull to get the exact information you’re looking for.
So cost is low. The amount of time you have to spend is fairly significant.
Search engines. People create a lot of lists. That’s something we’re going to be talking about is how to create lists of influencers to drive traffic to your website. Lots of other people have created them as well though, so there may be some already out there that exist that you could pull from.
However, you may just be looking at the top names. You may not be finding new emerging influencers to partner with. So again, cost is negligible. But the amount of time it takes, and then in terms of accuracy, you’re still going to have to do some further digging on their social channels, on their websites, once you find out who they are.
You can use AI. So cost again isn’t too much if you have, what is it, $20 a month for the pro version. It doesn’t take very much time if you get your prompts right, but there are some accuracy issues and ChatGPT will tell you right off the bat that not everything is accurate.
So you are going to invest a bit more time doing research, but you’ll get some answers quickly.
And then obviously you can partner with platforms and agencies like the one I work for.
You’re going to invest more, but the amount of time that you’re spending is obviously significantly less because you have people to identify and vet these influencers for you, and your accuracy is going to be quite a bit higher just because these are people that those teams are already working with on an ongoing basis.
Lesson four: keep your eye on the content trends.
So again, when we ask brands and influencers what their priorities were, for influencer marketing specifically. Brands said 76% social content. Influencers said 56% social content.
Making that shift from only wanting to cannibalize their audiences on certain platforms like LinkedIn and wanting to work exclusively on brand domains.
Followed by events.
You’ll notice that these are almost opposite in terms of which each group chose.
Brands are prioritizing social and video content, whereas influencers are prioritizing events and creation on brand channels.
So when it comes to events, obviously that’s an opportunity for an expert to come and speak at one of your brand events or attend and do coverage for your brand at the event. There’s a lot more money in that for an expert. It’s also a great opportunity for them to continue building their thought leadership, so I’m not surprised that that was the response.
But you have to weigh what the benefits and drawbacks are to each.
We have customers that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send influencers to events to do coverage, but we can’t all do that, right?
So trying to find that balance of making sure that influencers are properly compensated for the expertise they provide, for the amplification that they provide, but also knowing that you need to drive the ROI that’s important to you.
There’s been also a bigger trend in produced content on social channels.
I feel like, a few years ago, it was a lot of talking heads, or someone with an iPhone.
Our old CEO used to do Tim’s Top Tips every week, and you saw a lot more of those. You saw a lot more interview style.
But now you’re seeing a lot more produced content on channels like YouTube, on channels like LinkedIn, and that’s where the content is living.
Podcasts are not just audio, obviously. In fact, most of them are video that then gets repurposed into audio.
We’re finding that people are really utilizing these more produced pieces of content to tell a story in a way that you can’t with someone just looking at a camera.
Obviously the investment in these is a bit more, but creators have gotten really, really good at this. They’re creating some amazing content.
And when you—as a brand—can give them a little bit of leeway to be creative and work with them and make them part of the process instead of just dictating to them, you get some really awesome content.
This one on the left, it’s “the biggest tech company you’ve never heard of.” It was a preview to a larger podcast piece that we were doing for our customer, Equinix, and it published what, 12 days ago.
Already has 223,000 views on YouTube.
And similarly during the Olympics earlier this year, I think they provided some sort of heating element for the pools.
So we hired an influencer to actually go there, do some video shoots. And then he did all of the B roll. Edited everything together.
And it was amazing, and also performed really, really well on social channels.
Published September 12, 2025
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