As firm believers of influencer marketing, we’ve worked with a ton of great B2B influencers in the past, and got amazing results.
When done right, influencer marketing is a quick (and usually fun) way to make your campaigns more effective in less time. By reaching your target audience through an influencer instead of finding them on your own, people are already engaged and ready to trust and listen to you.
But we know finding great B2B influencers to work with is not easy.
As much as we’d all like to work with Oprah or David Beckham, they don’t speak to the right audience. Football fans and viewers of the O show aren’t exactly the ideal customers for your lead generation tool or content marketing services.
That’s why in this blog post, we’re sharing our very own list of B2B influencers.
If you’re looking for influencers for your next marketing campaign, sit back and grab a snack. I’m detailing the who, how, what, of the six best B2B influencers we’ve worked with and the projects we’ve done together for you to draw inspirations from.
Excited? Let’s get started.
Top B2B influencers you should be working with
1. Sujan Patel
The first on our list, is our good ol’ friend, Sujan Patel.
Sujan Patel is the co-founder of Web Profits, a growth marketing agency helping companies leverage the latest and greatest marketing strategy to fuel their businesses. Sujan has over 13 years of internet marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.
In the last two years, he’s contributed high-performing guest posts on the Mention blog, worked with us on a joint webinar on content marketing for boring industries, did a content marketing plan email course, and participated in our Real Smart Marketing video series.
Sujan educated our audience with high-quality content and helped us expand our brand reach to a whole new audience of digital and content marketers that we couldn’t have reached on our own.
2. Larry Kim
Everybody knows Larry Kim. With almost 800K Twitter followers, he’s one of the biggest B2B influencers you can find. Larry is the CEO of MobileMonkey, Founder of WordStream, a top columnist for Inc Magazine and a ton of other major business publications.
When I reached out to him for our video expert roundup, I was thinking “this is gonna be a long shot. But it’ll be amazing if he says yes!”
And I just sent him a tweet like this:
So I was really glad when he accepted the invitation to join our video series. He actively promoted our videos to his Twitter audience and also wrote articles on them.
When we finally met him in person in Inbound 2016, he also shared with us his plans for 2017 in a video:
Since our collaboration, he’s made me a contributor on his Marketing and Entrepreneurship Medium publication, introduced me to the editor on Social Media Today, and even given me a personal shoutout:
It was a real pleasure working with Larry. He brought us a lot of brand exposure, and we learned a lot from his marketing experience and strong work ethic.
3. Rand Fishkin
Rand. Even if you haven’t seen an episode of his Whiteboard Fridays, you’ve seen his mustache.
He’s founder and former CEO of SEO software startup Moz, host of Whiteboard Friday, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, co-founder of Inbound.org, husband to an equally amazing woman, Geraldine DeRuiter (author of the blog, The Everywhereist, which I love), a feminist, and lots of other cool stuff.
He’s contributed to an infographic that we created a while back:
So when we were looking for prominent, charismatic-on-video influencers, he naturally came to our minds. And we sent him this email:
And he kindly accepted. The whole team was so excited to have him on the series – and although we’d asked for selfie/Snapchat style video responses, the quality of his videos was so impeccable, they made the rest of the guests’ look bad.
(Curious? Check out our Real Smart Marketing video series here.)
He also regularly shares our content and does shoutouts for us:
Rand’s participation added a lot of legitimacy to our expert video series, and helped us convince other influencers to be part of our roundup.
4. Madalyn Sklar
If you’ve made even the tiniest attempt to learn about Twitter marketing, you’ve heard of Madalyn Sklar. Madalyn is a Twitter marketing expert ranked as the #1 Houston Social Media Power Influencer and is the host of the #TwitterSmarter Podcast and Chat.
We’ve worked with her on a number of #TwitterSmarter chats and podcasts:
And she regularly gives us shoutouts and endorsements on social media:
With her highly engaged audience on Twitter and other social platforms, Madalyn helps us spread brand awareness and reinforce our brand image as the perfect social media monitoring tool.
5. Sam Mallikarjunan
You may not have heard of Sam Mallikarjunan. But you must’ve heard of HubSpot. And Sam is one of the genius minds behind this awesome company.
As Executive Strategist at HubSpot, author of the book “How to Sell Better Than Amazon” (which is available on Amazon, ironically) and a Harvard instructor, Sam helps companies drive growth and push marketers to test, experiment, and challenge assumptions.
If you’re tired of run-of-the-mill content and strategies, Sam is your guy.
That’s why we were super excited when he agreed to do a webinar with us on a topic that’s relevant for every company – getting your sales and marketing team aligned to improve revenue generation.
It’s one of the rare webinars where the whole company – especially the marketing and sales teams – stayed to watch and learned so much from.
He was also on the first two episodes of our Real Smart Marketing series.
Among all the influencers we had on Real Smart Marketing, Sam gave us the best (and longest) answers to our questions. Everything he said was so jam-packed with well-researched insights that we had a very hard time editing his response down to 45 seconds.
He also wrote follow-up articles to elaborate on his ideas and help us promote our videos.
From the webinar to the videos and the blog posts, Sam brought our audience top-notched content and added so much to our Mention street cred as a high-quality, go-to resource for marketers.
Small tip: it’s Ma-lli-kar-ju-nan. Don’t let his last name stop you from hitting him up.
6. Neil Patel
As the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, QuickSprout, and Hello Bar, Neil Patel has been named one of the top 10 online marketers by Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world.
That’s why we were super excited when he published on QuickSprout “A Complete Guide on Building Your Brand,” and a whole chapter about brand monitoring and featuring our tool.
And his webinar with us – Grow Your Brand Online with Neil Patel – is one of our most popular webinars of all time and generated thousands of sign ups for us.
How to find B2B influencers
So how did we find all these amazing influencers? With hours of Googling, stalking, and borderline harassing?
Nope.
Working with influencers is all about getting more bang for your buck, so why would a successful influencer strategy include such a time-waster?
Savvy professionals like us rely on a powerful toolbox to save time without sacrificing quality of work.
From identifying influencers in the first place to researching important info like their audience background and any metrics, you want to use tools that save you time on all of this. Here’s what we use to find the key influencers in our industry:
- BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo’s freemium features let you search for influential publications, people, and popular articles. Just enter a topic, person, or URL.
- BuzzStream Discovery: This one’s a totally free tool that lets you search for influential individuals based on topic.
- Mention Influencers Dashboard: If you’re regularly monitoring your brand and your industry, identify influencers already talking about you or your industry.
The difference between using Mention and other influencer discovery tools is that with Mention, these influencers are “warm leads.” Depending on what alerts you set up, they’re already talking about your brand, your competitors, or your topic. So they’re much more likely to be interested when you reach out to them for any kind of partnership.
With our latest update, you can now see all the social profiles, interests, and recent activity of an influencer directly from our influencers dashboard. Saving you hours of Googling, scrolling, and tab-switching. 😉
Start leveraging B2B influencers
These influencers have helped us drive so much brand awareness, leads, and sales. It’s safe to say that we wouldn’t be where we are now if we hadn’t implemented an influencer marketing strategy.
So if you haven’t given influencer marketing a shot yet, start today.
Once you’ve built a targeted list of influencers that will help you reach your marketing goals, you’re ready to begin your outreach campaign. You’ll need to gather everyone’s contact info, write a few templates for your email pitch, and figure out a way to track the progress of your campaign. With the right approach, you can leverage influencers to extend your reach and get more visibility for your B2B marketing strategies.
