When most people think of influencer marketing, they think B2C – Instagram creators promoting skincare, nail trends, or travel destinations. It’s a fast-moving, transaction-driven environment built around quick clicks and impulse buys. B2B exists in a realm all its own, despite making the same promises as B2C. B2B influencer marketing offers the promise of reaching the right audience, creating demand from product use, and increasing revenue. But in truth, the landscape isn’t as forgiving.
Finding creators who truly specialize in B2B isn’t always easy. The sales cycles are long and multi-touch, which makes tracking impact more complex when affiliates are involved. Social-led efforts often introduce attribution gaps, creating data loops and buyer journeys that aren’t fully measurable, making it harder to capture the true value affiliates are driving.
Whether we’re talking about big-time influencers or micro-influencers, it’s difficult to get C-suite buy-in because influencer marketing is inherently immeasurable.
So, This Is Why Most B2B Influencer Marketing Programs Fail, Right?
This is one of the key reasons B2B influencer programs often start off strong, then stall, and quickly fizzle out. Content is running, and engagement is going, but it’s so difficult to measure that it’s nearly impossible to prove the channel’s value to higher-ups and executives who don’t believe in influencer marketing out of the gate.
Applying performance data to B2B influencer marketing is possible, but the biggest challenge is this: Influencer marketer funnels must be designed for measurement from the day of conception. Partners who believe in tracking and measurement, are interested in helping you meet your internal goals, and treat their influence as a source of revenue, not top-of-funnel awareness, are critical to the success of the program.
What About Incrementality?
Another massive influencer marketing challenge is incrementality. It’s really difficult to determine the source of truth when working with influencer marketers, especially since the sales that are happening could already have happened. Though influencer marketing can be hard to track with the same discipline as affiliate and performance channels, a good performance marketing agency can make it happen.
Agencies with experience in B2B influencer marketing can help bridge the gap between awareness and conversion by implementing structured, measurable tracking. For marketers entering this space, having a system that clearly connects influencer activity to revenue is essential.
Tracking the Source of Influence
B2C often works within a view to a quick purchase ecosystem, whereas B2B cycles are inherently longer. Part of the issue here is that B2B marketing is often enterprise- and sales-led, which requires a longer nurturing process and more human touch, and often involves a “not so quick” purchase with a higher-ticket amount. It’s simple logic that the more steps a sale requires, the higher the probability that tracking will weaken or fail altogether.
In addition, demand-gen-driven B2B sales often don’t happen in traditional ways. For instance, an exec might be scrolling on Facebook at night and screen grab or earmark a product for purchase during the work week on a different device outside the Facebook landscape. Busy execs are notorious screenshotters, sending clips and iPhone screen grabs to other execs or marketing team members.
Information could be shared on Slack and then re-typed or pasted into a browser in a way that prevents tracking. The way B2B buyers share data introduces a level of complexity that doesn’t exist in B2C channels, because B2B behaviors differ.
So, How Do You Find a Company That Can Actually Deal With This Tracking Problem?
This is all a result of how all-over-the-place the B2B buying process actually is from the get-go. B2B buyers are often looking for thought leadership pieces to verify independent purchases, and are doing their homework and window-shopping larger-ticket enterprise commitments, which introduces another layer of complexity into online buying. It also makes sense to assume B2C buying involves a single stakeholder, while B2B buying often passes through several channels, decision-makers, and stages.
Key Factors for Navigating Complex B2B Influencer Cycles
- Experience matters: Choose a company familiar with multi-phase, multi-stakeholder buying processes.
- Strategic approach: Agencies should handle campaigns with a full-funnel perspective, not just awareness.
- Performance-focused measurement: Look for B2B expertise that applies rigorous tracking and incrementality analysis.
- Impact over engagement: Campaigns should be evaluated based on actual revenue contribution, not just top-of-funnel metrics.
Why Is B2B Influencer Marketing So Difficult?
We’ve been living in a “cookie-less” world for a while, but tracking gets less effective with each passing day. When an influencer drives traffic, and the outcome isn’t apparent until 60 or more days after the initial view, last-click and shorter-time-frame tracking tend to short the influencer’s credit.
If an influencer drives upper-funnel awareness of a product and a conversion occurs within a few months through retargeting or other methods, doesn’t the influencer deserve some credit for that sale? And how can a B2B company ensure that the sale wouldn’t have happened anyway? This process becomes even more difficult when multiple people are involved. If one stakeholder initially sees the content and notifies another, then that stakeholder books a demo, and a third gets involved as the decision maker, traffic has great potential to break.
The reality is, B2B attribution is a full-data-picture problem, not a touchpoint-by-touchpoint problem, and the only way to address the stopgaps in the funnel is to use deep tracking,
working with technology and vendor resources that ensure tracking is deep and funnel-wide.
Are the C-Suites Right to Be Skeptical?
Finally, a critical lack of research in influencer marketing fuels somewhat deserved skepticism from C-suites and other company executives. The art of selling is inarguably about “get the sale no matter what,” particularly pushing a hard sale from mid-funnel to conversion. Truthfully, buyers just don’t follow that pattern of behavior like they used to. The days of Glengarry Glen Ross are over, but many businesses are still running on a sales-heavy, field-marketing strategy, ignoring the overall influence top-of-funnel activities like influencer marketing can have on the funnel from a 10,000-foot view.
At the end of the day, there’s only one way to fix this:
Tracking.
The only way to win the B2B influencer game (other than having an unlimited budget, which most companies don’t have the luxury of), is to track influencers like it’s a performance marketing channel.
Okay, So What’s Next? How Do We Know If Influencer Is Working?
To keep a B2B influencer marketing program running successfully, only two questions are important:
- Would we have gotten this sale anyway? And
- Can we actually link this influencer activity to actual sales/revenue outcomes for our business, without so many tracking gaps that we lose attribution?
One rule of thumb to ensure you’re working with a company that understands this and treats influencer marketing with the appropriate attribution is to work with a company familiar with performance marketing from the inside out. A company that knows how to work with affiliates and influencers, that understands the concept of incrementally, and knows how to track it.
Measurement dashboards designed for B2B influencer marketing can separate true revenue contribution from last-touch or vanity metrics, giving teams a complete view of how influencer activity affects the full marketing funnel.
How to Make B2B Influencer Marketing Work For Your Company
First, it’s critical to benchmark and define the success metrics. Higher-ups and decision-makers need to understand what the pipeline looks like, how it will be measured, how traffic will flow through it, and how revenue will be tracked.
Critical to this understanding is to observe how users move through the pipeline. Where do they get stuck? What is the TRUE decision point in the pipeline, and where do they come back/where are they retargeted when they return? Being able to measure this info is absolutely vital to the health of the program.
Next, it’s no good to introduce tracking that is so heavy and burdensome on the affiliate it will strain the relationship and make it difficult for them to create content. This is where a standard influencer protocol comes into play. Influencers require, at minimum, to succeed with decent trackability, unique URLs for every assets, swipe where appropriate, dedicated landing pages and assets, the assistance and structure of a CRM or dashboard that assigns credit, and manual touchpoint where the data touchpoint in the funnel fail (i.e., “How did you hear about us?” surveys or follow-ups.
Managing this technology stack is often difficult and burdensome for businesses with small, overwhelmed marketing departments. Utilizing an out-of-the-box incrementally and tracking solution is key to success.
So What’s the Path of Least Resistance?
It’s fairly straightforward to bring in an experienced firm to handle this. I’ve mentioned PartnerCentric a few times, but other well-known options like Acceleration Partners are also solid choices. Tools that integrate performance tracking, attribution, and incremental analysis can provide brands with actionable insights to optimize influencer spend and focus on partnerships that drive measurable results.
If you’re putting your short list together and you’re tired of awareness-only, your key differentiator should be how the company you’re scrutinizing measures up. If your vendor doesn’t have sophisticated tracking processes to be able to tell when sales would have happened without the work of an influencer, you can never truly be sure your influencer marketing is truly working for you.
Many B2B influencer specialists do not operate their own creator networks, instead working across multiple platforms to manage campaigns. Their core value comes from measurement, attribution, and the ability to evaluate which influencer partnerships are truly contributing to revenue.
Any approach should utilize trackable actions, partner evaluation based on what they contribute to your funnel revenue-wise (and not just volume), and optimization based on key factors, such as incrementally. When you work with the right vendor partner, meeting these goals is part of the relationship’s fabric.