How to do B2B Influencer Marketing - 2025

B2B Influencer Marketing Stats

B2B Influencer marketing - Partnering (either one-off or strategically long-term) with macro/micro-influencers to boost your brand reach, credibility, and revenue conversion.

In a chat with the LinkedIn Marketing team, Neil Waller, co-founder and co-CEO of creator management company Whalar Group, said they are seeing an ‘explosion of opportunity’ in the B2B influencer space.

However, despite the numbers above only 24% of B2B marketers include influencer marketing in their budget when 94% of them believe it’s an effective strategy as per Invesp

Partnership duration: 71% of marketers believe that ongoing ambassadorships are the most effective form of influencer marketing.

Ogilvy published a report back in 2023 on the global rise of B2B Influencer marketing and here are some stats worth sharing;

• 75% of B2B marketers are actively using B2B influencer marketing.

• 49% of the number, leverage influencers to enhance brand credibility and trustworthiness.

• 40% have experienced increased lead generation and sales outcomes due to influencer marketing.

• 93% of respondents reported they plan to expand their commitment to B2B influencer campaigns. 

B2B Influencer Marketing Playbooks

I delved into over 20 Influencer marketing experts from Wix, Hootsuite, ActiveCampaign, and more SaaS companies running such campaigns to understand their playbooks and reverse engineer them for you.

In this content resource, I will outline three playbooks from three different SaaS companies that you should execute for your business.

Submagic - Adding Paid Ads Layer across multiple channels

The AI short-form content editor & captions generator SaaS revealed how they scaled to $1m in 90 days on a Reddit post.

Selecting Influencers—They collaborated with creators on YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok by offering them a +30% commission via an affiliate program.

The playbook was simple: choose their ICP creators and contact them via email with the offer to produce video content for them.

Layering on Paid Ads - While most of the creators’ content will not gain much traction, the team put some ads budget on 2 of 10 that showed potential.

Cognism - Seasonal SME Partnership

Morgan J. Ingram is an SME ( Subject Market Expert) who sits at the intersection of sales methods like cold calling and marketing like Influencer Marketing. From the screenshot I have shared above, Morgan was tapped by Cognism to help them produce content on cold calling.

A while ago, Morgan shared the playbook behind this partnership when he worked with GetAccept. Here is how to think about;

From the excerpt you will notice, that Morgan didn’t only publish organic posts to his 168k+ LinkedIn followers, but he worked with the team with the company’s GTM at the center.

Early on, the Cognism team had worked with Ryan Reisert and they shared the playbook in the YouTube video. Aside from publishing content around his social channels, Ryan was contracted to also deliver on the following;

• Hosting a podcast

• Holding webinars

• Publishing blogs and newsletter

If you are looking to execute this playbook, you have to think long-term (6 -12 months), ensure you bring on board a subject matter expert that aligns with your ICP & product offering,g and structure a contract that goes beyond social content into webinars, podcast, & paid ad ( thought leader ads).

Hootsuite - Scaling with One-off Influencer Campaigns

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Hootsuite’s successful LinkedIn Influencer marketing campaign that drove $1 million in pipeline within 14 days.

The team executed a simple playbook;

1/Contacted 10 LinkedIn creators with 10k to 270k followers primarily founders in the social media agency space like Sophie Miller from Prett Little Marketer and Social Media Managers in tech companies like Lyft and Kickstarter

2/They produced am massive physical magazine dubbed; ‘ The Hoot Post ‘ and shipped it to creators to produce content for social - both images and videos.

3/The LinkedIn creators had creative freedom for both the visual and text copy.

4/Hootsuite promoted the organic posts using Thought Leader ads.

Example post

B2B Influencer Marketing Experts

I have come across SMEs who are both influencers and experts like Brianna Doe, Nick Bennett, Obaid Durrani, and more. Below are some expert insights I have shared in my resource, which I will link at the end.

Sarah Adam - Influencer Marketing at Wix

Besides the template, Sarah shares insights from the campaigns the team is running. Here are the 19 stages of executing Influencer Marketing in-house.

Obaid Durrani - Influencer Marketing at Clay

In his previous role at Hockeystack, Obaid was instrumental in the creation of The Flow - a B2B streaming platform by Hockeystack.

The team was able to produce video content series with Subject Matter Experts like;

Todd Clouser - The Worst Marketer in the World

Obaid Durrani - B2B Therapy

Tim Davidson - How Times Change with B2B Ross

Obaid is currently executing a similar strategy at Clay.

Brianna Doe - Founder, Verbatim; Host, Stop The Scroll podcast

Brianna has over 240k followers on LinkedIn and has partnered with over 20 SaaS brands including; Notion, ActiveCampaign, Webflow, and more.

Influencer Marketing Compensation Plans 

First off, David Walsh is building an interesting B2B Creator Partnership platform - Limelight, worth checking out if you are looking for LinkedIn creators to partner with. David recently published a pricing benchmark and below is a screenshot from the benchmark.

Casey Hill - Growth at ActiveCampaign’s Compensation Plan

Scaling Influencer Marketing with Thought Leader Ads

Over 12 months now, LinkedIn launched a new Ad feature dabbed Thought Leader (TL) Ads. I did a deep dive in my previous playbook for you to explore.

Example One: Hockeystack - ICP Employee & Thought Leader

Example Two; Attio - Founder & User Testimonial

The third would be Hootsuite’s Influencer Marketing campaign amplification that I mentioned above.

B2B Influencer Marketing Resources