While we associate influencer marketing with social media and reality stars, it’s actually such a natural form of marketing that its documented origins date back to the 1760’s and the production of a tea set for the ultimate influencer, the Queen of England.
The organic nature of influencer marketing is the human nature to trust word of mouth of not just friends and family, but also from trusted and revered members of society. If a tea set is good enough for the Queen of England, it must be a mighty fine set of cups.
Most of our modern associations with influencer marketing centre around B2C marketing but the fact is influencers are just as relevant in the B2B world. If you were a CEO looking to upgrade your company’s bookkeeping, would you trust a sponsored Google ad or your accountant friend more?
The organic nature of influencer marketing is the human nature to trust word of mouth of not just friends and family, but also from trusted and revered members of society. If a tea set is good enough for the Queen of England, it must be a mighty fine set of cups.
This trust and importance is even more crucial in the area of cybersecurity.
From a business and ethical perspective, the stakes are high. Protecting a company’s assets (and reputation) from threats should be a top priority, but many decision makers don’t know where to start.
The main issue is the lack of understanding of both the scope of threats and the scope of tools out there to guard against them. There are more than 2,000 active cybersecurity companies listed in Crunchbase and over 400 active companies in Israel alone.
Hubspot did a study in 2016 about the information sources used by businesses when making a major software purchase. Word of mouth ranked first at 55%, online reviews ranked last at being used by only 19% of respondents. In the middle was vendor-authored materials at 38%. Influencer marketing is a great way to elevate those vendor authored materials to the word-of-mouth arena.
This is where influencers come in.
Having respected professionals share your thought provoking content creates a QUALITY brand awareness. And the effectiveness comes from a few unique aspects of influencer marketing in a niche B2B field.
First of all, quality efforts in this area will focus on quality over quantity. It’s not important that your expertise is blasted to 200,000 random people. It’s important that 2,000 c-level executives and security experts see your work.
Therefore, in B2B, micro influencers are actually king/queen.
A micro influencer is typically defined as 1,000-100,000 followers. The benefit of fewer followers is that empirical evidence indicates higher levels of engagement. Micro influencers foster community, and often around a certain theme.
The best example is the following screenshot from a post shared from our cybersecurity content library. Here we can see information about engagement, views, and data about how well it reached the target audience:
What we see is that it was viewed by IT Consultants, founders, executives and other tech professionals. We can also see it was viewed in key economic hubs in the U.S. and abroad.
We’ve crunched the numbers previously and this proportion of engagement to followers is higher than macro influencers receive AND the audience is much more targeted. In fact, when we compare the engagement rate above with the engagement rate when the company posted the exact same content themselves, the influencer received 5X the rate.
But the beauty is that it was targeted in a very organic way, through the power of the LinkedIn community.
You don’t need to be the Queen or even Elon Musk to name you ‘Cybersecurity Solution to the Stars’, you just need the right CISO sharing and getting their cyber friends to talk about it.
