Can the Kardashians help your B2B business? Welcome to The Marketing Accelerator Podcast, featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker, and today I'm speaking with Zontee Hou. She's the Managing Director at Convince & Convert. That's a firm that builds and executes digital marketing strategies. But Zontee was also named a top 25 B2B influencer in 2023. Now, we've all seen and heard of celebrity influencers who have millions of followers that take action on their endorsements, but most of that happens in the B2C space. Zontee, how is the role of the influencer different in B2B?

Zontee Hou: Well, you started the show, Drew, with a reference to the Kardashians. And when you think about folks like that, you're often thinking about their really broad appeal. They have so many different followers who are interested in their lifestyle. But the question that you have to ask yourself is, do you trust the Kardashians to give you business advice? And I think that when it comes to B2B influencers, what we're really looking for are people who are truly trusted by the audience to give them those insights into the things that they need to execute in their own businesses.

Drew: So the size of the audience doesn't have to be as big as B2C, but trust is more important. Why is trust more important for B2B?

Zontee: I think that when it comes to B2B businesses, it's because we have to invest so much time, energy, or even human resources into the purchases that we're making for our business. Think about a service provider for your business or think about the last time you purchased a new software platform; those are big investments of time and energy to implement. And so, when we select those providers, we need to know that they are going to be a really good match to our needs. And in order to find someone that we trust to give us advice, it has to be somebody who's really highly relevant in the space that we're in, somebody who really understands the challenges that we face specific to our business.

Drew: That's really a great insight Zontee. How do I find an influencer, though, that is truly relevant to my audience?

Zontee: Yeah, that's a really great question. One of the things that we often work with our clients on is audience research. Whether that's going out and using a third-party tool like SparkToro that actually allows you to analyze audiences based on the social media accounts they follow, the topics they talk about, or even the websites they visit, that can allow you to see who do they trust and follow out in the world and whose content do they consume. That can give you one layer of trust. That can be everything from YouTube to podcast, etcetera. We also do a lot of research where we're actually going out to market and surveying the audiences of our clients and identifying who are the voices that they listen to when it comes to advice. And that can be a huge resource to us as a company that's helping to develop those influencer programs as well.

Drew: Well, that's another great insight. Talk to your customers to find out who's relevant and trustworthy in their view. The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com, where we accelerate business and marketing leaders to higher performance and results. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.