How to Make Your Influencer Marketing Work
When a B2B brand play beats demand gen
“Oh we don’t have the budget for that.”
“That’s not relatable, they have a million dollar influencer budget alone!”
Most B2B marketers write off influencer marketing and sponsorships before they ever try it because we think it’s too expensive, or too hard to measure. This type of marketing is better suited for consumer brands with Super Bowl budgets, or those “big” B2B brands like HubSpot and Snowflake and Ramp.
Fair reaction. My first instinct when I was approached for this concept was the same. “This feels like a Mastercard problem, not a me problem.” But one cool part about my job today is that I get to talk to people doing literally everything in B2B marketing so I’ve seen every channel work now. And the more I dig into how smart B2B teams are actually using influencers and sponsorships, the more I think we’re leaving a real opportunity on the table.
The problem isn’t the channel. It’s that most teams approach it with the wrong mental model entirely. They treat it like demand gen when it’s actually a brand play.
I know that influencer marketing is a hot topic right now, so we had Ishveen Jollyon our podcast recently. She’s CEO of OpenSponsorship, a marketplace connecting 30,000 athletes and creators with brands, and she laid out exactly why most of these campaigns fail.
Here are three things worth thinking about before your next influencer or sponsorship investment.
1. You don’t need a super famous athlete. You need the right narrative.
The best sponsorship plays in B2B aren’t about reach. They’re about narrative fit. Ishveen gave two great examples. A Canadian insurance company partnering with extreme sports athletes for $10-15k. Risk, protection, people who push limits. The connection writes itself. And, a data company that paid three coaches $5k total for a March Madness campaign to talk about how they use data to make decisions. Never asked them to post anything. Just used the content for case studies. It outperformed everything they’d made on their own because someone else was telling the story.
That’s the principle. Find someone your audience already trusts, whose backstory connects to what your company does, and let them carry the message. Start there, not with follower counts.
Note: one common question here is “how do I find influencers in my niche?” and that question usually makes me want to pull my hair out (if I had any left) because I’m like, you need to know this! How can you do great marketing to a group of customers if you don’t know what they read, what they watch, listen to, and who influences them online? You have to be able to make a list here…
2. Fixating on attribution kills most influencer campaigns before they get started.
The first question most B2B marketers ask when evaluating a sponsorship: can we put a UTM on it? Can we track pipeline from this specific post?
That’s the wrong question and it’s why so many of these investments get written off. Creator and athlete content is not a direct response channel. It’s a content generation machine that feeds into everything else you’re already running. The most powerful thing you can do with that content in B2B might be handing it to your CEO to post on LinkedIn with a clever message. If you go in measuring last-click conversions, you’ll always conclude it doesn’t work. Define success as far up the funnel as possible. Reach, engagement, brand association, and build the campaign around that.
3. “Let’s just run a small test” is why you think this channel doesn’t work.
Small tests with no real conviction are one of the most common failure modes in marketing, and sponsorships are where this plays out constantly. You do something small, nothing moves, you conclude the channel doesn’t work, and you never come back to it.
Here’s the thing: in a world where AI is making it easier than ever to spin up ads, landing pages, and content at scale, the brands that actually break through are the ones willing to make a real bet on something different. You can’t A/B test your way to attention. You can’t micro-campaign your way to being memorable.
Ishveen made a point that resonated with me: over-briefing is just as big a problem as under-investing. The brands that give creators real creative freedom get better work and pay less for it. The ones that show up with a rigid brief, a mandatory hashtag, and a post schedule pay a premium for content that ends up feeling like an ad.
Find someone you actually believe in. Give them room. Commit to it over time. That’s the whole thing. With every other channel getting more crowded and more commoditized by the day, what do you have to lose by trying something that requires a real point of view?
There’s a lot more in the full conversation worth listening to on all of these fronts.
