Moving the Needle: How to Use Influencer Marketing to Influence Hidden Champions and Drive Real Business Outcomes

1. Targeting Hidden Champions: Influencing the Unseen Decision-Makers

In business influencer marketing, it’s not enough to look at superficial metrics like likes or shares. The true challenge lies in identifying the hidden champions—the internal decision-makers within target companies who wield significant influence over purchasing decisions. These hidden champions are rarely visible in typical engagement data, yet they are crucial to driving business outcomes.

Success in this space depends on taking the time to carefully select influencers who can genuinely engage these key stakeholders. Currently, this process can’t be automated—it requires thorough manual effort to ensure the right connections are made.

Key Insight: To move the needle, you must target the right people within your prospects. While the process is manual and labour-intensive, identifying influencers who can reach these decision-makers is essential for ensuring your influencer marketing efforts truly impact business outcomes.

2. Overcoming Indecision: Three Drivers That Stall Progress

In the context of business influencer marketing, it’s common for marketing teams to hesitate before committing to an influencer campaign. This indecision often stems from three major concerns: valuation problems, lack of information, and outcome uncertainty.

• Valuation Problems: You might wonder if influencers will deliver more than surface-level engagement. Can they really influence the decision-makers that matter?
• Lack of Information: It’s difficult to tell whether an influencer is truly engaging with the internal champions within a prospect company, as this insight isn’t readily available and certainly isn’t something that can be automated.
• Outcome Uncertainty: Even after selecting influencers, there’s no guarantee that their content will resonate with the people who can drive decisions.

Key Insight: Manual research and careful content analysis are vital to overcoming these challenges. While there’s potential for tools to assist in this area in the future, today’s landscape requires hands-on evaluation to ensure influencer marketing delivers real results.

3. Building Constructive Tension: Why the Status Quo Isn’t Enough

Relying on quick searches and automated solutions to identify influencers might work in some contexts, but when it comes to business influencer marketing, these approaches rarely move the needle. The stakes are higher in B2B environments, where hidden champions within organisations are critical to the buying process.

The tension here comes from recognising the limitations of current automated approaches and understanding that finding the right influencers is still a largely manual task. Ignoring the complexity of influencer impact in B2B marketing could mean missing out on reaching the key individuals who drive decisions.

Key Insight: Shifting away from automated influencer identification towards more manual, thorough evaluation is essential in business influencer marketing. While automation may play a role in the future, for now, the hands-on approach is the best way to ensure campaigns resonate with the right decision-makers.

4. Engaging the Buying Committee: Tailored Approaches for Different Stakeholders

When developing a business influencer marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that multiple stakeholders within your own organisation are involved in decision-making. Each has different priorities, and the manual nature of influencer research can meet their varying needs:

• Efficiency-Focused Stakeholders: They want quick results, but quality can’t be compromised. Although time-consuming, the manual selection process ensures the influencers chosen are those who can truly impact business results.
• Insight-Seeking Stakeholders: These individuals need a deeper understanding of how and why an influencer is a good fit. Manual research provides a comprehensive view of an influencer’s ability to engage with decision-makers, which is essential in B2B contexts.
• Risk-Averse Stakeholders: They want proof that influencer campaigns will deliver. The rigorous nature of manually vetting influencers, analysing engagement, and understanding sentiment ensures you’re not relying on algorithms alone but making informed, human-led decisions.

Key Insight: Involving all stakeholders in the evaluation process can lead to more informed decisions and better outcomes. The manual research required may be time-intensive, but it provides the depth of insight and reliability that automated processes can’t yet deliver.

5. Collective Learning: Uniting Marketing and Sales Around a Common Goal

For business influencer marketing to drive meaningful outcomes, it’s essential that both marketing and sales teams are aligned. Sales teams depend on influencers to reach decision-makers within target companies—those hidden champions who influence purchasing decisions. Marketing teams need to ensure the right influencers are selected to engage these critical individuals.

At this point, the manual nature of influencer selection is key. While automation might streamline parts of the process down the line, the current landscape requires a focused, collaborative effort between marketing and sales to ensure that influencers are positioned to engage the right people.

Key Insight: Cross-department collaboration is crucial to ensuring that both marketing and sales teams are working towards the same goals. Manually vetting influencers ensures that the focus is on engaging the hidden champions who can drive decisions within target companies.

6. Reducing Risk and Driving Action: The Confidence to Move Forward

For many companies, adopting a business influencer marketing strategy that relies heavily on manual processes can feel like a significant investment in time and resources. However, when the stakes are high, the risks of relying solely on automated tools far outweigh the benefits.

Manually selecting and vetting influencers ensures that those chosen have the potential to impact the internal decision-makers who can sway purchasing decisions. While automation could eventually assist with parts of this process, it’s critical to recognise that a hands-on approach remains the most reliable way to ensure success in this field.

Key Insight: Investing time in manual research may seem daunting, but it provides the precision and assurance needed to make confident decisions in business influencer marketing. The quality of the results far outweighs the speed or convenience offered by automated alternatives at this stage.

Conclusion: Business Influencer Marketing Done Right

In the world of business influencer marketing, there’s no substitute for the careful, manual research needed to identify the right influencers—those who can engage with hidden champions and drive business outcomes. While there’s potential for automation to assist in the future, for now, the most successful campaigns are built on thoughtful, hands-on work that ensures influencers are aligned with the decision-makers that truly matter.

By focusing on the right approach, you can ensure your business influencer marketing strategy delivers real, measurable results.