I recently co-hosted a Walker Sands LinkedIn Live on B2B influencer marketing with my colleague, Senior Director of Social Media Aerolyn Shaw Woods. Together, our goal was to help unpack an increasingly important question for communications leaders at B2B brands: What does influencer marketing look like as it moves beyond experimentation?
The short answer? It’s more established than ever. It’s also more complex.
As part of our upcoming Walker Sands B2B Marketing Maturity Report (stay tuned for the full report launching in August), we surveyed 200 enterprise B2B marketing and sales leaders about priorities and challenges across several growth functions, including influencer marketing. The findings confirmed what many of us are already seeing — B2B brands are increasing investments in influencer marketing, which means pressures and expectations are also on the rise.
Whether you’re early on or further along in your B2B influencer marketing journey, consider this your guide for where opportunities are highest now and the steps to consider next.
Key Takeaways
- Just 2% of B2B organizations report having no influencer budget today, while 68% allocate at least 5% of their total marketing budget to influencer or creator initiatives.
- Thought leadership and brand awareness are the top perceived benefits of influencer marketing programs.
- Difficulty measuring ROI/business impact is the leading barrier to increased investment in influencer marketing among B2B brands.
- The next phase of maturity for B2B influencer marketing is operational excellence, which requires improved ownership, measurement and integration.
Trend 1: B2B influencer marketing is past experimentation
For years, B2B leaders treated influencer marketing as an extension of social media marketing — or they didn’t make use of the tactic at all. Today though, many organizations are evaluating dedicated influencer programs alongside other strategic marketing investments, and as a separate line item in budget planning.
This shift was clear in our research. When only 2% of organizations report having no influencer budget — and nearly 70% are allocating at least 5% of total marketing spend to creator and influencer efforts — we can confidently say influencer marketing is no longer a side experiment for B2B brands.
These investment patterns are even more indicative of where B2B influencer marketing trends are headed, considering the enterprise-level audience we surveyed. All respondents came from organizations generating over $100 million in annual company revenue, with 80% making over $250 million and a third (32%) eclipsing $500 million.
These aren’t early-stage brands experimenting with new channels. They’re established enterprises making deliberate marketing investment decisions designed to drive business growth.
What this context reinforces most is that, for B2B leaders, with these bigger influencer marketing budgets comes bigger expectations. As influencer marketing becomes a dedicated part of strategic planning conversations, there’s increased pressure for investments to support broader business objectives, category positioning and market visibility.
We’re seeing this spike with our clients. Inquiries are moving from “Should we invest in influencer marketing?” to “How do we maximize and showcase the impact of investments made in influencer marketing as part of our strategic communications program?”
Trend 2: Many programs are stuck in the awareness stage
Even as investments rise, we still see many influencer programs primarily focused on visibility wins. Our research found that thought leadership and brand awareness were the two most commonly cited benefits of influencer marketing programs for B2B brands today.
Don’t get me wrong, those outcomes still matter, particularly in complex B2B buying environments where trust and credibility influence buyer decision-making. But strategy shouldn’t stop there.
Our findings suggest many organizations have yet to recognize the expanded role creators can play in broader B2B growth strategies. During our LinkedIn Live, we explored this evolution by distinguishing between influencer marketing as a campaign and influencer marketing as a capability.
In its earliest stages, a B2B influencer program might center on content distribution: equipping a selected creator with a chosen story to boost visibility of that narrative in the market. Maybe you also bring the creator back in selectively for a product launch, industry report or event. While effective in the moment, these engagements are isolated at the campaign level, requiring reinvention every time.
A more mature program treats influence as a repeatable capability. That could look like building a network of trusted creator voices that reinforce key brand themes over time through ongoing executive thought leadership, LinkedIn content, webinars, events and earned media. The same creators might help you first build awareness, then moderate a webinar and also offer a fresh POV on new research.
This level of consistency helps shape how the market views your brand and pushes category leadership forward.
Campaign-level thinking still has its place, but don’t limit influencer marketing to awareness gains alone. When integrated strategically, creators can help your brand go from joining industry conversations to shaping them — and support progress toward all types of desired business outcomes.
Trend 3: Measurement remains a top barrier
If one challenge consistently emerged from our influencer marketing research, it was measurement — difficulty measuring ROI or business impact was the leading barrier to increased investments in influencer marketing.
That’s not surprising. Influence is rarely linear, especially in B2B environments where buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders, long sales cycles and numerous touchpoints. Much of influencer marketing’s value is created before an attribution model can capture it.
That challenge sparked one of the most interesting discussions during our LinkedIn Live: Are marketers evaluating influencer programs through the wrong lens?
There’s understandable pressure to tie every marketing investment directly to pipeline. But many influencer initiatives are designed to build credibility, shape market perception and engage high-value audiences. Those outcomes contribute to business growth over time, even if they don’t fit neatly into a traditional attribution model.
That’s why mature organizations align measurement with program objectives rather than relying on a single scorecard. Brand-building initiatives may be better evaluated through metrics like audience engagement, share of voice, sentiment and content performance, while demand-focused programs may place greater emphasis on pipeline and revenue.
Ultimately, how you track and measure influencer marketing should be based on the North Star goals of your investment. Avoid using the same success criteria for all creator engagements.
Trend 4: B2B influence goes beyond the creator-economy
An interesting finding from our research centered on who B2B organizations are choosing to partner with for influencer programs.
In B2B environments, influence is closely tied to expertise, trust and professional credibility. Buyers are making decisions that affect budgets, business performance and careers. As a result, they often place greater value on insights from practitioners, analysts and subject matter experts than on reach alone.
We saw this preference in our data: Respondents were most likely to be working with industry analysts and research firms (48%) or subject matter experts/consultants (42%). Only a third (31%) of organizations currently engage social-first thought leaders or independent content creators.
A respected practitioner with deep domain knowledge may have more influence on a B2B purchase decision than a creator with a significantly larger following. The goal is to identify voices that can help shape decisions among the audiences that matter most to your brand, and where learning typically happens and audiences naturally engage.
Trend 5: The next step is operational maturity
As influencer marketing becomes a permanent line item in B2B marketing budgets, operations become just as important as the creators you partner with.
One question that came up repeatedly during our conversation was who should own influencer strategy: Nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) cited unclear ownership of influencer strategy as a barrier to their company investing more in B2B creators or industry influencers.
Influencer marketing requires clearly defined processes, governance and connections to how creators contribute to business objectives. At a minimum, strong influencer marketing programs feature a central owner who coordinates strategy, relationships and measurement. This set-up ensures program-level accountability and forward momentum.
But the best influencer marketing programs go further and proactively bring together perspectives from all parts of the organization. Influence with B2B buyers touches multiple parts of the business, which makes successful influencer marketing a shared effort.
Content teams manage thought leadership. Social teams oversee creator relationships, behaviors and channel trends. Communications teams engage analysts and industry experts. Demand generation teams are responsible for audience targeting and measuring business impact. Product marketing knows positioning and audience pain points better than anyone else.
When a central leader or team can unite stakeholders from across the organization around these many strengths, operational maturity shifts from debates over ownership to clear accountability, cross-functional alignment and increased impact.
Without this operational maturity in place, growing investments will fall short of their intended impact.
Where B2B influencer marketing goes from here
If we were to have this same conversation again in two years, my guess is the discussion will be less about whether influencer marketing belongs in B2B, and more about how effectively organizations have operationalized it.
My take: Success moving forward will be determined by an organization’s ability to:
- Leverage influencer marketing as an always-on opportunity to build credibility and trust with audiences at scale
- Then deploy broader strategies, tactics and teams to turn those credibility and trust gains into long-term growth
Leading B2B influencer marketing programs are integrating activity into broader go-to-market strategies, not one-off activations. They’re thinking critically about opportunities to build and reinforce trust with buyers, alongside the measurement frameworks required to reflect influence’s contributions in buyer decision-making and brand perception. They’re working toward creator programs structured around retainer models, where influencers are involved early and often.
Most of all, they’re putting in the work to design strategic influencer marketing programs now.
Your buyers are already being influenced. The question is whether your brand is intentionally helping shape those conversations.
If you’re evaluating the maturity of your influencer marketing strategy or looking to build one for the first time, Walker Sands can help you design a program for lasting business impact.
If you want to hear the full conversation and walk through B2B influencer marketing in more detail, check out the recording here.
