In B2B we are drawn to (and enticed by) distinctive differentiated thinking, especially if delivered through a bold headline that causes marketers to pause and rethink their existing strategies.
Two such headlines currently dominate the B2B marketing conversation:
- “If You’re Not Building Thought Leadership content, You’re Losing Buyer Trust.”
- “The Rise of the B2B influencer”
There is no denying that both these headlines and the ‘trends’ they represent are rooted in truth, however they often trigger a rush to implement tactics without critical thought.
Suddenly, every brand needs a face. A personality. A thought leadership content strategy. Investment (requests) pours in, but the big question gets missed: does this actually make sense for us?
Marketers need to not fall victim to “Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS)”, chasing trends and adopting tactics to shore up ailing pipeline without stopping to think critically.
Because here’s the thing – B2B is nuanced. There is no one-size-fits-all. Real marketing impact doesn’t come from chasing trends. It comes from knowing your business, your buyers, and what truly works in your world.
With this understanding, let’s revisit those headlines – and give them the right treatment.
- Building trust is CRITICAL to any B2B brand, but not all B2B brands need to pump out thought leadership to achieve this.
Example:
You work for a B2B insurance broker selling to small businesses (eg. Tradies & sole traders) – your audience isn’t sitting around reading trend reports on the future of risk management. They want simple, fast, low-cost cover, ideally with as little interaction as possible. Their trust is earned through things such as simple comparison charts or “What’s covered / What’s not” guides – not opinions or industry commentary.
- Harnessing your brand’s sources of influence is CRITICAL, but not every brand needs to do this via a personality or paid influencers with 1M followers.
Example:
You work for a manufacturing company selling commoditised components into supply chains — B2B influencers aren’t your play. Your buyers care about price, specs, volume, and reliability. Attaching your brand to an influencer won’t sway them, but third-party reviews and distributor endorsements that validate your SLAs and delivery performance will. In this world, trust is earned through proof, not presence.
Brands need to distinguish between the outcome – building trust and influence, and the tactics used to get there – it’s not just about influencers or thought leadership content.
In other words, designing a program that connects the power of influence and trust is a universal need for B2B brands, but the tactics to achieve this aren’t.
And highlighting this need has never been more important. B2B marketing is in the middle of a wake-up call. As Mi3 has consistently reported, marketers must stop focusing on the wrong things and start investing in brand building that resonates across the entire buying group.
Because without earning the trust of both your target and hidden buyers, you won’t even make the shortlist.
In any business, a brand is built and resulting trust is earned, across a multi-faceted Influence Ecosystem: a layered collection of earned, internal, external, controlled, and owned sources. How your audience perceives you against these sources shapes your brand affinity with them.
Each of these influence sources contributes to creating durable memory associations with your audience around trust, critical for eventual evaluations and brand purchase from your future buyers.
- External sources drive trust through relationships, peer validation and third party endorsements
- Internal sources drive trust through building human connection with your brand and leadership
- Controlled sources drive trust by connecting your brand to authoritative voices or customer proof points who are proud to associate with you
- Owned sources drive trust through direct user experience
This ecosystem will be different dependent on your business – whether you are an established business or challenger brand, targeting SMBs or enterprise customers, or what industry and category you operate in. It’s critical to know which sources of influence matter most to your brand and buyers.
If you have this understanding, you can ruthlessly monitor, understand, develop and act accordingly. Learn how you can prioritise marketing investment and evolve your business strategy…(and yes, we’ve developed a way to help you do exactly that.)
Mapping Your Influence Ecosystem
Once you’ve identified and categorised the sources within your ecosystem, it’s essential to score your brand across three dimensions against each source:
- Presence (Scale) – How present is your brand against each source
- Strength (Quality) – How strong is your brand against each source, eg. Brand sentiment, brand associations
- Impact (Effectiveness) – How much influence does this source have on your potential future buyers
Putting the Influence Ecosystem into Practice:
Once you’ve mapped your Influence Ecosystem, as illustrated in the model above, patterns start to emerge. You can easily identify the areas that require attention, and critically, how much each point actually matters to your brand.
Not every gap demands attention, and not every strength is strategic.
Obviously it’s now all about prioritisation: where does influence carry the most weight for your buyers, and how well are you showing up? Overlay this with a lens of what your business can credibly deliver, and what’s sustainable – and you’ve got a clear line of sight on where to focus, and how to act.
Illustrative Example:
In this example, you’re a professional services firm with top-notch solutions – but it’s not enough.
- External influence sources drive impact for your buyers
- Analysts – your relationships with them are strong – but only a handful exist. Your move? Scale those relationships and amplify the influence they already have.
- 3rd party reviews – your buyers are looking not just star ratings – but who rated you, what they said, and whether it sounds real and intelligent matters a lot. Your move – interrogate and review your post sales experience and management (eg. Prompts for feedback and external appraisal)
- Internal influence sources validate trust beyond the product
- In your world, buyers care deeply about leadership quality: values, intelligence, ethics. Here, your strategy should dial up executive visibility — making sure your leaders’ actions, presence, and perspectives are visible and credible in the market.
Bottom line
Influence in B2B is bigger than influencers and building trust demands more than a thought leadership strategy.
Brands that understand where trust is formed, capitalise on meaningful sources of influence, and invest deliberately won’t just stay relevant, they’ll be leaders in the space. And hey – if a sharp, well-positioned B2B influencer is part of your ecosystem, go for it!
This article was originally published on Mi3