Growing Your B2B Company in 2016: 5 Ways Collaborating with Creators Helps

Creator collaboration programs for B2B tends to focus few marketing objectives. Just like other marketing focused investments, creator collaboration can yield more benefits that just having someone influential in your industry saying pretty things about your brand

When B2B companies focus on collaborating with creators solely from a campaign perspective, they miss out on the need to maintain relationships.

We become too…transactional

There’s a lot of competition for well known creators and relationships can keep the connection strong in your brand’s favor. However, with the need of updating creators’ profiles and content performance on excel sheets…we are left with less time to build relationships. Owh how we wish they could be automated. Isn’t it?

The future of working with creators is bright and with business to business marketers, it’s even more important to include creators in ongoing marketing because buyers are so self directed in the sales process and they trust experts more than brands (Nielsen).

Justifying resources to manage content creator relationships starts by fully understanding the value. Beyond advocacy, a creator’s expertise, network reach and talent for creating content can be very valuable to marketing outside of campaigns.

To help you expand your view of what creators can bring to your brand, here are a few ways working with creators can increase effectiveness and even reduce costs. Yes, increase effectiveness and reduce costs.

5 Creator Collaboration Tips for B2B Marketers

1. Marketing — From content co-creation used in online marketing programs to outright advocacy, the focus for most B2B creator collaboration is, logically, on marketing and customer acquisition. Rather than viewing creators as stand alone efforts, organize content in a modular way where one piece of the puzzle is “content creator”. Always consider with every content project whether it’s a blog post, YouTube video, or an event, where you can best incorporate relevant creators from your industry. Just like you optimize content for keywords and consider which social and/or advertising channels it should be promoted on, you should also think about content creator activation.

Optimized, socialized, publicized and content creator activated — all should be on your content checklist.

Creators can facilitate greater reach of your content, improve quality and some say creator content can inspire more buyer engagement to leads and booked deals. Ongoing creator involvement in your efforts can also lead to organic advocacy of your brand, products and services.

Other marketing-centric creator engagement options include:

• Maintain an ongoing content partnership as contributors to your content hub (think outside the campaign)
• Survey creators for opinions, ideas and insights
• Get feedback to optimize your creators marketing efforts
• Nurture creators into expanded roles as partners, employees or advisory board members

2. Public Relations — In between campaigns, maintaining relationships with content creators is essential. Including creators as subject matter experts in contributed articles to industry publications is a great way to bring authority to your earned content and shine a light of exposure back to your content creation partners. Improving the credibility of content your brand publishes with industry websites, magazines and other publications can help achieve brand goals as well as improve the effectiveness of overall PR. Whether the value is from increased PR effectiveness or reduced PR agency costs is up to how you implement.

3. Recruiting — Competition for talent is greater than ever, therefore it’s important for companies to create useful content for prospective employees who are self directing their journey to new opportunities by doing research.

Content creators and success are pretty much synonymous, so connecting your talent acquisition efforts with content creation partners to share career advice as content is an “everybody wins” situation. Creators get to share unique insights of high value for great exposure, candidates get useful advice and career inspiration and it all happens in the context of your brand’s content. Nothing beats having brand advocates working with you. To them, it’s more than a job - it’s love.

With creators acting as advocates of your company in hiring, will you reduce recruiting costs because of collaborated advice content? It’s worth a try.

4. Customer Service — Smart marketers collect the questions customers often ask your support teams to gain insight into what’s important, trends and even product enhancements. Put it all in a knowledge base or FAQ can create some very search friendly content and take some of the load off email or phone support team. Find some of the customer questions that would make sense for influencer subject matter experts to answer. Their contributions to content used in customer service can add credibility and a fresh (outside) perspective. This can be particularly useful when repurposed for marketing content.

5. Corporate Social Responsibility — With increasing serious take on social responsibility and implementing programs. Ask your influencer/creator community to participate in your CSR efforts where there are common interests either as an ambassador or in content co-creation. As with marketing, PR, recruiting and customer service, including influencers in these content efforts can add credibility and reach — hopefully increasing the effectiveness of your contributions and efforts.

As you can see, there are many ways to work with content creators. Keep in mind, your content creator program doesn’t have to be all about marketing and sales — but inevitably, it can grow in to that when there is content co-creation involved.

Increasing effectiveness and in some cases, lowering costs, are all part of the realm of possibilities when working with creators. The key is to maintain those relationships in ways that justify your brand’s effort and creates value for participating creators equally and satisfactorily.

If you have engaged content creators outside of marketing campaigns or in ongoing ways not mentioned above, please share in the comments.