Reach. Engagement. Conversions. These are the key goals most often tied to B2B influencer marketing, and it’s been that way for a long time. This is no different from the early days of social media marketing, where platform capabilities and user behaviors created the perfect storm for connection and interaction.
Fast-forward to 2025, and we’ve learned that social media is not a siloed form of communication, but rather a shared gathering place where people spend their time discovering, consuming, and interacting with content.
Influencers are powerful conduits and catalysts within these networks. From a marketing context, influencer marketing is the ability to inspire action, and since virtually every person with a phone is empowered to publish, everyone has some degree of influence.
So, where does this broader view lead us when developing an influencer marketing strategy optimized to attract, engage, and convert? To help answer that question—and extend optimization to retention and advocacy—here are five stages of the customer journey and how influencer marketing can play a vital role in driving better results.
The Goals Haven’t Changed. Has Your Strategy?
Attract
Contribution drives promotion. The key value here is that working with influencers on content can inspire them to promote it. Reaching the influencer’s audience with relevant, engaging, and credible content is highly valuable for brands looking to attract hard-to-reach customers.
Follow-the-leader-advocacy. Influencers who act like advocates often inspire other influencers and customers to advocate for the brand as well.
Retargeting influencer interest. When an influencer’s followers match a specific customer profile, marketers can retarget those followers with more tailored content, offering more context than a typical web visitor.
Source: LinkedIn
Did you catch Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2025 campaign? The brand enlisted 10 influencers, primarily on LinkedIn, to share photos featuring themselves holding comically oversized newspapers with the campaign’s headline on the front page. While the 10 paid influencers made an impact, the campaign quickly gained traction with additional organic influencers, causing it to go viral. Within just 24 hours, the campaign garnered 50 media mentions and over 5,000 engagements. Want to dive deeper into the details? Check out the full story in Adweek.
Engage
What drives interaction in the social media world? It’s simple: Creator talent. In the B2C space, charismatic creators are everywhere, each bringing something unique to the table to captivate and engage their audience. Their creativity, planning, and ability to promote breathe new life into what could otherwise be a tired marketing mix.
Authenticity is key to building engagement. When influencers align with the very customers a brand is trying to reach, they bring a real, relatable voice to the content. This connection often leads to more interactions and content sharing, creating a genuine conversation around the brand.
Relevance plays a huge role in successful marketing, too. When an influencer’s audience and the brand’s promotional goals align, engagement naturally follows.
Coca-Cola’s ongoing #ShareaCoke campaign is a fantastic example of how to leverage a diverse mix of influencers—macro, mega, micro, and nano—to boost brand awareness and engagement. By encouraging both paid and unpaid influencers to participate, the campaign creatively drives sharing (just like the hashtag suggests!) and has successfully captured the attention of new audiences. It’s a great way for the brand to reconnect with its roots while also adapting to modern marketing strategies.
Convert
Trust drives conversion. Few things influence purchasing decisions more than trust, and what makes an influencer powerful is their community’s trust in them. Trusted influencers, especially those who collaborate on content focused on the middle or bottom of the funnel, can be key in driving conversions.
Familiarity breeds confidence. Relevance is crucial, and influencers known for recommending products or services have earned familiarity with their audience. When they partner with a new brand and share a relevant product or service (with proper ad disclaimers), it can spark action.
Credibility equals believability. The more credible a brand’s content, the more likely it is to persuade and motivate action. Influencers play a pivotal role in bringing that credibility to the table.
Spearheaded by our team at TopRank Marketing, this B2B influencer program headlined Sprinklr Socialverse, a documentary-style masterclass hosted by trusted powerhouse social media thought leaders Jay Baer, Ann Handley, Mari Smith, and Paul Roetzer serves as an excellent example of convert. The credibility of this campaign with industry experts resulted in over 5000 event registrations, 100K engagements, and 23 million in reach.
Retain
Bring utility to the community. Expanding the scope of who is influential to customers and the community, brands can engage with influencers to participate in their community on everything from general best practices or tips to how to get the most out of the brand’s product/service.
Employees are influential too. Showcasing staff in brand content can help humanize the brand with customers.
Infotain customers to stay. Engaging creators to develop useful content that is also entertaining for customers can significantly contribute to retaining those customers. These can be routine communications to announcements or updates.
Dropbox’s “Working Smarter” podcast leverages employees as thought leaders, providing practical AI insights to engage and retain customers. By blending utility with infotainment, the series makes complex topics digestible while reinforcing Dropbox’s role in modern work. This approach turns employees into influencers, delivering value-driven content that builds trust and strengthens long-term customer relationships.
Advocate
Activate advocates. Bringing it back to reach through brand advocacy, brands can expand their view of influence to customers and activate those who show brand love to support sharing the good news.
Influential customer stories are powerful. Customer testimonials alone are great. Testimonials with customers that are influential, either personally or the brand, can go a long way towards supporting advocacy efforts.
Incentivize the good news. Incentives for referrals among influencers can inspire advocacy, but it’s essential to include an ad disclosure if compensation has been or may be paid for that promotional effort.
If no one is talking about you online, can you truly be considered relevant? HubSpot certainly doesn’t face that problem. The CRM platform sees hundreds, if not thousands, of posts each week, with everyone from small influencers to major voices sharing their positive experiences, news, educational resources, and more.
At the heart of this advocacy is the HubSpot Community Champions program, designed to foster learning, growth, and connection across the ecosystem, while amplifying the impact of its members. By uniting these powerful programs, their mission is to recognize and reward its members, empower the community, and elevate their Community Champions as thought leaders, helping drive the HubSpot ecosystem to greater heights.
Unlocking influencer potential at every funnel stage
Instead of thinking about influencers on the day you publish that amazing content you’ve worked so hard on, consider a more strategic approach that puts influencers in a partnership position to collaborate from the start. When you map out the stages of your customer journey and the content needed to help buyers make that journey, think about how working with influencers, experts and advocates can add that special sauce to your marketing mix.
Think about how the addition of credible experts with active audience engagement can add valuable perspective, inspiration, promotion and trust for conversion to your marketing content – across the entire customer lifecycle: attract, engage, convert, retain, advocate.
Ready to Attract, Engage, Convert, Retain, & Advocate?
