Your future B2B customer just liked a meme on Instagram, bookmarked a how-to thread on LinkedIn, and got business advice from a content creator on TikTok. That’s not B2C user behavior. It’s just user behavior.
B2B marketers can get so caught up in personas, job titles, and org charts that they forget they’re still trying to talk to people with fears, goals, distractions, and dinner plans. They follow business influencers not just for industry insights, but for personal stories and practical guidance. The difference is, when purchasing products for work, they may have longer timelines, more stakeholders, and higher stakes—as opposed to the one-person committee when impulse buying the newest TikTok shop product.
But that doesn’t mean that B2B marketing has to be any less creative. If anything, it should be more thoughtful, more connected, and more human.
Building that human connection is exactly how Hiscox, a leading provider of small business insurance, broke through the typical B2B noise. Rather than relying on staid corporate messaging, they leaned into an approach that reflects where today’s B2B attention lives: with creators that not only have reach, but offer opinions, experience, and build community.
This campaign paid off in both performance and recognition. It was named a finalist for The Drum Awards in the Influencer Marketing category, signaling a broader, widely recognized industry shift. B2B brands that show up with authenticity and empathy are the ones turning heads and driving results.
Key Takeaways
- Authenticity scales: Influencer content is a brand-safe high-performer
- Micro can top macro: Depending on the audience, smaller, niche creators can be more impactful than high-follower influencers
- The same creative won’t always drive the same results: When scaling creative across platforms, don’t expect it to perform equally—context is king
- Data unlocks creativity: Pairing qualitative storytelling with quantitative targeting maximizes outcomes.
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How B2B influencers are changing the way brands build trust
B2B influencers aren’t a new phenomenon. They’re a growing part of how businesses build trust in digital spaces. Over the last year, especially on Linkedin, we’ve seen creators evolve from thought leaders to full-blow brand partners. They’re not just posting for engagement. They’re influencing buying decisions.
This new generation of B2B influencers vary from SMEs, small business owners, consultants, and service providers—people with POVs that are backed by lived experience. And they’re across LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms to share that expertise in ways that are relatable, useful, and personal.
More B2B brands are treating influencers as a long-term strategy, with 53% of marketers now budgeting for them. They’re past testing engagement and integrating these creators into planning, marketing strategy, and brand storytelling. This shift is indicative of both how buyers are consuming information, and the types of content they’re more willing to trust.
Inside Hiscox’s influencer strategy: building authentic creator partnerships
Hiscox came to Amsive with two goals: build brand trust through authentic creator content and expand into new social platforms, specifically TikTok. But there were a few hurdles:
- Content volume: TikTok’s fast-moving algorithm rewards consistency—sometimes requiring 2–3 videos per day. Hiscox didn’t have the internal resources to sustain that pace.
- Authenticity matters: TikTok audiences want real, not polished. That meant traditional ad-style creative wouldn’t cut it.
- Scalability + efficiency: Hiscox needed a way to produce high-quality, high-volume content without burning out internal teams or blowing out budgets.
Why niche influencers drove a larger impact for Hiscox
Using Amsive’s Audience Science® methodology, the team identified a set of niche influencers that focused on running small businesses. These creators were chosen because their tone, content, and communities aligned tightly with Hiscox’s brand.
The value of niche influencers goes well beyond follower count. In many cases, they hold more trust, drive more engagement, and convert better because their followers see them as real people with lived experience, not as paid promoters.
What set this campaign apart was how deeply the creators were able to embed Hiscox into conversations that mattered to their audience without breaking the trust they’d built. This wasn’t about slapping a logo on a video. It was about genuinely integrating the brand into useful content: startup advice, growth strategies, risk-taking, and decision-making.
That’s where influencer marketing shines in B2B, when the product becomes part of a story, not the whole story.
Turning relatable creator content into scalable paid campaigns
Once the content was live, the team kept a close eye to identify what resonated, what messaging hit the mark, and which pieces of content were driving business outcomes. From there, they amplified high-performing creator posts across channels, turning authentic content into scalable paid opportunities.
This kind of amplification is key to making influencer content work long-term. It maintains the tone and trust of organic social while extending reach and driving results. Additionally, each platform was treated with intention. The same creative wasn’t just resized and reposted. It was adapted to suit the individual platforms, because context is king. How someone consumes content on TikTok while winding down at night is totally different from how they engage with a LinkedIn post during their morning catch-up.
Understanding those shifts in behaviors, and designing around them, is what can turn views into value.
How conversational content fueled higher CTRs
The campaign that Hiscox ran didn’t just outperform traditional branded content—it reframed how the brand could connect with this audience.
More importantly, it unlocked a new way for Hiscox to show up: not just as a provider, but as a brand with personality, relevance, and point of view.
This is an aspect that B2B marketers can overlook. We’re so locked into discussing how to improve one-to-one messaging that we don’t create space for communal conversation. B2B marketing should open up space for questions, discussions, saves, shares, and likes—micro-moments that can build brand familiarity with stakeholders well before they’re in the final hurdles of the buying decision.
Influencers create space for those moments throughout the B2B funnel, priming leads before they reach the conversion stage.
Best practices for building your social and creator ecosystem
One of the biggest takeaways from this campaign is how content functions best when it’s treated as part of a larger social ecosystem. It’s not just one platform that does the heavy lifting.
When those channels work together, aided by smart targeting, paid amplification, and credible voices, you no longer need to rely on any single piece of content to be everything to everyone. Instead, you feed the funnel from multiple angles, and let each touchpoint play its own role.
This approach also reflects how buyer behavior is shifting. Showing up in someone’s social feed at just the right time can stop your next-best audience in the middle of their nightly doom-scroll. The most powerful first impression of your brand may not come from you, but rather from someone talking about you.
That’s why it’s critical to have consistent, context-aware content across the platforms where decisions are forming before sales can enter the picture.
Key B2B marketing takeaways from Hiscox’s award-nominated influencer campaign
What Hiscox’s strategy makes clear is that successful B2B marketing doesn’t come from one viral moment or one perfect post. It comes from building a content ecosystem where every piece works together. Influencer content wasn’t just created and published. It was designed to fit into a larger strategy where organic engagement, paid amplification, and brand storytelling all reinforced each other.
This works best when the brand shows up with a consistent tone, clear values, and a point of view across every channel. When B2B brands maintain a consistent voice and produce high-quality, authoritative content, it can improve the chances of being surfaced by AI tools and search engines, increasing its chances of being cited, shared, and trusted across the web.
For B2B brands, the opportunity isn’t in chasing one platform or one format. It’s in building a connected social ecosystem where every channel, every voice, and every piece of content works together. Prioritize connection over perfection. Amplify what earns attention. And ensure your brand’s voice is consistent and recognizable whether it’s coming from your team, your creators, or the community that you build.
Interested in growing your B2B social audience? Check out these 10 tips, or let’s talk about how Amsive can help you future-proof your marketing strategy.
