Importance of Influencer Marketing Grows in the B2B Space: WPP-Kantar Report

Mumbai: While influencer marketing has traditionally been dominated by B2C (business-to-consumer) campaigns, 2024 has seen a notable surge in B2B influencer collaborations. In 2020, only 31% of B2B marketers leveraged influencer marketing — a figure that has since jumped to 82%, highlighting a growing recognition of its value in the B2B marketing mix.

The India Influencer Marketing Report 2025 by WPP Media’s The Goat Agency, in collaboration with Kantar, reinforces this trend. An overwhelming 94% of B2B marketers now consider influencer marketing a successful strategy.

Data-Driven Campaigns Are Key

Brand.AI (formerly known as INCATech) was the first tech platform to introduce data-driven influencer planning back in 2019. It enables marketers to optimize their creator mix using multiple data points, including platform performance, audience demographics such as gender and location, and more.

A standout feature of Brand.AI is its Genuity Score, which evaluates what percentage of a creator’s audience is genuine versus suspicious. The platform also assigns brand safety scores by analyzing past content for potential risks and identifies trending creators, helping marketers select the right influencers for each brief.

Beyond influencer discovery, Brand.AI provides insights into content trends around specific topics, competitor activity on social media, platform and format effectiveness, and overall content performance in the category. These features help transform what were once subjective content decisions into data-backed strategies.

To complete the workflow, Influencer.AI takes over once the ideal creator mix and content strategy are defined. It automates creator outreach, creative iterations, final asset delivery, deployment scheduling, contracting, and payments — all through a unified dashboard.

While several tools in the market support creator discovery, there is a growing demand for automation across the entire influencer marketing lifecycle — from brief to billing.

Influencer Marketing Across the Funnel

Brands are also evolving their approach to influencer marketing across the customer journey funnel. Traditionally used mainly for top-of-funnel brand awareness, influencers are now playing a vital role at the middle and bottom stages as well.

With advanced analytics, influencers are increasingly driving lead generation, sales conversions, and customer retention through mechanisms like discount codes, affiliate links, product reviews, and direct engagement.