How Peer-to-Peer Marketing Can Turbocharge Your B2B Efforts

In modern B2B marketing, we invest a great deal of time and budget crafting messages and delivering them to our audience segments, but one of the best strategies to generate leads and win new business is when our current customers tell prospective clients our brand story. This is the essence of peer-to-peer marketing (P2P)–also called word-of-mouth marketing–a strategy that is fairly common in B2C campaigns but grossly underutilized in B2B.

My agency gets more than half of its new business via direct referrals from current clients, which tend to be complex organizations in regulated industries. There is no better testimonial than a happy customer, so we have adopted P2P as a critical piece of our new business strategy. Our clients and partners help boost our credibility, causing our name to rise to the top when prospects are in the market for a strategic digital marketing partner. It is no surprise, then, that we make every effort to help our clients share their success stories–in fact, we take it beyond the basic “referrals appreciated” message.

Here are a few pages from our P2P playbook that B2B leaders can adopt:

Big B2B decisions–e.g., selecting a new enterprise software platform–aren’t made by individuals. They’re made by committee. Decision-makers and influencers need the right information to build a case with support points and rationale. In B2B, product selection tends to be complex with an infrequent purchase cycle--after all, you don’t replace that seven-figure enterprise software every year! Committee members need to convince themselves (and each other) that they are making the right decision.

This is where P2P marketing can be effective. Service providers tend to say nice things about their own products. That message becomes much stronger when positive information comes from an existing customer or a third party with nothing to gain from a good review. P2P has the potential to deliver what B2B businesses need most – brand credibility delivered by credible, unbiased sources.

Customer referrals are one of the most impactful forms of P2P marketing. If company A had a great experience buying and using your product, then that gives company B permission to believe they’ll have a similarly positive experience.

But P2P shouldn’t stop with customers alone.

• Partners and third parties. You can engage third-party organizations and sideline partners as advocates for your brand. Because these entities have collaborated with you across multiple engagements and scopes of business, they offer a unique perspective on what your company is like to work with, providing prospects with an inside track they wouldn’t necessarily be aware of.

• Category influencers. By definition, category influencers are people your prospective customers listen to. They are experts and thought leaders whose insights and opinions carry weight in no small measure because they are frequently quoted in relevant media and have built respected names and profiles. So, a good word or two from a category influencer can quickly vault your company from a Who? to a Whoa!

• Your own employees. While your employees may be invested in your organization’s success, they tend to be honest in their feedback and can be prime P2P candidates. You can encourage them to share their positive experiences or amplify your organization's messages on social media or other public platforms.

Success stories are critical to P2P marketing, but not every customer is a natural storyteller. That’s why it's important to arm customers with the language and supporting materials to share their story in a succinct, powerful and memorable way:

• Brand messaging platform. P2P is no different from any other communications effort: find the right messages and use them consistently. Offer your customers brief, easily adaptable talking points so they can tell your brand story in a way that sounds and feels natural to them. In our experience, most customers will happily take the guidance.

• Easily consumable content. We live in a digital world where an image speaks louder than words. Provide your customers with infographics, videos, images with captions--even memes, depending on your industry and audience--to help them tell their story in a way that is compelling and spurs engagement.

• Case studies. There is no better demonstration of work well done than a case study that highlights a successful joint venture. Case studies can serve as both conversation starters and leave-behinds that help a prospect visualize what it might be like to work with you and the potential positive outcomes.

• Incentive to share. Finally, there’s nothing wrong with offering customers incentives to share a kind review. If you give a reward to customers who provide referrals, they will be that much more inclined to engage in your P2P marketing efforts.

Have you had success with P2P marketing or run into unexpected challenges? Do you have effective P2P strategies beyond those discussed here? Please share–we’d love to hear them and see this strategy more effectively leveraged in the B2B ecosystem.

A version of this article originally appeared in Forbes.