In a feed full of AI-generated sameness, the most valuable thing a B2B brand can borrow is trust. And the fastest way to borrow it is from a person your audience already knows.

That was the focus of the latest Power to the People LinkedIn Live, where Katie Street was joined by Margo Laz, founder of B2B influencer agency Kudos Narratives, and Heather Barnett, B2B copywriter and LinkedIn comedy creator.

The conversation covered why creators work in B2B, what brands are really using them for, how to find the right ones, and how to get a creative idea past a nervous approvals process. Here's what stuck with us.

Trust is the bottleneck

B2B buying is slow, risky and done by committee. According to LinkedIn and Bain & Company's Buyability research, 40% of deals stall because the buying group can't agree, not because a competitor won. What buyers really want is a decision they can defend.

So what tips the balance? Other people. Buyers are three times more likely to choose a vendor heavily recommended by peers or customers over one promising a better product or a lower price. And the vendor everyone in the buying group already knows has a huge head start: vendors are 20 times more likely to be chosen when the whole group knows and trusts the brand at the start of the process, not just the technical champion.

Creators shortcut the slowest part of marketing. As Katie put it,

“You skip the years of earning trust yourself, because they've already earned it with the people you want to reach.” 

It works before sales is even in the room

The 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report shows how much of the decision is made early, by hidden decision-makers who never fill in a form:

• 71% say thought leadership is more effective than conventional sales or marketing materials at demonstrating a vendor's potential value
• 64% trust thought leadership more than marketing materials and product sheets when assessing a company's capabilities
• 95% say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach
• 79% are more likely to advocate for proposals from companies that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership

And the vendor buyers favour before they talk to sellers wins 80% of deals. Influence isn't a nice-to-have bolted onto the funnel. It's what decides who gets onto the shortlist.

The market is moving (just not evenly)

Katie shared a Forrester stat during the session: 75% of enterprise B2B companies expect to increase their influencer-related budgets this year.

Yet HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing research found that only 18.6% of surveyed B2B brands currently use influencer marketing. Meanwhile, 62.7% of marketers believe more unique, human-centred content is needed to compete with AI-generated content.

That gap is the opportunity. Most B2B brands know they need to sound more human. Very few are working with the people who already do.

What brands are actually solving for

Margot and Heather agreed that brands come to creators for a handful of reasons:

• Differentiation. In crowded categories, a creator's distinctive voice gets a brand noticed, and Heather's funny videos lodge a brand in someone's head alongside a positive emotion. Margot pointed to hyper-growth AI companies with near-identical features, for whom creators are often the only way to stand out.
• Rethinking the brand. Legacy tech brands are using creators to talk their audience through how they're evolving in an AI world.
• Measurable results. Brand awareness is the honest, easily tracked starting point, but plenty of brands want mid- and bottom-funnel results too. Margot shared that one of Kudos Narratives' clients drove 1 million organic impressions last year, while a start-up client saw a single creator post bring in 50 registrations, exactly the result they wanted.
• Feedback and testing. B2B creators are often practitioners who use the products daily. They can give honest product feedback and help brands test which positioning actually lands.

Follower counts are the wrong number to look at

If there was one point all three agreed on, it's this: size isn't everything.

Heather has around 6,000 followers, yet her videos hold their own against accounts many times larger, because the people following her are exactly the senior in-house marketers her clients want to reach. Margot has seen creators with 175k followers getting 32 likes on a post. Katie's audience is smaller than a celebrity's but packed with CMOs, heads of digital and CTOs at big brands, and her outreach for events routinely outperforms everything else.

B2B ICPs are small. You're rarely trying to reach 100,000 people, so the question isn't "how many followers?" but:

• Who actually follows this person?
• How many of those people are in our target audience?
• Are they engaging in a meaningful way?

Margot also loves working with people who don't think of themselves as creators at all: practitioners in the trenches who happen to share what they know on LinkedIn.

How to find the right creators

For anyone starting from scratch, Margot's tips:

• Use LinkedIn search to filter by role, geography and company (though you can't filter by follower count, so it takes time)
• Try a creator platform such as Favikon, where you can search by hashtag and filter across platforms
• Look to events and podcasts. Check speaker line-ups and see who's posting takeaways using the event hashtag
• Read the comments. Top creators tend to follow, support and challenge one another
• Ask the creators you already like who they follow

LinkedIn is still the number one platform for most B2B brands (and, as Katie pointed out, one of the sources LLMs cite most). YouTube came up as a strong second thanks to its long-tail reach, with Instagram and TikTok often more predictable for video-led brands. As Heather said, the answer is wherever your audience actually is, even if that means a tractor influencer on Instagram.

Getting past the approvals process

One question from the audience: how do you get around corporate bureaucracy? Three useful answers came back.

• Do the prep. Choose a creator whose tone already fits your brand and there'll be far less tension at sign-off. Margot's team also caps content at two rounds of changes and acts as a gatekeeper for both sides. Some things are non-negotiable (the link, the brand mention), but the creator needs room to be themselves.
• Speak their language. If your CEO came up through finance or sales, bring evidence. Heather pointed to Adam Morgan and System One's "cost of dull" research, which suggests a bland ad can cost around ten times more to achieve the same effect as a bold, creative one.
• Start small. Ask for a trial. Katie's advice was to say, "Let me just try it, and if it dive-bombs we won't do it again." 

And if you're working with a creator because of their humour or personality, squeezing it out in the edit defeats the purpose. Heather's point: you're hiring their tone and style as much as their reach.

Proof it works

LinkedIn's own case studies show what this looks like at scale:

• BT combined micro-influencers with promoted posts from experts and leaders (LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads) and saw 8x higher click-through, 44% more lead forms and an 8% lift in brand perception
• Smokeball promoted video testimonials posted by its own customers, and return on ad spend rose by 186%
• Mastercard APAC had six executives post thought leadership as an always-on programme, and followers grew 130% year on year

Different tactics, same principle: people trust people.

The takeaway

In a world of AI slop, the only thing that cuts through is real people. B2B creators give brands borrowed trust, a distinctive voice and access to exactly the audience they want, at a time when only a fraction of B2B brands are using them.

Start small, choose relevance over reach, give creators the freedom to do what they do well, and measure what matters.

Want to talk about building a people-powered strategy for your brand? Get in touch.

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