Stop Looking for Influencers. Start Looking for People Buyers Already Trust.

“Can you send me a list of B2B influencers?”

This is probably the question I’m most often asked by prospective clients since I starting specialising in B2B influencer marketing.

And it makes sense. If you’re a brand looking to start an influencer programme, it’s logical to want to know who you could potentially work with. So, you open up an influencer discovery platform, search for your industry, filter by follower count, engagement rate and location, and before long you have a spreadsheet full of names. Congratulations, job done.

Except it’s not.

As an influencer marketing consultant, I've spent the last few years following that exact process – finding B2B creators, assessing their audiences, negotiating deals, briefing them, managing campaigns and, occasionally, having the slightly awkward conversation with a client about why the person they were most excited about (you know the one, with the maximised profile and flashy rate card) hasn’t actually driven the strongest performance. Shocker.

And the more times this happens, the more I’m convinced at we’re starting in the wrong place.

The first question we should be asking isn’t “Which influencers should we work with?” But rather, “Who do our buyers already trust?” That may sound like a small difference, but it’s actually huge.

Influence doesn't start with follower count

One of the first things I look at when I'm assessing a potential creator is their audience, and I don't mean the size of it. What I want to know is who is actually following them. Who is commenting on their posts? Are they the people we're trying to reach? What questions are they asking? And is the influencer engaging in back-and-forth dialogue to move the conversation forward in a meaningful way?

A subject matter expert with 15,000 highly relevant and highly engaged connections can be just as (and often much more) valuable to a B2B brand than someone with 150,000 followers, reaching only a fraction of those people nearly all of whom have very little interest in what they have to say.

What I’ve learned over the years running dozens of B2B influencer campaigns and ambassador programmes is that sometimes the person with the smallest audience can drive the most interest and that’s why they’ll be the one I fight hardest to keep on a shortlist. Not because their content is necessarily more polished or because they have a perfectly designed media kit, but because their audience trusts them, and trust is much harder to manufacture.

Your buyers are already being influenced

This may seem like an obvious point, but actually I think its one that B2B marketers often downplay the importance of. Think about it. Your buyers don't suddenly become influenced because you launch an influencer campaign. They're already listening to people. They're reading LinkedIn posts, subscribing to niche newsletters, listening to podcasts while making dinner or walking the dog.  They're searching Reddit when they want an honest answer and watching YouTube tutorials to get ahead of the curve. They're asking their peers for recommendations and, increasingly, they're asking AI.

Google’s AI-generated answer features (AI Overviews) now appear in roughly 43% to 48% of all general search queries, representing a massive increase from about 15% the previous year. And what do you think are the top sources feeding Google’s AI Overview? Among the top three are video platforms (23%) and public discourse (18%), which is to say, influencer marketing.

And all of these conversations about your brand are happening before many buyers ever fill in a form on your website.

So instead of asking, “Who should we pay to talk about us?”, I'd start by asking, “Where are our buyers already spending their time?”, “Who are they listening to there?”, “Whose advice do they actually act on?” and “Who would they recommend to a colleague?”

That's where the best influencer research starts.

I've become less interested in “influencers”

As a B2B marketer, I never loved the term influencer. But the longer I work in the space, the more I’m convinced it’s not right. Not only because of the association with handbags and the Kardashians, which doesn’t exactly help to legitimise the practice in the minds of the C-suite, but because I think the term influencer makes it sound as though we're looking for a particular type of person. Someone with a big following, who posts daily, or even multiple times a day, who’s made it their full-time job.

Now I’m not suggesting that those who do those things cannot also be great partners, but crucially, and increasingly more often, this is not the case.

Recently, I was working with an IT company specialising in asset management, and I reached out to an ITAM expert I thought would be a great fit for the campaign. When I explained why I'd approached him, he told me he didn't really see himself as an influencer.

Those are my favourite moments. Because he was influential. He just hadn't thought of himself that way. He'd spent years building expertise, sharing what he'd learned, answering questions and becoming someone other people in the ITAM world listened to. He'd done all the hard yards without ever stopping to think that the knowledge and credibility he'd built had value to brands too.

Part of what I love about my job is being able to help people like that recognise the value they've created for themselves over years of doing the work. Not by turning them into a "creator", but by helping them see that the influence they've already earned can open up new opportunities.

And, as a nice bonus, I managed to negotiate a pretty good deal for my client too.

But in all seriousness, like this gentleman, some of the most valuable partners are practitioners, consultants, founders, analysts, engineers, cybersecurity experts, IT leaders. In other words, people who have earned their audience because they know what they're talking about – not because they've decided they want to become an influencer. And that distinction matters, especially in B2B.

Because real influence is earned long before a brand comes along with a brief.

The problem with the big list

I've lost count of the number of “top B2B influencer” lists I've seen. Platforms like Favikon regularly publish rankings such as Top 200 Creators Worldwide and Sprout Social provides influencer lists by category organised alphabetically – everything from Aviation to Wedding influencers (no Z’s unfortunately, I checked). And, like a TJ Maxx sale, they can be useful, if you don’t mind filtering through a somewhat chaotic, disorganized mix of high-end premium and random bargain-basement profiles.

All that to say, they can give you somewhere to start, but they shouldn't be your strategy.

If your entire influencer programme is built around finding the biggest names in your category and getting them to publish a post, you've essentially turned influencer marketing into another media-buying exercise. Here's the audience, the message, the number of posts, the budget. Go!

The trouble is, that's not really how trust works. You can't just rent somebody's credibility for a week, and you certainly can't assume that because someone has influence in your general category, they have influence with your specific buyers.

And then there's the brief...

This is where things can get even more confused. Let’s say a brand finds someone whose audience it wants to reach. The creator agrees to work with them. So far, so good. Then the brand sends a 24-page brief (And that’s not even the longest I’ve seen – 47 pages is my record!) Then, there are the multiple key messages and mandatory phrases. Words they can't use, things they can't say. And multiple rounds of amends. Eventually, what the creator ends up publishing is something that technically ticks every box but sounds absolutely nothing like them. I've seen enough campaigns to know that this is where a lot of the magic (and credibility) gets lost.

Now, I'm not suggesting brands should throw all their guardrails out of the window. Of course, there need to be boundaries, especially when you're working in areas like cybersecurity, fintech or other highly regulated industries. But if you've chosen someone because their audience trusts their opinion, you have to give them enough freedom to actually use that opinion. Otherwise, why did you choose them in the first place? Influencer marketing is Earned and Shared, not Paid (although they can be used together to great effect – more on that in a future article).

The best creator partnerships I've worked on aren't the ones where the brand gets every word exactly as it wanted, but where the brand's message and the creator's voice meet somewhere in the middle. The creator sounds like themselves, the brand is comfortable and the audience doesn't feel like they're reading or listening to another advert (and immediately switch off helping exactly no one). 

The campaign shouldn't be the end of the relationship

Another thing I'd like to see more B2B brands do is stop treating every creator relationship as a one-off transaction. Time and time again I see programmes where the creators publish their posts, the campaign report gets pulled together, everyone looks at the impressions, engagement, perhaps some UTM links and then that's it. On to the next campaign.

But what happens if you find someone your buyers genuinely trust? Why would you only want to work with them once? Maybe the relationship started with a sponsored LinkedIn post, but why could that turn into a webinar, a podcast appearance, a piece of research, a customer event, a roundtable, a conversation with your sales team, or an introduction to another expert.

Or simply an ongoing relationship where the creator knows your brand and what you stand for and you continue to work together over the course of a year in multiple ways that only builds on that trust. To me, that is much more valuable than collecting influencer posts.

Not to mention strategically savvy if it means you are keeping them from working with one of your competitors for a bit longer.

This doesn't mean clicks don't matter

I should probably say this before someone thinks I've completely lost the plot. Of course I care about results as do my clients. Like any good marketer, we set SMART targets at the beginning of a campaign and monitor KPIs like engagement, clicks, and audience fit throughout. When possible, we speak to the sales team to understand the volume and quality of the leads coming through to understand if we’re hitting the right buyers. Because if a brand is investing serious money in influencer marketing, we absolutely need to understand whether that investment is working.

But I've also become increasingly wary of judging every creator partnership by the same metrics we would use to judge a paid social campaign. Sometimes the value is much harder to see. A creator might introduce your brand to someone who doesn't need your product today, but that same person might recall the brand six months later. Remember the 95:5 Rule, which shows that only about 5% of potential buyers are actively looking to purchase at any given time. The other 95% are out-of-market, meaning if you’re strategy is focused entirely on immediate conversion, you’ll miss the vast majority of future revenue.

So, they may not register for that webinar, but perhaps they mention you to a colleague, or start following your company page, or engage with your CEO. They might click something three months later. None of that makes for a particularly linear attribution report, but that doesn't mean influence didn’t happen.

So where should B2B brands start?

I’d start with a list of influencers.

Just kidding. That was a test to see if you’ve been paying attention.

Of course, I would start with your buyers. Talk to sales, listen to customers. Look at the communities they are part of, the people they follow, the content they share. Look at the questions they ask in Reddit. Then map the people influencing those conversations.

You might find a well-known LinkedIn creator, or someone with 10,000 followers who has spent years gradually building an incredibly engaged audience of the exact people you want to reach. You might find a niche newsletter with a few thousand subscribers or a Reddit contributor whose name you're still not quite sure of, but who has amassed over 100,000 karma points by providing genuinely helpful advice.

You might even find that your best potential “influencer” is an internal employee who’s influential within your industry or a customer who is already telling other people how good your product is.

And that's the bit I find especially exciting and why I love the work I do, because once you stop looking for influencers and start looking for people your buyers already trust, the world gets much bigger and your influencer list much smaller and far more useful.

And isn't that what you were really looking for in the first place?