B2B Influencers Are About to Have a Very Big Year

When we say influencer marketing, B2B probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

You're more likely to picture a beauty creator testing a new moisturiser than a procurement lead talking about software. But B2B influencer marketing has been quietly growing in the background - and we think 2027 is the year a lot more brands start taking it seriously.

Because B2B buying has changed.

Decision-makers aren't only looking at company websites, sales decks and whitepapers anymore. They're following founders on LinkedIn, listening to industry podcasts, reading newsletters from people they trust and paying attention to experts who actually understand their jobs.

In other words, B2B has influencers too. We just haven't always called them that.

And now LinkedIn is making it much easier for brands to work with them.

B2B influencer marketing is growing up

For a long time, influencer marketing sat pretty firmly in the B2C camp.

It made obvious sense for fashion, beauty, food and travel brands because you could put a product into the hands of someone with an audience and watch what happened.

B2B was different. Longer buying cycles, multiple decision-makers and products that aren't always particularly easy to demonstrate in a 30-second video meant influencer marketing could feel like an awkward fit.

That's changing quickly.

B2B brands allocated around $4.1 billion to influencer programmes in 2026, up 47% year on year, while the market is projected to reach $7.8 billion by 2027.

And it makes sense when you think about how people actually make decisions at work.

You might be buying something on behalf of a business, but you're still a person. You still trust recommendations. You still want to know what people in your industry think. And you'd probably rather hear someone who genuinely understands your problem explain a product than watch another corporate brand video telling you it's “revolutionary”.

B2B buying is still human buying.

The B2B influencer probably doesn't look like an influencer

This is where brands need to broaden their definition of a creator.

Your most valuable B2B influencer might not have hundreds of thousands of followers. They might have 8,000 incredibly relevant ones.

They could be a founder. A consultant. An analyst. A subject-matter expert. A well-known marketer. Someone running an industry newsletter. A podcast host. Or simply the person whose LinkedIn posts seem to appear in every conversation happening within your sector.

Their value isn't necessarily their reach.

It's their authority.

If 5,000 of the right people trust someone's opinion, that can be significantly more useful to a B2B brand than reaching 500,000 people who have absolutely no reason to buy what you're selling.

And when the product you're selling requires a six-figure budget, internal approval and three months of convincing finance, credibility matters quite a lot.

LinkedIn is becoming the home of B2B influence

None of this works without somewhere for those voices to build an audience, and LinkedIn has increasingly become that place.

The platform has moved a long way from promotion announcements, corporate updates and people beginning posts with “I'm humbled to announce”.

Founders are building personal brands. Employees are becoming creators. Industry experts are developing huge audiences around incredibly specific subjects. People are sharing opinions, advice, case studies, videos and behind-the-scenes content that previously would probably have lived on a company blog.

And buyers are paying attention.

Nearly six in ten B2B buyers now consume creator content on LinkedIn, while creator-led formats are showing that expert voices can do more than generate engagement - they can influence actual buying decisions.

That makes LinkedIn increasingly interesting for brands that have historically separated their influencer, content, paid and demand-generation strategies.

Because those lines are starting to blur.

LinkedIn Collaborative Posts could accelerate everything

And then LinkedIn went and made the opportunity even more obvious.

In 2026, the platform announced Collaborative Posts, allowing brands and individuals to co-author content on LinkedIn.

If you've used Instagram Collabs, the principle will feel familiar.

Instead of a creator publishing something and tagging the brand, or the brand awkwardly reposting it afterwards, collaborators can appear together on a single piece of content. Collaborative Posts can include up to five collaborators, including individual profiles and Company Pages, with the post distributed across their audiences and engagement brought together in one place.

It sounds like a relatively small platform update.

For B2B influencer marketing, it could be a very big one.

Brand and creator content no longer needs to live separately

Imagine a cybersecurity company publishing a piece of research alongside three respected cybersecurity experts.

A fintech brand and CFO co-authoring a breakdown of a major industry change.

A software company publishing a case study alongside the customer who actually implemented the product.

Or a business hosting an industry event and bringing the speakers, brand and partner together on the same LinkedIn post afterwards.

Previously, those might have become five separate posts, five separate conversations and a lot of tagging each other in the comments.

Now they can become one piece of content with multiple credible voices attached to it.

For B2B marketers, that's particularly powerful because the creator's credibility and the brand's expertise don't have to compete for attention. They can exist together.

It could also make employee influencers much more interesting

B2B brands shouldn't only be looking outside their organisations either.

Some of the most credible voices a company has are already sitting inside it.

Your CEO might have an audience. Your Head of Product might be brilliant at explaining complicated subjects. Your strategists might be known within their industries. Your sales team probably hears the same questions from customers every week.

Historically, employee advocacy has often meant sending everyone a pre-written LinkedIn caption and hoping they post it.

We can do better than that.

Collaborative Posts create much more scope for businesses to genuinely co-create with the people inside them - pairing the reach of the Company Page with the personality, expertise and networks of employees.

And importantly, the content doesn't need to sound like it was written by the corporate comms department.

In fact, it probably shouldn't.

Thought leaders could become paid media too

The other important piece of the LinkedIn puzzle is amplification.

Creator partnerships don't have to stop at organic reach. LinkedIn's Thought Leader Ads allow brands to put paid media behind posts from individuals, meaning a strong piece of creator or expert content can become a performance asset too.

That's where B2B influencer marketing starts getting particularly interesting.

A brand can partner with a credible industry voice to create something useful, publish it through the person audiences already trust, collaborate on the organic distribution and then amplify that content to precisely the decision-makers it wants to reach.

Influencer, organic social and paid media start working as one system rather than three separate channels.

For B2B brands trying to reach relatively small groups of very specific people, that makes a lot of sense.

But please don't turn LinkedIn into one enormous #ad

There is, naturally, a way for brands to ruin this.

If every industry expert suddenly starts posting identical scripts about how a piece of software has “transformed their workflow”, audiences will work out what's happening fairly quickly.

B2B influence works precisely because these people have credibility.

That means brands need to give creators and experts room to actually have an opinion.

A useful partnership might involve an expert challenging the brand's thinking, explaining where a product is and isn't useful, contributing to original research or talking about a genuine industry problem rather than spending three paragraphs listing product features.

The more complex the purchase, the more valuable that honesty becomes.

Borrowing someone's audience is easy. Borrowing their credibility requires trust.

B2B brands should start thinking beyond campaigns

This is probably the biggest opportunity for 2027.

Instead of finding three LinkedIn creators every time there's a product launch, brands can start building networks of credible voices around the subjects they want to own.

That might include external creators, customers, founders, employees, academics, consultants and industry experts.

Some relationships might involve paid partnerships. Others might involve events, research, podcasts, Collaborative Posts, newsletters, webinars or ongoing content series.

The aim isn't simply to generate a burst of reach.

It's to make your brand consistently visible inside the conversations your buyers already trust.

That's much closer to an always-on influencer strategy than a traditional campaign.

So, is 2027 the year of the B2B influencer?

We think it could be.

The market is growing quickly, B2B buyers are increasingly looking to people rather than companies for expertise, and LinkedIn is building tools that make collaboration between brands and credible voices much easier.

But perhaps the biggest change is simply how we define influence.

B2B influencers don't need millions of followers. They need the right people to listen when they speak.

And with Collaborative Posts making co-creation more native and Thought Leader Ads giving brands the ability to amplify those voices, B2B influencer marketing is becoming much more than an awareness play.

In 2027, the brands that win on LinkedIn might not be the ones talking about themselves the loudest. They'll be the ones working with the people their customers already listen to.