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Most of your best LinkedIn posts probably come from a person's profile rather than the company page. That isn't an accident. Buyers pay more attention to a face and a name than to a logo, and B2B teams have leaned on that for years, handing launches to founders and execs. This week LinkedIn launched two tools built around the same idea.
The story
The first is the Creator Marketplace. It's part of LinkedIn's ad platform, and it lets you search for creators by topic, look at who follows them, and reach out to set up a paid partnership. The second is BrandWorks, a LinkedIn team that will plan and make the actual ads for B2B advertisers. Both lean on Thought Leader Ads, the format that lets a brand pay to boost a person's post.
LinkedIn also pointed to its own research. The stat that stood out: 56% of B2B marketers said buyers lean on a creator's input right before they buy. Most teams still use creators early, to get noticed. This says they matter at the end too, when the deal is on the line.
The press called it a land grab, which is fair enough. LinkedIn is years behind here. TikTok, Instagram and the rest built creator marketplaces ages ago. But LinkedIn knows where its users work, so it can match a creator's followers to the kind of buyer you sell to.
Inside the Creator Marketplace
You'll find it in Campaign Manager, where you already buy your LinkedIn ads. You search by topic or area of expertise, and you get back a list of creators with their follower count and recent engagement, plus a breakdown of who follows them by job title and industry. You can spot the ones already mentioning your brand, message them, and set up a deal. After that you can promote their posts as Thought Leader Ads, or run their video through a tool called BrandLink.
Creators get a say too. They choose how brands can reach them, and they approve any post that gets used in an ad.
The audience breakdown is the useful part for B2B. Consumer influencer tools never had job-title and industry data like this. It means you can check whether a creator's followers match the customers you sell to before you put money behind them, which you could never really do from outside LinkedIn.
For now the search tool is invite-only, what LinkedIn calls an alpha, and it's limited to some brands and creators in North America, in English. The organic version and the self-serve BrandLink tool are already open more widely.
BrandWorks, and why LinkedIn is hiring creative talent
BrandWorks is the other half, and it's people rather than software. It's a LinkedIn team that will handle the strategy and the creative for some advertisers, planning the campaign and making content that fits the feed. LinkedIn launched it in March and has grown it by about 60% since, pulling people from TikTok and Meta. SAP and Webflow are among the first clients.
This is the half we're watching. Finding creators is easy to build. Good creative is the hard, expensive part, and LinkedIn clearly wants that work for itself. That puts it up against the agencies that do this today, even if the team is still small next to a company like Meta.
Where this lands for B2B SaaS
Add it up and the idea is simple. Marketers are starting to plan and budget for trust the way they already do for search ads or events. LinkedIn's research makes the case: 82% of B2B marketers say creators make a brand more credible with decision-makers, and 83% say credibility matters more now than traditional brand messaging. Put that next to the 56% who lean on creators near the buy, and you can see why LinkedIn built this.
So what you're really paying for is precision. You can put a credible person in front of the exact buyer you're chasing, using data nobody outside LinkedIn had before. That's what separates B2B creator marketing from the influencer world on consumer apps.
There are fair reasons to be skeptical. Jess Phillips of The Social Standard made the obvious one: there just aren't many B2B creators compared with consumer platforms, and the good ones are busy operators who won't chase brand deals. A tool can help you find people who already post. It can't talk a quiet VP of Product into becoming one. Brendan Gahan of Creator Authority got in early and likes it. He singled out Thought Leader Ads, which, as he told Digiday, "from our experience, have been super effective" for the brands running them.
That lines up with what we see. On the LinkedIn programs we run for B2B SaaS, posts from a named person beat the company account on engagement and cost-per-lead, and have for more than a year. The marketplace mostly saves us time finding the right person.
What we'd set up now
Most teams can't get into the alpha yet. You don't have to wait for it, though. A few things worth doing now:
- Make a shortlist. Write down the 10 to 20 people your buyers already follow in your space, your own execs included, and work out whose audience looks like your customers.
- Start with your own people. The cheapest credible creator you have is a founder or an exec who already posts. Get Thought Leader Ads running on them before you pay for outside names.
- Judge it on pipeline. If 56% of buyers lean on a creator near the buy, then influenced pipeline and cost-per-lead are what to track, the same as any demand generation program.
- Decide on the creative. BrandWorks will pitch some accounts. Work out now whether you'd rather have LinkedIn make your creator content, or an agency that vets creators handle it.
We haven't written about LinkedIn's creator push before, so this is our first take, and probably not our last. The gist: LinkedIn wants to sell brands faster access to credible voices, and the teams that come out ahead will be the ones who already know who their buyers listen to. If you want a hand building that list, map your creators with us.
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