Noticed: your buyers don't trust your ads. They trust the person who posted above them

Part 1 of 4 in One buyer, four stages. Start with the overview: Your buyers decided before you knew they were looking.

Where a B2B buyer first hears about you has moved. It used to be an ad, a trade show stand or a search result. Now it is a post from someone they already follow: a RevOps lead, a founder, a CFO who writes about the problem your product solves. The buyer wasn't looking for you. They were reading someone they trust, and you were there.

The numbers behind the shift

• LinkedIn's 2026 Global B2B Marketing Outlook found 82% of B2B marketers believe creators raise credibility with decision-makers; in the UK cut, 72% say pulling back from creators would leave revenue on the table.
• LinkedIn's 2025 Benchmark report found 55% of B2B marketers already work with creators, with trust as their top goal.
• Reddit and SurveyMonkey's 2025 research ranks peer recommendations as the most trusted source for B2B buyers. Vendor content sits well below.
• Bluewhale Research (2025) found over 55% of tech buyers trust marketing claims most when endorsed by peers or industry experts.
• Gartner's 2025 CMO survey has marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of revenue, with 22% of CMOs saying GenAI has reduced their reliance on agencies. The money for creators is coming out of channels that stopped working, not out of thin air.

HubSpot's answer to losing 80% of its search traffic included a creator programme launched in 2022. Its own Loop playbook puts the logic in one line: "Ads put you in the right feed; creators put you in the right conversation."

A real example: what one practitioner's feed is worth

I run a LinkedIn account with 224,000 followers. Over the past three months, single posts have reached 709,000, 89,000 and, with a brand partner, 1.1 million impressions. Brands including HP, monday.com, Airwallex, Vodafone, Gamma and PolyAI have paid for sponsored posts on it. The reason isn't the follower count. It's that the people who read it are marketing and sales leaders at B2B companies, and they read it because it's written by someone who runs one.

That is what a B2B creator is: not a celebrity, a practitioner with an audience of their peers. There are thousands of them on LinkedIn with 5,000 to 60,000 followers each, and almost none of them have an agency.

Why most B2B influencer campaigns disappoint

Three reasons, and they're all fixable.

1. The wrong creators. Picked for follower count, not for who follows them. A 40,000-follower creator whose audience is students is worth less than a 6,000-follower creator whose audience is VPs of Marketing. Relevance beats reach; even HubSpot's creator filters put audience and fit ahead of size.
2. Fake engagement. Engagement pods and comment farms inflate every number you're shown. If nobody checks, you pay for likes from people who will never buy.
3. No proof. The campaign ends with "impressions" and "engagement rate". Nobody can tell the sales team who saw it.

How Fame Influencer works

• A vetted roster. Our creators are drawn from the practitioners who've appeared as guests on the 300+ B2B shows we've produced: operators, founders and specialists. Each is checked for pods and comment farms before they're matched to you.
• A two-month test, then a subscription. Five creators, five placements for $9,500. Then ten placements a quarter for $21,000, counted in your portal. Published prices, no proposal needed to find out.
• Named engagers. Every report lists the people and companies who engaged with each post, by role, and the share who match your ICP. The list goes to your sales team.
• Honest measurement. Blended CPM against LinkedIn Ads benchmarks, every month, on the average, not the viral outlier.

Why it's stage one, not the whole plan

A creator post gets you noticed. It doesn't get you chosen. The buyer who liked the post is the same buyer who'll hear you on a show next month (Fame Connect), follow you to your own show (Fame Podcast), and then see you named when they ask ChatGPT who to consider (Fame Search). The creators themselves often host those shows, and the engagers they surface become your guest list.

Which is why the Influencer test is where most companies should start. Two months, five creators, and a list of names that proves the audience exists before you build anything bigger for it.

Next: Heard

Book a 30-minute call. We'll show you which creators your buyers follow. Book a call