The state of B2B influencer marketing

The state of influencer marketing 2026

Five emerging trends transforming B2B influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the most discussed—and least understood—disciplines in B2B marketing. The consumer model is well established: brands partner with social media personalities who have large, engaged followings to promote products...Contents

1. Niche appeal beats broad awareness

2. The control paradox

3. The pipeline connection

4. The relationship compound

5. The experience dividend

Conclusions and recommendations

Thank you for reading The state of B2B influencer marketing

Introduction: B2B’s influencer identity crisis

Influencer marketing is one of the most discussed—and least understood—disciplines in B2B marketing. The consumer model is well established: brands partner with social media personalities who have large, engaged followings to promote products through sponsored content. The economics are straightforward, the metrics are familiar, and the playbook is mature.

B2B has no equivalent playbook. The audiences are smaller and more specialised. The buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders over extended timescales. The content must demonstrate genuine expertise, not just aesthetic appeal. And the ROI calculation is fundamentally different: a plumbing influencer with 50,000 followers who drives 16,000 sample pack requests from qualified installers delivers more commercial value than a lifestyle influencer with 5 million followers who generates fleeting brand awareness.

As Kriston Sesto of Custom Influence put it, influencer marketing in B2B is “not exactly PR, but not exactly performance marketing, not its own channel.” It lacks a settled home within marketing organisations, and most teams are still working out where it belongs, who should own it, and how to measure it. This identity confusion, as much as anything, explains why adoption remains low.

When we examine hundreds of B2B marketing campaigns across the 2024–2025 awards programmes, we find genuine influencer marketing in roughly 5–6% of entries—a fraction of the 48% that reference thought leadership. Yet within this small sample, clear patterns emerge that point toward a distinctively B2B approach to influencer marketing: one built on trade credibility rather than social reach, commercial integration rather than brand awareness, sustained relationships rather than one-off activations, and real-world experience rather than digital-first content.

“Three years ago, when I entered the space, almost nobody was doing it, particularly in the UK. I really think the creator economy, influencer marketing, social-first media is such an exciting space for growth.”

Kristen Sesto, Custom Influence

The landscape: How influencer is being used in B2B

Before examining what makes B2B influencer marketing effective, it is worth understanding how it is currently being deployed. Several baseline patterns emerged from our analysis that provide useful context for the five findings that follow.

It is not confined to social media. In the B2B Marketing Awards 2025, influencer marketing appears across 16 of 29 categories—more than half. Critically, 83% of campaigns that reference influencer techniques are entered in categories other than the dedicated social media and influencer category. Product launches, PR campaigns, brand initiatives, events, creative, and enterprise marketing all feature influencer activity. This suggests that marketers are already treating influencer as a component that enhances other strategies rather than a standalone discipline—even if they are not always doing so deliberately.

Campaigns that use influencer techniques outperform those that do not. In the B2B Marketing Awards 2025, 71% of campaigns referencing influencer marketing were shortlisted, compared with 49% of those that did not. While this does not prove causation—campaigns confident enough to reference influencer may simply be better-executed overall—the gap is notable and consistent enough to suggest a correlation between influencer deployment and campaign quality.

The influencer types span a wide spectrum. Across the campaigns in our dataset, nearly half (49%) reference social content creators—YouTubers, LinkedIn creators, TikTok personalities. But 17% deploy ultra-niche trade practitioners (plumbing installers, equipment operators, veterinarians, chefs) with small but deeply engaged professional audiences, and a further 17% use celebrities or public figures for headline value and PR amplification. The spectrum is wider than the consumer model typically deploys, reflecting the diversity of B2B audiences and objectives.

Half of all influencer campaigns are anchored in real-world experiences. Unlike the consumer model, which is overwhelmingly digital-first, around 50% of B2B influencer campaigns reference events, factory visits, trade shows, or other physical experiences as part of the influencer activation. The physical world generates the digital content, rather than the other way around. This connection between experiential and digital is a distinctive feature of B2B influencer marketing that has no real parallel in consumer practice.

Some campaigns borrow the aesthetic without the influencer. An adjacent trend is campaigns that adopt influencer-style formats—mockumentary content, vlog-style production, direct-to-camera delivery, platform-native formats—without necessarily partnering with external influencers at all. Approximately 7% of all campaigns in the B2B Marketing Awards 2025 use this kind of influencer-informed creative language, and three-quarters of those are not influencer campaigns in any formal sense. The borrowing of the influencer grammar—authenticity, personality, unscripted delivery—suggests that the value of ‘influencer’ may lie as much in the format and tone as in the individual.

Growth is steady, not explosive. The proportion of campaigns referencing influencer marketing in the B2B Marketing Awards rose from 8.7% in 2024 to 11.6% in 2025. The more telling shift is qualitative: in 2024, influencer mentions were more concentrated in social media contexts. By 2025, they had spread into product launches, ABM programmes, enterprise marketing, and purpose-led initiatives. The discipline is broadening, even if it is not yet surging.

These patterns provide the baseline against which the five findings should be read. They describe a discipline that is small, diverse, and evolving—not yet mainstream, but increasingly integrated into the broader B2B marketing mix.

How we defined and measured influencer marketing

For this analysis, we conducted a comprehensive audit of all campaign submissions across four datasets—the B2B Marketing Awards and Elevation Awards for both 2024 and 2025—identifying those that deploy external individuals whose credibility, expertise, or audience is deliberately leveraged as part of the campaign.

This strict definition excludes employee advocacy programmes (internal ‘brand ambassadors’), customer advocates, DMU ‘influencer’ roles (a common false positive where ‘influencer’ refers to decision-makers within buying committees), AI-generated avatars, and journalists who are simply coverage targets rather than active campaign participants.

Using this methodology, we identified approximately 33 unique campaigns in the 2025 awards cycle and 33 in the 2024 cycle that genuinely deploy external influencers. These figures are significantly lower than a simple keyword search would suggest: a broad search for ‘influencer’ across all submissions returns over 130 hits in the B2B Marketing Awards 2025 alone, but the majority prove to be false positives. The gap between keyword mentions and genuine influencer deployment is itself a significant finding, highlighting the terminology confusion that continues to surround this discipline.

The statistics in the landscape section above and the findings that follow draw on two different methodologies, and it is important to be transparent about the distinction.

The landscape percentages—the 83% outside social media, the 71% shortlisting rate, the 50% events integration—are based on keyword analysis across all submission text. Any campaign that mentions the word ‘influencer’ in its objectives, strategy, channels, or results is counted. This is a broad net that captures campaigns where influencer is a deliberate, named strategy, but also those where the term is used more loosely—to describe a buying committee role, to reference an employee advocacy programme, or simply to note that social media influencers exist as a channel option.

The five findings, by contrast, are based on a much stricter audit. We manually reviewed every campaign flagged by the keyword search and classified it against a specific definition: an external individual, not employed by the brand, whose credibility, expertise, or audience is deliberately leveraged as part of the campaign. This definition excludes employee advocacy programmes, customer advocates, DMU ‘influencer’ roles (where ‘influencer’ refers to a decision-maker within a buying committee), AI-generated avatars, and journalists who are simply coverage targets.

The gap between the two counts is itself significant. A keyword search for ‘influencer’ across the B2B Marketing Awards 2025 returns approximately 12% of all entries. Our strict audit reduces this to approximately 5–6% of genuine influencer campaigns. Roughly half of all keyword mentions prove to be false positives—a finding that underlines the terminology confusion still surrounding this discipline, and one of the reasons we believe a stricter definition is essential if the profession is to develop a shared understanding of what influencer marketing actually means in B2B.

The landscape section uses the broader keyword data because it provides a more complete picture of how the term is being used and where it appears. The five findings use the stricter audit because the conclusions they draw—about credibility, creative freedom, commercial integration, sustained relationships, and experience-based content—can only be supported by campaigns that genuinely deploy external influencers.

The B2B Marketing Awards and The Elevation Awards are the two most prominent awards programmes operating in the B2B marketing space, operating for almost 25 years, and receiving hundreds of entries per year collectively. Both are international in scope, although the former is focused on the UK and EMEA, whilst the latter on North America. The insights used to generate this analysis utilised entries from these two programmes for 2025 and 2024.

About the B2B Marketing Awards

Joel Harrison is founder and director of B2B Marketing (www.b2bmarketing.net), host of the 'Trust and Influence in B2B' podcast, and globally recognised authority on B2B marketing.

Joel speaks regularly at industry conferences, including B2B Marketing Ignite and the Global ABM Conference, and his work has helped shape how B2B marketers think about thought leadership, account-based marketing, and the integration of brand and demand generation. Contact: joelharrisonb2b.com