Brands and creators had an easy relationship for the past decade: brands paid creators for reach, and a creator’s knowledge of the subject was irrelevant. Today, the b2b creator economy is no longer a marginal element in the overall narrative of digital content. It has become a formidable business and a strategic asset, increasingly recognised by breakthrough brands as an asset for innovation instead of just a marketing tool.
As more and more B2B companies are realizing, creators in niche professional fields no longer simply message senders. Their communities provide highly engaged fast feedback loops, and they know the practitioner’s needs inside and out as they are extremely knowledgeable in their field. The brand owner’s question is no longer ‘how do we get creators to promote us?’. It’s much more about how to “co-create” with them.
The B2B Creator Economy Is A Game-changer
The creator economy is usually talked about in consumer jargon – fashion, fitness, lifestyle, gaming. The fact that B2B is much less talked about is one of the reasons why it is not being tapped as much. Here are three key reasons to reevaluate that.
B2B creators grow their audiences through their professional proficiency. A supply chain consultant with 80,000 followers on LinkedIn isn’t built that way. Their way of earning it is by a sustained and reliable analysis of a particular field. Followers are practitioners who are convinced of their judgment. This trust is priceless – it’s not only about lead generation!
According to LinkedIn’s 2023 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 61% of decision makers believe thought leadership is one of the best methods of proving value to customers. Specifically, 54% of respondents use thought leadership content to screen organisations they are interested in working with. A creator’s community is not just a marketing asset. It is an actual indication of market sentiment. The 2025 edition of this research is also available.
Whether or not the brand intended it, the creator has become a conduit for feedback. An example of product intelligence is when a fintech platform introduces a new product and a well-known finance creator posts 300 comments, all asking a similar query. It’s innovation input when a SaaS company rolls out an integration, and a developer advocate’s YouTube video comes up with 10 use cases which the product team hadn’t thought of.
The Process From Endorsement To Co-creation
This change from “creator as promoter/conduit channel” to “creator as collaborator” goes beyond semantic language. It has implications for the way brands organise themselves around external voices.
There are generally three forms of co-creation in the b2b creator economy sector.
- Product co-development is when creators are actively involved in design or a feature/tool/some service refinement. For instance, HubSpot’s Partner Program is inspired by the knowledge of trainers, consultants, and content creators who use HubSpot every day. Their feedback isn’t limited to informing marketing, it shapes roadmaps. It has done the same with its community of designers and educators, many with a rich portfolio of work, by featuring them in its community councils and beta programmes to influence product decisions.
- Content co-creation is more than just sponsored content. It involves collaborating with creators to create truly valuable content – research papers, instructional videos, principles, and other formats – that are both the property of the brand and the creator’s. This is more difficult to manage, which boosts authenticity and makes it more believable. The audience knows when an artist has been instructed to present something compared to when the artist is an actual participant in the creation process.
- Community-led innovation is an approach where creator-anchored communities are organized as input mechanisms. Instead of hosting a traditional focus group, brands seek out the communities that already exist around the creators that are relevant to them to serve as an easy-to-access, high-trust audience for ideation, concept testing, and problem framing. This is the logic of open innovation, and it is especially relevant to B2B because the communities are already full of the very people that brands desire to connect with.
The Mutual Value Exchange
It’s important to be aware of the reason creators would want to be involved in this sort of collaboration. Co-creation with a brand can’t just involve payment. If the relationship is simply transactional, it won’t create the type of real engagement that makes the collaboration worthwhile in the first place.
The benefit B2B creators usually reap from a high-quality co-creation relationship is access—the opportunity to access platforms and data, access internal experts and research, and access the insights they can then share with their audiences. This adds credibility to what they do. If a creator can confidently claim to have “helped design this feature” or “had a hand in shaping this report,” they are giving their audience something that a competitor can’t. The partnership with a brand becomes a part of their diversification.
Brand owners add value to their products product in three ways.
- First, they acquire an efficient channel into domain expertise they don’t have.
- Second, they are able to reach more authentic audiences that are highly qualified audiences in comparison to traditional advertising.
- Third, and most significantly for innovation, they have a continuous real time feedback loop that a traditional market research process cannot provide.
According to Edelman’s 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, 52% of buyers reported that thought leadership has directly resulted in them selecting a company to do business with that they hadn’t been considering. Credibility gained from real co-creation isn’t just just brand equity. It plays a role in the decision-making process.
What This Looks Like In Practice
Salesforce is a good example to follow. It has created one of the most advanced models of co-innovation between customers and creators in enterprise software known as its Trailblazer Community. Many of these members are active contributors to the Salesforce community as content creators, and their ideas directly inform product development.
The Salesforce IdeaExchange site has emerged thousands of product enhancements, and the most popular ideas are often included in the biggest releases. Crowdsourced innovation at scale, with creators and their community members being the crowd.
Shopify’s model offers a good example of how the creator economy in the b2b space could be formalized on a different level. The company has developed a network of teachers and content providers, teaching merchants on its platform. They are creating user education and feedback on the product as they are doing it through their YouTube channels, newsletters, and podcasts.
Shopify codified it with its Commerce+ ecosystem, offering certain partners roadmap briefings and product previews in return for meaningful input.
Both of these scenarios don’t seem like typical influencer marketing. They are knowledge partnerships, in which innovation is a two-way street.
Challenges Brands Have To Face
The process of co-innovation with creators isn’t free of conflict. There are a couple of recurring problems when implementing this.
There is no compromising on editorial independence. When a creator feels their credibility is being affected by brand involvement, they remove themselves from the brand. Or worse, they produce work that is less and less trusted by their audience. Brands that control messaging too tightly will negate what makes the co-creation valuable in the first place. The idea is to use the creator’s authentic voice, not to make an obviously scripted message more acceptable.
Image source: Markus Winkler, Unsplash
Be clear about the intellectual property from the beginning. If a creator is involved in the development of a product, who owns what? These questions can be forgotten in the excitement of initial collaboration, and cause regrettable pain later. The relationship architecture should include formal contracts covering IP, exclusivity and attribution issues from the outset.
Scale creates dilution. The power of a b2b creator economy relationship lies in specificity: a creator in a specific niche, having a specific audience, in a specific area. The quality of input drops, particularly, as the number of transactions increases, when brands try to industrialize this and create “creator co-innovation programmes” at scale.
It’s a depth over breadth question. Fifty shallow relationship with the right creators will yield less usable innovation input than five truly collaborative relationships.
Some Questions Your Organisation Might Want To Ask
If you consider co-innovation with creators and imagine how that might work in your B2B environment, you should ask yourself three questions first.
The first question is, where are the knowledge clusters? Who are some of your creators who’ve established loyal and active communities in your industry? Not necessarily high followers of these people. They are the ones whose audiences view their content as a professional resource; not entertainment.
Second, what type of input are you looking for? Structures and types of creators’ involvement are different for product feedback, market intelligence and content credibility. Talk to possible collaborators about specific learning/building goals.
Third, what do you have to offer in return? When brands come with a co-innovation proposal and only have a fee to offer, they are missing the mark. The creators that are best to work with are already getting paid. What they often want is access to data that they can use as content to deliver insight and convey true influence on something that matters.
The b2b creator economy has now reached the stage of being a research and development powerhouse of its own, with the most advanced creators doing just that. Brands who do not consider them as marketing opportunities are not only missing the opportunity; they are missing out. They’re missing an innovation one.
The New Shape Of Open Innovation
There’s something even bigger to be aware of. The concept of open innovation (which involves tapping into external sources of knowledge, not just internal R&D) has been largely understood in the context of formal organisational partnerships, academic collaborations and competition-style idea contests. That’s where the b2b creator economy comes in, to provide an additional and uniquely informal dimension to the situation.
In essence, creators are, embedded researchers. They are constantly collecting information from their community and are summarizing it into public information, creating bodies of knowledge that brands can access, if they have the right structure. The backing of the crowds is already in place. In most instances, what’s been missing is an appetite to acknowledge it as such from an organisational standpoint.
As Henry Chesbrough, the academic who originated the notion of “open innovation”, has been arguing for years and years, the lines between inside and outside the organisation are becoming blurred. Creators are making it more porous, whether brands acknowledge it or not.
Brands that will be the leaders of the next stage of B2B innovation don’t need to have the biggest R&D budgets. It’s the ones that learn to perceive the b2b creator economy around them as a distributed intelligence network, and cultivate the relationships to tap into it.
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