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- Follower Count Never Mattered for B2B Creators. Here's How 30 Marketers Vet Them
Follower Count Never Mattered for B2B Creators. Here's How 30 Marketers Vet Them
30 Marketing Execs: Why 8K Niche Followers Beat 80K in B2B Campaigns
Nii Ahene
May 19, 2026
B2B Influencer Marketing is becoming a more formal part of brand strategy, but creator selection remains a weak point for many programs. Nearly 50% of B2B marketers cite identifying, qualifying, and connecting with ideal influencers as their primary challenge, even as more teams move toward always-on influencer programs and increased budgets.
That gap is especially visible in creator vetting, where follower count, engagement rate, and broad audience demographics often fail to capture niche authority, buyer relevance, or trust inside specialized professional communities.
To examine how teams are adapting, we asked 30 Creator Economy and Influencer Marketing professionals which criteria and processes they use to evaluate B2B creators and which traditional vetting methods no longer work.
Three things we tell ourselves about AI search
"It's too new, we'll handle it next year."
"That's an SEO problem, not mine."
"We have ten priorities ahead of this."
All three are wrong, and the data is starting to make that obvious.
Brands, Agencies and Creators are already using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI products to build partnerhip shortlists. Right now. Today. Across 500+ creator economy companies analyzed, most of the category is invisible in these results. A handful are dominating.
On May 20, Devesh Khanal from Grow and Convert walks through the data and the playbook. What's working, what's not, and what to do this quarter.
It is 45 minutes plus live Q&A. Free. Capped at 100 live seats because we want to actually answer your question about your agencies during Q&A.
If you cannot make it live, register anyway and we will send the recording and the data appendix.
See you May 20.
Nii A. Ahene, Founder, Net Infleuncer