On 19 October, Billion Dollar Boy Group bought Creator Authority. Billion Dollar Boy is a London creator agency aiming for $100 million in revenue next year. Creator Authority is a LinkedIn-first agency built entirely around B2B. BDB's founder, Ed East, called B2B one of the most significant growth opportunities in creator marketing. LinkedIn has been building toward the same thing, with a Creator Marketplace inside Campaign Manager since June.
The numbers explain the rush. LinkedIn's own research says 59% of B2B buyers pay attention to creator content on the platform. One in five marketing decision-makers in BDB's survey has already put money into B2B creators this year.
So should you go and hire an influencer? Probably not first. Here's why.
Buyers trust people, not logos
The creator boom isn't really about creators. It's about something buyers have always known. A person who knows the work is more believable than a company page talking about itself.
That's why a post from an engineer or a shop supervisor tends to earn more trust than one from the corporate account. It's why a tender panel remembers the project manager who walked them round the site, not the brochure. Trust sticks to faces, hands and experience.
For an industrial business, that's good news. You don't have to rent credibility. You have a building full of it.
Caterpillar didn't hire celebrities. It used its own operators.
Go back to 2014. Caterpillar wanted to lighten up a heavy-metal image, and more and more of its customers were going to YouTube to research Cat equipment. So it didn't call a talent agency. Its marketing team asked its demo operators to play Jenga.
Five Cat machines. Five operators with 121 years of combined experience. Around 28 hours of play, cut into a film two and a half minutes long. It passed 1.1 million views within days.
The stunt was the hook. The precision was the proof. Watching an operator ease a block out with a 349E excavator tells you more about the machine, and the people behind it, than any spec sheet could. That's creator content. It was just made by people Caterpillar already employed.
One of the biggest industrial creators started as an engineer
Grady Hillhouse spent years as a dam and levee engineer. His YouTube channel, Practical Engineering, now has around 4.67 million subscribers and more than 500 million views. His subject is infrastructure. Dams, levees, the things most people drive past without a thought. Not glamorous. Massively watched.
The lesson for industrial owners is blunt. People want to know how things work. Your team explains how things work every day, to apprentices, customers and auditors. That knowledge is content. Most businesses just never point a camera at it.
Humanity works even in the most technical rooms
Then there's Invenra, a biotech developing antibody-drug conjugates. At the World ADC Conference in San Diego this month, it skipped the usual brochure. Instead it handed out "52 Views of Cancer", a deck of playing cards. Every card carries original art by a cancer patient, a survivor or a family member.
The idea came from CEO Roland Green, after his daughter was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and made artwork of her own. Selected artists were paid a $1,000 stipend and kept the rights to their work. And the deck launched alongside a hard business announcement: expanded ADC discovery services.
It doesn't replace the science, and Pharma Marketing Network rightly notes that whether it wins partnerships remains to be seen. But nobody leaves it in the hotel bin. In a room full of scientists, the company that showed why the work matters is the one people talk about over dinner.
How to find the creators already in your building
Before you budget for outside voices, start inside.
Find your explainers. Every business has two or three people who light up when they explain the job. The estimator who can talk tolerances all day. The site lead who loves a tricky install. Those are your voices.
Film the work, not the office. Sparks off a grinder. A part coming off the line. A crane lift at dawn. Show the process and skip the boardroom.
Give them a point of view. Creators win because they have opinions. Let your people say what they think the industry gets wrong. This is where strategy earns its keep. What's the one idea you want the market to link to your name?
Make it look like you. Ten people posting in ten different styles is noise. A clear brand gives every voice the same frame, so a post from your welder and a post from your MD both feel unmistakably yours.
Then consider outside creators. Once your own story is clear, sponsoring a respected industry voice amplifies something real. Do it first and you're renting attention for a brand nobody can picture.
The real job
The creator rush is a signal, not a strategy. It tells you B2B buyers have stopped listening to companies and started listening to people. Your brand's job is to make sure the right people are speaking, and that everything around them says capable, current and big enough to trust.
If your team is excellent but your brand still makes you look smaller than you are, that's fixable. A good next step is nim's free 2-minute Industrial Brand Health Check. It scores where your brand is costing you work and shows you what to fix first.
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