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Dear GTM Strategist,
In 2023, a brand offered me $600 for a LinkedIn post.
My honest reaction was: wait, you want to pay me? For this?
I had just started growing an audience and had about 18,000 followers back then, but overall I just enjoyed writing and figuring out my take on GTM in public. The idea that a legit company would open a budget line for me felt like someone had made a clerical error in my favor 🤷.
Three years later, that clerical error is one of the three business pillars of what we do at GTM Strategist. I’ve worked with 36 brands so far, and the demand for placements has exploded in 2026 - now I get 3-5 collab requests a day, and I have to say no to roughly 95% of what lands in my inbox.
You know how it is:
It takes years of work to build the trust.
It would take a couple of bad decisions to break it.
And this is not an outlier; it is an ongoing shift in B2B budgets. TopRank reports that 85% of B2B marketers are now running influencer programs, with 75% increasing budgets. B2B is now the fastest-growing slice of the influencer market, up roughly 47% year over year.
Creators are now a standalone motion in the modern B2B playbook - not a line item under “social media”.
How does this look IRL? Most bigger creators I know are sold out 3-6 months in advance. Brands that I work with book anywhere from 30 to 300+ creators a quarter.
The sole intent of this post is to help you make sense of what is going on in the space, and I’ll do it through 3 different lenses:
5 Types of Creator programs brands in our network are running - backed up with our collabs and real numbers - examples from Clay, Anthropic, Miro, and Userpilot.
Budgets and ROI stats for the posts in the go-to-market vertical: I’ll show you the exact logic I use when I curate creators for our clients.
How to DIY your creator campaign for brands that are starting out.
Let’s get into it.
The 5 Creator Programs Brands Are Actually Running
I went out there and asked some of our long-term partners how they are managing their creator programs. I identified five types.
1. Industry standard: Sponsored content
This is the classic. Brands send a brief to selected creators, review the deliverables, and then measure the collabs with impressions, engagements, and clicks (sometimes conversions) - it is a form of media buying where creators add an edge to the brand message.
The reason why this one is so popular goes beyond the cliché: “Organic reach for brands is down, ads are getting diminishing returns, let’s try something else”.
Why most brands are eager to invest in creator collabs (and often pay a premium for it) runs beyond impressions and CTR. Whenever a creator presents a brief to their audience, there is inherited trust and affinity - meaning someone watching their favorite creator is much more likely to react to the message than someone rushing to press skip on YouTube ads.
These programs become powerful when the numbers compound. Most brands running these work with anywhere from 30 to 300+ creators, tiered into roughly three groups:
Anchor partners. The steady, contracted relationships - usually yearly contracts. The creators are deeply embedded in the brand’s ecosystem and understand the broader picture of what is going on in the space. Brands often call these tier 1 analysts - I like to call them taste makers. They are authorities in their spaces.
Practitioner experts. Creators who share their playbooks and demo the product to uncover more use cases and usage. These partnerships are usually done on a quarterly or biyearly basis. These creators are really into the product and can answer more demanding technical questions.
Reach partners. When brands have special projects (launches, event reports, company updates), they will usually recruit more creators in the space to perform what I like to call a “LinkedIn takeover” - these are usually one-time collabs aimed at securing critical mass of relevant reach.
These programs require serious management. I prefer to work directly with tier 1 or 2 brands; I don’t do tier 3 anymore since it felt a bit blank to just broadcast like a billboard. I work best when I use and love the product and the partners we work with. Tier 3 is often managed by platforms or agencies, and there are no direct relationships between the brand and creator (yet) - it can be a nice starting point, though. Tiers 1 and 2 are managed in-house by creator/influencers managers, marketing pros, or, at smaller companies, even directly by founders.
Example: Miro managed nearly 90 influencers across three global Canvas events this year, creating real buzz around each event. Nicole Judson shared how her team got 99% of content live within 48 hours by creating an AI-assisted review process.
2. Boosted organic with Thought Leader Ads on LinkedIn
Another upside of working with content creators is not just their audience, but content creation skills.
That’s why most brands require advertising permissions when working with influencers. You take the creator’s post and put spend behind it - usually by whitelisting the original post. The organic placement becomes the asset for a campaign. On LinkedIn, these are called Thought Leader Ads (TLA). More rarely, the brand will also approach creators with detailed scripts to prepare a post that will also work in a campaign.
To my big surprise, brands are massively underutilizing this option. The content already carries a trust signal that brand-produced creative often can’t match. Check out these stats we had for Anthropic. The organic creative reached 300,000 people, and when the brand boosted it, we were just a little shy of 1,000,000 impressions. Massive potential there.
Example: Emilia Korczynska ran Thought Leader Ads at Userpilot inside an ABM program that returned $8.8 in pipeline per dollar. They worked best at the top of the funnel, promoting webinars when the post came from an influencer her ICP already followed. She described her full playbook in this GTM Strategist post.
A minimum suggested budget to start with TLAs would start at $1,500-$3,000 per month for one campaign.
3. Affiliate and commission-based
Not feeling like spending money? No problem - you can only pay money when you make money. 😎 With CAC of paid placements skyrocketing, most PLG brands have to consider this one at least to flatten the spend on paid.
If people are already posting and promoting your product because they love it (congrats on nailing product-market fit!), why not reward them for doing so when they deliver value to your ecosystem? So referrals are a good pitch to creators who have the benefit of a large and/or trusted audience.
Sounds good in theory, but it is not the easiest thing to pull off - IRL, most partners who apply to an affiliate program will never activate and deliver a sale. So I reached out to our friends at Cello, who have helped craft affiliate programs for Descript, Miro, Tally, Typeform, Bolt, and many other companies, to learn how to do MUCH better than that and kick off an affiliate program that actually works, not one that collects dust somewhere on your website. 🕸️
Cello’s CEO Stefan Bader recommends: “Affiliate programs fail at two points, and most companies only think about the first one. Recruiting is where everyone starts, but activation is where the money is. Roughly 90% of partners who sign up never drive a single sale, usually because nothing happens after they hit submit. No link handed to them, no first campaign idea, no nudge in week two. Fix that and a signup list becomes a revenue channel. Partner Radar solves the finding part. Cello handles what comes after.”
Stefan’s team open-sourced their partner scoring method as Partner Radar skill for Claude - run it and get leads with contact data for your top potential partners.
Two more cents from me because many people are sleeping on referrals: If you are already recommending a product that you love, check out if they have an affiliate program and share your affiliate link instead. Works best if you are an agency or a consultant. If you have a healthy LinkedIn following, you may reach out to the brand for some sponsored placements too - why not have your cake and eat it too?
4. Strategic content co-creation
As a nerd and maker by soul, this is where my heart and joy are. With AI agents and AI native products, this is probably the fastest-growing type in my line of work, and I love it because we are creating so much value together with a partner.
OK - now I have to tell you what it is 🙂
A brand hand-curates creators to team up with for an important special project. Here are some special projects that I did with partners in Q2/Q3:
Live streams and mega-assets with Clay - example
Miro Blueprint and sidekick - template production, workshop and webinar
With ongoing partners such as Miro, Clay, and Attio (Tier 1), I really feel that we have an amazing relationship going on. We have shared Slack channels, and I am happy to pitch in with best practices, learning so much from them. Saying that “I feel like a part of the team” would be cheesy, but it ain’t far from the truth either 🙂
You probably have a much clearer idea now, right?
And there are so many more awesome things that could be done. That, for me, is the future of the influencer channel - reading AI-generated video scripts is not :)
Oh - and talking of Clay - there is another level you can unlock with your creator collabs:
5. Creators as builders in your ecosystem
Clay is a configurable, build-it-yourself product, in the same family as Notion, Webflow, or Zapier. That format lets all kinds of experts and use cases shine and find their own niche. And when someone figures out a new build that solves a real problem, there is a “pride of ownership” - they want to share it.
Creators in this context may be less established than full-time influencers. But what they lack in distribution and brand, the right ones make up for in authenticity and specificity.
A 4,000-follower RevOps consultant showing a build they actually shipped will outperform a 90,000-follower generalist reading your talking points.
“The trick is to find the right balance of give and take. Unlike paid influencer programs where you’re explicitly paying for posts, creator programs depend on aligning incentives and keeping things interesting.” - Peter Kang, Social at Clay
Clay’s version of that:
Launch briefs for every campaign, so nobody guesses at the message
Customized brand assets for each creator on major campaigns, so content felt differentiated and posting took minutes, not hours
Perks that money can’t buy: exclusive swag, beta feature access, direct access to the team, a dedicated support queue, a private community where creators trade knowledge, curated dinners
Stackable economics: the program can run alongside affiliate revenue, post boosts, and other models
Done well, a creator ecosystem program scales distribution and produces decentralized product innovation, while program management overhead stays roughly fixed. You are not hiring a person per creator. Add 30 creators and the cost curve barely moves.
Now that you know all the cool things you can do with creators and how to navigate to the right type of program for you to implement, I wanna wrap this up with something super tactical. Recently, I’ve been curating a batch of influencers for a client, and I’ll walk you through the exact logic I used to help them kick off their creator program.
Example of curating a creator program
I am not just a creator myself. In my GTM work with clients, I also work with companies on the other side of the deal. So here’s an example from my practice.
It all starts with choosing the right objective: The brand I was working with is in the technical AI space, and they wanted to use creators to create buzz for their launch. We agreed on a $20,000 budget, and the interesting part was how we allocated it.
What it costs on LinkedIn. Pricing at the entry tiers tracks roughly with follower count. Above that, it tracks audience quality: brands pay a premium for the density of senior decision-makers in their target market, not the number.
These are the numbers that I see for LinkedIn posts in the GTM creator vertical. Actual pricing varies heavily based on the seniority/credibility of the creator, industry, audience breakdown (we are mainly interested in senior decision-makers’ reach from the US and Western Europe), and whether you are working with creators directly or if there is a stakeholder (platform, agency, salesperson) who takes a 10-30% commission on top of the core price.
In the example described above, we also had to understand the reality of having no dedicated creator manager, and that working with more than 10 creators would be administrative overkill for the team. We definitely wanted to bring in some bigger names to the campaign because when you say that you work with top voices in your industry (think Lenny Rachitsky for product), recruiting other creators becomes much easier - you inherit their trust.
We could afford two bigger names (100K+) for this one. But remember, bigger is not always better, and I’ve seen smaller creators selling much better than longer ones many times because they do put more work into the placements. If I were just chasing performance, I’d easily opt in for 10 names at $1000-$2000 per post, but since we needed some whale 🐳 for the campaign for an investor “halo effect”.
In the end, we went with 2x 100K followers, 4x 30-80K range, and 6 smaller creators we were bullish on for amazing demos.
Criteria that I used for vetting:
Export 28 days’ impressions and send a screenshot of the audience breakdown (if not updated in the media deck)
% of senior decision-makers in the audience (US, tech companies)
Quality check: How they are doing brand partnerships - do they actually care, or do they just push something out? For the first campaign, we needed people who go the extra mile and actually show the product and results or using it
Genuine engagement: if there is any sign of engagement, pods - out of list
Now, curation of the influencer list. I never use platforms from the get-go; I first do my own research:
Ask your customers/target group. “Whose stuff do you read and learn from?”
Run the analysis in Claude. Make it prepare a list of 20-30 perfect influencer fits for your ICP and generate the table with traction data, contact data, and fit estimate - review everything manually before you reach out
Look at what competitors have done. If someone has worked successfully with a brand in your industry, it is very likely that they are open to collaborations and have what it takes to cut through the noise.
An outreach list will look a little bit like this:
And then you go, go - you reach out to those people, and here is what will happen next: Most creators are jammed, and it will take 2-3 attempts to get their attention. To speed things up a little, you do this:
Write “Paid collaboration” in the subject line, especially if you are a lesser-known brand
Acknowledge that you are following their work with proof points
Excite them about the company - make them care + use social proof
Use the lingo - aka send us your media kit, if they would be open to reviewing the brief - what if your availability - don’t try to lure them into a 15-min intro call
If you need help preparing briefs, outreach, and strategy for outreach, I created a Miroverse template based on our best practices to help you navigate your first campaigns
In our example, we went back and forth with briefings and approvals, and 3 weeks in, the campaign was finally out. We timed the posts around launch dates and validated performance primarily based on cost per lead - CPL (registered qualified leads). Our max CPL was $300, and most creators scored from $150 to $230, and the ballpark results that we’ve gotten from the $20,000 campaign look like this:
Overall reach: 310K impressions
CPM: $64.52
Outcome: 108 qualified leads
Blended CPL: $185.19 per qualified lead
Fun fact: I presented this campaign to my brother, who is a senior Meta advertiser in ecommerce and a brand owner; he laughed out loud - these CPMs and CTRs are crazy to someone who was playing the volume game his entire career. But B2B has different logic: when you land one great enterprise client from a campaign like this, you shake the person’s hand and pop a bottle because you’ve got 5-10X ROAS. 🍾
Hopefully this one was value-packed and awesome. If you’d like to work with me as a content creator, I have two exciting opportunities available in Q4:
GTM Strategist Media Pack (LinkedIn + Substack) collaborations for Q4
State of B2B GTM Report & Summit planned in October - a new project with Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged). Last year’s report reached +1 million people and made waves
If you’re interested in partnering on either option, feel free to reach out.
Hope we can join forces and launch some amazing projects together in Q4!
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