How to Find the Right B2B Influencers for Your Brand

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Finding the right B2B influencers is one of the most important and underrated parts of running a successful influencer marketing campaign. And whether you are trying to find niche micro influencers or the top expert in a specific industry, there is a clear process you can follow. I am also going to share some tactics that most marketers skip entirely, like how to identify your competitors' top performing influencers and then find lookalike influencers for your own brand. Let me walk you through how to do this manually first, and then show you how to speed up the whole thing with the right tools.

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Start With Manual Search on Each Platform

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The most straightforward place to start is just manually searching each platform using specific keywords. If you want to find an SEO specialist on LinkedIn, for example, you can just type "SEO consultant" or "SEO" into the search bar and filter by people. You can also add a location or an industry filter. But honestly, I do not find those filters to be especially useful in practice.

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What I find much more useful is looking at which influencers your competitors have already worked with. If Ahrefs is a competitor, for example, I would type #ahrefs partner into LinkedIn, click on posts, and immediately get a list of real partner posts. From there, I can click on one of those creators and see who else LinkedIn recommends. That often surfaces some genuinely good leads.

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The tricky part here is that you might not even know which competitors are currently running LinkedIn influencer campaigns. In that case, you might have to start by finding just one influential person in the space and then work outward from there.

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Watch Out for Fake Engagement

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One thing you absolutely need to check before reaching out to anyone on LinkedIn is whether their engagement is legitimate. This is a massive issue on the platform. A lot of creators, especially the ones with high engagement numbers, participate in engagement pods. That means you might not actually be reaching your ideal customer profile even if the numbers look great on the surface. The influencer marketing manager at Wix, Sarah Adam, actually quit partnering with LinkedIn influencers entirely because of this problem. That alone should tell you how serious it is.

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Finding Influencers on YouTube

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On YouTube, the process is similar but even more straightforward. You just search for keywords relevant to your product. If you are a website builder like Wix, for instance, I would search for "how to build a website" and see which YouTubers consistently show up at the top. One extra thing to check here is upload frequency. A lot of YouTubers are inconsistent, which can make your results vary wildly from one campaign to the next. Look for creators who publish on a reliable schedule.

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Substack Is a Different Animal

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Substack has a search function, and you can type in keywords like "SEO" to find newsletter creators. But I will be honest, I do not find the native search filter very helpful. It is better to move on to other methods when looking for Substack influencers.

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Use Google or ChatGPT for Recommendations

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If you want to find newsletter creators, for example, you can just Google something like "best SEO newsletters" and you will get a huge list. Google works well for this type of broad discovery. That said, it does not work as well for finding LinkedIn creators specifically, and that is where ChatGPT becomes more useful.

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The influencer marketer at Ahrefs shared the exact process they use. They start with a prompt like: "Share some YouTube channels that had Shopify as a sponsor. I need channels related to marketing, business, entrepreneurship, education, etc." Then for LinkedIn, they ask something like: "Can you give me a list of LinkedIn influencers with more than 20,000 followers who talk about marketing?"

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Sometimes the initial results are too broad and you just get mega influencers, so narrowing it down helps. They tried prompts like: "Let's do 20,000 to 80,000 followers. Can you find me around 20 or so?" But even then, ChatGPT often skews toward the biggest names, which is not always what you want. That is when I move on to the third option.

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Look at Your Existing Customer Base

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This is the option most people overlook, and it is often the best place to start. Are any of your existing customers influencers? Existing customers already know your product. They have real use cases, real results, and potentially a case study they can share. That makes them infinitely easier to work with than a stranger you cold outreach.

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One founder I spoke with said that before going outside their customer base at all, the first thing they did was ask: "Who among our users might already have an audience and talk about these topics?" Because those people are way more easy to convince to work with you at the beginning. You also barely need to brief them, since they already know the product and have live case studies. They gave an example from a funnel tool where a customer could say something like: "In my previous tool I got 5% conversion rates, with this tool I have 25%." That is already a compelling video or testimonial ready to go.

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They suggested something as simple as sending an email to your customer base saying: "Hey, we are looking for people who want to talk about their experience with the product. If you have an audience and are interested, just reply." That one email alone can get you started for a long time.

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A Clever Trick Using Your LinkedIn Archive

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One smart tactic I learned from Rand Fishkin: you can download your LinkedIn archive, then use a tool like PhantomBuster or even ChatGPT to analyze the data and identify influential people who already follow your company page or the pages of influential employees in your organization. Not all of your customers follow your LinkedIn page, so this is not a complete solution. But it is a solid supplementary approach to find warm leads who already have a connection to your brand.

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Use a Tool Like Favikon to Speed Everything Up

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The honest truth is that the easiest way to find relevant B2B influencers is using a tool like Favikon. It works across all the major B2B platforms including LinkedIn, Substack, and YouTube, as well as Instagram and TikTok. The filtering is genuinely advanced. You can search by niche, engagement rate, follower count, posting frequency, language, country, and more.

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For example, I can type something like "SEO influencers on LinkedIn with at least 10,000 followers but no more than 50,000, who speak English and are active on the platform" and it generates a list of relevant SEO professionals. You can scroll through and get an overview of each creator's specialties and which platforms they are active on. If you want to go deeper, you can click into any profile and see a full breakdown.

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The Authenticity Score Feature

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One of the standout features inside Favikon is the Authenticity Score. This is a metric designed specifically to help you weed out influencers who participate in fake engagement like engagement pods, or people who excessively use AI to write their content. Given how rampant this is on LinkedIn, this single feature alone saves an enormous amount of time and money. When you pull up a creator's profile, you will see their Authenticity Score at a glance, along with estimated pricing based on verified rates collected from over 100 LinkedIn creators. That pricing factors in not just follower count, but engagement, the Authenticity Score, and other signals.

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I will say, the estimated price is exactly that, an estimate. The market is still the wild west in a lot of ways. I have heard of one B2B marketer being quoted $650,000 for a single LinkedIn post. So take the numbers as a useful benchmark, not a hard ceiling.

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The Lookalike Tool for Competitor Influencer Research

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One of the hardest parts of influencer marketing is figuring out which influencers actually drive sales. One way to get a shortcut on that is to look at which influencers your competitors keep rehiring. If a competitor keeps bringing the same person back, that is a strong signal that creator converts. You obviously cannot hire those exact people since they likely have an exclusivity deal, but you can use Favikon's lookalike tool to find similar creators.

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The way it works is simple. You type in any influencer's name and Favikon shows you creators who are similar to them. So if your competitor Dream Data has run several campaigns with Brendan Hufford, you can type in Brendan's name and get a list of comparable influencers. You can then layer on filters to narrow things down further. If I want to focus specifically on the SEO niche, I can add that filter and the results update accordingly. It is a genuinely powerful way to build a qualified list without starting from scratch.

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You can also watch the full walkthrough video here:

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Managing Campaigns Inside the Tool

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Beyond discovery, you can actually manage your entire influencer campaign inside Favikon. You can message influencers directly and manage your outreach inbox from within the platform. That alone takes a significant amount of coordination work off your plate, especially when you are running multiple campaigns at once.

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What About Hiring an Agency?

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Another option is to hire an influencer marketing agency. The main benefit is that they already have systems in place and probably already know which influencers tend to convert and what a fair price looks like for your category. That can be a huge shortcut when you are just getting started.

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That said, an agency is not a perfect solution. The influencer marketing manager at Ahrefs described working with one as anything but a seamless experience. But the bigger issue, in my view, is that when you go through an agency you do not get to develop a deep relationship with the influencer yourself. And you want that relationship to be more than transactional. The deeper the relationship you build with a creator, the more likely they are to give you genuine customer research insights, talk about your brand more positively and organically with their audience, and potentially mention you even outside of paid campaigns. Using an agency can be a good way to get systems in place early, but over time you want to build those creator relationships directly.

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The Bottom Line

There is no single right way to find B2B influencers, but there is definitely a smart order to go in. Start with your existing customer base because those are your warmest leads and easiest conversations. Then use manual platform searches and ChatGPT to expand your list. And when you are ready to scale and go faster, use a tool like Favikon to do the heavy filtering, check authenticity, understand pricing, and find lookalike creators based on what is already working for your competitors. The research phase is where most campaigns either win or lose before they even start, so it is worth doing it right.

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Also See 👀
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