International B2B companies often are built around expertise. They employ engineers, application specialists, service technicians and product managers who know their products and understand the challenges their customers face. Yet when it comes to marketing, we often hear very little from these people.
Often most of the communication comes from the company itself. Carefully written messages about innovation, performance, sustainability and reliability. All important, but often quite similar to what competitors are saying.
What if we gave the people behind that expertise a bigger role?
LinkedIn is putting increasing attention on B2B creator marketing. In September 2026, the platform highlighted new ways for brands to find relevant experts and promote their content to specific professional audiences.
For industrial B2B, I think the opportunity is particularly interesting. And the people worth promoting might already be working for the company.
An expert doesn’t need to be an influencer
When we hear the word influencer, we usually think of someone with a large following who creates content professionally. But that is not necessarily what matters in industrial B2B.
Imagine an engineer explaining why a certain technology works better in one application than another. Or a service specialist sharing a practical observation from working with equipment in the field.
The audience might be relatively small. But for someone facing that exact technical challenge, the information could be highly relevant.
These are the kinds of people industrial buyers might want to hear from. Not because they have thousands of followers, but because they have knowledge and experience that is difficult to replace with a polished marketing message.
Of course, the company still needs to communicate as a brand. Product information, customer references and corporate messages all have their place. But allowing specialists to share their own perspectives adds something different.
Paid advertising changes the opportunity
One challenge with employee-generated content is reach. A technical expert might write an excellent LinkedIn post, but if their network is small, relatively few potential customers will ever see it.
This is where LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads become interesting.
Instead of promoting an advertisement published by the company page, we can sponsor a post from an individual. LinkedIn’s targeting then allows us to reach people at selected companies, in relevant industries or within specific professional functions.
For a manufacturer targeting a relatively small number of industrial companies, this gives us an opportunity to combine two things: the expertise of an individual and the precision of account-based advertising.
We are not dependent on the expert having a large following. We can help their content reach the people we believe will find it relevant.
And importantly, the message still comes from the person behind the knowledge.
What we have seen in practice
We have tested this approach ourselves in several industrial B2B campaigns, promoting content from technical experts rather than relying entirely on traditional company ads.
The campaigns were optimized for engagement, encouraging people to interact with the content rather than focusing on visits to a landing page.
What I found particularly interesting was how people interacted with the individual experts. We saw reactions to their content, but also people choosing to follow the experts themselves.
That is a different kind of interaction from someone clicking through to a product page.
It does not tell us whether those people will eventually become customers. And because the campaigns were optimized for engagement, we should not directly compare its click-through rates with campaigns focused on website traffic.
But it does suggest an opportunity worth exploring. Advertising can introduce potential customers to the people behind a company’s expertise, not just its products or brand.
And that relationship does not necessarily end when the campaign stops.
The challenge is getting experts involved
I don’t think the biggest challenge here is the advertising setup. LinkedIn has made the process relatively straightforward, although the individual must approve the promotion of their content.
The bigger challenge is finding the right people internally and helping them become comfortable sharing their knowledge.
Not every engineer wants to write LinkedIn posts, and we should not expect them to become professional content creators.
Marketing can help identify relevant topics, structure ideas and make the content easier to communicate. But if we rewrite everything into standard corporate language, we risk losing the very thing that makes the individual perspective interesting.
The content also needs to be genuinely useful. A specialist repeating a product brochure under their own name does not automatically make the message more credible.
A practical observation, an explanation of a common problem or a personal perspective on developments in the industry is often a more natural starting point.
There is also a longer-term opportunity here. Rather than promoting isolated posts, companies can gradually build recognition around selected experts whose knowledge is relevant to their customers.
Expertise deserves a wider audience
Industrial companies have spent years building knowledge within their organizations. Some of that knowledge is already being shared with customers through meetings, technical discussions, training and service visits.
Digital marketing gives us another way to make it accessible.
LinkedIn’s growing investment in creator marketing makes that easier, and Thought Leader Ads offer a practical way to reach relevant professional audiences beyond an employee’s existing network.
I don’t see this as replacing traditional B2B advertising. It is another way to communicate expertise, particularly in markets where technical understanding and confidence in the supplier matter.
Sometimes the most interesting person to put in front of a potential customer is not a hired influencer or someone from the marketing department.
It is the person who actually knows how the product works.
If you want to discuss how to combine expert-led content with targeted B2B advertising, just reach out to:
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
