AJ Eckstein, the founder of Creator Match, has some of the wisest insights into the world of B2B marketing right now. The agency is 2 years old, manages 8 figures in creator spend, and has run campaigns for brands like Notion, Airtable, Lovable, and Anthropic.
So when we asked him where a B2B team should start a creator program, we assumed the answer would involve, well, creators. He told us to start with employees.
He calls this playbook the “content flywheel” (you know we love flywheels around here!), which runs in three layers — and the order matters more than anything else:
EGC: employee-generated content. Your founders and team, posting first.UGC: user- and customer-generated content. The people already talking about you.IGC: influencer-generated content. Paid creators, once you know what works.Here's how to run each layer, what to get right once money enters the picture, and how to price a creator so you're not guessing.
Key takeaways:
Start with employee-generated content (no money, no usage-rights headaches), layer in customers who already talk about you, and only write checks to external creators once you know what “good” looks like. Get your paid media and influencer teams in a room before anything goes live. Most B2B creator programs fall apart at the usage-rights stage because nobody asked the paid team what they needed before the creator made it. The bar for B2B content is low. Add a little storytelling and you're 50% above average; add a human face (aka a creator!) and you're golden. B2B creator content is easier to crack than you think B2B has one big advantage when it comes to creator marketing: The bar isn't particularly high.
“If you look at some of these ads on LinkedIn, the creative is horrible. It's mostly AI slop. So you add a little storytelling, and you're already 50% above average. Then you put a human face, like a creator, and you’re golden.”
Creator Match has built a business on that gap.
For Notion's “New Year, New You” campaign , Creator Match coordinated roughly 50 creators to change their LinkedIn headshots to custom Notion Faces on the same day. AJ says the campaign took over LinkedIn to the point that, before his team had even sent the wrap report, the client already knew it worked.
“The best part is the aura from the campaign, the vibe,” he says. “Everybody was talking about them.”
He also helped run an experimentation at Airtable, which built its Hyperagent launch around creators, and at Lovable, where AJ especially likes that creators have room to build campaigns around their own ideas.
“The tool is almost in the passenger seat, and the creator is still in the driver's seat,” he adds.
For most B2B teams, the harder question is how to get there without burning through the creator budget before you've figured out what you're doing.
Why B2B creator campaigns fall apart (it's not the creators) Here's how AJ sees a lot of B2B creator programs start: The marketing team gets a budget, finds a few influencers, negotiates the deals, approves the content, and gets it live. Then someone spots a post performing well and asks the obvious question: Can we turn this into an ad?
That's when it falls apart.
The content was built to work as a sponsored post. Nobody asked the paid team what they needed before the creator made it.
AJ sees that disconnect constantly: “Right now, the performance/paid team and the influencer team don't talk to each other, but they could be each other's best friends.”
His team fixes that by getting both sides in a room before anything goes live. They discuss: What does paid want to boost? Where are they short on creative? Which product or channel needs more content? Those answers shape the creator campaign from the start, because by the time you're debating usage rights and handing content over to paid media, you're already deep into the process.
Creator Match built out a paid media team in house to boost influencer content at scale for the brands that don’t have bandwidth or the knowledge to pull it off.
The brands AJ sees struggle aren't picking the wrong creators. They're starting at the end.
“I would actually start with no budget, as you’ll likely need to show some glimpses of success to leadership before unlocking budget,” AJ says.
Not what you'd expect to hear from someone whose company manages 8 figures in creator spend.
But AJ's argument is that creator marketing works better when you build toward the budget instead of starting with it.
Begin with employee-generated content (EGC). Then activate user- and customer-generated content (UGC). Only after those two layers are working do you start spending on influencer-generated content (IGC).
EGC is the easiest place to start because no money has to move and there's no conversation about usage rights.
The brand behind the brand: Brian Chesky has become part of Airbnb's product marketing. Jensen Huang and his leather jacket have become the face of the AI boom. Tobi Lütke's very-online founder persona is inseparable from how people experience Shopify.AJ thinks founders and executives have an especially important role here. He points to companies like Airbnb, Tesla, Shopify, and NVIDIA, where the people running the company have become “the brand behind the brand.”
“People don't follow brands anymore,” AJ says. “They follow people.”
AJ notes that this gets more complicated for public companies, where employees may not always know what's safe to share. The principle still applies, but the guardrails need to be much clearer.
You don't need to convince the CFO to hand you $100,000 to find out whether the model can work for your company.
AJ's version of the program runs in 3 stages. Each one teaches your team something they'll need before they're ready for the next.
Play #1: Start with employee-generated content (EGC) Before you spend a dollar on creators, AJ recommends spending a month or two getting your own people to create (something Buffer figured out too !).
That means founders, executives, and employees posting about the work they're already doing. It gives the team a chance to figure out what people respond to before contracts, creator fees, and usage rights enter the picture.
AJ has seen this work inside Creator Match.
During a recent hiring cycle, the team turned employees into the distribution channel. Their in-house designer made custom graphics for anyone who wanted to post. AJ offered to review drafts for people who needed help getting theirs out the door.
Roughly half a dozen people posted, each telling their own version of the story: the CEO on starting the company, others from marketing and account management on theirs. AJ estimates those posts generated more than 400,000 impressions .
“Spend a month or two building your in-house creator program,” AJ says. “Once you start building that muscle, you get a bit more comfortable and start building an appetite for, ‘OK, I can see the value.’”
Play #2: Turn customers and advocates into creators (UGC) Some of your customers are probably already talking about your product. Others are saying great things in Slack channels, emails, sales calls, or conversations with your team, but nobody has ever suggested they share any of it publicly.
Those are your next creators.
“There might be some people — let's say storyarb as an example, or beehiiv as an example — where they love your product. They actually talk about it already on social. Or you know that internally they talk about it, but they've never been encouraged to post.”
You might be tempted to turn that enthusiasm into a polished testimonial.
Instead, you should amplify those customers and internal advocates, AJ says.
Your employee program has already taught you what good creator content looks like and how to support someone without writing the post for them. Now you can apply that muscle to people who have something your employees don't: firsthand experience as a customer.
Once both groups are creating content people actually want to see, you've got a much better reason to start spending money on the next play.
Play #3: Match the creator to your marketing goal (IGC) AJ doesn't start an external creator campaign by asking which influencers a brand wants to work with. He starts with a much less exciting question: What does success look like?
“Success can look like a million things,” he says.
Sometimes it's qualitative: Leadership wants to see the brand showing up in the right feeds before approving more budget. A sales team wants prospects to start saying, “I saw you on XYZ channel.”
Other times, there’s a number attached: CPM, clicks, customer acquisition cost, or ROAS.
The answer changes who you should hire.
The mapping holds wherever your audience is. Creator Match runs programs across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube, and the same goal-to-creator logic applies on all of them.
The biggest shift happens when you're buying creative rather than reach.
“You need more content, but you don't actually need the content to perform organically,” AJ says. “The value will be created in the boosting aspect.”
That opens the door to creators with much smaller audiences. A creator with 5,000 followers and a killer video can be more useful than one with 500,000 if you're going to put paid media behind the content anyway.
“I'm going to work with the best creators that make the best creative — even if it doesn't perform organically, because maybe they don't have an audience,” AJ says.
This is where usage rights matter. If you want to turn creator content into paid media, your agreement needs to give you permission to do it. Some creators won't allow brands to boost content using their name or likeness, but may still allow the content to run from the brand's ad account.
The audience you're renting and the creative you're buying are 2 different things. Know which one you need before you pay for both. And remember that when you boost — say, on LinkedIn (via Thought Leader Ads) — you are “renting” the creator’s NIL (name, image, and likeness), and since B2B is all a trust game, you are buying more than just content.
How to run a paid creator campaign without wasting budget Rule 1: Let the creator cook Once you've found the right creator, resist the urge to write the post for them.
AJ says the best campaigns give creators a clear job and plenty of room to decide how to do it.
When Notion launched its offline mode, the brief wasn't a script explaining how the feature worked. Creators were told to go do something interesting offline.
“Notion Finally Works Offline” Thomas Frank Explains They could head to the beach, the mountains, a ski slope, even get on a helicopter. The product had a role in the story, but the creator got to decide what the story was.
Compare that with asking someone to sit in an office, turn off the Wi-Fi, and demonstrate offline mode. “The best-performing campaigns are the ones where you, for lack of a better phrase, let the creator cook,” AJ adds.
You've hired them because they know how to make content their audience wants to watch.
Give them enough room to prove it.
Rule 2: Price creators on performance, not their title Creator pricing in B2B is still, in AJ's words, the “Wild, Wild West.”
A CMO might charge $500 for a post, while another creator asks for $15,000. The title next to their name won't tell you which is the better deal.
Performance data will.
“You have to back it by actual performance data,” AJ says. “If you average 20,000 impressions per post, you can literally assign a CPM to calculate what your cost is.”
Once you know the metric you're buying against, a creator's rate stops being a number floating in space.
Rule 3: Sell the use case, not the feature “Nobody cares about the next feature that launched,” AJ says. Power users might follow every update, but most people care much more about what the product lets them do.
For a compliance platform like Vanta, AJ says that's relatively straightforward: Its audience largely falls into two camps, founders and CISOs.
Products like Loom, Airtable, Typeform, and Claude have a different problem. The same product can solve completely different problems for marketers, salespeople, finance teams, founders, or students.
AJ recommends building a “starting five” of creators around those use cases.
How Creator Match built itself with the same playbook Creator Match was built this way too.
Before the company existed, AJ was posting on LinkedIn to promote a podcast for job seekers. That content helped him spot a problem worth building a business around: Creators had audiences on the platform, but almost no way to monetize them. Creator Match was the first agency to pay out $1M to B2B creators on LinkedIn. Now, they manage 8 figures in spend.
The customers came the same way. So did the talent. So did his COO Tara Knight , who found the company through a post.
AJ has a name for it: "outbound content to inbound DMs."
Which is the argument for the flywheel. Start inside the company and learn what people respond to, then bring customers in once you know what good looks like. By the time you're writing checks to external creators, you'll know who the content is for and what you're paying it to do.
Most teams find that out in reverse order. It costs them a lot more.
FAQ How do you build a B2B creator program with no budget? Start with employee-generated content (EGC) before spending on external creators. Have founders, executives, and employees post about the work they're already doing, as it's the lowest-risk way to learn what your audience responds to. AJ's team turned a single hiring push into more than 400K impressions with about half a dozen employees posting.
What are EGC, UGC, and IGC in creator marketing? They're the three layers of a B2B creator program, run in order: EGC (employee-generated content) is your team posting, UGC (user- and customer-generated content) activates the people already talking about you, and IGC (influencer-generated content) entails hiring paid creators once you know what works. The sequence matters: Most teams start at IGC and pay to learn what EGC would have taught them for free.
Do you need usage rights to boost influencer content as ads? Yes, boosting creator content as paid media requires usage rights written into the agreement before the content is made. Most B2B creator programs fall apart here: The team runs the campaign, spots a winning post, then discovers they never bought the rights to turn it into an ad. On LinkedIn (via Thought Leader Ads), boosting also means renting the creator's name, image, and likeness, so you're paying for trust, not just creative.
Should we pick creators by follower count? Depends on what you're buying. If you want organic reach, larger creators with predictable impressions make sense. But if you're going to put paid media behind the content, you're buying creative, not audience; a creator with 5,000 followers and a killer video can outperform one with 500,000. Just make sure your usage rights allow you to boost before you pay for both.
