Why influencer marketing matters to B2B brands

Influencer marketing has shifted from a “nice-to-have” tactic to a core part of modern B2B and tech marketing, bringing the reach and authenticity of social media to your product or brand to boost visibility and amplify your story. By connecting with carefully targeted audiences and driving high engagement, influencer marketing has turned into a $33 billion industry. Today, B2B buyers expect more than polished product pages. In fact, they want to hear from real practitioners using the tools they rely on every day

Within the influencer marketing landscape, creator marketing is the next evolution. Unlike one-off influencer marketing campaigns, creator marketing focuses on expert voices who consistently translate your product features into real workflows, scenarios, and outcomes their communities care about. These creators deliver always-on, evergreen content that builds brand trust and authenticity over time by helping real users. Your message shows up in the right feeds, from people your audience trusts, on a regular basis.  

Think scalable for success

To make this approach scalable, brands are turning to creator programs. Rather than juggling ad-hoc collaborations, a creator program is a structured, ongoing initiative to identify, recruit, and partner with the right creators so your brand shows up consistently where your audience is already paying attention. When done well, it becomes part of your go-to-market infrastructure, supporting launches, driving adoption, and feeding real-world feedback back into your product and marketing teams.  

Building a creator program that works is not simple. It is far more complex than sending a few DMs and signing contracts. Teams quickly discover the number of moving parts, tools, decisions, and strategic trade-offs involved. In this blog we will share what works, what doesn’t, and lessons that can help you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate success, and one B2B brand’s success building their creator program from the ground up.

Why creator marketing is worth it

At its core, creator marketing lets brands leverage trusted, third-party voices to reach people who might never see, follow, or possibly even trust their owned channels. Instead of your team explaining why your product matters, creators show how it fits into real workflows and solve real problems the way their communities actually work.  

For B2B and software brands, this is especially powerful because decision-makers want proof from peers and practitioners, not just claims in a campaign. A strong creator program can help you reach net-new audiences beyond your existing email lists and social handles, while also building credibility and a sense of community around your product.  

What creator marketing success looks like: Microsoft Excel Creator community

One of the best examples of what a mature creator program can do is the Microsoft Excel Creator community. By intentionally building a global network of expert-level Excel creators, the program turned a familiar product into an always-on education and inspiration engine for users worldwide.​

These creators produced a steady stream of content around Excel’s latest features with tutorials, tips, and real-world applications shared across social and video platforms that met people where they already spend their time. The result was hundreds of millions of impressions and a massive expansion in reach beyond traditional channels, but more importantly, it helped everyday users unlock new value from the product in their actual day-to-day workflows.​

This kind of program doesn’t just amplify awareness. It drives deeper product adoption, showcases real use cases, and creates a sense of community around innovation, all powered by trusted third-party voices instead of brand-only messaging.

Explore the full case study.

The hidden value of creator programs: feedback and ROI

Great creator programs do more than drive impressions and clicks. They become a live feedback engine for product and marketing teams. Creators sit close to your target users, and they hear what’s confusing, exciting, or frustrating in real time through comments, DMs, and community conversations.  

When you plug into that loop, creator content starts to inform roadmaps, messaging, and positioning. It surfaces use cases and objections your internal teams might never uncover on their own, while also generating evergreen content that keeps working long after a traditional campaign would have ended. That combination of insight and longevity is where creator programs start to show real ROI and give leaders the proof points they need to keep investing.  

Why creator marketing is hard to do in‑house

On paper, “Let’s launch a creator program” sounds manageable. In practice, most teams underestimate the operational lift. To run even a small program effectively, you need to understand your end-user personas, map them to creator personas, and vet a long list of potential partners before you ever sign a contract.

From there, the complexity only grows. There are contracts and briefing processes, clear content review guidelines, reporting infrastructure, and tools to pull reliable performance data across platforms. Layer on the time it takes to optimize—pivoting when content underperforms, doubling down when a new format lands—and it becomes obvious why “we’ll just doit ourselves” often leads to mediocre outcomes or abandoned pilots.  

Core building blocks of a successful creator program

Sustainable creator marketing comes from treating it as a productized program, not a one-off campaign. At minimum, a successful creator program needs:  

· Clear objectives and success metrics that tie directly to marketing and product goals, whether that’s adoption, usage, advocacy, revenue influence, or a mix.  

· Defined audience and creator personas that spell out who you’re trying to reach, what they care about, and which creator attributes—skills, style, platforms—will resonate.  

· A selection and vetting framework that looks at relevance, engagement quality, vertical expertise, and brand fit, instead of just follower counts.

· A program strategy that connects creators to launches, campaigns, and evergreen themes, so content feels cohesive instead of random.  

· Operational workflows for outreach, onboarding, briefing, approvals, and ongoing communication, so creators feel supported and aligned rather than left to guess.  

· Reporting and optimization loops that track engagement and downstream behavior, then feed those insights back into both the program and your broader GTM strategy.  

When these pieces are in place, a creator program stops being a set of disconnected posts and starts acting like a coordinated extension of your marketing and product engines.  

The tooling and data layer you can't skip

Behind the scenes, the right tooling makes or breaks your ability to scale. You’ll need to define ways to discover and track creators, pull performance data from multiple platforms, and consolidate campaign results into dashboards your stakeholders actually trust.  

That data layer also unlocks experimentation. With solid tracking in place, you can quickly test formats, audiences, and messaging, then shift budget toward what works instead of flying blind. Without it, teams end up relying on screenshots, anecdotal wins, and gut feel—which doesn’t hold up when you’re trying to secure budget or expand the program.

Why B2B brands call The Delightful Agency

Because platforms, formats, and creator expectations evolve so quickly, many brands lean on partners who live and breathe creator programs every day. Delightful has helped enterprise brands transform influencer marketing from one-off experiments into scalable, always-on programs that drive adoption, create feedback loops, and build communities around innovation.  

Enterprise clients trust Delightful because the team combines deep industry knowledge with agile execution. There is:

· Vertical expertise in tech and software, so complex products and nuanced audiences are understood from day one.  

· Full-service management across strategy, creator discovery and outreach, engagement, and analytics.  

· A nimble, responsive team that moves fast without the layers of bureaucracy that slow larger agencies.  

That approach doesn’t just deliver business results. It also earns recognition: Our Delightful Creator Program for Microsoft received a MarComm Award for excellence in strategic influencer marketing, highlighting the impact of building a global creator community that supports core business goals.  

Influencer marketing isn’t optional anymore. For B2B and tech brands, a thoughtful creator program is how you turn that reality into a durable advantage, driving adoption, fostering trust, and generating measurable ROI over the long term.

If you’re ready to build that kind of program, now is the time to start the conversation.  

Contact the Delightful team today to get started!