Start with your buyer, not the creator
Before you search, write down exactly who you need to reach: role, seniority, company size, industry, and the problem they're trying to solve. "VP of RevOps at 200-1,000 person SaaS companies frustrated with messy attribution" is a brief. "Marketing people" is not.
This profile becomes your filter for everything that follows. The goal isn't to find the biggest creator—it's to find the creator whose followers most closely match that one sentence. A perfect-fit audience of 5,000 beats a loose-fit audience of 50,000 every time.
Where to actually look
Mine your own world first. Search the hashtags and topics your buyers follow on LinkedIn and X, and see whose posts keep surfacing. Check who your competitors and adjacent tools have sponsored—podcast back-catalogs and newsletter archives are public and full of names. Ask your customers who they learn from; the answer is often a specific creator or newsletter.
Look sideways, not just up. Conference speaker lists, podcast guest rosters, and the comment sections under high-engagement posts surface operators with real credibility who may not bill themselves as "influencers." A marketplace like Marquee compresses this: you browse vetted B2B creators by channel and topic with their real rates listed, so sourcing and pricing happen in one step instead of weeks of outreach.
Vetting signals that matter
Read the comments, not the like count. Real B2B influence shows up as substantive replies from people in the target role—questions, disagreements, shared experiences. A wall of emoji or generic "Great post!" replies is a warning sign. Engagement rate (interactions divided by followers) above ~2% on LinkedIn is healthy; well below 1% suggests a bought or stale audience.
Check consistency and topic focus. A creator who posts steadily on one domain has compounding authority; one who jumps between unrelated sponsorships has a transactional audience that tunes out ads. Scroll their last 10-15 posts: do they sound like someone your buyer would trust, and have past sponsorships felt native or bolted-on?
Red flags to screen out
Watch for follower spikes with no matching jump in engagement, comment sections full of accounts outside your market, and creators who promote a new tool every week. Vague or evasive answers about audience demographics are a tell—a serious creator can tell you who reads them.
Be wary of anyone who won't share a media kit or sample of past work, or who only quotes prices behind a wall of negotiation. Transparency is itself a quality signal. Listed, public rates and a clear sense of audience make a creator far easier to trust and far faster to book.
Key takeaways
- →Define your exact buyer first; that one sentence is your filter for every creator.
- →Source from hashtags, competitor sponsorships, podcast guests, and customer recommendations.
- →Vet on comment quality and engagement rate, not follower count.
- →Red flags: follower spikes without engagement, off-target comments, and constant new sponsorships.
- →Marketplaces with listed rates collapse sourcing and pricing into one step.