LinkedIn may have been slow to start, but the professional network platform just launched its own Creator Marketplace for the first time.
Monetising expertise
The new feature, available within Campaign Manager, brings together discovery, insights, and partnership tools to pair brands with creators.
According to LinkedIn, for creators, the marketplace facilitates partnerships and avenues for monetising expertise.
Opting in means creators agree to share their information with brands, while retaining control over collaboration, with a dedicated monetisation tab soon to be visible on profiles.
Zoning in on expertise and niche
On the brand-side, through the tool, marketers can search for vetted creators by topic and content expertise, audience and performance and identify organic and sponsored creator content featuring their brand, before amplifying this with Thought Leader Ads.
Brands can also extend campaigns by activating a curated video inventory through self-serve BrandLink.
Alongside this is the launch of BrandWorks, a team comprising brand, creative, content, and events experts — with hires from across TikTok, Meta and X — that will collaborate with brands and agency partners to deliver strategy and creative support.
The platform launches these offerings into a burgeoning creator economy, projected to reach almost $500 billion by 2027. The B2B creator economy is a growing subset of this ecosystem, built out from experts well-versed in different niches with followings that are highly engaged in their specialisms and trust their recommendations and endorsements.
Indeed, speaking to CMO Insider, Sam Corrao Clanon, Director of Product at LinkedIn, said: “Whereas on other platforms you might go to the marketplace to be like, 'What are the cheapest CPMs I can get if I push my messaging through people?' Here, what you're looking for are subject matter experts and practitioners in addition to capital 'C' creators that can speak credibly to their experience with your product.”
Trust and credibility
But the launch also sits within a broader shift: trust and credibility are increasingly being built outside of traditional brand messaging — 83% of B2B marketers now say that credibility matters more, according to LinkedIn’s own research. And when it comes to LinkedIn engagement, individual profiles now significantly outperform brands.
In tandem, creators are increasingly moving beyond just driving awareness to influencing decision-making, with 70% of marketers reporting that buyers place more weight on peer voices and experts than brand-produced content. At the same time, over half of B2B buyers rely on creator input in the final stage of the buying process to validate recommendations.
Since the launch last week, Creator Marketplace is in alpha, available for select brands and creators in North America and English-only content, while organic content discovery and self-serve BrandLink are now both available globally.
The move seems to signal yet another step towards creators being considered as both a legitimate and valuable partner within the marketing ecosystem.
