A managed marketplace, not a message in your DMs
LinkedIn launched Creator Marketplace on 10 June 2026, rolling it out first in alpha to US and Canadian users for English-language content only. The marketplace lives inside Campaign Manager under a new Content and Assets section, putting creator discovery in the same interface where brands already run ads.
Marketers can search for vetted creators by topic and content expertise, then assess each creator's profile for audience, performance, and fit. Eligible creators sign up via a new Monetization tab, which links through to the marketplace listing flow. Creator contact information is visible in the marketplace, allowing direct outreach over potential promotions and collaborations.
What used to happen through cold LinkedIn messages, agency introductions, or third-party platforms now happens inside the tool where B2B ad budgets already live. LinkedIn's ambition is to monetise the full path from creator discovery to paid amplification without a marketer leaving Campaign Manager.
Why LinkedIn is pushing this now
B2B influencer marketing has crossed from experiment to line item. LinkedIn's 2026 Global B2B Marketing Outlook, a YouGov study of 1,299 B2B marketers across the US, UK, France, Germany, and India conducted between January and February 2026, found that 82% of B2B marketers say creators increase credibility with decision-makers, while 56% of B2B buyers say they depend on creator input in the final stage of the buying process.
B2B brands allocated $4.1 billion to influencer programmes in 2026, a 47% increase year-over-year, far outpacing the roughly 30% growth in the broader influencer marketing industry. 55% of B2B marketers already use influencer or creator marketing on LinkedIn, with another 29% planning to adopt it within the next year, and brands running these programmes outperform non-users by up to 39% on customer engagement and brand awareness, and by 30% on revenue growth and lead generation.
The demand was there. The infrastructure wasn't.
How it actually works
Brands can search creators by topic and content expertise, then assess audience, performance, and fit. They can identify organic and sponsored creator content that features their company, amplify it with Thought Leader Ads, and access creator contact information to open partnership conversations.
Creators who opt in can hand-pick and feature their favourite original content, choose how brands reach them, and approve how their sponsored content is used. According to reporting by Metricool in 2026, LinkedIn does not take a commission and does not process payments in Creator Marketplace,fees and settlements are negotiated directly between brands and creators.
That flexibility gives both sides control, but it also means the platform isn't mediating contracts, usage rights, or exclusivity clauses. You still need a brief.
The part nobody else can copy
LinkedIn starts with its proprietary data: professional audience, job titles, industries, interactions, and published formats,exactly what B2B advertisers have been looking for. Brands can assess each creator's audience composition and content performance, identify existing organic and sponsored content that mentions their brand, and amplify selected posts through Thought Leader Ads.
The advantage isn't just discovery. It's targeting layered on top of influence. A third-party tool can tell you someone has 80,000 LinkedIn followers. LinkedIn can tell you 12,000 of them are senior marketing leaders in SaaS companies in North America, and that the creator's posts on paid media strategy get 4.2% engagement from that segment specifically.
That level of professional targeting is what separates LinkedIn's marketplace from the consumer equivalents.
What this changes for brands
Most B2B creator partnerships previously happened informally or through external agencies, and having it built into Campaign Manager, with audience data and performance metrics visible upfront, makes it easier for brands to evaluate fit.
The shift isn't just operational. Employee-generated content marketing could be transformed, as executives and internal creators now have visible metrics to be measured against. If your Head of Product has 15,000 followers and consistently drives engagement in your target accounts, that's no longer anecdotal,it's measurable, and it sits in the same system where you're already spending six figures a quarter on LinkedIn ads.
For brands used to working with external creators, the question becomes whether the marketplace offers better signal than their existing relationships. For those who haven't run B2B influencer programmes yet, it removes the main barrier: they no longer need to figure out how to find credible voices or structure deals from scratch.
What this changes for creators
Creator Marketplace hands creators something they've never had on LinkedIn before: full control over how brand partnerships happen. The marketplace is currently in alpha, available in North America only, with global expansion planned but not yet announced.
The creators who were already building consistently in public before this launched are now sitting on a real asset, and the ones starting now still have time to build that track record before the marketplace scales globally.
But there's a vetting layer. Not everyone gets in. LinkedIn hasn't published the criteria, but the marketplace is described as "vetted creators", which means someone at LinkedIn, or an algorithm, is deciding who qualifies. If you're building an audience now, you're building towards eligibility, not guaranteed access.
The part that sits alongside it
LinkedIn also announced BrandWorks, an internal team of brand, creative, content, and events experts that provides hands-on strategy and production support to B2B marketers. BrandWorks is offered to select managed customers, not as a general-availability product, and is available globally.
Through its predecessor programme Top Voices 360, which pairs advertisers with creators for sponsored content, LinkedIn generated over $20 million in revenue between May 2025 and May 2026, with clients including SAP, IBM, and ServiceNow. LinkedIn reportedly aims for BrandWorks to reach a $100 million annualised revenue run rate in the next fiscal year.
Creator Marketplace is the self-serve tool. BrandWorks is the done-for-you service. Together, they give LinkedIn two routes into the same B2B influencer budget.
What to watch next
How fast Creator Marketplace expands beyond North America and English-language content will determine how quickly enterprise brands can operationalise it. Brands with global teams can't run a creator programme at scale if it only works in two countries.
Whether rival platforms answer with their own B2B creator tooling is the second signal. If Meta or YouTube launch competing tools with professional targeting, LinkedIn's first-mover advantage shrinks. If they don't, LinkedIn owns the category.
According to internal strategy documents reviewed by Business Insider, LinkedIn is developing a suite of new monetisation tools for creators, including the brand deals marketplace now launched, a subscription product allowing creators to charge for access to newsletters, podcasts, and paywalled communities, and a potential creator fund, with plans to roll out the features heading into fiscal year 2027, which begins in July 2026.
If subscriptions and a creator fund arrive, LinkedIn stops being a discovery and amplification layer and becomes a full creator economy platform. At that point, the value for a B2B creator shifts from "I can get brand deals here" to "I can build a sustainable income here without leaving the platform".
The underlying bet
82% of B2B marketers say working with creators increases credibility with decision-makers, and 56% of B2B buyers say they rely on creator input at the final stage of the buying process.
LinkedIn's bet is that trust in B2B is moving from institutions to individuals, and that the platform that mediates those relationships controls a growing share of how enterprise software, services, and solutions get discovered and validated.
Creator Marketplace is the infrastructure for that bet. Whether it works depends on whether brands find better creators faster than they did before, and whether those creators generate better outcomes than the alternatives. The data on adoption and performance will tell that story over the next two quarters.
For now, B2B influencer marketing just became a managed product, not a DIY project.