A B2B influencer is someone whose opinion carries weight in other companies' buying decisions in a specific sector: an engineer who writes about maintenance, a lean consultant, a lecturer, an analyst, the journalist on a trade title. You can't spot them by follower count. You spot them by who reads them and how often their name comes up when a buyer is doing research.
To see where these people sit in the UK, we ran a simple test: we took eight searches typical of an industrial buyer and looked at who holds page one of Google UK. Of 67 organic results, not one was a page published by a person on their own channel. The rest were manufacturers, software houses, consultancies, public bodies, professional associations and a handful of publishers. That result changes how you should look for industry influencers, and you'll find it explained below along with the method we use.
How a B2B influencer differs from a B2C one
In B2C an influencer sells to their followers, often with a discount code and a purchase made the same day. In B2B the buying journey is long, involves several people, and most of the audience isn't buying anything at that moment. Edelman and LinkedIn's 2024 B2B thought leadership study, run with almost 3,500 managers in seven countries, measured it: 95% of business customers say they aren't actively looking for goods or services at any given time.
In the same research, Edelman reports that 75% of buyers and managers started researching a product or service they hadn't been considering after reading a piece of thought leadership, and that 73% see it as a more reliable basis than marketing material for judging a supplier's capabilities. These are global figures, not UK ones, but they explain why in B2B what matters is who writes the things a buyer reads before they need you.
| B2C influencer | B2B influencer | |
|---|---|---|
| Who they are | Creator with a broad audience | Professional with an audience of peers and decision-makers |
| Metric that counts | Followers, reach, sales through a code | Who reads them, how often they're quoted, their role in decisions |
| Where they publish | Instagram, TikTok, YouTube | LinkedIn, trade publications, conferences, podcasts, newsletters, sometimes no social media at all |
| Time to results | Days | Months, because it follows the sales cycle |
| How you find them | Influencer marketing platforms | Search, events, customers, article bylines |
The practical point is the last row. The influencer marketing platforms you come across when you search for "how to find influencers" (70 searches a month on Google UK, and 140 for "find influencers", according to Google Ads data pulled through DataForSEO on 10 October 2026) index creators with large followings on Instagram and TikTok. For a company selling machinery, business software or technical services that database is close to useless, because the person who moves a six-figure order may have a few thousand LinkedIn connections and no Instagram profile at all.
The test: who has a voice on Google in eight UK industrial searches
On 10 October 2026 we used DataForSEO to pull page one of Google UK (desktop, United Kingdom, English) for eight queries an industrial buyer uses when researching: predictive maintenance, full expensing (the UK tax relief on plant and machinery, the closest equivalent to Italy's Transizione 5.0 incentive), MES software, how to calculate OEE, digital twin manufacturing, cobots, industrial IoT and lean manufacturing. Then we classified every organic result by hand according to who publishes it.
| Query | Organic results | Companies (manufacturers, software, consultants) | Trade media and publishers | Public bodies, research, associations, encyclopaedias | People (personal channel) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| predictive maintenance | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| full expensing | 8 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| mes software | 8 | 6 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| how to calculate oee | 9 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| digital twin manufacturing | 9 (1 video) | 5 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| cobots | 7 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| industrial iot | 8 (1 video) | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| lean manufacturing | 9 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 0 |
| Total | 67 | 44 (66%) | 3 (4%) | 18 (27%) | 0 (0%) |
Three things stand out. First: two results in three are company pages, from SAP, Dassault Systèmes, AVEVA and Autodesk to UK firms such as the accountants Price Bailey, the integrator Cobots Online and the distributor Farnell. Second: in the UK the second voice isn't the trade press but institutions, with 18 results. Some are British, such as GOV.UK, ACCA, CIPS, TWI, the Manufacturing Technology Centre, Enginuity and Automate UK; others are Wikipedia, Gartner and US bodies such as the EPA and ASQ. Seven of the 18 are on lean manufacturing alone. Trade media get only three results, and one of them, Plant Engineering, is a US title. Third: there's no personal page at all. The only LinkedIn result, on OEE, is a post published under the brand name Shakehand with Life, not under a person's name.
The AI Overviews tell the same story. Google showed one on all eight queries and we could read the sources every time: 64 citations in all, with YouTube appearing on five queries, Wikipedia on four, SAP on three, and IBM and TWI on two. None of the sources was a person's profile. On "full expensing" three of the eight citations were GOV.UK pages, and on predictive maintenance and lean manufacturing the AI Overview quoted TWI, the Cambridge-based research and technology organisation.
What this means if you're looking for industry influencers
In a technical sector the influencer almost never presents themselves as one. They sit behind a brand: the engineer who writes the article on a manufacturer's blog, the consultant who writes the guide to OEE, the researcher at a catapult centre or professional body, the journalist who covers manufacturing for a trade title. On Google you see the domain, not the person. To find them you have to open the page and read the byline.
That has two consequences. If you look for influencers with follower filters, in industrial B2B you'll find almost nobody. If instead you start from the pages your buyer actually reads, you'll find a short and highly qualified list of names, and you'll discover that some of them work for a competitor, so they can't be engaged but you need to know who they are. The same logic applies to AI search engines, as we saw in our test of what AI Overviews cite in digital PR.
Where to find B2B influencers: six sources ranked by yield
1. The SERPs for your queries and the article bylines
Take 10-20 informational queries in your sector, the ones a buyer uses before asking for a quote, and open the top ten results for each. Note the author of every page, the publication or company they write for and how many times they come back. If you don't have the list of queries yet, you'll get it from a properly built B2B SEO strategy. Anyone who appears on three or four different queries is a name to keep. The same goes for results that aren't articles: YouTube videos, conference talks, PDFs from associations.
2. Trade publications
In our UK test trade media barely made page one, but that doesn't mean they don't count: every sector has its own technical titles, in print and online, and buyers read them outside Google too. Look at who writes regularly, who gets interviewed and who has a column. A specialist journalist who has covered a subject for years is often the most underrated influencer in B2B, because they decide who gets written about.
3. LinkedIn, with the right search
LinkedIn is still the main channel for B2B. Searching posts, filtered by technical keywords and language, brings out the people who publish regularly on the subject. Sales Navigator adds filters for industry, role and company size. The check that matters is reading the comments: if production managers, buyers and technical directors comment under someone's posts, that person has the audience you need. If only other marketers comment, they don't.
4. Trade shows and conferences
Conference programmes are ready-filtered lists of people the sector considers authoritative. For UK manufacturing that means looking at the speakers at shows such as Advanced Engineering (NEC Birmingham, 4-5 November 2026) and MACH (NEC Birmingham, next edition 3-7 April 2028), at the webinars run by trade associations and at events from programmes like Made Smarter and centres like the MTC, which also appeared in our test. Anyone invited to speak several times in a year has already passed someone else's selection.
5. Podcasts and newsletters
In technical sectors there are small podcasts and newsletters read by very targeted people. You search for them by keyword on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and newsletters are often on Substack or LinkedIn. A tool like SparkToro helps you see which sources a given audience follows, although on small niche audiences the data is thinner.
6. Your customers and your CRM
It's the source almost nobody uses. Ask your sales team who a customer mentioned during a negotiation, which consultant recommended the supplier, which outside engineer was involved in the choice. In the records of deals won and lost you'll find the names that really carry weight, including people who publish nothing online. It's also the quickest way to work out where to find new B2B customers like the ones you have. The same exercise helps with B2B lead generation strategies, because it tells you who brought you your best leads.
How to assess a candidate before you get in touch
A list of names isn't yet a list of influencers. For each candidate you need answers to a few questions, and it's worth putting them in a table you share with sales.
| Criterion | Question to ask | Where to check |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Are the people who read and comment potential customers of yours? | LinkedIn comments, newsletter subscribers, event attendees |
| Search presence | Do they appear on your sector's queries, on Google or in AI answers? | SERPs for your queries, AI Overview sources |
| Third-party mentions | Do others quote them, interview them, invite them? | Trade publications, conference programmes, podcasts |
| Consistency | Have they covered your topics for at least a year, or changed subject recently? | Archive of their content |
| Conflicts | Do they work, or have they worked, with a direct competitor? | Profile, declared partnerships |
| Style | Does the way they write fit your brand? | Read ten recent pieces |
Engagement rate, the first metric in B2C, needs reading with care here. A technical post with 30 comments from plant directors is worth more than one with 3,000 likes from students and marketing colleagues.
What the US data says
We haven't found public UK research on how B2B companies select influencers. The most recent reference we found is TopRank Marketing's 2025 report, based on 404 marketing professionals at US B2B companies with at least 100 employees. It's a US sample of mid-sized and large companies, so the numbers don't carry straight over to the UK market, but they show where the difficulties lie.
| How US B2B marketers find influencers | Share |
|---|---|
| Social media research | 52% |
| Recommendations from trusted sources | 50% |
| Web searches | 49% |
| Influencer discovery tools | 40% |
The same report says that for 48% of respondents the main difficulty is precisely identifying, qualifying and contacting the right influencers, and that 43% report excellent results from their programmes. Web search comes third: from what we saw in our test, in UK industrial B2B it's the method to move to first place.
What UK rules require
In the UK there's no follower threshold. The Competition and Markets Authority's guidance for influencers (last updated 3 September 2025) applies "no matter how many followers you have", and counts any incentive as payment, including free products. It asks for a clear label such as "Ad" placed up front, and says that tagging the brand or using a discount code isn't enough on its own. A B2B specialist with 2,000 LinkedIn connections who is paid for a post is covered just like a creator.
The ASA and CAP influencers' guide (third edition, March 2023) sets out the same principle from the advertising codes: paid content has to be obviously identifiable as advertising. The CMA frames its guidance around consumer protection law, so a post aimed only at engineers in other companies sits in a less clear-cut area. In B2B there's also a practical reason to label it anyway: an engineer who loses credibility with peers over an undeclared sponsored post is no longer any use to you or to themselves.
How to approach them without burning the contact
Industry influencers get fewer proposals than consumer ones, but they also accept them less readily, because their reputation is their work. The approaches that work usually give something before asking:
- original data to comment on, for example a market analysis or a test like the one in this article
- an invitation to a webinar or panel as a speaker, not as a testimonial
- a co-authored piece in which their name stays front and centre
- early access to a product or tool to try out and judge freely
Payment is fine, but in B2B the request "publish a post about us" is almost always the one that gets the fewest replies. A B2B content marketing plan that includes collaborative content makes the proposal feel more natural.
How to measure your work with B2B influencers
Sales come months later, so you need interim indicators. The four most useful are: growth in Google searches for your brand name, brand mentions in trade publications and third-party content, mentions in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and leads who say during qualification that they heard of you through that person. For AI answers, the measurement method is in our guide to AI visibility.
If the influencer's content includes a link to your site from an authoritative publication, you also get a link building benefit, but it shouldn't be treated as the main goal: a link demanded as a condition of the collaboration is the quickest way to make the collaboration look less credible.
Frequently asked questions
Someone whose opinion shapes other companies' buying choices in a sector: an engineer, a consultant, an analyst, a lecturer or a specialist journalist. You judge them by who reads them and how often they're quoted, not by follower count.
There's no threshold. In an industrial sector someone with a few thousand LinkedIn connections can matter more than a creator with hundreds of thousands of followers, if the people reading them are technical managers and buyers.
Mostly LinkedIn, but not only. In our test of eight UK industrial searches, the people with influence showed up as authors of articles on company sites and at professional bodies, or as speakers at trade shows and conferences, never on a personal channel.
Start from the searches your customer makes: open the top Google results for your sector's queries, read who writes the articles, and cross-check the names against conference speakers and what your sales team hears after deals.
Yes. In the UK the CMA's guidance for influencers applies no matter how many followers someone has and counts any incentive, including free products, as payment. The ASA and CAP influencers' guide also requires paid content to be clearly labelled as advertising, for example with "Ad" up front.
It depends on the sales cycle. Interim indicators, such as brand searches and mentions, move before contracts do, and in industry contracts follow negotiations that often last months.
The influencer you're missing may already work for you
You can also read the test result the other way round. If two results in three on industrial searches are company pages, the people who write those pages already have a voice in the sector; they just often don't sign them. An in-house engineer who publishes under their own name, on the company blog and on LinkedIn, answering the questions buyers ask Google and AI assistants, can within a couple of years become the person others quote.
We've seen it in manufacturing with Macropix, an Italian maker of custom LED screens: on the keyword "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) the site went from position 88 in 2020 to position 2 in 2025, with a page written on a subject the company genuinely had something to say about, and in July 2026 it had a 25.55% share of voice on its keyword group, ahead of Amazon. There are more cases on our projects page. If you want to find out which queries in your sector are still uncovered and who is being quoted instead of you, that's the work we do in our SEO for AI service.
