Semrush Was Doing This Before It Had a Name
Olga did not arrive at Semrush with a B2B influencer marketing strategy. She arrived as a social media manager who could see that the company had no real community and that a handful of creators were already talking about the product without being asked. So she started paying attention to those people. She made sure their content got amplified. She commented on their posts. She built relationships before anyone in the company had the budget or the language to call it an influencer programme.
At the same time, a colleague was running outreach to give free Semrush accounts to one hundred creators a month. The goal was simple: get the tool into the hands of people whose audiences trusted them. If those creators genuinely used the platform, they would mention it. And the mentions that mattered were always the ones that came from real use. Not a paid post. Not a brief. Just someone showing their audience a tool that was actually in their workflow.
That is the thing about early stage B2B creator marketing that most brands miss when they try to replicate it later. It worked at Semrush because the product was strong and the relationships were authentic. The creators were not being paid to say something. They were being given access to something useful and choosing to talk about it. That distinction is the whole game.
The Creator Who Influences Other Creators Is the One You Want
When Olga talks about the B2B influencer landscape, she makes a distinction that most brands never think about. There are creators with large audiences. And then there are creators whose audiences are almost entirely made up of other creators and industry leaders. The second group is far smaller. They are also far harder to work with and far more valuable.
These people cannot be bought with a free account or a paid post. They protect their credibility because their credibility is the reason their audience trusts them. The only way to earn a mention from someone like this is to give them something they actually value: access to data, connections they do not already have, or a platform that exposes them to an audience worth reaching. The exchange is non-monetary but it is very real.
This is where B2B influencer marketing separates from B2C. In B2B, the people making buying decisions are often the same people producing content. When a VP of Marketing or a Head of Demand Gen shares your product, their audience is not passive consumers. It is other decision-makers. One authentic mention in that community is worth more than a hundred paid posts to a general audience.
Why Personal Brands Outperform Company Pages
Olga ran a test at Semrush that tells you everything you need to know about personal brands versus company pages. They shared the same infographic on the Semrush company account and on her personal account. The company account had ten times the followers. Her account drove more clicks to the page.
The reason is not complicated. When a brand posts, people know it is a brand posting. When a person shares something, people read it as a recommendation. The content is identical. The trust level is completely different. This is exactly why Thought Leader Ads work. You are not running a company ad. You are putting a trusted individual's content in front of the precise buying committee you need to reach, and that audience experiences it as a peer recommendation rather than a sales message.
The data backs this up. Individual reach on LinkedIn can be twelve times that of a company page. Olga saw this in practice years before it became a talking point in the industry.
Employee Advocacy Does Not Scale on Enthusiasm Alone
One of the most practical parts of this conversation was how Olga actually scaled employee advocacy at Semrush. The instinct most companies have is to run a culture initiative. Send a Slack message encouraging people to post. Host a workshop. Hope for the best. It does not work at scale.
What worked at Semrush was building a system. They hired a freelance writer whose job was to take every major company campaign or piece of news and turn it into ten to fifteen LinkedIn post variations. Those posts went into a shared channel. Employees could pick one up, label it taken, tweak the tone to fit their own voice, and post. Nobody had to stare at a blank screen. The creative barrier was gone.
The employees who became genuine thought leaders needed something different. Olga created a private mastermind group for the first twenty or so more senior people. Not a content calendar. Not a brief. A space where they could talk about what worked, what their audience cared about, and how to build a real point of view. The two tracks existed in parallel. One for reach, one for authority. Both matter. They are not the same thing.
The B2B Creator Economy Is Still in Early Innings
The number that should stop every B2B marketer in their tracks: there are approximately 150,000 active creators on LinkedIn. On TikTok and Instagram there are millions. Olga estimates that despite the volume of content now on the platform, only around 5% of LinkedIn members are actively posting.
That means the competition for creator relationships in B2B is nowhere near as fierce as it feels. The brands that are building those relationships now, identifying the right voices, running Thought Leader Ads to amplify trusted content directly in front of buying committees, and treating creators as long-term partners rather than one-off campaign assets, those brands are building something their competitors have not even started.
Semrush understood this in 2013. The window is still open for the brands paying attention today.
