While TikTok and Instagram compete for dance trends and lifestyle content, AJ Eckstein sees untapped potential in B2B marketing on LinkedIn. As the founder and CEO of Creator Match, AJ has transformed the professional networking site into a profitable space for creator monetization, working with leading companies like HubSpot, Notion, and Teachable.

From LinkedIn Creator to Founder

AJ’s path to LinkedIn creator marketing emerged from direct experience. As a content creator on the platform, he witnessed the monetization challenges firsthand.

“I have some creator friends who have 500,000 followers on LinkedIn, get millions of impressions per post, but have never made a penny from the platform,” AJ explains, contrasting it with the system on YouTube where “you don’t have to have any brand deals; you just get money through AdSense.”

At creator events, AJ noticed a clear bias. “I’d go to these creator events and conferences, and you have a roundtable, and you’re like, ‘What primary platform are you on?’ ‘I’m on YouTube.’ ‘I’m on TikTok.’ ‘That’s so cool and exciting.’ And then I say LinkedIn, and everyone’s like, ‘Is that a joke? You’re kidding, right?'”

This experience sparked a key realization: “You should always, as selfish as it sounds, build for yourself first and then try to find other people who experience similar problems,” AJ shares. “I am a LinkedIn creator. I’ve always said that my first and primary social media channel was LinkedIn, which was unique. Traditional brand marketing, especially B2B, has been the same recycled boring playbook. It was time for a refresh.”

Creating the B2B Marketing Infrastructure

Creator Match operates through two key services: managing influencer marketing campaigns for major brands as an agency and developing specialized tools for LinkedIn creator marketing through their free Chrome Extension and campaign management SaaS.

“We have both an agency where we run the influencer marketing for the biggest brands in the world—it’s a done-for-you service,” AJ explains. “And then we’re also building technology to build and power the infrastructure since LinkedIn doesn’t offer an API and other companies can’t just plug in.”

The company stands out through its comprehensive campaign management. “You need a dedicated team to run effective creator marketing,” AJ notes. “It’s interesting that most people think brands with an influencer marketing manager still do everything in-house, which is untrue. Many brands we work with just want an extension of the influencer marketing team because they may want to take YouTube and TikTok in-house, but they outsource things they’re not experts in.”

Their campaign process follows clear steps. “We start with a discovery call with a brand to understand what they want to do and what constitutes success,” AJ shares. “Once we decide to move forward, we send over a partnership agreement. Our team builds out the creative strategy and the campaign brief, which outlines everything from who the company is to the campaign’s focus, the creative idea, the objective, rates, and deliverables.”

Creator selection involves multiple criteria. “We source the creators based on different criteria: audience, location, follower size, and gender. It could be keywords, what they’re talking about, or the niche that they’re in. Have they done sponsorships before (which our Chrome extension shows)? Are they video creators? What’s their engagement rate and average likes per post? Are they macro creators or micro creators?”

Innovation in Analytics

Creator Match has developed a Chrome extension that provides comprehensive creator analytics. 

“One of the biggest pain points that we’re seeing from brands is that they are in the dark when it comes to creator marketing on LinkedIn,” AJ explains. “Analytics on LinkedIn are like oil and water—they don’t mix. LinkedIn’s not prioritizing it, and the analytics are very poor and minimal.”

The extension delivers detailed insights: “You can go to any of the 1B+ profiles on LinkedIn, either a personal profile or a company profile, and see all of the stats from this specific creator or company,” AJ shares. “I can instantly fetch all their post content and sort it, with high to low engagements in the last 180 days. You can filter by keyword, timeframe, post type, and even isolate sponsored content.”

Communication and Reporting

Creator Match prioritizes client communication. “We add all our brand partners to Slack, and we always say that we are an extension of your marketing team,” AJ emphasizes. “We’re updating you daily. If you have to ask us for an update, we failed at our job that week. We want to inundate you with updates so you feel in control and can get back to your busy job as a marketer.”

Campaign analysis includes detailed reporting. “The biggest call we have is a wrap-up call,” AJ notes. “The campaign finished. We collected all the analytics, reviewed them, and will chat live with the brand about what went well compared to the campaign’s goals and objectives. What could be improved? What are some learnings for another campaign? Do you have some ideas? Maybe we can take key takeaways from a different campaign with different brands to this company.”

Introducing B2P Marketing

Creator Match introduces B2P (Business to Professional) as a new marketing category. 

“If you’re a brand and want to do a general activation across all channels, you go somewhere else, that’s fine,” AJ states. “But if you want to do anything from B2B or B2C, we call this new acronym B2P (business to professional). We have worked with B2B companies like HubSpot and B2C companies like Athletic Greens (AG1). So, we aim to serve brands that want to reach a professional audience, and the best platform to target professionals is LinkedIn.”

This approach led to successful campaigns like Teachable’s “9-5 Quitters Club.” 

“We activated ten creators on LinkedIn to share their 9-5 quitter story,” AJ shares. “Teachable wants to reimagine what traditional work means. You don’t have to be someone who quits their job to redefine what that means. Why can’t you work on your side hustle after hours or before hours?” AJ was also a creator in the campaign since he recently quit his 9-5 corporate consulting job at Accenture.

Targeted Impact

LinkedIn’s professional audience composition offers unique value where a large following is not always needed. 

This was a main topic during AJ’s recent speaking event at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival (BTS video here), where he spoke alongside the Head of Content Partnerships and the Chief Creator Officer at Whalar on “Why Creators must be part of your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy.”

“If you are an accounting software company and we’re reaching out to someone who’s a CPA and their entire audience is 5,000 CPAs, there’s much higher value in that niche audience,” AJ notes.

Creator Match’s success comes from its LinkedIn specialization. “I have a big mentality around an ‘inch wide, mile deep approach,’” AJ points out. “That’s how we become known in the space. Even six months in, we’re still very early, but we’ve been able to have success without spending $1 on marketing thanks to building Creator Match in public with content on LinkedIn. Everything comes inbound because we’re so known in this niche space, and if you think about content as this hammer, we keep hammering on everything around LinkedIn creators.”

The impact on creators has been substantial. “We’re extremely proud to say that we’ve paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to LinkedIn creators,” AJ notes. “Of course, there are bigger companies that have paid out more to Creators on other platforms, but it’s cool to give back to a community where I started my creator journey, which has never been able to make a dollar specifically for LinkedIn creators.”

Education remains crucial for market growth. “Most brands don’t even realize that there are influencers on LinkedIn,” AJ notes. “The amount of times I’ve heard brands say, ‘Wait, what’s a LinkedIn influencer? I thought it was a job search platform,’ which is crazy.” Plus, most LinkedIn influencers have never done a brand partnership, so the space is still quite new.

Final Thoughts

Signs point to significant growth in LinkedIn creator marketing. 

“LinkedIn is leaning into video content, and they have been testing a dedicated video tab on the homepage,” AJ reveals. “You can have a tiny audience and get 20 likes for the post but get a million impressions, which is unheard of on any other platform.”

The company’s growth reflects this potential. “We’ve never been busier,” AJ shares. “I thought Q4 was going to be relatively slow. We are slammed. We just hired another full-time team member as our Head of Creator Marketing (Tara Knight), and we’ll likely have to hire again since we are already almost at capacity for Q1 next year, which is insane.”

“If you think about this as a poker table, we are pushing our chips all in on LinkedIn,” AJ concludes. “It’s not if it will work; it has to work. If I had to bet on one platform… we could think about what platform out of all the social media platforms can survive without social media being a primary focus, which is LinkedIn. 

“They’re never in the news for questionable things, selling data, speaking to Congress, platform threats, and the looming potential of getting banned like TikTok. As much as people say they hate LinkedIn and think it’s cringe, you go to any event or conference, exchange LinkedIn profiles, and people still spend a ton of time on it.”