As we emerge from the peak of inflated expectations into the trough of disillusionment with AI, the shifting tides of skills for B2B marketers continues to be a moving target.
On the one hand, there is greater demand for AI-savvy leaders who can help navigate adoption in the spirit of efficiency and productivity. On the other hand, there is a growing hunger for humanity, storytelling and trust. Where these interests intersect is much of what B2B brands are in need of when it comes to marketing that will succeed in 2025 and beyond.
To drill down into the specifics of the most important skills in B2B marketing, I reached out to some of the smartest B2B marketing leaders I know including several of the B2B Marketers on the Move, Spring/Summer Edition honorees that includes B2B marketing executives from Verizon Business, ServiceNow, Docebo, BMC Helix and more.
The question I asked was…
What is the most important skill that will separate good from great B2B marketers in 2025?
I’ll start. Given the B2B marketing industry deep dive into AI and the growing trend of marketers feeling overwhelmed this year, I’d suggest one of the most important skills for B2B marketing leaders in 2025 will be the ability to craft context. Whether developing marketing prompts for a GenAI platform or providing direction to teams for a go-to-market strategy, the ability to pull together timely, accurate and compelling current situation information, pain points and objectives is essential for creating the kinds of best answer storytelling and marketing experiences that can deliver on brand, demand and revenue outcomes. TLDR: Context is still King!
Now let’s hear from the true B2B marketing experts on what skills B2B marketers will need to succeed in 2025 and beyond:
“What will separate good from great B2B content marketers in 2025 is the ability to earn trust through influence. Good marketers will keep creating content to inform and convert. Great marketers will amplify credible voices, use high-impact formats like video, and tell stories that resonate with real people across complex buying groups. The latest installment of our 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark, Trust Is the New KPI, drops in mid-July — and early findings show that marketers who lead with trust are seeing stronger performance across the entire funnel.”
Tequia Burt
Editor in Chief, LinkedIn Collective & LinkedIn Ads Blog
Senior Content Marketing Manager
LinkedIn
“You need a solid grasp of relevance engineering based on deep buyer understanding and attunement. Set aside algorithms, automation, and prompting your LLM of choice. Engineering relevance is about buyer proximity. Marketers attuned to buyers’ needs, situational and emotional context, risk perceptions, and desired outcomes will help them architect possibilities by expanding their situational view. The result? The depth of critical thinking necessary to build trusted relationships with meat on the bones. That’s what will drive revenue and growth in a world overwhelming B2B buyers with mediocre content.”
Ardath Albee
CEO
Marketing Interactions
“One critical skill is the ability to think strategically and engage in productive conversations with executives and cross-functional leaders. This means understanding business goals, translating marketing’s impact, and aligning initiatives with the bigger picture. Great marketers should also develop the skill to assess how AI impacts both individual roles and team-wide workflows, then apply that knowledge programmatically—whether that’s through Martech tools, building internal AI agents, or deploying bots to automate tasks.”
Pam Didner
B2B Marketing Consultant
Relentless Pursuit
“One of the most important competencies of a great B2B marketer is the ability to anticipate and align strategies to ongoing customer demands. Customer centricity is at the core of how I think about marketing and how I lead my team. Every day we seek to better understand the pain points our customers have and the vision they have for their business. That allows us to market our products and services demonstrating how we can solve those pain points and better enable their strategic vision.”
David Brozo
AVP Marketing
Verizon Business
“In 2025, the best B2B marketers won’t just be creative, they’ll know how to get things done. The ones who stand out will be the ones who can connect the dots between brand, product, sales, and data to actually drive results. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”
Kyle Lacy
CMO
Docebo
“The marketers who rise above in 2025 will master two things: strategic empathy and applied AI. Strategic empathy means ditching personas and getting into investigator mode to learn what really drives your audience—their pressures, blockers, ambitions. Then, utilize that insight to craft content that truly resonates with your audience’s needs and challenges. On the flip side, applied AI isn’t just about saving time. Marketers who write and test sharp prompts, iterate on feedback quickly, and scale with intention will outpace the rest. But the real potential? Blending both. Let curiosity and discovery lead the way, and amplify it as much as you can with AI innovation.
But there are traps: Over-relying on AI leads to vanilla, off-brand content (with a suspicious amount of em-dashes). Skipping customer conversations results in surface-level campaigns and check-box content marketing. The marketers who will win will be the ones who stay curious, prompt with purpose, and build with both heart and horsepower.”
Luke Kintigh
Senior Integrated Content Strategist
ServiceNow
“Creativity is at the heart of building a relatable brand, but data validates its success. Today’s B2B marketers must master balancing art and analytics, ensuring every campaign not only tells a great story but also delivers measurable results like pipeline growth or customer acquisition. This ability to connect creativity to business impact is what sets great campaigns, and marketers, apart.”
Brianna Miller
Director of Demand Generation
Cohere Health
“What separates good from great B2B marketers in 2025 is the ability to translate the what into the why and how. It’s no longer enough to list features or specs. The real differentiators are marketers who can connect product capabilities to strategic value—showing how solutions solve real business problems, drive outcomes, and align with customer priorities. This is the bridge between messaging and meaning. And it’s what earns trust, accelerates decisions, and drives growth.”
Madhu Chikkerur
Director of Product Marketing
PartsSource
“I believe the most important skill marketers will need in 2025 and beyond is the ability to adapt and learn. The landscape is changing, between the expansion of LLMs, the addition of AI in solutioning, and the need to not only show up for customers/prospects in the channels we know, but also in emerging channels we have yet to fully understand. Adaptability, continually learning new techniques, new technologies, and fully harnessing this ever changing landscape will define greatness and ultimate success.”
Rayna Naclerio
Director of Web Performance
Justworks
“Controversial answer, but I’m going to say it anyway—what separates great B2B marketers in 2025 won’t be their ability to use AI. I’m assuming most marketers have crossed that beginner gap by now. What will set them apart is their ability to focus. With so many tools, distractions, and competing priorities, the best marketers know how to zero in on 2-3 strategies that drive core goals, whether that’s pipeline, revenue, or user acquisition. For me, it’s always been about results, and AI is just one part of the equation in getting there. Cut through the noise, stick to what matters, and track progress consistently. That’s the key to being a great marketer.”
Kristen Ribero
VP of Marketing
unitQ
“In 2025, B2B leaders who want to set themselves apart will need the skill of discernment. In one form, that means the determination to demand quality when it has become so easy to generate reams of uninspired, undifferentiated content and marketing that won’t have an impact. In another form, it means separating signal from noise—amongst mountains of information, knowing which datapoints are meaningful and what to do about them.”
Hal Werner
Senior Manager, Digital Strategy & Optimization
BMC Helix
Skills B2B marketers need to exceed the status quo in uncertain times
In 2025 the B2B marketing teams who rack up wins won’t just be experts in AI or creative content. They’ll be strategic, customer-obsessed, and relentlessly focused on outcomes. Across every conversation with B2B marketing leaders that I had for this post, there were a few consistent themes: the ability to earn trust through relevance and influence, the discipline to prioritize what really drives impact, and the skill of connecting marketing efforts directly to business goals. I think we all know that it’s not enough to simply create content anymore. The B2B marketing leaders and teams that perform are the ones who can tell meaningful stories based on buyer insight, publish those stories in the right formats, and are able to proves their value with data. AI literacy matters, but only as an extension of human driven inspiration and creativity. Those who blend curiosity, empathy, and technical know-how to create great, best answer marketing experiences with impact will be the greats of 2025.
*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing Client
About the author
Lee Odden has been recognized as a top B2B Marketing professional by Forbes, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. For over 20 years he’s worked with his team at TopRank Marketing to help elevate the B2B marketing industry through creative marketing programs that deliver more authentic, experiential and inclusive content for brands like LinkedIn, Dell and Adobe. Lee is the author of Optimize and has published over 1.4 million words on his agency’s B2B marketing blog. As a trusted marketing thought leader, he has given nearly 300 presentations in 20 different countries on B2B content, search and influencer marketing. When not marketing, Lee is probably running, cooking or traveling.
