The Marketing Executive's Playbook: How Marketers Can Work & Level-Up Like 700+ Leaders in 2025 [New Data]

The Growth–Brand Balance: A New Playbook for 2025

Remember when marketing teams had to choose between driving immediate revenue or building long-term brand value? That line is blurring.

Our research shows marketing leaders are rejecting this false dichotomy.

While 20% prioritize increasing revenue and sales as their top goal, there’s also a strong emphasis on deeper customer understanding (16%) and brand awareness (16%).

And these aren’t either/or choices — many leaders reported pursuing multiple strategic priorities simultaneously.

Sarah Reece, director of demand generation at Orum, a sales acceleration platform, captures this shift perfectly.

“My philosophy is that brand is demand, and every touchpoint is a brand touchpoint,” she explains.

“From our social presence to our website to the way our sales team outbounds, we’re building a brand reputation that creates trust, builds affinity, and drives preference so that folks default to Orum when they come into the market.”

And the numbers back up this integrated approach. “We actually saw a pretty immediate impact on our demand gen goals when taking decisive action to emphasize brand,” Reece shares.

“Direct and organic web traffic increased, social reach climbed, pipeline and revenue grew, and deal velocity increased too … If anything, growth was exponential and has continued to tick up with every big brand moment we introduce.”

With this foundation of balanced priorities in place, let’s look at how marketing leaders are using AI and automation to execute these goals effectively.

How Marketing Executives Are Approaching AI and Automation

Marketing leaders are moving past the “AI will fix everything” mindset to a more strategic approach. Our research shows marketing leaders are prioritizing three key AI initiatives for 2025:

• Leveraging AI to create multi-modal campaigns (24%).
• Using AI agents for end-to-end marketing automation (22%).
• Implementing AI-powered reporting tools for ROI evaluation (21%).

Finding the Right Balance

What fascinates me most about these numbers isn’t just the high adoption rates — it’s how leaders thoughtfully integrate AI into existing workflows.

Christine Royston, chief marketing officer at Wrike, a workflow management platform, has observed this evolution firsthand.

“We’ve certainly seen a lot of change in the past three years with the rise, popularity, and accessibility of AI,” she explains.

“The most dramatic change I’ve witnessed is an increasing shift towards delivering efficient growth through data-driven decision-making.”

According to Wrike’s 2024 Impactful Work Report, more than 80% of business leaders have named efficiency their primary focus for maintaining competitiveness.

Royston and her team are responding by investing heavily in AI-powered predictive analytics.

From Theory to Practice

While many marketing teams are still experimenting with AI, some are already seeing concrete benefits. At Goldcast, a B2B video platform, CEO Palash Soni sees AI transforming content creation and distribution.

“The fundamentals of what makes a B2B brand successful haven’t changed,” he explains.

“High-quality thought leadership, differentiated PoV, standout attention-grabbing content, and a bulletproof operations base have always won and will continue winning. Making these things scale well is where AI comes in for top brands.”

Ashley Faus, head of lifecycle marketing at Atlassian — a workplace collaboration and productivity software company — takes a targeted approach with Rovo, Atlassian’s AI-powered tool.

“We used it to work on a content audit, brainstorm topics, and even create a custom agent to add context on some of the messaging for our products,” Faus explains.

Her team plans to expand these capabilities: “I foresee us creating more agents to help analyze asset and channel performance, close gaps in our content strategy, and personalize the journey for different personas.”

At Orum, Sarah Reece has found practical applications across multiple functions.

“AI in project management has been extremely helpful for creating project boards, automating status updates, and keeping work moving forward,” she explains.

“We’re also heavy users of AI for video and podcast editing and production. AI has made everything related to editing video and audio, picking out clips for social, and transcribing for social posts, captions, and content repurposing beyond easy.”

Balancing AI and Human Creativity

What struck me most in my conversations with leaders was their emphasis on maintaining human oversight.

Kacie Jenkins, senior vice president of marketing at Sendoso, an enterprise gifting and marketing engagement platform, put it perfectly:

“Human connection and thoughtful personalization are the heart of everything we do at Sendoso because they’re the beating heart of good marketing. We believe that AI is an amazing way to augment human workflows, but it needs a human at the helm, and oversight is critical.”

Jenkins’ team has found success by focusing on using AI to enhance rather than replace human capabilities:

“We use AI for research, to help us target our marketing efforts more effectively, to eliminate mundane, manual work, and to deliver the right personalized gift and message to the right person at the right time across the full customer journey.”

While AI adoption is accelerating, marketing executives emphasize the importance of thoughtful implementation. Wrike’s Royston advocates for balance.

“Although we welcome AI implementation as it allows for increased opportunities for high-impact work and collaboration,” she explains, “human creativity and empathy are irreplaceable in crafting compelling storytelling, developing innovative strategies, and fostering authentic customer connections.”

This balanced approach to AI sets up one of the biggest challenges marketing leaders face in 2025: scaling personalization without losing authenticity. Let’s look at how the most successful executives are tackling this challenge.

Pro tip: Identify areas where AI can handle routine tasks, freeing your team to focus on strategic thinking and creative development.

How Marketing Executives Are Scaling Personalization

The numbers from our research tell a compelling story about personalization in 2025:

• 90% of marketing leaders offer somewhat or very personalized experiences.
• 86% report that personalization increases sales moderately or significantly.
• 18% cite rapidly changing audience lives as their primary challenge.

Beyond Basic Personalization

These statistics only tell part of the story. In my conversations with marketing leaders, I discovered they’re completely rethinking what “personalized” means in 2025. VP of Marketing Deb Garber emphasizes this evolution at Kount, an Equifax company focused on fraud prevention and digital identity solutions.

“Marketing is constantly evolving, and so are our target audiences,” Garber explains. “What they want, how they behave, how they want to be communicated with is continually shifting and can make it challenging to keep up.”

Data-Driven Personalization at Scale

For financial services companies, this challenge is particularly acute. Marla Pieton, senior director of influencer marketing at Alkami, a digital banking platform, has seen how sophisticated personalization drives actual business results.

“In digital banking, the faster we can analyze account holder behavior, the faster we can tailor products and services to meet their needs,” she explains. “This level of personalization can be the deciding factor in whether an account holder remains loyal to their financial institution or seeks alternatives.”

The solution? According to Pieton, it’s about modernizing your technology stack:

“To stay ahead, modernizing data technology with advanced analytics, particularly predictive analytics, can provide valuable foresight into account holder needs and preferences, enabling more proactive and personalized experiences.”

Pro tip: Focus on refining your data collection and analytics process. Prioritizing behavioral insights and predictive analytics will help you anticipate customer needs and ensure campaigns remain impactful and relevant.

Building Trust Through Transparency

One of the most interesting approaches I encountered came from Huntress, a cybersecurity company. Chief Marketing Officer Jason Marshall takes a radically transparent approach to personalization.

“We provide a full audit log so customers can see how we use their business information,” says Marshall. “We also publish detailed policies regarding data collection and how we use it.”

Marshall emphasizes that while more consumers are conscious of their data-sharing practices, having clear-minded policies and honest dialogue helps maintain trust.

This focus on trust becomes even more critical as personalization gets more sophisticated. At GRIN, a creator management platform, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Partnerships Olivia McNaughten sees co-selling as the next frontier.

“When you let creators choose products they genuinely love and share them with their audience, you create an unforgettable shopping experience for audiences who genuinely trust these creators when it comes to product recommendations.”

Pro tip: “Empower creators to take the lead to curate and promote products,” says McNaughten. “It’s more personal, more impactful, and delivers stronger results for both brands and creators.”

Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch

The real magic happens when companies find ways to personalize at scale while maintaining authenticity. Kacie Jenkins and her team at Sendoso combine AI, intent data, and automation to personalize interactions at scale, generating over $1M in outbound qualified pipeline per quarter.

This balanced approach to scaling personalization pays off. Jenkins’ team successfully uses AI and data to deliver “the right personalized gift and message to the right person at the right time across the full customer journey.”

The key? Taking data maintenance seriously. “Don’t use AI if you can’t trust your data!” Jenkins emphasizes.

This balance of technology and trust sets up another crucial challenge marketing leaders face in 2025: creating content that resonates across multiple channels while maintaining consistency and value. Let’s explore how executives are transforming their content strategies to meet this challenge.

Pro tip: Start with clean, reliable data before implementing AI-driven personalization tools. The quality of your personalization efforts can only be as good as the data that drives them.

How Marketing Executives Are Transforming Content Strategy

Our research shows marketing leaders are evolving their content strategy beyond basic product promotion. Three key trends emerged from our data:

• 20% prioritize value-aligned content.
• 21% are increasing brand content featuring industry experts.
• 17% focus on repurposing content across channels.

The Rise of Authentic Video Content

One of the most dramatic shifts I’ve observed is in video marketing. Jennifer Burak, vice president of marketing at Socialive, a video content platform, explains the fundamental change in audience preferences:

“The biggest change in video marketing is the shift to short-form, authentic video as a way to attract audiences with the goal to get them to go deeper.”

This shift, she notes, is driven by evolving social media habits and growing consumer preference for relatable content over polished marketing materials.

Building Expert Communities

At Atlassian, Ashley Faus has taken this authenticity principle even further. “We have a practices and evangelist team to help us connect with more technical audiences,” she explains.

The results speak for themselves: Their technical evangelists have built significant followings, with one receiving LinkedIn’s Top Voice badge in 2024 and another becoming a regular keynote speaker at major tech conferences.

But what really caught my attention was Atlassian’s approach to community content. Rather than limiting themselves to external experts, they’ve created a program that turns their most engaged users into content creators.

Through monthly training sessions on new features, industry trends, and platform best practices, they’re helping their community members become authentic voices for the brand.

Value-First Content Development

“Fall in love with the customer’s problem, not your product.”

This advice from Joanie Kindblade, senior director of product marketing at Lumen Technologies, a Fortune 500 tech company providing enterprise-level networking, cloud, and security solutions, captures how marketing executives are rethinking content strategy.

Rather than leading with product features, they’re focusing on understanding and addressing customer challenges first.

Pro tip: Kindblade suggests creating content that “resonates with customer values by understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points.” This customer-centric approach is reshaping how marketing executives think about content.

Ashleigh Cook, CMO at RainFocus, an event marketing platform, puts this principle into practice through direct customer engagement.

“We rely on insights from our own user conference and customer surveys to better understand where opportunities exist for broader market education as well as more technical education on our platform,” she explains.

“It’s also critical to have direct conversations with customers and a constant feedback loop between sales and marketing.”

Noah Dye, executive vice president of global strategic client engagement at global marketing agency TEAM LEWIS, reinforces this shift.

“Content remains king. However, it has become more of a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach,” he explains. He points to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Video Marketing survey, which found that 89% of consumers want to see more videos from brands, with 75% specifically preferring short-form video content on mobile devices.

Socialive VP of Marketing Jennifer Burak agrees.

“Move from selling products to solving problems by highlighting how your brand’s mission aligns with your prospects’ values, such as sustainability, diversity, or innovation,” Burak says. “Use storytelling to connect emotionally and collaborate with employees and customers to create relatable video content.”

Content Efficiency and Smart Repurposing

While high-quality content remains essential, marketing leaders are finding innovative ways to maximize its impact. At Goldcast, Palash Soni sees AI as a crucial tool for content amplification.

“High-quality video content demands a lot of work and costs a lot to create,” Soni explains. “AI can help that work and cost go a lot farther by helping take existing video assets across channels and campaigns.”

Jason Marshall at Huntress has taken a comprehensive approach to content through Huntress’s new partner portal. The platform combines cybersecurity training, product updates, and industry insights in one place, helping build customer expertise while strengthening their connection to the brand.

“By providing ongoing access to information on Huntress products alongside deep dives into industry topics and marketing and sales tips, building the cybersecurity expertise of our consumers will ideally bring them closer to our company,” explains Marshall.

Maintaining Quality at Scale

“One concern I heard repeatedly was about maintaining content quality while scaling production. Marija Kojic, director of content at CAKE.com, a company that helps businesses worldwide organize and run operations through productivity tools like Plaky, Pumble, and Clockify, offered a valuable perspective:

“Search engines are still giving precedence to well-structured content delivering high value, in-depth information, infused with original expert opinions and insights — and you should, too.”

In practice, this means being strategic about content repurposing. Jennifer Burak of Socialive recommends looking for platforms that help teams efficiently transform long-form videos into short clips for social, blogs, or email campaigns.

I’ve seen this multi-channel approach work particularly well when the core content is solid and value-driven.

Pro tip: Start building your content repurposing strategy now. Identify your most valuable content pieces and plan how they can be transformed for different channels and audiences while maintaining their core value.

Looking Ahead: Content Strategy in 2025

After analyzing hundreds of responses and speaking with dozens of marketing leaders, I’m seeing a clear pattern emerge: Successful content strategies in 2025 must balance authenticity, efficiency, and value.

The most effective approaches combine:

• Deep understanding of customer challenges.
• Expert and community-generated content.
• Smart repurposing across channels.
• Consistent quality standards.

This multi-faceted approach to content ties directly into how marketing leaders are using data to drive decisions. Let’s explore how executives are moving beyond basic metrics to understand and serve their audiences better.

How Marketing Executives Are Using Data to Drive Decisions

Our research reveals a fascinating evolution in how marketing leaders approach data. The priorities have shifted significantly, with leaders focusing on:

• Content consumption habits (33%)
• Basic demographics (32%)
• Shopping habits (28%)

Moving Beyond Basic Demographics

I’ve noticed a significant shift in my conversations with marketing leaders: They’re no longer satisfied with knowing who their customers are — they want to understand how their customers behave and what they prefer.

“The most significant evolution in marketing in the past decade has been with the digital engagement of audiences through multiple channels and the harvesting of that data footprint for better behavior,” explains Vibhor Kapoor, chief business officer at NextRoll, a marketing and advertising technology company.

“Central to every effective marketing team’s strategy today should be leveraging the data to capture intent signals, understand behavior, make recommendations, and predict the next best actions.”

The Financial Services Example

I’ve seen this evolution play out particularly well in financial services. At Alkami, Marla Pieton shows how sophisticated data analysis drives personalization.

Her team uses advanced analytics to draw on account holder behavior, “uncovering deeper patterns in categories like transaction history, merchant spend habits, channel utilization, and engagement with past offers. This allows the data-informed digital banker to create more relevant and timely marketing campaigns.”

Navigating Data Challenges

However, marketing executives face significant hurdles in their data initiatives:

• 21% cite decreased consumer trust in sharing personal data.
• 18% face increasing data privacy regulations.
• 16% struggle with poor data quality.

Sarah Reece, director of demand generation at Orum, discovered an unexpected solution: focusing on quality over quantity. Her team made the bold move to cut all its demand capture digital spend and de-emphasize low-intent conversions.

“Our overall lead volume definitely went down,” Reece explains. “But we’ve been able to show that leads are not a strong indicator of pipeline health… Only high-intent leads are useful for predicting pipeline (demo requests, contact sales, etc.).”

The results? “While overall leads decreased, we’ve been able to grow our total opportunities and improve our opportunity value by focusing our intention on maximizing the right conversions.”

Creative Solutions for 2025

Looking ahead, marketing leaders are finding innovative ways to balance data needs with privacy concerns.

Chris Williams, CMO at Arima, a cloud-based consumer insights platform that creates privacy-compliant synthetic data mirroring real consumer behavior, suggests an unconventional approach: using synthetic data to create population simulations that can inform marketing strategies while protecting individual privacy.

“Rather than try and collect massive data sets of hard-to-get data on prospects, marketers are looking to companies that create synthetic data instead,” says Williams.

This evolving approach to data sets up the broader challenge marketing leaders face as they prepare for 2025: balancing innovation with proven fundamentals. Let’s explore how executives are preparing their teams for what’s next.

Pro tip: Focus on collecting and analyzing the right data, not just more data. As our experts show, targeted, high-quality data points often prove more valuable than vast quantities of general information.

Marketing Executive Outlook: Preparing for 2025

As I’ve analyzed our research and spoken with marketing executives across industries, I’ve noticed a clear theme emerging: Success in 2025 will require a delicate balance of innovation and fundamentals.

Our research shows marketing executives are preparing for several significant shifts:

• 20% are focusing on personality-led content and creator partnerships.
• 21% are diversifying paid media approaches.
• 19% are updating SEO strategies for AI-driven search.

Embracing Uncertainty

“Even with the U.S. elections behind us, uncertainty will persist in 2025,” observes Noah Dye from TEAM LEWIS. “As brands prepare for the year ahead, they need to remain flexible. Make sure that marketing plans can flex in response to change.”

Strategic Resource Allocation

What’s surprised me most in these conversations isn’t just what marketing leaders plan to do — it’s how thoughtfully they approach the balance between innovation and fundamentals.

Take Kacie Jenkins, senior vice president of marketing at Sendoso, who plans to dedicate 60% of her 2025 budget to brand and category building, with the remaining 40% focused on demand generation.

Her reasoning?

“We know that is the way to create the trust and preference that will put us in the consideration set for the vast percentage of potential buyers (95%) who are not yet in the market,” she explains.

“You know when you do something today because your future self will benefit from it, like filling up the gas tank or setting up automatic savings deposits? Same idea.”

Preparing for Multiple Futures

Through my conversations with executives, three key approaches to future-proofing stand out:

1. Value First, Technology Second. “Making these things scale well is where AI comes in for top brands,” explains Palash Soni. His team focuses on using technology to amplify proven strategies rather than replace them.
2. Balanced Innovation. At Lumen Technologies, Joanie Kindblade and her team are “exploring possibilities of AR and LLMs in product presentation and ethical content generation” while maintaining focus on “customer interests and ethical algorithm inference.”
3. Trust-Based Relationships. Ashley Faus emphasizes community and long-term relationships. Her team has expanded their Atlassian Creator program to incorporate more community members, hosting monthly training sessions on new features, industry trends, and platform best practices to help them increase their reach and engagement.

Pro tip: Start preparing for 2025 now by auditing your current marketing stack and identifying areas where AI can augment (not replace) your team’s capabilities.

Marketing Leadership Reimagined: Insights for 2025

As I wrapped up my conversations with these marketing executives, I found myself excited and humbled by their shared insights.

What struck me most wasn’t just their technical knowledge or strategic thinking — though both were impressive — it was their ability to stay grounded in marketing fundamentals while embracing transformation.

The data paints a clear picture of this balance: While marketing leaders are focusing on AI for multi-modal campaigns (24%) and end-to-end automation (22%), they’re simultaneously prioritizing human elements — 90% are investing in personalized experiences, and 20% are focusing on value-aligned content.

Finding Balance in Change

Our research confirms that marketing has changed more in the past three years than in the previous 50. Yet these leaders are doing more than chasing the next shiny AI tool or jumping on every new trend.

Instead, they’re thoughtfully evaluating how new technologies and approaches can amplify what already works: understanding customers, creating value, and building trust.

I started this research expecting to write about dramatic technological transformations.

Instead, I discovered something more nuanced: The most successful marketing executives are those who can balance innovation with authenticity, automation with human connection, and immediate results with long-term brand building.

Charting Your Course for 2025

As you plan your strategy for 2025, remember that the goal isn’t to implement every new tool or trend. It’s to find the right mix of innovation and fundamentals that works for your audience, your team, and your goals.

After all, as many of our experts reminded me, while the tools of marketing may change, the core principle remains the same: It’s all about creating genuine connections with the people we serve.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.