Tom Pepper, LinkedIn Ads: How to succeed in B2B marketing in 2025

As with the turn of every year, 2025 will bring an array of challenges that marketers will need to tackle head on, as well as a multitude of opportunities they can aim to take advantage of.
Tom Pepper, LinkedIn’s senior director for marketing solutions in EMEA & LATAM, is no stranger to this.
For almost a decade now, he’s been spearheading LinkedIn’s Ads business, and has been instrumental in growing the employment-focused social media platform’s advertising business.

In his role, he works closely with CMOs at global B2B brands to support them with bolder B2B creativity, new strategies to build influence with the buyer group, and in navigating the rapidly evolving B2B marketing landscape.
As such, he’s well placed to read the lay of the land in the world of marketing.
Brand trust and credibility will be top of mind for CMOs this year, he believes. As technologies like AI rapidly change the marketing landscape, CMOs are doubling-down on building brand trust and credibility in 2025. Across the internet, new technology is making it cheaper and easier to fake credibility, as we’ve seen with the deepfaked CFO and AI clones in video calls.
“With rising concerns over misinformation in the age of AI, authenticity will become more important than ever before, and there will be a notable shift towards understanding the value of placing brand messages in trusted environments,” says Pepper. “In 2025, brand leaders will prioritise building a credible and strong reputation to cut through the noise and earn loyalty.”
B2B brands are also now read, and willing, to invest more in influencer marketing, according to Pepper.
B2B brands are betting big on the creator economy, which is projected to hit $500 billion by 2027, and influencer marketing is a primary driver of this growth.
Pepper explains: “In the year ahead, we’ll see B2B brands reallocate their budgets towards influencer marketing with 61% of B2B leaders saying they will increase spend on influencer content in the near future.”
B2B brands are recognising that people trust people and expert driven thought leadership from influencers and expert voices plays a critical role in the consideration stage of the buying process – and ultimately helps drive purchases.
Pepper also expects B2B marketers to “bet big” on video to improve ROI. With 81% of B2B ads failing to gain adequate attention or drive recall, B2B marketers are now engaging buyers through video storytelling to humanise their brands, improve ROI, build authenticity and trust, and stay top of mind with the buyer group, including Gen Z buyers.
“LinkedIn research reveals that 63% B2B buyers say that short-form social video content helps inform buying decisions, and 55% of B2B marketers globally say that short-form social video produces the highest ROI,” says Pepper. “In the year ahead, we will also see more B2B marketers and CMOs leverage video to build thought leadership, testimonials and case studies, and product demos.”
Pepper is also urging CMOs and CROs to become what he refers to as change management experts.
In 2025, he is confident that CMOs and chief revenue officers (CROs) will play a crucial role in guiding their marketing and sales teams amid rapid changes driven by AI and shifting roles.
He says: “With 72% of marketers globally feeling overwhelmed by how quickly their job is changing, leaders must promote adaptability by fostering a culture of resilience and continuous learning.
“CMOs and CROs will be called upon to adapt their leadership to build trust and inspire confidence by communicating consistently and authentically. They will need to equip teams with the right tools, and prioritise developing intrinsically human-centric skills such as collaborative problem-solving.”
Along with human-centric skills, sales professionals are also investing in developing AI skills to get ahead, with 47% of sellers taking online courses on AI and experimenting with AI tools on their own, he explains.
And he’s calling time on the ‘knowledge economy’, an economic system of consumption and production based on intellectual capital. This, he predicts, will give way to the ‘relationship economy’.
Knowledge and information have long been the currency for career success, but Pepper feels the marketers and sellers who demonstrate strong people skills and focus on nurturing relationships this year will win.
LinkedIn research has also found that 88% of B2B CMOs believe that relationship-building is the key to success in the year ahead.
“Leveraging AI will create efficiencies, helping professionals to use the free time to innovate in ways that technology cannot,” he says. “AI can help free up an additional 11.5 hours a week so sellers can spend more time building strong relationships and developing a deep understanding of a customer and the challenges they are facing – both critical to closing deals in B2B.”
AI will surely continue to have a huge impact on marketing in 2025. Pepper predicts that marketers and sellers will use the tech to define the problems they need to solve.
“In 2024, AI entered the workplace and marketers have been leading the charge on upskilling in AI,” he notes. “But in the year ahead, we will see marketing and sales leaders pivot from experimentation to leveraging AI to solve specific business problems. They will use the technology to help drive better decision-making, optimise campaigns, and expose knowledge gaps in understanding customer needs.”
Over the past 18 months, marketing organisations have also been focused on cleaning, organising, and preparing their underlying data stack for the next phase of their AI journey.
“As those data projects start to come to fruition, expect to see CMOs leading bigger, more ambitious, cross-functional AI deployments in areas such as orchestration, personalisation, and customer journey,” says Pepper.
“2025 will be an ambitious, strategic, and extremely pivotal year for B2B marketers – setting them up for a new tech-powered advertising era. We will see brands take big bold bets in creativity and technology to innovate, stand out, and build efficiencies. However, the brands that will win, will be those who prioritise building authenticity and credibility.
“They will pull all the right brand levers – video, thought leadership, influencer marketing, and AI – to humanise the way they communicate with audiences and transform the way their brand shows up in different environments.”
Ultimately, in 2025, Pepper believes that credibility will be the driving force behind building a strong reputation, winning hearts, and getting brands bought.
Interested in hearing leading global brands discuss subjects like this in person? Find out more about Digital Marketing World Forum (#DMWF) Europe, London, North America, and Singapore.
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