Marketing professionals have the potential to become great creators and influencers.

If you think about the skills needed to become a successful content creator — things like content creation, storytelling abilities, and marketing channel knowledge — you might just as easily picture a corporate marketing professional as you would an influencer.

If you’re a marketer wondering about becoming a creator alongside your corporate marketing job, here’s the tea.

Corporate marketing skills are the creator starter pack

Being a creator is about building trust, showing up consistently, and delivering value to an audience.

All skills marketers practice every day in their jobs.

Marketers know how to:

• Think deeply about audiences and their motivations.
• Write impactful messaging and tell stories that resonate.
• Create content across formats, whether it’s video, newsletters, or carousels, and repurpose that content into publishing systems.
• Build distribution, from organic content to paid strategy.
• Analyze what’s working, double down on it, and shift what isn’t.

Many marketers are already great creators as they execute these techniques in the context of corporate marketing programs. They’re just doing it under company banners.

Now, marketing professionals are starting to do it under their own names, too.

Why now is the time for the marketers to become creators

Skill prerequisites aside, the market actually wants marketers to become creators.

The growing B2B influencer marketing industry and emerging LinkedIn creator economy are set to account for a meaningful portion of the $480 billion dollar creator economy.

We’re in a unique moment where a few big trends are converging that set the stage for marketers to turn into part-time creators:

• LinkedIn is evolving into a creator platform with new tools, video features, and a growing appetite for original content.
• Brands are investing in B2B influencers to reach niche audiences with real credibility.
• The idea of a “personal brand,” or being a part-time creator alongside a full-time job, is becoming mainstream. It’s also being accepted and valued by employers as they recognize the benefits of employee personal branding.

For marketers who’ve spent their careers behind the curtain building brands for businesses and corporate executives, it’s a chance to step out front — as thinkers, educators, and even entertainers.

The fading stigma around employee personal brands

Corporate product marketing professional and accomplished part-time creator Hannah Zhang just wrote a great LinkedIn post calling out the elephant in the room with employee personal brands.

She captured the fears and guilt that can come from building a personal brand and business along side a full-time role.

• Wondering if your employer will think you’re distracted or slacking.
• Feeling pressure to explain your side hustle more visibly on LinkedIn than on other platforms—AKA your coworkers and boss see it.
• Fear of judgment or misunderstanding that could impact your reputation at work.
• Wondering if you’re “allowed” to be doing this, or if it’s somehow selfish or not ok.

These are concerns that are luckily becoming less relevant as employee personal brands become normalized and accepted in corporate culture.

This is especially true in the marketing industry, where there’s a community of marketers building awesome personal brands alongside high-impact in-house roles (see below).

Hannah also articulated the tangible benefits that are driving this normalization and helping to nullify our concerns:

1. Experimenting with content creation helps us spot trends and test ideas that can inform the marketing strategies we build at work.
2. Regular content creation improves our clarity, writing, and storytelling—all tools that we use on the job.
3. Building a presence connects us with peers and ideas that strengthen our day-to-day work.
4. Our personal brand audiences become a credible, authentic extension of the corporate brand audiences we help build.

Businesses are seeing the value of employee personal brands. Bare minimum buy-in sees businesses accept their employees having a focus on their own brand outside of work.

And the businesses leading the charge are even going as far as activating their employee bases as in-house influencers and hiring full-time creators.

A CMO primed to tell their story

I caught up with a CMO friend this week who is debating becoming more active with his personal brand. He’s lived all of the experience people want to hear about.

He just hasn’t capitalized on sharing it yet.

In our chat, he was:

• Telling stories about the times he succeeded on campaigns.
• Being vulnerable about the pressures and challenges of marketing leadership roles.
• Sharing his take on the current marketing industry and trends like AI adoption.
• Discussing everything in-between.

It was all marketing insight gold that fellow marketing professionals would eat up if they had the chance to hear it.

However, it was all stuff he hasn’t shared publicly yet while he was focused on significant, demanding in-house marketing roles.

He’s now seeing the opportunity and getting ready to create content alongside his marketing work.

Our conversation made me wonder how many other marketers are out there sitting on their own goldmine of insight.

My friend is just one example of the opportunity marketing professionals have to tell their story.

• Seasoned marketers can share their perspective from the top of the career mountain.
• New marketers can build in public as they learn the craft and help other marketers navigate their first roles.

It’s exciting to think about what the marketing industry will look like as this concept becomes the norm and we have access to more marketer stories. The “here’s what worked and didn’t work for me”-type stuff you won’t find in marketing strategy frameworks or get from ChatGPT.

Examples of marketing professionals with great personal brands and part-time creator side hustles

Some of the most exciting creator brands are being built by marketers who are telling their stories publicly.

They’re finding a balance as they run their day jobs while growing audiences online.

• Christina Le posts raw, “here’s what worked and didn’t work for me”-style content about being a first-time head of marketing to her 30K followers.
• Kieran Flanagan breaks down the future of marketing and AI to a large personal brand audience alongside his executive role at Hubspot.
• Rebecca Mackenzie  built a side business around public speaking while holding marketing leadership roles at brands like Salesforce. Rebecca’s personal brand is noteworthy as she exemplifies how you can balance a job and personal brand that aren’t necessarily focused on the exact same niche.
• Ish Verduzco teaches community building and social media marketing while actively building his own prolific social following and personal brand ecosystem.
• Eileen Kwok is the Social Media and Influencer Strategist at Hootsuite and a LinkedIn creator herself, working at the heart of the B2B influencer and part-time creator trends.
• Hannah Zhang doesn’t just post about normalizing marketer-creators. She exemplifies it as she builds her 100K Instagram following and business alongside her product marketing career.

These aren’t full-time creators. They’re marketers who decided to create content about what they know.

And they’re doing so with serious results.

The financial opportunity for marketer-creators

In addition to obvious career benefits, like having a strong portfolio and network to leverage in job searches, the financial opportunities for part-time creators are significant.

Sarah Adam, Head of Partnerships and Influencer Marketing at Wix, posts regularly about the state of influencer marketing, including B2B. Her recent post about pricing for LinkedIn influencer content shows a significant increase.

1. The average increase in sponsored LinkedIn post pricing across all creator tiers was approximately 407% YoY from Q2 2024 to Q2 2025.
2. The sub-20K follower tier saw a 300% increase in price-per-post, increasing from $300 per-post in Q2 2024 to $1,200 in 2025.

These numbers show that B2B influencer marketing is exploding across the board.

As LinkedIn opens up more creator tools and monetization options and as more brands tap in, this shift will only accelerate.

And career marketers who create content stand to benefit.

For example, Christina Le’s content creation earned her over $100,000 in brand deals on LinkedIn last year — all while holding down her full-time marketing job.

Success isn’t just being had by creators with hundreds of thousands of followers either.

There is also a significant group of niche creators making great content, driving real impact for brands, and seeing personal brand dividends for themselves.

Eileen Kwok recently reflected one her own content creation success, landing her first brand deal after three months of consistently building her brand on LinkedIn.

These two marketers are building career and financial assets in the form of their personal brands. And it’s all being driven by consistently creating content alongside their corporate marketing gigs.

The challenging duality of the marketer-creator

Despite strong prerequisites for becoming a creator and the prospect of very real benefits, marketers face an ironic challenge:

Their corporate brand work and personal brand work is… the same work.

That’s an exhausting and duplicative reality.

I wrote a LinkedIn post about this very challenge. Marketers who are building their own brands are forced to navigate messaging, content creation, creative thinking, etc. for both their day jobs and their personal brand content.

This is a duality marketers will have to endure unless they move on from corporate marketing work or sacrifice investing in building their own brands.

As a corporate marketer building my own thing on the side, I’ve found some strategies and mindset shifts that are helping me stay consistent with both:

1. I found a time that works to write and work on content ideas (for me, it’s Saturday mornings).
2. I was real with myself about how often I can post without burning out. I’ve committed to a reasonable weekly content publishing system that is helping me discover a balance.
3. I let myself be ok with the fact that some days and weeks I just don’t have it. If I worked an exceptionally long day, had a big project, or had personal life stuff come up, I skip posts without shame. We’re all human and life happens.
4. I write my content ideas down when they hit me. I might not have the energy or time to write the post that day or even that week, but I give myself the notes for when I do. Social scheduling tools also help here if batch writing doesn’t kill your writing vibe.
5. I stopped trying to create a “personal brand.” I just write about the things that get me excited and try to find people who want to talk about the same stuff.

These methods aren’t a panacea that suddenly makes balancing work for your own brand and day job feel easy.

However, I do think these tools can help you act on your personal brand motivations in a way that builds sustainable momentum.

What this means for you

If you’re a marketing professional, this moment is worth paying attention to.

You don’t need to quit your job. You don’t need to launch a podcast or start a YouTube channel (unless you want to).

You already have expertise worth sharing and stories people could learn from. And you can do it in a way that feels right for you.

If this trend is one that excites you, what you should do is find a channel where you can share your expertise and connect with fellow marketers building their own thing.

Start small:

• Write a post on LinkedIn about a lesson from a recent campaign.
• Share a tip on TikTok about a tool you use daily.
• Publish a story on Substack about a time something didn’t go as planned and what you learned.
• Find a realistic publishing cadence like I’m trying to, challenging yourself to post once or twice per-week.

Your personal brand doesn’t need to be a performance.

It just needs to be consistent and rooted in what you actually know and like to talk about.

And if you play it right, it could lead to job opportunities, speaking gigs, consulting opportunities, brand partnerships, or simply more leverage and visibility in your corporate marketing career.

Final thoughts on marketers becoming creators

The next wave of creators won’t just come from B2C, media, or entertainment.

They’ll also come from inside companies — from people like you who’ve been building brands for others and are ready to build one for themselves.

The skills you’ve sharpened as a marketer translate to creator opportunities.

All that’s left is to hit publish and start sharing your own brand voice alongside the other brand voices you steward every day.