Are you as excited as I am for 2025?

I see đź”® the B2B creator economy as more mature, an industry that’s coming into its own. This is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, we know that a lot is possible in this space.

On the other hand, growth and scaling get harder, especially for new creators.

We’ll dig into why and how in a second.

In the meantime, today’s partner has an amazing offer you can’t miss if you take email marketing seriously (and you should!)

đź“Ł Brought to you by đź“Ł

​Thought Leader HQ​

Did you know that for every $1 you spend on email marketing you can expect to get back up to $36 over time?

However, to truly optimize the ROI on your email marketing – every business needs THREE critical automated sequences.

The Conviction Marketing Agency has put together a free guide explaining the three sequences and then mapping out an email by email outline for each of those sequences so you can get them set up ASAP! Grab your free guide below and start getting that email marketing ROI!

Gimme the guide!

Want your name up here? ​Grab a slot at the lowest prices I will ever sell them​.

(Sold out until February)

The creator economy at a glance

The creator economy could reach ​half a trillion dollars​ (yes, with a T) by 2027. It’s a large pie to share, even among the ​300+ million creators worldwide​ (take this number with a grain of salt, it’s likely higher).

Only ​7% of them​ make more than $200K a year and, to make more than $1 million, you need an average of 5 million followers (note: this is likely data for B2C creators, B2B creators don’t need that big of an audience).

​Only 1% of creators​ have audiences of over 1 million people. The other 99% have a median following of only 4,000 people.

→ As in every industry, there is a huge difference between the top 1% and everyone else.

The more invested a creator is, the more revenue sources they have. According to ​Kit​, full-time creators have over 6 revenue sources.

This is very consistent with my own observational data. Most creators and solopreneurs I know understand that most products and revenue sources have a limited shelf-life, so they diversify as much as possible.

The math is simple: if your product tanks, your affiliate marketing might work. If that doesn’t either, you can fall back on your services, and so on.

I recently wrote about ​products vs services​ and which is better for monetization, especially early on. The data supports my take: services still reign supreme.

Onto our B2B creator economy trends:

1. More brand partnerships because creator content simply performs better

No matter what you post, it will get better traction if it’s posted by a personal brand. Companies know that and so do creators.

Image via ​CreatorIQ​

Even compared to Fortune 100 brands, creator content performs much better:

Image via ​CreatorIQ​

Interestingly enough, partnerships between creators are also gaining a lot of traction. You’ve probably noticed that quite a few of my ​sponsor placements​ are from fellow creators.

Why? For three main reasons:

  • Social media reach is down and everyone needs to grow their audience.
  • Creator partnerships (paid or organic) are a great way to tap into someone else’s audience. If you took ​the Audience Accelerator course​, you know that I talk about this quite a lot.
  • Recommendations from fellow creators boost your credibility more than regular CPC ads, although they are usually more expensive.

2. Creators will add more people to their teams

I don’t buy Sam Altman’s ​stance​ that AI can power a one-person unicorn. Not yet, at least.

From what I’ve seen, AI has the opposite effect on creative businesses.

Think about it this way: anyone can churn 100 mediocre social media posts in seconds with their favorite AI tool. Heck, add 100 email newsletters to that order too, why not? It’s almost free.

People balk at AI-generated content in the B2B creator space not because they’re old men yelling at the moon but because it’s soulless and because it has less appeal than a bread-on-bread sandwich.

A single human can’t generate the terabytes of content the industry and the insatiable algorithms now demand. Sure, you can use AI to repurpose some of your content but the differentiating factor will be human creativity, not AI-generated hooks.

Add the need to ​diversify across several channels​ and you’ll understand why you need to add a couple of team members to your “solo” business.

Confession time: one of my guilty pleasures is doomscrolling on Instagram lifestyle influencers’ feeds. Because, like it or not, they usually set the tone in this industry.

In the past year or so, I noticed how the size of their teams grew. They may not all have full-time employees but the crews they use to shoot paid partnerships or more complex videos rival Hollywood film crews.

Cameramen (yes, plural!), photographers, directors, editors, producers, assistants, make-up artists, hair stylists, managers, and more. Everyone’s on set even if the “set” is a busy street.

Sure, they may shoot the occasional story on their phone with or without a light ring but the money-making content is no longer solo-made.

It’s a team effort and it shows.

We don’t need as much glam in B2B. The tall asks are elsewhere:

3. Content gets deeper, more strategic, and overall better

Forget “10 proven LinkedIn hooks you can steal”. Crap like this may get you a couple thousand views but it won’t get you paying customers.

What will work in the B2B creator economy in 2025:

This is why I urge you to NOT listen to the people who tell you “it’s never been easier to get started”.

It’s easy for everyone so getting started isn’t even a standard.

The real differentiation happens when you have real expertise to share and when you can produce content worth a few minutes of your audience’s lives.

As I like to say, when the entry barrier is low, the growth barrier is towering.

4. More focus on operations because everything else can be easily commoditized by AI

If you don’t have SOPs or documented procedures, and you’re not very clear on your operations, deal with the holes in your business NOW.

AI may not be able to power a one-person unicorn but it can speed things up significantly in almost every aspect of a creator business: content creation, content distribution, syndication, web design, graphic design, operations, and more.

My long-term goal is to hire my boss — an operations lead who tells me what to do and takes care of the nitty-gritty so I can focus on the creative side of my business and client-facing work.

While that goal is still a few years away, I constantly fiddle with my process because better operations means faster everything: time-to-market, revenue growth, audience growth, and more.

Key takeaway from the last two trends: if you want to outsource something or hire a new member in your team, start with operational help, not content. You need your personality in the content, not in your systems.

You can have someone improve your processes significantly without adding a “foreign” feel to them. You can’t say the same about outsourcing content (in most cases).

5. Content will be viewed as a product, not the means to an end

Traditionally, we think of content as something we put out there to generate or nurture leads. It’s not the end game, it’s a means to an end.

Consequently:

  • We spend more time on the product, not the content
  • Content is seen as a single-use, disposable asset. “If this blog post didn’t rank, it’s time to move on to the next”.
  • Social media posts are often spaghetti that only soil walls and have no purpose other than to check a box — “there, I sacrificed something to the algorithm gods today”.

In the 2025 creator economy, especially in B2B, we need a different mentality. Creator brands live and die by the quality of the content they put out there.

Yes, even if you’re not charging a sponsorship fee per piece of content.

Smart creators have already started treating content like a product:

  • They build libraries of their content that they can easily pull from.
  • They re-use, repurpose, and syndicate. This is ​a good primer on how to do that​.
  • They milk every piece of content for all it’s got precisely because it’s harder and harder to create content that truly stands out.
  • They make sure it’s unique in every possible way: unique voice, unique branding, unique insights. And a real omnichannel strategy — the same experience across channels. If you follow someone on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn and subscribe to their newsletter, you should have the same experience and the same “brand feel” across all these channels.

Do this before the end of the year

At the end of 2023, ​I was predicting​ that 2024 would be the year that makes or breaks budding creators. In the previous years, it was easier to generate revenue because of the cash cushions from the COVID era.

As I see more and more people struggling to sell, I hate to say I was right. (I honestly hate it, I wish selling was easier for me too).

The good news is that, if you’ve made it so far, you’re now part of a mature market. The industry is vetted and we know you can make a comfortable living as a B2B creator.

However, you need to know that the customers who buy from B2B creators, be they other creators or “traditional” businesses:

  • Are more discerning. Everyone’s been burnt by at least one digital product so far.
  • Are spoilt for choice. The competition is intensifying, so it’s become easier to look for a perfect match.
  • Can smell BS far more easily.
  • Look for reputation, credibility, and authority. I cannot stress this enough. In Robert Cialdini’s words, “the messenger is the message.”

Personally, everything I bought this year from other creators I bought because I trusted them, not because they had “an offer you couldn’t refuse”. In most cases, I didn’t even read the landing page; I just looked for the “buy” button and typed in my card details.

So I’ll leave you to ponder ONE question that can make or break your 2025:

“Why should people buy from YOU?”

Do you have a good answer for this? If not, I urge you to find it.

Pro tip: don’t look at your products (it’s easy to hide behind them). Forget how much “value” you packed into a single offer.

Look in the mirror. Tell me why YOU are someone I should trust with my time and money.

If you need an intellectual sparring partner for this exercise, hit reply, I’d love to know why you’re awesome!

That’s it from me today!

See you next week in your inbox.

Here to make you think,

Adriana

Need me in your corner? Here’s how I can help you:

  1. ​Promote your brand to 30,000+ entrepreneurs and creators.
  2. Need a bigger, more relevant audience? Who doesn’t, right? The Audience Accelerator course will teach you how to get it with zero hacks and sleazy bro tactics.
  3. Boost your chances of success by 400%: document your strategy with The Guided Strategy Template.
  4. Get my product launch email templates that sell: 5+1 emails you can send to your list in 45 seconds.
  5. Book a 1:1 strategy session with me. Let’s unlock your growth in 60 mins!