Despite a turbulent job market, LinkedIn is continuing to shift the dial. In the three months to 30 June, revenue jumped 9% year-on-year, while comments surged more than 30% and video uploads rose by more than 20%.

With membership hitting 1.2 billion and premium subscriptions climbing 75% in a single quarter, chief marketing and strategy officer Jessica Jensen’s ambition is to take that progress and push it even further.

Now nine months into her role, her mission is to make LinkedIn “bolder and more exciting” as a brand. LinkedIn has been reframing B2B marketing in recent years, positioning it as more than just consumer marketing’s less-interesting peer.  

“A lot of B2B marketing can be pretty sleepy,” she tells Marketing Week. “And so, ensuring that we as a marketing team and as a brand show up in the world with as much power and zest as LinkedIn has, and the desire to match our promise with what we express and share and put out, [is] a key priority.”  

LinkedIn appoints first chief brand officer

This month, LinkedIn appointed Adobe’s chief brand officer, Heather Freeland, as its first brand chief, mirroring the set up at businesses like Adobe and Elf Beauty, which have a CMO and CBO working alongside each other.  

LinkedIn has “historically operated as a set of business units”, explains Jensen, with separate teams for talent, marketing and sales. But she says it’s important the business “shows up in the world as one LinkedIn”.  

“We need to demonstrate to the world that we are the network that works for you, for your career, for your business, for your government, for your economy,” she adds.

This messaging will be key to Freeland’s role. “It’s become clear to me and the leadership team of LinkedIn that what we need to knit together and communicate across the whole landscape is giant,” says Jensen, involving all teams. 

The unification of LinkedIn’s internal units and ability to connect its brand fluently “requires a level of expertise and marketing chops that I think are very deserving of a chief brand officer title,” she adds.  

Regarding how the two C-suite marketers will work together, Freeland will run all brand, messaging and creative integration across the business, and while Jensen will partner on this, she is also “responsible for getting investment from the CFO and Microsoft, measurement of marketing, product marketing” and much more.  

“We’re revamping how we do creative, we’re developing company-wide narratives and messaging that will tell the full story of LinkedIn, rather than ‘we’re the best recruiting platform, you should buy ads from us’,” says Jensen. “We’re trying to really help the world understand the magic of LinkedIn.” 

Marketing as a growth driver

LinkedIn is responding to a turbulent job market with innovation supported by marketing. One recent example is its AI Hiring Assistant, an agentic-led recruiting tool. Jensen believes it will have a positive impact on how recruitment moves forward on the platform.  

“It saves so much time and effort, it also surfaces candidates that you would never have thought of,” she says. In her own mock searches on LinkedIn, she explains that looking for a vice-president of corporate brand, for example, brought up profiles of candidates in different areas like communications and product marketing outside of her “bullseye”. 

For Jensen, this demonstrates not only how AI can help recruiters be more effective, but also how LinkedIn as a platform can broaden opportunities for talent.  

‘Go a layer deeper’: LinkedIn on why ‘brand really matters’ in B2B

The marketing function plays a key role in the business’s success.  

“Marketing is already a huge growth driver for LinkedIn,” says Jensen. “We drive ROI, positive growth, all day every day, and my team and I have very, very firm revenue targets.”  

However, the role of marketing is changing. “Marketing is going to play, and is starting to play, a bigger role in terms of galvanising the entire company and making sure that we show up as the number one place to connect with professionals and grow your business or your economy.”  

The time has “never been more necessary” for marketing to take on a bigger role in the business and be a driver across communications, product, sales and policy, suggests Jensen. She says “the world is in chaos” and she believes LinkedIn can play a vital role in people’s lives, from personal connection and professional development to news and insight, as well as its bread and butter in helping people find jobs or hire.  

“I think the role for our brand and to help people understand how to get the most magic from us is never more important than now,” says Jensen.  

Amid this expansion of marketing’s remit, skills requirements are shifting. Jensen is putting “more time and resource” into AI tools, martech and measurement.  

“I think many marketing teams are using AI and other techniques to reduce their need for some forms of creative production,” she says.  

While AI is core to much of LinkedIn’s latest product development, “good creative in the marketing world and good messaging and grabbing people’s minds and hearts will be done by humans,” says Jensen.  

In terms of the skills shaping marketing, she encourages people to develop “agility, the desire and the willingness to embrace new technology, creativity and having a high creative bar for what actually grabs people’s minds and hearts”.  

She believes writing for some marketers has become a “lost art”, but maintains “clear, effective, evocative writing still matters”.  

Shaping a career in marketing

Despite what she describes as a “macro wacko” economic environment, she says the way recruitment and the world of work is “changing all the time” is exciting. “What a blessing is the largest professional network in the world, 1.2 billion people. We have an incredible level of connection with employers and job seekers and workers of every stripe.” 

Jensen is no stranger to navigating shifts in the job market. Before joining LinkedIn in January, she was CMO at Indeed.com between 2021 and 2024. 

Navigating change has also been a theme in her career. Jensen started out in management consulting before moving into marketing. “What I learned there in terms of assessing markets, capabilities, growth, cost savings, talent development, has been foundational for me,” she explains.  

LinkedIn appoints Indeed CMO as first chief marketing and strategy officer  

She leveraged her background in strategy and analytics to cinch a marketing role, before racking up marketing leadership roles at Yahoo, Apple, Facebook and Booking.com.  

It was a “non-traditional” route, she says, but one she encourages others to consider. “I proved to people that I could segment audiences and markets and drive customer insights into the development of messaging and campaigns,” she explains. “And then I learned some creative development chops and tried on some sweaters.”  

Her career path was aided by leaders who allowed her to expand her remit, another thing she encourages in her teams.  

Her advice to marketers? “I tell people, don’t get stuck,” she says. “So many people wind up doing the same job for seven, eight, nine years – and you stopped learning maybe at year four.”