How we’re sharpening our B2B marketing pencils for 2025
Business as usual is seldom usual for long, and we expect 2025 will present a fresh definition. Enthusiasm for new marketing technologies will be accompanied by higher expectations for efficiency than ever before. It will be a year of rigor and scale, of buyer control and data-driven decision-making. As a full-service B2B marketing agency, we like what we see.
The twelve months ahead will also offer challenges, from modest budget increases to well-known models that will be flipped on their heads or discarded. Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant. Our job is to help our clients capitalize on it.
Today we’ll expand upon one of our recent posts, “Bring on 2025: Our thoughts on what’s ahead in B2B marketing,” by offering a final footnote on how we’re preparing for next year.
Recent conversations with clients and B2B technology leaders have reinforced three key themes and one red thread: efficiency. All eyes and resources are trained on where to find it, how to achieve it, and what it will mean in 2025.
Here are our top three efficiency recommendations and what we’re doing about each:
Dedicate 80%+ of your marketing resources to repeatable, scalable motions. With marketing budgets more likely to remain flat than grow, you’ll need to optimize for ROI. This will require resetting your ICPs with data-backed insights on the themes, assets, channels, and offers that are driving buyer engagement, rigorously prioritizing each, and eliminating those that aren’t working. It will be leveraging (and refactoring, as needed) your creative resources for faster deployment across buyer touchpoints. With efficiency in mind, AI-fueled martech will remain a priority, as will CRMs that can work across co-marketing and co-sell platforms.
We’re responding to the drive for repeatable, scalable motions by helping our clients set up marketing engines that deliver campaigns and programs that reach, nurture, and convert buyers more reliably and with greater accountability than ever before. It’s integrated marketing that spans upper, middle, and lower funnel activities and enables each stage to work in concert with the next and become more efficient over time. Out with single-stage, in with multi-stage and, for partner ecosystems, multi-partner. As for the other 20% of your resources: test, test, and test.
Smash silos between sales and marketing. Because buyers won’t tolerate gaps in communications, and budgets won’t have room for slow (or nonexistent) handoffs. We’ve seen and heard it hundreds of times and too often in 2024: Marketing generates leads and sales doesn’t close them. Or the opposite: Sales needs leads but marketing can’t deliver. Or vendors and partners don’t share tactical plans for mutual success. It’s an ages-old back-and-forth that’s no longer in style. What to say, what to do? Invest in platforms, processes, and assets that create win-win scenarios and reinforce repeatable, scalable motions.
On the partner side, readers of this blog will recognize how important co-sell has become and the traction we’re seeing with it. The ways it’s facilitating more efficient (there’s that word again) marketing and sales engagement and accelerating conversions. As an agency that encourages its clients to begin with the end in mind, we’re all-in on alignment and are going all-out to deliver the strategies, tactics, assets, and guidance to help marketing teams achieve it. If not now, then when?
Uplevel your content and media plans. Because the high-quality leads your team depends upon aren’t getting easier to source. And as we know, outperforming the competition requires more personalization and value delivery than ever before. A top 2025 challenge for in-house marketers will be managing their agencies and teams to achieve it.
Also with efficiency top-of-mind, we’re helping clients compose three important lists: start doing, stop doing, and keep doing. As applicable, the stop doing list features generic email blasts that are all noise and no signal, AI-generated content that’s obviously AI-generated (for example, “In today’s fast-moving business world…”), and relying too heavily on words when pictures and video are viable options. On the keep doing list: Continue experimenting with AI, investing in analytics, and capitalizing on digital and in-person events. And finally, on the start doing list: Raise your quality bar for authentic, informative content across formats (including video) and channels, and re-focus on the trustworthiness of your brand, because buyers notice and want to engage with brands that are in the game for them. Our lists are long; these are just starters.
Looking back on 2024, our biggest successes have been scale successes. Each has built upon a set of B2B marketing principles, strategies, templates, technology integrations, SaaS expertise, production workflows, and audience engagement tactics honed over many years. These successes are visible in our KPIs: hundreds of campaigns, dozens of strategies, millions of impressions and engagements, many thousands of highly targeted leads and conversions, and more. At the top of the list: happy clients.
Finally…
If you were to write a calendar year 2025 press release today, what would it include? Would it highlight specific, tangible progress that reflects each of the recommendations above? Or is your focus elsewhere, or maybe you prefer to express your focus differently? The only correct statement is the one aligned with your mission and goals. The specifics are yours to iron out.
Our attention is dedicated to one overarching purpose: helping our clients outperform their most ambitious expectations and position for lasting customer success. As complex as our work can be, our purpose is that simple.
To learn more about Knack and how we’ve earned our position among the technology industry’s most trusted and innovative B2B marketing agencies, drop us a line or book a workshop [add links]. We’ll be happy to connect.
See you in 2025.