Integration of AI across channels. Purpose-Built Enterprise LLMs. Demand for personalized content. A questionable first quarter start to 2025. Economic uncertainty for the months ahead.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by your B2B sales and marketing challenges since the start of the year?
If so, you’re not alone.
However, frustration isn’t inevitable.
Instead, we can understand the latest B2B buyer trends and streamline results, delivering real value for our customers and companies. Here’s what you need to know to achieve this.
1. Clear Strategy Unlocks Compelling Results
Effective marketing is predicated on a clear strategy.
Many B2B marketers may have missed this memo. Instead, organizations rely on rumors, intuition, and online trends to drive their marketing efforts. Common assumptions include:
- Blogs are mandatory for marketing success
- An omnichannel approach is required from day one
- You should spend a lot of time on social media
- Video will outperform other mediums
- Generative AI (Gen AI) will transform marketing
To be sure, these marketing tactics can be successful. It’s not a matter of which strategy you use, but how and why.
In contrast, constantly shifting tactics diminish impact because marketers can’t identify and assess adequate key performance indicators (KPIs) or produce actionable business results, creating bottlenecks in the marketing process that undermine immediate outcomes and hinder long-term refinements.
Identifying a clear, compelling B2B marketing strategy is essential for sustained success and measurable growth. It may not be a perfect strategy, but pick one, stick with it, and refine your approach in response to data-driven buyer signals.
Most importantly, define the right KPI. While revenue growth is the ultimate goal, a marketing strategy can’t be judged by dollars alone. Rather, divide your marketing strategy into multiple phases, deployed over time, and with specific indicators in place, including:
- Traffic
- Conversion rates
- Sign-ups
- Email open rates
- Brand searches.
These and many other factors contribute to a B2B purchase. To achieve the best results, deploy a clear strategy and measure its effectiveness over time.
2. Quality Content is Back
Gen AI is ubiquitous in the marketing space, helping marketers refine their strategies, A/B test their content, and analyze vast amounts of customer data to predict future trends and behaviors.
According to Forbes, 85% of marketers report using Gen AI in 2024, a number likely to increase as tools become more accessible, understood and expected. It’s also contributing to a deluge of mediocre content at scale, at once inundating information spaces with low-quality AI-generated material, and saturating mediums with more information than buyers can manage.
This has made it more difficult than ever for B2B marketers to break through the noise, as audience fatigue, information overload and content saturation erode the effectiveness of traditional marketing approaches.
As a result, high-quality content is back.
Put differently, B2B marketers can’t just create content at scale and hope to influence their audience. They must produce high-quality content appropriate to the medium and message to engage today’s B2B buyers.
CMI’s analysis found that 77% of B2B marketing’s top performers identify high-quality content as the reason for their success. To be sure, Gen AI can contribute to these outcomes. Forbes analysis also found that 85% of marketers acknowledge that Gen AI can lead to “an improvement in content quality.”
Notably, buyer demand for video continues to surge, as both short and long-form video sees growing customer engagement. However, you can’t force a text-based buyer to automatically switch to video. The same sentiment is valid in the opposite direction.
Therefore, develop an omnichannel marketing strategy that delivers quality content that inspires, delights, educates, and engages your audience. In an increasingly saturated B2B marketing environment, this is the only way to actually reach potential buyers.
3. The Buyer Journey is Longer (and More Digital)
Forrester’s 2024 Marketing Survey found that three-quarters of B2B marketers say buyers are “taking longer to commit to a purchase compared to a year ago.” Last year, just 67% of respondents shared this sentiment.
What’s more, these B2B buyers are purchasing in groups and prefer to stay anonymous longer, making it more difficult for marketers to reach customers with targeted messaging that speaks to their place in the sales funnel.
B2B-focused marketing technology (MarTech) solutions allow marketers to do more with less. Specifically, Gen AI, customer data platforms and intent data platforms allow B2B marketers to track anonymous digital buyer behaviors, making content more specific and actionable for every potential buyer.
Additionally, FastCompany reports that the B2B buyer’s journey is more customer-initiated and direct than before, as buyers are often millennials or Gen Z, making them “self-directed information seekers.”
Consequently, sales teams play a less involved role in the buying process. Collectively, approximately two-thirds of buyers say they didn’t involve salespeople in their research, making effective marketing efforts even more important.
The B2B buyer journey is longer and less linear than before. Marketers must adapt by providing the right information at the right time, so buyers have the information they need to make the purchase they want.
Better B2B Demand Generation
B2B sales & marketing doesn’t look the same as it did even a few years ago. New technologies, changing buyer expectations, and market factors are forcing marketers to reimagine the ways they
To succeed in this environment, marketers need a clear strategy to unlock compelling results, develop quality content that resonates with their audiences and adapt to a longer, more digital buyer journey.
Understanding and responding to these trends will allow B2B marketers to streamline results and deliver real value for customers and their companies, ultimately driving sales that boost revenue and foster long-term business relationships.
Mario Peshev is the CEO of DevriX, a global WordPress agency providing scalable, long-term technical partnerships along with marketing, and business consulting. Peshev is the author of the new bestselling Amazon book, MBA Disrupted: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Bootstrapping $1M+ Digital Businesses. Peshev empowers entrepreneurs with sage advice through the Growth Shuttle advisory and by supporting local and global aspiring technologists with scholarships, internships and educational opportunities. He is also an ambassador with SeedBlink and Flippa, bridging the gap between investments and acquisition deals. Follow him on Twitter @no_fear_inc and connect on LinkedIn.
