6 Predictions for B2B Tech Marketing for 2025

If you felt like you were working harder than ever for the same results last year, you’re not alone. Marketers were challenged with:

• Less resources—overall budget cutbacks
• ROI hurdle—budgets contingent on building the business case for every ask
• Less to talk about—fewer product launches, many of them iterative
• AI adoption—fast-changing landscape impacting needed skillsets and SEO tactics
• Cookie false alarms—the roll-back of the deprecating of cookies caused some wasted energy and strategic uncertainty

In the B2B tech sector, 2023 seemed to be the year of branding and broadening their multi-channel strategy. After a long stretch of COVID, and a stabilizing of supply and demand, it was a time to invest in digital transformation and digital lead generation.

Many industries, like optics and photonics, instrumentation, life sciences and medical devices maintained or cut budgets in 2023 and 2024 due to flattening market demand. They successfully focused on fewer, better things, cutting tradeshows but made a bigger splash at the events they kept, and improved their digital presence.

What’s to come in 2025? Here are our predictions:

• Increased M&A activity will increase the need for stakeholder communications, market positioning and re-branding.
• Pursuit of productivity as we get clarity on specific use cases for AI in marketing, and omnichannel drives the need for ever-more activities. In fact, many of our global corporate clients measure the success of their marketing team by activity.
• Brand awareness as customers change. We see a retirement wave coming, and a lot of new faces at industry events. Companies have a need and an opportunity to reset their brand story.
• Marketing strategy gap, as marketing teams lose expertise to retirement and cutbacks. Even in high-functioning teams, the activity count may require outside help to move beyond pure production into truly creative, holistic campaigns.
• Shifting social platforms—with a big X (Twitter) exodus, emerging platforms like Bluesky for research audiences, and new successes in Instagram and even Facebook. Keep an eye on Meta, which has announced it is going the route of X and getting rid of moderators, which may make these platforms noisier than ever. YouTube is now our go-to for short-form how-to’s, and many companies need to increase their video content to stay competitive. Talk of the TikTok ban will open up a bigger conversation around data privacy.
• Customer discovery, user experience and customer loyalty will set apart the winners. A number of social and business changes have left us more disconnected from the customer than ever before. It’s time to ask the vulnerable questions—and dedicate resources to addressing them. Get voice of the customer in front of product development. Customer loyalty programs, many of whom were started and stalled years ago, may be a winning play if they’re in line with what customers value. Most have the CRM infrastructure in place to make them a reality now.

Ready to talk through your 2025 B2B marketing strategy? Book a meeting with our team.