B2B Marketing Strategy: 2025 Edition

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. This is an extra special episode because it was hosted by Jamie Gier while I was on vacation with my wife in Africa. Yes, I saw penguins. Jamie is a long-time huddler and the CMO of DexCare, and she came up with the awesome idea of running a six-part poll examining marketing strategies in 2025. She explored the results with three Huddlers: Charles Groome of Biz2Credit, Tom Bianchi of Acquia, and Josh Leatherman of Service Express. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one podcast for B2B marketers. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Jamie: Welcome to CMO Huddles Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. You’ve probably noticed that I am not Drew Neisser, but I am your guest host, Jamie Gier, live from my home studio in Seattle while Drew is visiting the colony of African penguins on Boulders Beach. I am extremely excited to be here today and hosting this show, as you’ve probably seen on LinkedIn, on Drew’s LinkedIn, we have been polling the LinkedIn community of marketing executives to understand and pulse what are you doing to prepare for 2025. Where are you placing your bets? ‘Tis the season for planning, budgets, planning strategies, and we wanted to get a sense of what’s in your minds as you’re starting to prepare for that. So I’m excited to be joined by three awesome CMOs, and we’ll be delving into these details and more throughout the show. So with that, let’s bring on Charles Groome, Vice President of Growth Strategy and Operations at Biz2Credit, and a returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss Account-Based Marketing. Hello, Charles, how are you and what and where are you?

Charles: Hey, Jamie. And very good Drew impression. I think that was well done. I’m gonna have to work on that for myself. I am in New York City in our brand new headquarters office location right above Penn Station. So loving it and doing very well this week. We have gotten out of the summer lull a little bit, and being in the financial services space, we are all keeping very close watch on the Federal Reserve news next week. So my team has got a lot of content to produce, a lot of advertising changes that we’re keeping our fingers on the buttons around just this week particularly. So yeah, joining you in an exciting time.

Jamie: Excellent. Well, I’m sure you’re going to have a lot to say on the topic. So I do want to kind of tease this out a bit before we bring on all panelists. But tell me, where are you placing your bets in 2025?

Charles: Yeah. So I’m going to interpret bets here in a very specific way, thinking about things we’re experimenting into, as opposed to those things that are kind of, you know, the house money, if you will. So for us, there’s really three, I would say, bigger bets that we’re really starting to lock in for next year. The first, and this is an interesting one, and I think a lot of CMOs in the Huddles community have shared about this, in-house events, things that you’re organizing as a team in your own marketing org. I think there’s two real value props that we see here. First is content creation, and then the second is business development. I think a lot of CMOs tend to see it the other way around. They look at in-house events as something that is helping the sales team first and foremost. We’ve kind of taken this other lens on it, and I’ll share more about this, Jamie, as we do follow-ups. But definitely, these in-house events are going to be a big bet area for us next year as well. I think another interesting area—so you know, I’ll have three quick ones we can discuss. The second big one for me is going to be cross-channel. We got our belt around us on ABM in the last, say, 18 months, and now we’re really starting to figure out how we can deploy the ABM programmatic strategy in a way that reaches our target accounts across all of the platforms where they happen to be online. And this means going into some of those somewhat less comfortable places for B2B, right? Like Meta is an area that we’re really starting to lean into for B2B purposes, and those are the kinds of areas that we definitely are beginning to experiment, put some of our betting dollars into, as opposed to our core performing channels. Similarly, my last one will be kind of influencer, and this is again going to be about the content. So how we can create content with the right kind of stakeholders that our target account and our target buyers already trust is something we’re just scratching the surface on, but it’s something that we’re excited about for 2025 to experiment with as well.

Jamie: I’m in the same boat as you. My team—so I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Dex Care, and my team just spent a good nine months putting in the infrastructure to really have the go-to-market motions to do ABX. And so we’re kind of in the throes of really activating all of the channels to effectively do that. I’m going to guess that a lot of our audience is probably in a similar position, kind of in the early stage of rolling out ABX and all of the infrastructure and the programming around it. On influencer marketing, I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about that because I think sometimes when people hear influencer marketing, they think of a big-name sports figure or something else. So how are you guys thinking about it at Biz2Credit?

Charles: Well, it’s kind of hand in hand with that in-house events program that we’re running in a lot of ways. So let me break down if we have multiple business audiences that we’re trying to reach. So multiple types of B2B buyers, and there’s two of those B2B buyer types that are particularly aligned to a sort of influencer, or, you know, sort of social-driven strategy, native social strategy. Those are the accounting vertical and the business brokering vertical. So these are areas where we have a SaaS product that we’re rolling out to those communities. It helps them provide financing to their own clients. So it’s kind of a B2B-to-B type of distribution approach. And what we found is that there are key voices in each of those segments that tend to drive the conversation, and they’re doing that in other channels, channels that we may not have direct access to, like a newsletter, for example, occasionally it’ll be like a podcast or, you know, content that they may be publishing in a LinkedIn post. One of the long formats that we see from Drew is a great case study in how that can work in B2B. And so what we’re trying to do there, or the hypothesis, anyways, going into influencer is that we can be aligned with them on the content from the beginning, where we can get them talking about subject matter that really resonates with our value proposition as a software platform, and hopefully draws the connection between our value proposition, or at least, you know, educating the market on what that is with the buyers’ needs or the trust that they’ve built up with that audience in their own sort of closed network. And part of this is also then bringing them into these live events that we’re hosting. So we hosted four live events this year as kind of the first real push into this strategy. And we actually did a mix of this, both here in the States and internationally, to some of our international market opportunities, like we’re doing in the APAC and the Middle East, and this is a great area to cross over. So you get somebody who has a presence on social, you bring them into these in-house events, you put them up on stage, you record it, you make that content available, and then you allow them to disseminate through their own megaphone, content that also aligns with what your team has been coordinating with the event agenda and the subject matter and so forth. So we did this, I can share some of it is public on our event website, frontiersofdigitalfinance.com, but one of the key things you have to look for there, at least in our sense for B2B, is you got to look for the right kind of brand. So we’ve got, we’ve had folks from places like AWS, participate, MasterCard participate, the big brands, right? You know, it’s sort of natural driving these conversations when they’re on stage at a major event. We’re bringing them in in a more micro, cosmic sense, and having them do like a closed-door session with 150-200 prospects, just on topics that are relevant to them and the industry.

Jamie: Alright. Well, I heard for 2025 you’re focused on kind of cross-channel marketing, to take lift from all of the ABM work that you put in place, I heard events which we’re going to get into because that was one of the poll questions, and then influencer marketing. So we’ll come back to that. So thank you, Charles. 

Okay, let’s bring on Tom Bianchi, who is the Senior Vice President of Product and Solution Marketing at Acquia, and an industry expert who has graced our stage before to delve into global website management and adapting digital experience in downturn. Hopefully we’re on the upswing, because it sounds like, according to one of the poll questions that we’ll get into later on, we’re starting to see maybe more investments in marketing. So hello Tom, wonderful to see you. How are you and where are you?

Tom: Thank you, Jamie. I’ll second Charles’s opinion. Your Drew impression is coming along very nicely. I’m doing great. Thanks for asking. We here at Acquia are getting ready for two big events in the coming weeks. So we’re a digital experience company, and one of the community events that we participate in is DrupalCon, and there’s a DrupalCon in Barcelona next week. Next month we have our own event, Acquia Engage. So looking forward to the events discussion a little bit. Where am I? I’m just outside London in my home office. And for those of you wondering, this is a wooden statue, and he’s called Steve-O the Stag, my own little emblem that goes side by side, of course, with a CMO Huddles penguin.

Jamie: Nice. So Steve-O—is there a story behind the name?

Tom: A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I used to work with a general manager for EMEA at a software company who was called Steve, and he used to make fun of my stag, so I named the stag after him.

Jamie: Alright. Well, same question for you, Tom. Where are you placing your bets in 2025?

Tom: Yeah, sure. So for context, Acquia is a digital experience company, so we help big brands all over the world host their digital experiences, their websites everywhere. And so for 2025 from a company perspective, we’re making three bets, and these kind of trickle down to marketing really easily as well. And so all of the marketers out there will identify with this.

The first big bet is we’re getting ready to launch new products. So as we launch new products, we need to think about what markets we play in, where we play, how we play, the target segments that we go after. And so that’s point number one. But then point number two and three are very closely related to that.

In 2024 we also launched new products, and we acquired products too to sell. And so we are, for 2025, doubling down on the products that we’ve already launched with a cross-sell approach into our installed base, using tactics like ABM, of course. And the third point, which I kind of already hinted at, is really understanding our segmentation, both for the new products that we’re about to launch on our existing markets and getting hyper-focused on what tactics and channels we use for which segments, what content we build for those segments to basically improve our return on marketing investment for every single segment and maximize our sales.

Jamie: So I heard you’re launching new products. We can’t underestimate the amount of effort and work that takes to bring something to market. You also acquired products in 2024 and launched some and so now you’re still trying to get some lift from that and do some cross-sell activities and segmentation. So tell me a little bit more about how you’re approaching segmentation and how that will inform the different tactics that you deploy.

Tom: Yeah, exactly. So all really tied into that launch process. My team in particular is working on building a repeatable process so that we can continue to do this effectively. And so for any of you out there that have ever done anything with Pragmatic Marketing Institute, you’ll know that it’s all about the data that you gather to help you make those informed decisions, and not just going with those kind of, “Oh, I think we should do this,” because it worked once with this one customer that one time, right? So the process that we’re following is really simple. We’re looking together market intelligence, customer intelligence, competitive intelligence, and then product intelligence, and build a whole decisioning process over the segmentation that we get to based on all of that data.

Jamie: So a lot of go-to-market there. Alright. Tom, thank you. We’ll bring you back up here shortly.

I would like to now welcome Josh Leatherman. Hello, Josh. Josh is the CMO of Service Express who has previously joined us on the show to shed light on the intricacies of pipeline playbooks. We all need those. And brand consolidation. We’ve probably all been through acquisitions that required brand consolidation. So hello Josh, welcome back. How are you and where are you?

Josh: I’m doing well. I’m missing, actually, the penguin hat. I don’t know if you have a penguin hat that you can put on, but Drew should have probably sent you one.

Jamie: Well, I did try to be in Drew’s office.

Josh: Yeah, I’m based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, so I’m sitting here at Service Express’s global headquarters here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’m doing very well.

Jamie: Excellent. Okay, so same question for you. Where are you placing your marketing bets in 2025?

Josh: Yeah, I think first and foremost, 2023-2024 was kind of the years of generative AI, using AI for content creation and that type of thing. I think CMOs and marketers are feeling more comfortable with that now. I actually think 2025 will be the year of using AI in marketing for analytics and understanding the business better.

I think one example of that is building maybe some predictability into the way that we look at account targets, account scoring, building some predictability into win rates, loss rates, that type of thing. So I think marketers using AI for data analytics, not just in marketing, but to inform everything across the business. I think marketers are going to start to do that more often.

I also think enhancing our own products and services with AI, understanding how we can do that, will be a critical area for marketers. And I think marketers, in particular, will be uniquely positioned to be able to advise the company on that. And then I think account-based sales and marketing driven by data-driven field marketers or account-based marketers, that’s kind of, you know, Account-Based Marketing 2.0, I think that is going to be a huge focus for 2025.

Jamie: Yeah, I was actually talking to a couple of different marketers. I think we’re all having had or are about to really put the infrastructure in place for ABX. And one of the questions is, well, what is it going to take to run that? And not from a technical perspective, but the talent that you need, whether it’s an ABX specialist or field marketer, and it sounds like that’s where you’re placing some investments to make sure that maybe in territory or for certain segments, you’ve got marketers who are intentionally focused on that.

Josh: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jamie: AI, that’s such an interesting topic that tends to dominate all of our conversations right now. I heard, let’s see, predictability of pipeline getting into a little bit of win, loss data analytics around that. I actually just saw a really cool demo of AI going through call scripts and synthesizing information of who are your key champions on the call. What were some of the key phrases or competitors that they dropped? I think that there’s a lot of promise there that we haven’t really thought about. I think a lot of the times AI is around content, but not necessarily around analytics. So it’s refreshing to hear that. Okay, anything else on that?

Josh: I think that’s a big one. Listen. I think a lot of the products that sales and marketing are using are starting to implement AI, which is great, but I think using tools like Claude or ChatGPT, which just understanding how to build custom GPTs and things like that will be critical for marketers. So it’s not just using AI within the tools that we have. It’s really understanding what are best-in-class AI tools. They’re launching all kinds of features, and things like custom GPTs are, I think, the next kind of thing that marketers have to be really aware of, how those work, and we have to be skilling our people up with some of those skills.

Jamie: Agree, especially as we continue to be challenged with the do more with less. I think we’re all in that same boat, although once we get to the poll questions and delve into that, there might be a little bit of good news on the front for marketers when it comes to headcount and budget.

Alright. Well, thank you, Josh. So I’m going to quickly switch gears for a second so I can talk a little bit about CMO Huddles. We are a community, and I’m part of it. In fact, I am a founding member of CMO Huddles, and I’ve been part of it for more than three years. It was launched in 2020 and we are a close-knit community of over 300 — I can’t believe that because when I joined, I think we were like 80 maybe — but we are a 300-person strong community of B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness.

One of the reasons I love CMO Huddles is I can go into the community real-time when I need information in the moment, and people are very, very responsive, but we’re also a very supportive community where we share best practices, we share a template, and as I’ve mentioned to Drew on a couple of different shows, it’s a little bit of therapy as well. So if you are a senior B2B marketer and need a shortcut to B2B greatness, take a second to sign up for our free — this is cool — free starter program at cmohuddles.com.

Charles, Tom, Josh, I’m wondering if you can share with our community specific examples of how CMO Huddles helped you.

Josh: I’d be happy to start. I have a concept I shared with Drew before called R&D, which is not research and development. It stands for “rip off and duplicate.” You know, to be a great CMO, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. All you have to do is find good CMOs who are doing great things in areas that you and your team need to grow.

CMO Huddles is a built-in network for marketers, where I, you know, prior to CMO Huddles, I had to kind of build relationships and figure out who’s doing things really well. Now I’ve got a built-in network, and I know if I’m doing Account-Based Marketing or intent data or events or a customer advisory board, Drew and the CMO Huddles team has been able to connect me with the right people, and I’m able to rip off and duplicate, frankly, what they do, understand what they’re doing well, and bring it back to Service Express. So CMO Huddles has been just a tremendous resource for both me and Service Express.

Jamie: Okay, well, I’m gonna rip off the R&D definition for it. That’s pretty awesome. Alright, Charles.

Charles: Yeah, well, I think the rip off and duplicate concept definitely applies, because there’s a lot of stuff that gets shared into the Slack channel that I’m constantly following along on threads. And one of the things that has been really, really helpful, to be honest, is vendor evaluations and getting a real-life perspective on here’s an agency that did a fabulous job for us in this area. Here’s somebody who you need to speak to if you’re evaluating ABM tech. Here’s how we went forward with our website rebuild, and here’s the SEO agency that we use to do the migration. Just that kind of practical, hands-on, got-to-get-a-job-done type of assistance really comes in handy, especially as I think we all have been this last year. When you’re trying to be scrappy, right? You’re trying to do more with less a little bit. And so having other folks who are in the same position and give you that couple steps down the road advice is an incredible asset.

Jamie: I cannot agree more. And it is through this community that I found my talent that helped me to set the foundation in place for ABX, both from a process perspective, technology, talent, all of that. So I went to this community, and now I’ve got my full infrastructure in place, and couldn’t be happier. Alright, Tom.

Tom: Yeah. I mean, all great comments by Josh and Charles there. I think the one that I would add is actually Drew himself, so sometimes an underrated resource. But if you can book a one-to-one with Drew and either he can help you navigate what’s going on in the community, where you might turn to specifically for an answer, who specifically has done something, or even if you just need some therapy as you answered that before, Jamie, you want to allow some steam about everything that you know, those work pressures we all face every day. He can be good for that too.

Jamie: Yes, he can be, and he is on speed dial for that reason. Alright, so as we mentioned to the audience, we do have a free starter program. If you’re not part of our community, you should take advantage of that. So we kind of did an interesting thing with this studio live. And for the past five, six weeks, I think it’s been Drew has been pushing out poll questions around 2025 planning, and so we’re going to delve into those questions today and reveal the responses. We got a really phenomenal response rate. I was so excited, as I was watching those come through. So at least we know we’ve got more than 100 responses to almost every single question, alright, and there are some interesting data points. I was a little surprised by some of the responses, so we’re going to get into them. We’ll kind of do a round-robin on your perspective.

The first poll question that we asked to the LinkedIn community and marketing executives is, how do you anticipate your marketing budget changing in 2025? The majority, 40% of respondents said an increase. 32% for will remain the same. 28% responded a decrease in marketing budget. So I think for many marketers who are in that 40% category, great, because it feels like, or at least the data has substantiated that for the last several years, we’ve been on a decline. In fact, Gartner published their B2B spend research, and we had a 15% dip in spend from 2023 to 2024. Are we bouncing back? What do we expect to see? So any thoughts from you on the fact that 40% of the respondents said they’re expecting to see an increase? Are we back in the saddle? Are we done with this downward trend?

Tom: I would like to be that optimistic, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? I think all of the data that we’ve seen in recent years, from Gartner and so on, I said, you know, marketing budgets are decreasing and so on and so forth. I want to be optimistic and say yes, that’s definitely going to be the case. This poll caught me off guard, though. I was expecting it to be a still a little bit more weighted. You know, if you think about those that said it’s staying flat or it’s declining, it was still 60%. I kind of expected that to be around the 70% mark. Maybe something caught me off guard. Maybe companies are starting to place those bets back in marketing, you know, particularly with the US election having been concluded by 2025, the Fed expecting to have cut interest rates by then, maybe that means the available lending to businesses is coming at a cheaper cost, so they can afford to place the bet in marketing to restart their business. But it was not what I was expecting.

Charles: I also think there’s an inflationary aspect to this, which is the cost of marketing has gone up, so you can’t continue to cut to the bone as the cost of media has increased. I mean, at least in our category, we’ve seen CPC bids in Google just continue to rise and rise and rise over the last three years, outpacing inflation, even in some verticals, very significantly. Now that has a lot to do with, you know, our category, being in financial services, and there’s definitely high demand there as well right now, given how constrained and tight the lending environment is. But I think you’ve got to and this is good to see that there’s sort of a realism, I would call it Tom—not so much optimism, but there’s a realism about this at maybe at the board level—that you can’t mortgage the future of your business by just continually constraining marketing. And it’s good to see that at least when you weigh it up, there’s a strong plurality of folks that are expecting to see dollars flow in from a marketing budget standpoint.

Another thing I’ll be interested in, maybe Josh, you’ve got perspectives on this too, is how much of that is being driven by external expenditures versus staff and team investments that the companies might be making into marketing. We definitely look at it kind of both ways, right? And I think for us, I’m actually seeing kind of a hold-the-line approach on the top-line numbers for marketing expense, but more of an invest in the team sort of mid-term goal, which will carry us into 2025.

Josh: I think particularly for companies that strive to have low double-digit annual revenue growth, they’ve recognized the path to that long-term sustainable growth is through performance marketing teams. In order to realize that gain, they have to invest. I think that investment, though, comes with a string—and the string is not just that marketing is driving top-line growth. It’s that marketing is also driving profitability, and that has not always been the case. You know, we saw in the last couple of years, boards of directors, private equity firms, and others start to focus not just on top-line growth, but profitability as well. I don’t think that’s changed. I think marketing will still, even though we have more money to spend, we’re still going to have to account for how profitable the team and the company is.

Jamie: And I would imagine efficiency too. I would guess that what might have influenced this a little bit is the stage of company. So if you’re in a high-growth mode, early stage, maybe Series B, Series C, you’re going to see that there’s going to be more investment in marketing. And then as you start maturing into that 100 million plus, it’s going to flatten out a little bit. There’s a lot of data out there, so that would be an interesting one to explore as well. All good points. Let’s move on to poll question number two because we got several more to go through.

Which of these marketing areas will get more of your budget in 2025 than in 2024? Now this one was a little close, but I’m not surprised by this. In fact, I’m actually delighted by it. Events got the majority of the votes, 42% followed by online marketing, 39%, and then offline, which excluded events. There was a small portion where allocations were going to stay the same. Events are back. I mean, Charles, we were just talking about that when you’re talking about 2025 where you’re placing bets and influencer marketing. But I’m absolutely delighted because I think in B2B marketing, relationships are key to selling and that trust factor, and let’s be real. I mean, it’s hard to replicate that online. That human-to-human connection is best done when you can actually shake hands with somebody, break bread over dinner, lock eyes, and have a conversation. So I’m actually delighted by this, Charles. I cut you off there for a second, but I know you have something to say on this one in particular.

Charles: I have so many thoughts and reactions to the return of events, right? I mean, we were one of the industries in small business finance that saw the pandemic really from the inside out and its impact across a wide range of businesses. The decline in events was one of those major things. I mean, in our SaaS business, we went from spending probably half to two-thirds of our budget in those early pre-COVID years would go into physical events and sales activations around events, and that went to zero right overnight during COVID. So having it come back is kind of natural. And like you said, Jamie, it’s a relief in that way.

But at the same time, I’ve experienced events are coming back in a different way. In our industry, we’ve seen some of the staple events didn’t make it through those COVID years, they couldn’t survive. They tried to pivot into being content publishers and build up a following in that way. So there’s been a lot of turnover. There’s one major conference in our sector that ended up folding up, I believe it was last year, called Lendit. It was kind of a mainstay in the FinTech industry. But that’s just one of a number of examples of events in sort of that old-school brand mode of event management that just have not really blossomed.

At the same time, I think there’s been a new crop of events that have come up. And as you know, I’ll toot our horn, as we’ve definitely been doing at Biz2Credit, also brand-led events, and ones that are going to more tightly coordinate between a sales outcome and the brand investment that’s involved in putting an event together, getting the right people there, and building up that agenda. And so I’m definitely bullish on more brand leadership around events right now, and I think that might be why we’re seeing in this response just beating out online marketing as an area of increased allocation in the near term. Is because this is an area that you can have more direct control than you maybe previously could, and a lot of that we’ll get to at some later point, I’m sure, is, you know, the infrastructure around running your events now, if you’re doing it in-house, has become a lot easier, right? So the apps and techniques are just starting to get disseminated more broadly, and I think it’s opening more marketers’ eyes to the fact that they can actually put on a successful event.

Jamie: Especially if you work for a company where you have an elongated sales cycle, and perhaps your ASP is on the higher side, and so trust matters even more, or your buyers want to meet your customers in person, that has a profound impact. I know in my industry, I’m in healthcare technology, we market to hospitals and health systems. Events are a prime channel for us to have the conversations, even to meet with customers, because they go to these places to meet even with their vendors. But that trust factor is so big. Forrester did a study on events specifically, and the majority of marketers said that they’re really going to start focusing their event strategy on the smaller, intimate, hosted events, whether those are diner rounds or something else. I’m not surprised by that either. They can be quite expensive, but very, very effective. Tom, any thoughts on this poll question?

Tom: Yeah, I think obviously, Charles, you said it all with events. I’m absolutely thrilled to see them come back. I think it is really, really important. I’m based in the UK, and so I would say here in Europe, even more so than in the United States, that face-to-face component of doing business is really important. So thrilled to see that come back. Not a surprise. On your comment there as well, Jamie, around the kind of dining format or smaller networking events being popular too. I think we started to see that trend, actually, even before the pandemic. And then, you know, now people are looking for those human connections as they try to engage. Thinking about the second-place answer in the poll though, online marketing, for me, that’s absolutely no surprise. And interestingly, Google just announced a few weeks back that they’re not going to be removing the third-party cookie going forward, which, you know, is maybe seen as a loss for privacy all over the world on one hand, but I think for B2B marketers, it helps with some of those challenges we’re facing. You know, Charles talked about the increase in advertising costs and the cost per unit, however you’d like to measure that. So optimizing your digital experience through third-party cookies, through optimization tools to get more means that now, compared to maybe five years ago, it’s easier to place a bet in online marketing and know that you’re going to get a return and deliver predictability to your business.

Jamie: Right. Josh, thoughts on this one before we move on?

Josh: I suspect that events will get a greater share of the dollars. I also suspect online marketing is not getting less a share of the dollars. I think to Tom’s point, it’s easy to articulate the ROI for online marketing. I think the value proposition, or the differentiator for events, is that online marketing has always been and has increasingly become a crowded space. Attention is a currency, and it’s very difficult to get attention, particularly for buyers in the enterprise segment online. And I do think the value proposition for events is that businesses can get in front of enterprise buyers and get attention easier. So I would guess that is really the value proposition and why people are getting into events more in 2025.

Jamie: Yeah. So I think what we’re seeing here is be where your buyers are. Funnel by objective, that you use different channels to do different things based on where buyers are and how you effectively engage, so hybrid of both online and offline. Alright. Poll number three, let’s move on. We asked which of these objectives will get more of your budget in 2025 than in 2024. Colo me shocked. Demand gen got 51% of the vote, followed by brand and reputation building. So when I was looking at this, two things came to mind. One is, we’re always trying to show our impact. And so yes, demand gen kind of gets back to marketing as a revenue generator and not a cost center, and we got to show that we can actually impact profitability and all of these things. So I guess it’s not surprising. But two is, I think we’re still afraid to talk about brand as revenue marketing too, and we’re afraid to say that brand is demand. Today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand. So I wasn’t shocked by this. Tom, do you want to kick this one off and give your thoughts on it?

Tom: Yeah, I’d love to. I’m totally with you, right? There’s no demand without brand. It doesn’t exist. I think one of the things that’s happened in a post-pandemic world is the competition that you have is tougher than ever before. For a good number of years, we’ve not all been fighting over the last grabs. I think that’s perhaps a little bit too far, but it’s definitely been a more crowded marketplace because the tactics and channels that we can all go through to get to market in our respective markets have been restricted at times. So now is, if you’ve got the wiggle room in your budget to do so, it’s absolutely the right time to bring your brand spend back, because you’ve got to be able to differentiate yourself from the competition and really show the world what you do that’s better, that’s different, that’s unique, that’s a new commercial proposition that your competition doesn’t do. And I think it’s also a great way to really show off what your company is doing today, in a world where sometimes we can be a bit complacent about how we communicate the message of what we do.

Jamie: Josh, you’re nodding your head.

Josh: Yeah. I totally agree with Tom. I think the other reason that this probably is so high is because it’s easy for CMOs to be able to talk about the objective value and ROI of demand initiatives. We still haven’t found the language or the algebra of how to articulate the value of brand, particularly with our CEOs and in front of the board. I think demand generation, if CMOs just focus on that, is a very short-term thing. It means that marketing teams are relying on getting in front of buyers at the right time that they’re making buying decisions. The cost of not focusing on brand is that all of these buyers are not going to recall your company and what you do and what you offer and what your value proposition is and how you’re helpful to them. For a CMO to drive long-term growth, you’ve got to be able to focus on brand. The buyers have to remember that if you don’t get in front of them when they’re ready to make a buying decision, they have to remember who your company is and what it is that you offer. And I just think as CMOs, we’ve got to do a better job finding the language to be able to speak to the importance of that and the value of that, outside of just algebra and other things. So it doesn’t surprise me. I think it’s still a challenge that we have to solve.

Jamie: To that point, Josh, assuming the research is correct—I’ve heard variations of it, but let’s just assume only 10% of your market is in market at any given time—you have to make sure that when the 90% is ready to purchase and they’re showing intent and a desire to do business with you, you have to be memorable to them. They have to remember so when that moment is right for them and they’re in market. So I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I’m actually going to add on the next poll question, just for the sake of time, and then I’ll have Charles answer that, but the follow-on question to this. And I guess this is not a surprise, given that the majority of the audience put demand gen as where they’re going to put more budget, is demand gen is also the talent that they’re looking to hire onto their team in 2025 followed by content marketing, which received the same votes as not planning to add new roles. And so for demand gen, adding talent there, Charles, speak to that a little bit in terms of the talent that you’re bringing on, especially as you’re getting more on your multi-channel approach and getting more lift from your ABX strategy. What kind of talent should we be looking for in demand gen?

Charles: I interpret this as really there’s definitely spend more in channels that have a short-term ROI that have a proven ROI as well. Generate leads. It’s all about MQLs for the sales team. And, you know, I think that discipline in the CMO function should be there, right? We have to, sort of to your point, Tom and Josh, we have to be able to sort of speak in the algebra of the CEO and the board to be able to maintain credibility in those conversations. I think we need to add something further to the conversation. And I don’t recall exactly where I got this nugget. I’m just going to attribute it to CMO Huddles as a result. I think really breaking this into the notion of demand creation, away from demand capture, and thinking about these roles in a slightly different lens will start to reveal what I see as a bit of a paradox here, where you’ve got marketers saying that they’re going to allocate more into demand generation, these classical channels of paid performance marketing, and spend media dollars to acquire leads. At the same time, where are they significantly investing into their teams, and where do they see the highest ROI, which we’ll come to as well, I know Jamie, is in these areas that have a lot more to do with reputation, a lot more to do with brand, and events are kind of a case in point where you’re able to blend these two things together. You’re not going to say the event was successful only based on the number of leads. You’re going to say it’s successful on the basis of the agenda went off the way it went. The content that was produced is reusable into the future, and you generated the leads for the business that sales was looking for. So I think kind of a little bit of a reframe might be needed in the way that we’re all thinking about this and all talking about this, and understand that these are two ends of the marketing challenge. You can’t just address only one side of them and not address the other. You need a team that will produce content that knows how to create really awesome materials to showcase your product, to connect with and resonate with the value propositions that are pertinent to that user community that you’re trying to sell into, then you can generate those leads and drive activity at the mid to bottom of the funnel. But I think right now, I see this as kind of paradoxical results, a little bit where, you know, we’re still in this hyper, financially minded, business-minded, outcomes-minded mode, and yet there’s this underlying sense that you have to be able to do content well. You have to be able to do brand well at the same time.

Jamie: And to that point, Charles, you know, we spend a lot of time standing up channels, because we know we need to be where our buyers are, and they’re in different places, and different channels do different things. And if you’re not feeding it with the right ammunition, which is our content, to actually engage and get their attention, it’s noisy out there. I mean, Google is the new battleground for people’s attention, and you got to capture it because you don’t have the luxury of always having a well-established brand that comes to memory when somebody thinks about that. I would also say that for demand gen, as your company matures, depending again on what stage you are in, the marketing roles become highly specialized as you start standing up more channels. And so I’ve talked to a lot of marketing professionals that are in a Series B or Series C stage, and they’re starting to add on highly specialized talent, including, and this will be part of our next question, too, around AI, people who might have the skills, specific skills around that. So I’m actually going to move on to the next poll question, just for the sake of time, because this one’s really interesting, and I know we want to get into ROI as well. So poll number five, bear with this audience. What skills or competencies do you see as most critical for your marketing team’s success in 2025? So even though I just dropped AI then, it actually scored one of the lowest votes. Clarity and collaboration, 55% of the audience voted for clarity and collaboration, for skills and competencies. What’s behind that? Tom, you’re laughing. What do you think?

Tom: I’m really happy to see that up there, because I think one of the most under-talked-about things in building a successful marketing department for any business is the fact that you need a team that works well together, particularly when you layer in the things that we were just talking about, the number of different channels that we have to stand up, the more complex go-to-market situations that we have with multiple segments and multiple products in market, that really helps. Let’s though, spend a moment on 11% was it for Gen AI as a capability?Jamie: 11% for Gen AI and 11% for creativity? Which that one actually was, you know, a little bit of a stinger, because I love, I love creative roles.

Tom: So on the Gen AI piece, though, I’ve got two theories on this, and maybe they’re opposing. I don’t know. The first theory is maybe there’s just the expectation that everybody should have a Gen AI capability as part of their own skill set today. And so people aren’t specifically looking for that because they assume that you already have it. So maybe that’s one. The other one is as well. I think there’s a balancing act with AI, and I think during 2024 we all learned that. And that’s the connection between the previous poll question, where people were looking to add content capabilities to their team, and the fact that Gen AI is ranked so lowly in this question because people, I think, tried to scale their content operations using AI and realized that if it’s not used properly, it could create not the best quality content. Perhaps, you know, not as authentic or original as others. I went to a CMO Huddles meetup in London last week, and Drew was there on his way to seeing the penguins in Africa. We were blessed by the CMO of Vodafone B2B, and she said the top agencies today are advising her to put your problem into AI and whatever it spits out, don’t do that, because your competition probably will do something different and more original. I think there’s a connection between people looking for content talent and AI being ranked so low.

Jamie: Interesting point. Josh, any thoughts to what Tom just said?

Josh: First of all, I would just say that, you know, clarity and collaboration is, it’s so funny that the more technology that we bring in to break down walls and build teamwork, it seems the more siloed organizations become and building out strategies and working through problems. And I just believe marketing plays a unique role. We touch so many different departments within our organization, we’re uniquely positioned to be able to bring that collaboration. I’ll say something also that’s probably not as popular. One of the choices was Gen AI. I really do think, though, that I’m seeing more private equity firms and others embrace AI, not generative AI, but AI as a tool for understanding their business, and AI is really advancing rapidly. I don’t think Gen AI is, but I do think AI like the tools, the products are advancing rapidly in their ability to help you understand your business. And I do think that AI is a way to understand your business through data analytics and give you a point of view and find patterns where a human’s not going to see patterns. I think that’s underrated right now. I see private equity and others moving in that direction, and I do believe they’re probably going to demand the same of executives, including the Chief Marketing Officer in 2025.

Jamie: I would also say that we’re still doing a lot of heavy lifting on demystifying what we do, which is shocking to me. It’s surprising because when people ask me, “What does marketing do? Like, how do you purchase products? What is the process you go through? How do you learn about a product? How do you discover it? What’s a purchasing process like, what do you expect in service?” And I simply ask that question, they’re like, “Oh, okay.” But I would imagine some of this too is the clarity and the collaboration around working with other teams to be able to demystify but also when we’re doing more with less. How do you get work done through other people? Before we move on to poll six, Charles, did you want to add anything to that?

Charles: Just that I would love the marketing department to be the clarity department, right? We’ve talked about the branding of the CMO. Chief Clarity Officer, to me, that would be a decent rebrand if we needed to do that, because I think crystallizing the business down into seven words and being able to make those seven words fit for the breadth of what a company can achieve or its lines of business. Tom, you and I have very complex business stakeholders to manage, so being clear about how you’re going to approach things, what message you need to bring—those I think are foundational. Are they the hard skills that you might expect to see in demand here and now? I agree with Josh, I think data analytics and a really strong ability to use technology to pull out insights is what will give clarity to marketing teams in 2025 if that’s our mission, right? We can’t see it as just one or the other. It’s got to be about finding the insight in the business that gives us a nugget on which we build, whether it’s a campaign strategy, a brand position, or just as simple as a blog post title. I think clarity is the word I would definitely lean into.

Jamie: Alright. Final poll question, the one we love to talk about—ROI or impact. Which of the following tactics do you expect to have the highest ROI in 2025? Hands down, owned content and SEO got 63% of the vote, followed by paid ads, including SEM and events. I remember, actually, there was a comment when Drew had released that poll that we should have decoupled content from SEO for all intents and purposes. They’re together. Tom, you want to kick this one off on what’s going to have the greatest ROI—content, and SEO, or maybe something else?

Tom: Well, we talked about content a little bit, so maybe let’s spend a minute on SEO for this question. So two things with SEO. Firstly, we know that buyers today, particularly in a B2B space, will do more than 70% of their research about your company and your product before they even raise a hand. So SEO is table stakes for me, and I think for a lot of companies because it can be difficult and can take some time to have a really good, basic SEO foundation for your website and your digital experience. It can be neglected sometimes. The second piece of that puzzle, I think, as well, is why would it have the most ROI? Well, actually, if you do it well, it can be a really cost-effective strategy, right? If you put the right number of team members on this and it becomes a theme throughout your organization, not something that’s done in silo, if you use the right tools to help you, of course, I would say that, because Acquia sells one of those tools. But putting that aside, if you use the right tools to help you, and then you build a program of work and a structure around it, it can certainly be a lower-cost option and deliver great results for you.

Jamie: Alright. Josh, thoughts on this one specifically?

Josh: Yeah, I love this one. I think, totally agree with Tom, content, and SEO are long-term but harder things to do. But when done right, they last years. We have content that we created 11-12 years ago when I started that we still use today because it’s evergreen and thoughtful, and articulates our value proposition well. These are things that are harder to create, and sometimes you have to add roles to do that, but there’s no question in the long term, these are the ones that pay off. So it’s good to see that this was number one.

Charles: Personally, Jamie, for me, merging these two together speaks to a larger challenge that we’ve got, and we definitely face it in our business, which is, you sort of think of them as brandied together and you say, “Oh, this is an area where we’ll just deal with it in-house. We’ll just sort of make sure that that’s always on.” And I think there’s an evergreen value to having a great content strategy, and SEO is how that content very often gets discovered, but I would separate it out. I would say content has to be part of the ROI picture for all of these other channels that marketers are thinking about. It’s got to be part of your event strategy. It’s got to be part of your paid digital and advertising strategy. It’s got to be part of your organic strategy. It’s got to be part of earned media. Content, to me, is the thing that’s the common denominator. You pull it away from all those other distribution vehicles, and then when you’re just assessing where you’re going to have ROI in 2025 from any one of those vehicles, I think it really is brand-specific. I mean, you look at a company like us, even unto ourselves. I’m thinking about two different brands, one serving small business owners, one serving the financial services sector. And my answer to ROI is going to be different, right? Events is going to have a much higher ROI for me in the financial services target audience. But when it comes to my small business owner community, that’s where I think really getting precise on search optimization and then distribution into earned media, those are going to be areas that have the highest bang for our buck investment-wise. So I think that’s a little bit of a reframe. Maybe it’s a contrarian view here, but I kind of feel like you’ve got to take content out of the story first because it always permeates everything else that you’re doing.

Jamie: Right. Well, I’m going to save this other question for a different time, but there’s always that debate, gated or ungated, or is it a hybrid? But we don’t have time because we are at the tail end of the show. So I want to thank Charles, Tom, and Josh for all being good sports and joining me on today’s special episode while Drew is off with the African penguins. Hopefully, he’ll bring us, well, not a live one back, but some goodies that he could share with the community. And thank you, audience for staying with us. We hope that you found this very valuable.

Drew: To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we’re live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week!

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!