2024 has had no shortage of twists and turns. As we close the chapter on another year, we reflect on the Most Impactful B2B Marketing Trends we’ve seen over the last 12-months across our clients and agency partners.

Alright, let’s skip a lengthy intro and dig into each one of these meaty trends and their impact on Marketers and Agencies in 2025 (FYI, we saved our favorite for last)...

#1: Importance of Brand Building. 

We are in a moment in time where the lines between “B2B” and “B2C” have blurred. Some B2B brands have begun to understand that B2B buyers are people, who have lives outside of their day-to-day jobs. Building a relationship with the B2B buying committee across their personal and professional lives is becoming increasingly critical. This is how B2B brands are making shortlists, as buyers buy from companies they know and trust. 

Impact to Marketers in 2025: The challenge with brand building is often justifying budgets to support true brand building activities (across creative, production and execution) and showing the impact of brand on your business. Brand building often requires executive team (sometimes board) buy-in. Let’s help you get buy-in from your executive team with some stats to build your internal case:

• 67% of CMOs plan to increase brand budgets in 2025 (LinkedIn)
• 88% of CMOs are moving towards bolder creative (LinkedIn)
• 90% of buyers do their research online before you know they’re doing research (Forbes)
• 95% of your  potential buyers aren’t in market - brand building helps bring them into market (LinkedIn)

Impact to Agencies in 2025: Brands need an agency partner who can help them simply, creatively and innovatively stand-out in a sea of industry sameness and gain the attention of the audiences that matter the most to them against, not only their known competitors, but also any number of brands vying for the audience’s attention. Because of this, you need to understand your client’s brand and their target audiences.” Cool ideas” need to connect, have legs and drive impact. 

#2: Tying Together Brand and Demand. 

While seemingly simple, tying brand and demand together is a riddle many B2B brands have yet to crack. Some brands are taking great strides in building full funnel alignment, which fundamentally comes down to rethinking team goals and team organization. Many individual contributor marketing goals (and sometimes even team goals) do not align with marketing organizational goals or overarching business objectives. As a whole, we need to be less territorial and more focused on the impact we can make together.

Impact to Marketers in 2025: For brand and demand to truly work together, cross-functional teams need to work together, individual goals need to align with marketing goals and marketing goals need to align with business objectives. You also need the right tools and technology, the right agency partners and shared access to data. According to B2B Marketing, “ROI on campaigns that sought to integrate brand and demand averages is 35:1,” which is significantly higher than brand or demand campaigns ran in silos. 

Impact to Agencies in 2025: Sometimes brands hire you thinking you’re the answer to this riddle. You’re not, but you can either be part of the problem or part of the solution. To be part of the solution, help your clients think in less siloed ways, support cross functional initiatives and take a step back to think about how your work with them is impacting the whole. Make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, including the part that you manage with them. Some of this is also managing internal politics, which can be tricky. Do your best to not add to the drama, but be a trusted and unbiased third party partner. 

#3: Marketing Teams with Revenue Goals. 

Some marketers are being held on the hook for revenue, while others are being held to other goals like sourced or influenced pipe, etc. Either way, marketers need to be able to show the impact of your activities more than ever. Marketer’s jobs now are dependent on this. 

Impact to Marketers in 2025: This is a big and complex topic. Most soft KPIs aren’t cutting it at the executive or board level anymore. Showing how your team influenced, sourced and even generated revenue is now needed for you to adequately prove the effectiveness of your marketing investments. If you work with external agency partners, you need to know that they are truly your strategic partner and that they are investing your dollars as if their jobs depend on it (because yours just might). 

Impact to Agencies in 2025: Vanity metrics are not good enough anymore. Your clients need to know “why”, not just that one ad got more clicks than another. You need to help your clients show their bosses usable insights, the value of what you did together and how you impacted business results. If your client’s jobs depend on this, so does yours.

#4: Real-time Strategic Agency Partnerships. 

Marketers need an agency that can brainstorm with you, ask insightful questions, have strategic conversations and really be the partner you thought you hired. Marketers truly want an extension of your teams, not simply execution. Most of Tenx4’s RFPs begin with complaints about the agency team members, “They’re order takers,” “No strategic input,” “They don’t make any recommendations about how to improve our campaigns,” etc. 

Impact to Marketers in 2025: Just like we talked about above, you’re on the hook for tangible results. Marketers don’t want order takers and executional-centric agency partnerships. You need an agency partner who adds value, provides strategic guidance, makes you better and stronger, and can help you showcase the results of your efforts to your internal stakeholders. If you feel like you’re not getting this type of support from your agency, it is likely time for an honest conversation with your agency. If you’ve already tried to improve your agency partnership, it might be time for a new agency.  

Impact to Agencies in 2025: You need to educate and empower your team to have real-time strategic conversations with your clients. Encourage your team to have POVs and give them the safety to feel comfortable enough to try new things. Cultivate curiosity, sharing ideas, think outside the box and bring your creativity to your clients. Focus on the long-term value of the partnership over the short-term profits under the microscope of timesheets, billable hours and burnrates.

#5: Increase of Outsourcing to Consultants and Agencies: 

With uncertain economic times, we’ve seen an up-tick in brands turning to third party contractors, consultants and agencies in 2024. Some brands have hiring freezes for FTEs, while they have ample budgets for third party contractors and agencies. There are likely many reasons for this, but some that we have noticed are CFOs/CEOs/Boards are more comfortable with flexing up and down budgets with external partners rather than staff reductions and external partners and contractors are paid from different budgets (aka, they stay off the employee financing books). 

Impact to Marketers in 2025: There’s no way to sugar coat it, it is a rough job market. With the layoffs across the industry, there’s an influx of super high quality talent available. It is making finding a job harder, as there are many qualified applicants. It is also disheartening to hear so many stories of marketers “being ghosted” after multiple rounds of interviews. We’re not trying to paint a bleak picture, it is just the reality of this moment. We’re hopeful that greener pastures are just around the corner. That said, if we can ever help our friends find a job, please let us know (we’re not recruiters and never make any money from this, we just like to help). 

Impact to Agencies (and Consultants) in 2025: There seems to be more work for you all. While some brands are seeing budget cuts, others are increasing their reliance on external vendors for roles once managed in-house. This is your opportunity to roll up your sleeves and add value where your clients need support. They’re likely being asked to do more with less resources - help them where you can and as much as you can. But, be careful not to be constantly “selling” to your clients. Marketers can tell when they’re being sold to rather than when someone is truly trying to help add value. 

#6: Trust

We saved our favorite topic for last. While “trust” is not a new topic to anyone, we saw the importance of trust be solidified in 2024 more than ever. As work has become less “corporate” and more “human,” our human defining core trait has taken its deserved role at the center of the stage: Trust. People choose to work with people they trust, they buy from people (and brands) they trust and they stay with people (and brands) they trust. People are constantly evaluating mico-moments and life’s biggest moments through the lens of trust. Trust is everything. 

Impact to Marketers in 2025: Trust should be at the cornerstone of everything you do. Your real job is to build trust between your brand and your target audience. Your brand needs to be seen as the leader, the trusted source and the obvious answer to solve your target audience’s challenge. But, your challenge is to build that trust across the buying committee and across the buyers’ journey. This takes dedication from your entire marketing team and also a ton of coordination across other departments too (sales, product, operations, web, design, etc.). And, if you are working with external agencies, you need to know that you can trust them to help you build trust with your target audiences. 

Impact to Agencies in 2025: Your business depends on your ability to build trust with your clients. Many will tell you that your business is built on your ability to perform. Performance is a byproduct of trust. Building trust should be the focus of most (probably all) of your actions. You build trust by adding value, meeting deadlines, helping your clients achieve their goals, being accountable, behaving with integrity, strong communication… the list goes on and on. Building trust should be the cornerstone of everything you do. Remember that trust is gained in drops, but lost in buckets. 

Yep, you made it through 6 topics and none were about AI. We intentionally decided not to talk about AI. Everyone is talking about AI, so we decided to talk about other things. 

It’s been a big year. Hopefully we can leverage learning from 2024 to build a stronger approach to marketing, more impactful relationships with your target audiences and more successful relationships with your agency partners. We can’t wait to see what 2025 has to offer, so much is possible! 

Sources: LinkedIn B2B Report 2024, Forbes and B2B Marketing