AI, even more privacy legislation, new cookie banners, and expanded possibilities in terms of content. Marketing certainly hasn’t stood still in 2024. But what’s next? It’s high time to look at the B2B marketing trends for 2025.
Key takeaways B2B marketing trends 2025
- AI is here to stay, its applications are increasing, and it will become an integral part of our daily marketing activities.
- If you want to create effective content as a B2B service provider, you’ll need to focus on video and terms like user-generated content and zero-click content.
- Due to increasing privacy legislation, smart solutions are needed to maintain insights into important data without compromising the user experience.
- Customers from different target groups are seeking authenticity in companies.
1. AI as useful tool
By now, everyone knows ChatGPT, but it’s no longer the only or even the biggest player in the market. Google is still hard at work developing Gemini, Microsoft has Copilot, and those are just the chatbots. Meanwhile, you can find specialized AI tools for a wide range of applications, and their use will only grow in 2025. For example, there are programs for creating (moving) images, voice-overs, and even buyer personas.
After the initial debates about what AI would bring us, ranging from utopian to dystopian visions, it’s now clear that AI is here to stay. Marketers and communication specialists, in particular, will increasingly use AI as a practical tool.
For B2B marketing, this mainly means that we can increasingly delegate the ‘easy’ tasks to AI. Think of translating content for a bilingual website, a grammar check for blog content, or helping brainstorm the right pay-off. AI will not quickly replace human creativity, but it can stimulate that creativity and provide much more space for it.
2. New expectations from content
Content will require more attention in the coming year. The trends we’ve already seen in consumer marketing will also become B2B marketing trends in 2025.
Video content
TikTok has brought about a change across all social media platforms, where video content is favored by both users and the algorithm. Now, LinkedIn is joining in. This year, a ‘Reels’ tab was added to the LinkedIn app, and when creating a post, adding a video is the first option. LinkedIn is the ideal social media platform for B2B marketers. So, where we could previously ignore video platforms, thinking the audience wasn’t there, B2B marketers will now have to embrace video more.
Zero-click content
Zero-click content will become increasingly important under the influence of AI and social media algorithms. For example, on LinkedIn, posts with a link are much less widely shared among followers than posts without one. On Instagram, adding a link to a post isn’t even possible. Platforms, as well as search engines like Google, want to provide visitors with information as quickly as possible and keep them within their own domain. For instance, the new application of AI in search engines now provides ready-made answers, so users don’t need to visit websites. These changes require a new approach to maintain the visibility of your content.
User-generated content
Due to an abundance of content and ads, we will revert to an age-old successful concept in 2025: word-of-mouth marketing. Now packaged under the new term, user-generated content, it’s all about having a real user promote your product or service. People prefer to buy a new product if they already know that others liked it. Many companies already support this by gathering good reviews, but it will also need to feature more prominently in content strategies. This can, for example, be done through influencer marketing. That doesn’t mean you need to call Kim Kardashian. Think more about an authority in your field— a relevant person who writes a guest blog, provides a testimonial for the website, or promotes your product or service in another way. That will be a big boost for leads and sales.
3. Increasing privacy legislation
In recent years, privacy legislation has become increasingly stricter. With the arrival of new ways to use the internet, this legislation will often be adjusted. For B2B marketing, data is still of great importance. It’s how we determine whether the SEA campaign is delivering enough results and whether a blog is successful or not. Under the new privacy regulations, such as the ability to always refuse cookies, data collection has become much more challenging. Complying with the legislation, collecting as much data as possible, and at the same time minimizing the disruption to the user experience requires smart solutions, such as implementing server side tagging.
4. Authenticity please
We live in turbulent times, where important issues such as the emancipation of minorities and protecting the climate are high on the agenda for various target groups. It’s important to note that there is a clear focus on authenticity. Customers want to know what a company stands for and also see this reflected in its actions. A pitfall when involving social issues in business operations is the so-called ‘rainbow washing’ or ‘green washing,’ where a company claims to stand for something but doesn’t back it up with actions. The best way to align with this trend is to first determine what your company truly stands for and what you can genuinely incorporate into decision-making and communication. In this way, you contribute to the cause while remaining authentic.
