By Harry Mackin

To say that 2025 is proving a tumultuous time for B2B marketing (or anything else) feels like a gross understatement. 

Between inflation, continued supply chain disruptions, interest rate hikes, and the unfolding consequences of tariffs, it’s little wonder that B2B organizations everywhere are feeling more than a little uncertain about the future. And as B2B marketers unfortunately know, when organizations are faced with uncertainty about their health, they look at adjusting their marketing budgets for relief all too frequently.

According to Forrester’s Budget Planning Guide 2025: B2B Marketing Executives, nearly half (47%) of global B2B marketing decision-makers said they were expecting only between a 1% and 4% growth in their marketing investment, which, accounting for inflation, equates to essentially no gain at all. Meanwhile, the pressure to prove the ROI for these budgets to hold onto them is reaching a fever pitch as the C-suite adjusts to rapidly shifting market realities.

Clearly, B2B marketers have their work cut out for them this year by making more out of less. It’s not all bad news, however. As B2B marketers look for ways to innovate without increasing spending and prove their budgets to the C-suite, emerging technologies and trends may hold exciting new solutions. And based on what we’ve seen so far this year, B2B marketers are taking advantage.

These are a few of the most prominent trends in B2B budgeting in 2025 so far, and what we can learn about the state of the industry by analyzing them.

Concerns guide but do not slow tremendous AI investment

Salesforce recently published its ninth edition of the State of Marketing report, for which it surveyed nearly 5,000 B2B and B2C marketer leaders worldwide to understand how the marketing world is changing in 2025. The top section of their report summarizes arguably this year’s most pivotal budget trend: “AI tops marketing’s agenda.”

Three out of four (75%) marketers are either experimenting with or have already fully implemented AI into their operations — up from 68% in 2022. These adoptees are clearly reaping huge benefits, as high-performing marketers are 2.5x more likely to have fully implemented AI within their operations than underperformers.

Source: Salesforce

This massive adoption of AI coincides with a shift in how marketers are thinking about ways in which the technology can help them. In the State of AI in B2B Marketing in 2024, ON24 asked 500 B2B marketers what they considered the biggest reasons to invest in AI now, rather than waiting for the technology to develop further. Their responses are eye-opening:

Four out of the five top reasons marketers cited for investing in AI now are explicitly financially motivated: marketers believe AI will help them become …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron