Not your average B2B marketing trends 2025

Another year, and the obligatory B2B marketing trends 2025 blog is pencilled into the content calendar at every marketing agency across the world. We love them; they’re a great tool, but let’s face it: 20 per cent (maybe) have truly insightful, useful insights, and the rest are replicas of those good ones.

We all have the same reports and have access to the same internet and research tools, and if we’re good, we should all be getting the same industry insights. The best of them are data rich, pulling together all the stats of this year to inform next year, and that’s the direction we plan to go… but with some little side routes along the way.

Perhaps what’s really valuable that you can’t get from all the research are the hunches—predictions rather than just trends—the impressions that we don’t always have data to back.

The Lead Agency has at its helm a leader with more than 20 years of B2B digital marketing experience and a broader team with 30+ years of collective experience in B2B. Some things we feel in our bones. So, let us share with you the B2B marketing trends of 2025 and the hunches we have for the year ahead.

Download the full paper or read on for the highlights. 

Download our full 2025 B2B marketing predictions paper

11 B2B marketing trends 2025: Not your average predictions

Most marketers will still lack a solid AI game

In mid-2024, Adobe released its 2024 Digital Trends Asia Pacific and Japan Report. It revealed that APAC, including Japan, is a global leader in Generative AI adoption, but Australia is still one of the biggest laggards in the world.

Right now, 50% of Australian companies are adopting Gen AI. That includes AI solutions or pilot projects. Interestingly, only 27% use it for tasks such as crafting emails, messages, and other copy. I can understand that. As someone who produces and follows content for a living… Wowie, 2024 was a low point for trash content flooding the internet. But that’s no reason not to develop the skill to put out something well-researched, thorough and enhanced beyond your usual limits.

AI still won’t have matured

Maybe you don’t even need it anyway. JK. You do. However, I would bet money that the easy-access LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, and all the rest of the “general use” Gen AI tools will still not be mature enough for oversightless usage in 2025.

What do I mean? Unless we’re talking about super simple tasks like fixing your grammar, asking for summaries or tasks that have simple answers or outputs, it would be unwise to go to your board with a report or publish a piece of content that hasn’t been fact-checked, iterated or edited before being approved.

TikTok will be dead. X is too unstable. All eggs in the LinkedIn basket

TikTok will be dead

TikTok is not too widely used in B2B. There are great examples, like Adobe’s TikTok account, but generally speaking, it’s already an “Eh, it’s so hard…” kind of channel for B2B marketers.

But this is a prediction piece, and we predict that TikTok will be on the decline in 2025. What makes us think that? The US is actively working on trying to ban TikTok over data privacy and national security concerns—’cause, China. And it’s not only the US.

X is too unstable

Then, there’s X. Under Elon’s leadership, X has found itself in disputes with governments and organisations worldwide, particularly for issues of content moderation, misinformation, and data privacy.

After Elon took over in 2022, ad revenue dropped by at least 55% each month. By August 2023, ad revenue had dropped 60% compared to the same period the previous year. After that, X stopped sharing its results.

 

All eggs in the LinkedIn basket

The scandals above really leave us with Facebook and LinkedIn. Let’s face it: LinkedIn is our favourite platform, anyway.

Facebook’s visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 0.77%, compared to LinkedIn’s 2.74%. It still plays an important role, but LinkedIn generally outperforms Facebook in B2B contexts for direct lead generation.

Video still won’t be a fully adopted B2B marketing trend in 2025—but it should be

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 76% of B2B marketers are using video in 2024. That’s pretty high. It is second only to short-form/post articles. But we don’t see it. We work with companies from multinationals to local SMEs, and the majority across all sizes are just not doing it, and we don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for that to change.

B2B brands could benefit from YouTube

Ahead of all other content forms—case studies, e-books, reports and short articles and posts, video is the favourite at 58%. The CMI report doesn’t go on to say how. However, the HubSpot 2024 State of Marketing report highlights YouTube as being one of the highest ROI channels for marketers.  

Human to human (H2H) not business to business (B2B)

By 2026, 90% of B2B decision-makers will be Gen X and younger. These demographics care about brand personality, brand values, and being engaged and understood.

In the B2B world, that means understanding their pain points, levelling with them and being “real”. Every B2B marketer knows they need to understand their buyer personas, their pain points and what their buyer needs to make their work lives easier/to solve the problems they face.

The next part is the language and how you communicate the message.

The year of the webinar

How can B2B businesses create video content without an extrovert staff member or a killer animation team? Webinars.

Here are some stats:

• 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders consider webinars the most effective way to generate high-quality leads.
• After attending a webinar, 62% of participants are likely to request a demo.
• Webinars significantly boost engagement, with 81% of B2B professionals engaging in Q&A sessions during webinars.

Gen AI content overuse will kill brands

Obviously, we’re pro-Gen AI, but there have been a number of slips this year with companies overusing these tools without enough oversight and suffering some reputational damage as a result.

One significant example was CNET, which quietly used generative AI to publish a series of articles—73 of them! They say human editors were involved, but the factual errors that snuck through would indicate that those humans gave the AI a little too much trust that what it said was true.

2024 may have been a forgivable year, but we can’t imagine 2025 will be so generous.

Attention spans will shrink even further

We’ll keep this short and sweet. Attention spans are going down. In the last decade, they’ve gone from 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds. God help us with this paper. Anywho, the rise of short-form content like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts has made us all eager to get the highlights at warp speed. That’s only going to get worse.

Organic traffic will fall by 13%

This is one where we’re really just throwing it out there, placing bets, and eager to see how close we are to this figure this time next year.

It’s not a total left-field prediction, though. So far, I have not opened Google once in all of my research for this paper. Those stats were found in conversations with an LLM while discussing the topic and looking to see what stats were out there. With it being much more concise, specific and much faster, buyers are going to use LLMs to answer questions rather than search engines.

Totally avoidable security blunders

Just like posting unedited AI outputs, AI illiteracy has seen some companies sharing proprietary or personal information to LLMs like ChatGPT, breaching data privacy and internal IP rules.   

In a 2023 report, Cyberhaven—a data security service—detected and blocked a scary number of requests to input data into ChatGPT. Of the 1.6 million employees belonging to its various clients, Cyberhaven blocked requests from 4.2% of them.

Google Ads will become even less obvious

If you’ve been using Google Ads (previously Google AdWords) for a long time, you will have noticed a significant aesthetic change over the years, reducing the distinction between ads and the organic content below.

We expect that to be blurred even further in 2025.

It used to be that, for those who were patient, you could opt to invest your marketing budget in SEO and enjoy the fruits of your labour. That’s no longer true. If you use Google Ads, this is not bad news, but it is worth considering in your 2025 marketing strategy. With organic likely to decline as a result of LLMs and Google keen to keep you reliant on ad clicks, SEM might need to be a larger part of your strategy going forward.

Free download of our B2B marketing trends 2025 predictions paper is coming out soon.