B2B Marketing Playbook 2025
Five core best practices to consider when developing B2B marketing playbooks in 2025.
The B2B marketing industry has exploded over the past decade. Private equity companies identified the powerful impact of digital channels on B2B success in the 2010s and that catapulted the sector into major growth mode. B2B companies will spend almost $50 billion on advertising next year, triple what they spent in 2019. B2B marketing and advertising works.
But making B2B marketing work in a predictable, scalable and cost-effective way that accommodates a variety of internal stakeholder needs is another story altogether. Here are the five core fundamentals of the B2B marketing playbook that we advocate with all of our clients: narrative, funnel, KPIs, AI and digital.
1. Manage The Narrative
There is a great deal of misunderstanding about what B2B marketing can and cannot deliver. CEOs and CROs adore high-quality, low-funnel inbound leads that convert to profitable new customers in a few weeks. Even at companies selling pricey B2B solutions with six-figure price tags, this kind of thing will happen a few times throughout the year if marketing operations are humming. But it’s the exception not the rule. The norm with most expensive B2B sales processes involves a “long hard slog” that occurs over months or even years.
This reality leaves B2B marketing managers in a tough spot. We need to communicate and celebrate short-term, building block-style wins like launching a newsletter or building out a microsite while we are building up a pipeline that might not deliver a new customer for 24-36 months. So setting realistic expectations with organizational leadership is job number one, and it often takes awhile to get teams calibrated.
2. Master The Funnel
BOFU, MOFU, TOFU, and even FOFU are terms thrown around with abandon in marketing circles, especially B2B ones. And for good reason: they help us to communicate efficiently, prioritize resources, and understand the customer journey at a detailed level. Funnel-centric style planning makes sense for most B2B marketing teams because it’s a straightforward construct that’s easy to understand and has been around for awhile. It also helps with setting internal performance expectations.
Example: events are often the biggest budget line item for a B2B marketing manager, but are also typically regarded as a mid- or even top-funnel tactic. So there isn’t an expectation that attending an event will yield “low funnel” leads in the short term, even though that sometimes happens. For this reason, events can be a good starting point for assigning relative value to different tactics throughout the funnel.
Another big factor is the 95:5 rule, which states: 95% of the total available market for most B2B offerings are not in active shopping mode. This means we marketers need to prioritize our efforts among the 5% of shoppers (understanding that we have limited insights into who they might be) while also making sure that we keep filling the mid- and top-funnel pipeline, i.e., the other 95%. It’s an ongoing juggling act that requires equal attention to performance management and creative problem solving.
3. Corral KPIs
Orienting the organization around a handful of KPIs seems like a straightforward exercise. Pro tip: it almost never is. Corporate storytelling author Bill Stafford explains, “People often don’t know what they actually need — they just know what they think they want. To succeed, you need to cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and uncover underlying needs”.
Example: it can be incredibly valuable for a company to have a massive footprint on LinkedIn. But it might also not lead directly and unambiguously to new business and therefore its impact can be difficult to quantify. Does that mean all of this company’s LinkedIn metrics are “branding” or “vanity”? No, of course not. It’s just we need to find a different way of measuring the contributions.
While every company is unique, typical KPIs for B2B marketers are: cost per new customer acquisition, cost per lead, and cost per engaged website visitor. When calculating ROI metrics, work backwards from lifetime customer value. For alot of B2B companies, marketing investments are break-even for year one of the new customer relationship and then positive ROI kicks in during year two and beyond.
4. Embrace AI
Artificial intelligence is the latest phase of automation to catch fire among the most influential corporations and management consulting firms and whether you love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. B2B marketing leaders need to lean in and both embrace useful new AI-fueled tools and also understand its impact on digital marketing tactics, specifically search engine marketing. Leaders of every functional category in the enterprise — strategy, finance, operations, HR, etc. — are being challenged to embrace AI and marketers are no different.
It’s more likely than not that your marketing staffers are already using AI tools, either deliberately through their own initiative or because most large vendors in martech like Salesforce and Hubspot have incorporated AI into their platform in recent years. AI has many applications in marketing in general and especially digital marketing but only time will tell if AI adoption will result in tectonic-like shifts in the industry or the more common incremental evolution that occurs every 10 years or so. In the meantime, senior marketing managers will be wise to pick their AI battles carefully and embrace a measured, phased approach to adoption, while loudly celebrating the wins.
5. Don’t Overdo It With Digital
The rule of thumb for sourcing new B2B business is based on a “thirds” concept. Most B2B sales and marketing organizations realize about a third (33%) of new customers via digital channels (website, search engines, LinkedIn, email, advertising, etc.); a third from the events channel; and a third from direct outreach (think: old school dialing-for-dollars). Companies that get overly reliant on the digital channel for new business sourcing inevitably run into problems that can take months or even years to fix. Because B2B sales cycles are so long, identifying the problem itself can be difficult, nevermind remedying the situation.
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Tim Bourgeois is a B2B digital marketing consultant and leads the digital marketing audit services practice at East Coast Catalyst. He is based in Greater Boston.