A New Era For B2B Marketing

Two-thirds of today’s business buyers were born after 1980. Coming of age in the internet era, they are accustomed to fast, intuitive, self-serve buying experiences. B2B buying experiences often disappoint: 81% of buyers in a recent Forrester survey expressed dissatisfaction with the winning provider in a recent B2B purchase.

This generational shift demands that businesses rethink traditional engagement models. Modern buyers want seamless, digital-first experiences and expect transparency, responsiveness, and consistent interactions. Post-purchase, they also require the same level of attention they received as prospects to maintain loyalty and value in the relationship.

Meanwhile, buying decision-making has grown more complex. On average, 13 stakeholders from multiple departments influence buying decisions. For marketers, this means shifting focus from isolated marketing-qualified leads to understanding the intricate dynamics of buying groups. New technologies and tools can help. But a mindset shift is also required.

How can B2B marketing organizations address these changing buying behaviors? Working with their sales, product, and customer success counterparts, B2B marketing leaders must prioritize the following key approaches to thrive:

• Help — don’t just sell. Buyers are looking for partners who understand their challenges, not just vendors pushing products. Brands that position themselves as facilitators by offering insights and connecting the dots for stakeholders build trust.
• Deliver value beyond the sale. Your relationship with customers shouldn’t stop once the deal has closed. By working closely with customer success teams, B2B marketers enhance retention, achieve account growth, and turn customers into brand advocates through consistent value delivery.
• Decode buying signals. Every interaction — from a website visit to an e-book download to an in-person conversation — is a buying signal. By connecting these signals across channels, marketers can craft meaningful, contextual experiences that resonate at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
• Collaborate with external influencers. Social voices such as journalists, podcasters, and other niche influencers now shape how B2B buyers make decisions. In a recent Forrester survey, 30% of Millennial and Gen Z buyers reported that they include 10 or more of these external influencers in their buying processes. Collaborating with such external influencers through social media and other media partnerships and events can drive greater impact.
• Prepare for AI’s growing role. AI is no longer just a “nice to have”; it’s becoming an active part of B2B buying networks (pictured below). Generative AI (genAI) tools and AI agents help buyers research, analyze, and perform other purchase-related tasks. Marketers must adapt their strategies to engage these AI-driven systems effectively.

Though B2B marketing is fast-evolving, the core purpose of B2B marketing strategy — to align marketing’s efforts with the company’s business objectives — remains unchanged.

Marketing strategy is a long-term vision that provides a blueprint for how the marketing function will create value, drive growth, and achieve a competitive edge. It’s developed in tandem with sales and product strategy, forming the basis of annual marketing planning.

To develop an effective modern marketing strategy, B2B CMOs and business leaders must:

1. Align marketing strategy with business goals

Business objectives are the “true north” of B2B marketing strategy. CMOs and other C-suite leaders collaborate to answer critical questions such as:

• How will the business generate revenue over the next 3–5 years?
• What markets, customer segments, or offerings represent key growth opportunities?
• What is our competitive differentiation?
• What disruptions are on the horizon?

The answers to these questions are cascaded throughout marketing and guide decisions on branding, customer segmentation, and entering new markets.

2. Understand customer needs

Effective B2B marketing strategies are rooted in customer understanding, which infuses everything from offerings to prioritized customer segments to go-to-market strategy. Bring this understanding to life through value-driven narratives that connect your offerings to the most pressing challenges your buyers face. Develop long-term campaigns that focus on consistent engagement with customers, turning each marketing initiative into a conversation rather than a one-off effort.

3. Build in flexibility

Rigid strategies struggle in a landscape that’s defined by volatility. To thrive, B2B marketing leaders must adopt adaptable plans that can pivot to meet new opportunities, market demands, or internal shifts. That means:

• Focusing on overarching goals rather than specific tactics. For instance, rather than setting rigid campaigns, create adaptable programs that can pivot as needed.
• Periodically reviewing your strategy. Regular evaluations can help you identify what’s working and make changes for what’s not. These should include your sales, product, and customer success counterparts.

4. Invest in channel-agnostic strategies

Rather than treating individual channels (e.g., SEO, email, social media) as standalone strategies, adopt a channel-agnostic approach to integrate digital efforts cohesively and optimize them around larger business goals.

For example:

• Focus on cross-channel digital strategies like delivering personalized customer experiences or enabling real-time engagement, regardless of the platform.
• Ensure that marketing subfunctions (e.g., field, demand, content) collaborate to maximize ROI while eliminating inefficiencies such as redundant campaigns or siloed messaging.

5. Accommodate buying networks

For marketing strategies and plans to be effective, they must be rooted in the reality of how buyers buy. Task your teams with mapping out the members of your buying networks — including their needs, motivations, and preferences — and understand the influencers they turn to in vetting purchasing decisions.

Continue exploring and investing in technologies that facilitate buying network engagement, such as data unification to capture the signals created by the entire buying network, advanced analytics to interpret those signals and create contextual experiences, and agentic AI to optimize and automate buyers’ self-service experiences.

Changing buying dynamics are forcing marketing leaders to rethink their balance of brand-building and demand generation efforts. For years, many B2B marketing leaders have prioritized short-term demand gen tactics at the expense of building long-term brand value. That must change if B2B marketing organizations are to build a durable foundation for growth.

The rise of buying networks — particularly third-party influencers — makes investing in brand-centric activities such as paid media partnerships and traditional influencer relations programs more critical. The growing salience of zero-click search adds to the urgency as B2B organizations look beyond conventional search marketing strategies.

Yet brand-building efforts must be more than a collection of transactional arrangements. B2B CMOs should strive to build a strong, authentic brand that reflects the company’s mission, vision, and values and serves as the compass guiding organizational action. Gone are the days when B2B brands fly under the radar of public opinion; like their B2C counterparts, today’s B2B brands are judged for their actions, not their words. Brand is pivotal in building the trust that’s paramount in high-stakes business buying decisions.

Because B2B brand perceptions stem from accumulated experiences and interactions with employees, marketing leaders must ensure that the brand is clear and meaningful to all. As marketing plans are activated, brand building must integrate with campaigns, sales, and go-to-market strategies to have impact.

A heightened focus on brand means adopting metrics that balance the short- and long-term view. Today, brand-related metrics such as loyalty and reach feature on few CMO dashboards. B2B marketing leaders must find ways to connect brand building to business outcomes, as demand marketing efforts cannot succeed over time if they remain unsupported by brand.

As AI gains salience in B2B buying networks, B2B marketers must understand AI — including genAI and AI agents — and incorporate them into their ways of thinking and working. To date, B2B marketers’ use of and enthusiasm for AI has lagged behind that of buyers. For example, Forrester survey data shows that while nine in 10 business buyers already are using genAI at each stage of the buying process, just 19% of B2B marketing organizations have genAI use cases in production.

What are the right use cases for genAI in B2B marketing? The answer will depend on an organization’s specific goals. Yet some ways that marketers have been using it successfully include:

• Repurposing content and creating variants or derivative assets (e.g., creating an e-book or blog post from a webinar).
• Surfacing buyer and customer insights through buyer feedback, customer interviews, call transcripts, and other assets.
• Formulating messaging by using genAI to analyze competitors’ messaging and surface differentiating factors.
• Optimizing campaigns by creating variants of messaging and adjusting materials for different personas, industries, or partners.
• Analyzing content gaps and identifying questions to answer and subtopics to prioritize.

Hesitation on genAI puts marketing organizations at risk of falling behind. Marketers who have genAI proficiency have an edge over those who don’t — and that divide will only grow.

To equip their organization to use genAI and capture its benefits, B2B marketing leaders must take a holistic, deliberate approach that prioritizes three areas:

1. Improving infrastructure by auditing and streamlining tech stacks to eliminate redundancies and improve integration. Investing in data cleaning and structuring is also critical for generating accurate insights and trustworthy AI outputs. Marketing leaders must also analyze and document workflows to identify gaps and areas ripe for genAI’s integration.
2. Establishing AI literacy programs to build confidence and facility with genAI tools. Organizations that are successfully using genAI go beyond formal training and aim to embed genAI into everyday workflows. They encourage sharing best practices through small working groups and dedicated office hours.
3. Strengthening collaboration across departments to promote alignment and maximize AI impact. Consider forming an AI council with representatives from marketing, sales, product, and other functions to align on strategies and unify efforts. Work with external partners such as agencies and vendors so that AI workflows are aligned across the entire business ecosystem.

With the rise of buying networks, marketers must also prepare for AI agents acting on buyers’ behalf. AI agents will increasingly be called on to conduct research, monitor provider lead time and pricing — and even make repeat purchases. Marketers must treat these AI agents as members of the buying group and ensure that their websites make it easy for them to retrieve accurate information.

Leading in a transformed B2B marketing landscape takes vision and courage. To deliver growth, CMOs must be bold and willing to break from long-standing approaches. They must champion the customer, orchestrate alignment, and advocate for marketing by connecting its work to business outcomes.

Successful B2B marketing executives:

• Expand marketing’s role in transformation. CMOs must champion business growth by redefining marketing as more than demand generation. Focus on acquiring new clients, retaining loyal ones, and enhancing customer relationships while connecting brand, customer, and employee experiences to drive holistic transformation.
• Put customers first. Operationalize customer obsession by embedding it into leadership, strategy, and operations. This means shifting mindsets, reallocating resources, and aligning actions to make the customer core to every decision. Work to show the relationship between customer centricity and business growth.
• Align across functions. Foster agility and collaboration between marketing, sales, and product teams. Unified coordination fosters seamless customer experiences and drives measurable business outcomes.
• Invest in data. Work with marketing operations to implement a robust and accurate data strategy. High-quality data provides fuel for better, more personalized marketing campaigns and realizing the promise of AI.
• Build adaptive teams. Equip teams to innovate quickly with data-driven, buyer-insight-informed strategies. Invest in upskilling through advanced certifications, prioritizing both creativity and the ability to adapt to emerging challenges.
• Modernize measurement. Assess the current balance between customer value and organizational value metrics on your leadership dashboard. Consider value-focused metrics that are appropriate for your context — e.g., the portion of customers who have achieved a stated goal using your solution or the percentage of customers with plans on track.

As B2B marketing organizations grapple with evolving market dynamics, adapting and growing requires deliberate effort and reflection. Strategies, including preparing for buying networks, investing in continuous upskilling, and modernizing measurement approaches, lay the groundwork for navigating complexity. By prioritizing adaptability and creativity within teams, leaders enable their organizations to address unexpected challenges with agility.

Clinging to traditional, inwardly focused approaches is no longer an option, yet within this necessity lies immense opportunity. By embracing innovation and proactively responding to shifts in customer behavior and technological advancements, organizations can not only stay competitive but also unlock new pathways for growth. Marketing leaders who seize the moment and its possibilities ensure that their companies remain resilient, agile, and poised to grow in uncertain business climates.