B2B CMOs and other marketing leaders will need to make their budgets go further next year. Does that sound familiar? It should. B2B marketing budget growth has been slowing since 2023, and we anticipate minimal increases again in 2025.
According to Forrester’s Budget Planning Survey, 2024, only 35% of B2B marketing decision-makers say they are expecting a budget increase of more than 5% in 2025. The majority — 47% — expect an increase of just 1% to 4%. Factoring in inflation, that’s not much of a gain.
So don’t make plans that rely on budget increases to fuel incremental marketing performance in 2025. Instead, follow our guidance to make the right investments, divestments, and identify worthy experiments.
Synergy Will Be Key To Stretching Budgets
Making your marketing budget go further in the year ahead will require leaning into collective strategies, collaboration, and cross-functional partnerships. Forrester’s newly released Budget Planning Guide 2025: B2B Marketing Executives provides concrete advice to achieve this. You’ll learn which areas to prioritize to succeed in the coming year (and which to let go of), all supported by Forrester research and data. You’ll also find insights into how your peers intend to spend.
Taking these four actions (explored in greater depth in the guide) will help you successfully plan and budget for 2025:
- Benchmark your current spending. Make sure your program, personnel, and technology investments are allocated in the right proportions for growth. Our research finds that marketing program budgets will get more emphasis, while personnel budgets will come under more scrutiny. Meanwhile, IT will be a bigger influence on marketing technology budgets.
- Prioritize investments that have a synergistic effect on business growth. To stay ahead of changing buyer behaviors and economic uncertainty, invest aggressively in areas that can have an outsized impact on growth. For example: move high-impact generative AI use cases (such as content creation, advertising/media buying, and marketing analytics) into production. We also recommend extending partner ecosystem program investments across the entire customer lifecycle to drive scale in a tight-budget environment. Doing this successfully will require evolving demand and engagement strategies and processes to support partner personas and investing in partner engagement programs and enablement.
- Divest judiciously so that you can free up budget for investments. The question this year isn’t whether or not to cut, it’s where and when. One area ripe for revisiting is marketing plans. Don’t spend time and resources building complex ones that comprise lists of activities that rarely align to business objectives. Today’s marketing environment demands streamlined, responsive, and adaptive plans that can navigate market, competitor, product, and account changes.
- Identify the best opportunities to experiment, even though budget is tight. In the coming year, it will be important to test-before-you-invest in a few key areas. One worthy experiment for marketing executives is reining in their organization’s revenue obsession and sponsor a shift toward customer-obsession instead. The reason? Focusing on customer value creation drives revenue. This seemingly straightforward shift takes bold leadership — specifically, working with sales leadership to pilot transformational revenue processes that more closely align with buyer and customer processes. Start this evolution by aligning marketing, sales, and customer success leadership on a shared vision to prioritize buyer and customer value, and move away from marketing-qualified leads toward opportunity activation.
Find More Budget Planning Insights And Advice
Our Budget Planning Guide goes into more detail on these recommendations and others. Read the full report before you start your planning cycle so you can anticipate next year’s headwinds and tailwinds. If you’re a Forrester client, schedule a guidance session with one of our B2B marketing executive-focused analysts and sign up for one of our Budget Planning Guide peer discussion groups to get ideas from marketing executives working for other companies.
Whether you are a client or not, you can dive deeper into our 2025 planning recommendations by attending our 2025 Budget Planning Guides Live: B2B Marketing webinar on Tuesday, September 10. Learn more and register.
