Reimagining B2B Marketing in 2025 and Beyond

At Leed, we believe AI is redefining every aspect of B2B marketing—from the way we engage buyers to the way we structure our teams to the metrics that really matter. If you’ve been watching the steady decline of traditional demand-gen tactics, you’ve probably sensed this shift, too. We’re at a pivotal moment: AI isn’t just a new tool; it’s accelerating a complete reimagination of the marketing function.

Below, I’ll walk you through my predictions for 2025. You’ll notice that many of them center on AI’s impact on marketing—an area where we at Leed have put our stake in the ground by developing an AI-native platform that finally addresses what we believe marketing automation should be.

1. AI-Powered Consolidated Platforms Will Transform Marketing and Sales

In 2025, AI-powered consolidated platforms will transform marketing and sales, offering increased efficiency and effectiveness. These platforms will seamlessly integrate various marketing functions, from content creation to customer segmentation, into a single, intuitive interface. By leveraging advanced AI algorithms, these consolidated platforms will provide real-time insights, automate routine tasks, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale. Marketers will benefit from predictive analytics that anticipate customer needs and behaviors, allowing for proactive campaign adjustments and more targeted messaging. 

These platforms will also enhance collaboration across departments by centralizing data and insights, fostering a more cohesive and data-driven approach to marketing and sales strategies. As a result, businesses will be able to streamline their operations, make more informed decisions, and create more impactful customer experiences, ultimately driving higher ROI and maintaining a competitive edge in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace.

Related Shifts

1. Hyper-Personalization at Scale: With advancements in AI and data analytics, marketers will be able to deliver highly personalized experiences to customers across all touchpoints. This will go beyond basic segmentation to truly individualized content, product recommendations, and interactions

2. AI-Powered Analytics: Machine learning algorithms will increasingly be used to predict consumer behavior, optimize ad spending, and automate complex marketing tasks. This will enable more proactive and data-driven decision-making.

3. Revenue Enablement: The shift from traditional sales enablement to holistic revenue enablement will continue, with marketing, sales, and customer success teams working more closely together to create seamless buyer experiences.

2. Seat-Based Pricing Will Yield To Subscription Models That Grow with Your Success

According to Forrester’s predictions for 2025, consumption-based pricing will become 10% of the price of enterprise software. In 2025, Forrester expects a sharp rise in true consumption-based pricing models. At the same time, CMOs are living with less; marketing budgets have dropped from an average of 9.1% of company revenue in 2023 to 7.7% in 2024. Given the increasing marketing budget constraints, organizations need simplified and predictable costs. The current tool stack cannot accommodate additional tools, and the budget lacks tolerance for unexpected subscription costs. 

Traditional seat-based pricing struggles to align with AI’s value proposition—where automation reduces manual labor but increases data processing needs. A tiered consumption model solves this by:

1. Eliminating overprovisioning risks through pay-as-you-go flexibility

2. Incentivizing platform adoption through low-barrier entry points that scale with marketing sophistication

3. Aligning costs with ROI by tying expenses to metrics like engaged accounts or predictive analytics usage

Leading AI-powered systems structure tiers around capability maturity rather than user counts. For example, Leed provides:

• Starter tier that offers core AI automation for basic web site building, marketing operations, and content delivery

• Growth tier unlocks feature sets for clients to execute marketing campaigns, expand marketing operations, and optimize the marketing funnel

• Enterprise tier provides a full package for mature organizations looking to expand their account based marketing practices and expand market share

3. Marketing Automation Platforms Will Be Reimagined for the AI Era

Conventional marketing automation platforms were built to pump out MQLs and drip campaigns, not to orchestrate the robust, AI-driven conversations that modern B2B buyers now expect. This gap has led many organizations to bolt on AI features—ChatGPT plugins, for example—to outdated tech. It’s like attaching a jet engine to a prop plane. What organizations need to do is reimagine their entire marketing infrastructure with AI at its core.

Enter the Next Wave

• AI-Native Architecture: Future-ready platforms will eliminate data silos, while integrating buying group intelligence, product analytics, and more, all driven by AI.

• Intuitive Orchestration: Marketers shouldn’t have to code or rely on a specialist to change a campaign. AI should build, test, and optimize on the fly.

• Holistic Buyer Journeys: Email, advertising, social, chat, direct mail—every channel must be harmonized around buyer preferences and readiness signals.

At Leed, we’ve developed our platform precisely for this moment. Our AI-native approach means you can simply set the strategies and guardrails, then let the system do the heavy lifting—no patchwork or endless applications required.

4. AI-Powered Personalization Will Improve Customer Retention

Marketers will benefit from more advanced personalization features, with AI curating tailored customer experiences using user data to send curated content and communications. This kind of advanced personalization can be applied across all customer touchpoints, creating a seamless, highly individualized experience, whether the customer is interacting with a website, mobile app, or email campaign. This level of AI-driven personalization will not only enhance customer engagement but also significantly boost conversion rates and customer lifetime value for businesses.

Identifying Buying Groups: A Key Advantage of AI-Powered Personalization

One of the significant advantages of AI-powered personalization is its ability to identify and target specific buying groups effectively. By analyzing vast amounts of customer data, AI algorithms can segment customers into distinct groups based on their content consumption, preferences, and demographics. This advanced segmentation allows marketers to tailor their strategies to meet the unique needs of each group, thereby increasing the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts.

The ability to identify and effectively target specific buying groups gives businesses a significant competitive advantage. It allows them to differentiate themselves by providing unique, relevant experiences that resonate with their target audience.

5. AI Will Make Marketing More Human

What excites me most about AI isn’t the possibility of replacing people, but rather enhancing what we do best—creative, strategic work that actually moves the needle. AI gives us the freedom to focus on truly human endeavors: building trust, forging relationships, delivering value that resonates on a personal level, and creating better, and more authentic, buying experiences.

At Leed, we’re committed to helping marketers make this transition seamlessly and profitably. By offloading the grunt work to AI, you can spend your time on what really matters—community-building, brand storytelling, cutting-edge research, and experiences that can’t be summarized by a machine. After all, if AI can tackle the “-ing” of marketing, you get to concentrate on the “market” itself.

It’s an exciting future—one where the best of human insight and AI efficiency converge to create a new era of B2B success. Together, let’s embrace AI in a way that elevates both our work and our relationships!