Marketing agencies are caught in the crossfire of 2025’s “cautiously optimistic” economy. Budgets are consolidating, headcounts are shrinking, and yet expectations have never been higher.
Gartner reports that marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue (Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025). Only 35% of B2B CMOs anticipate budget growth of more than 5%, while 47% project increases of just 1–4%, effectively a zero-sum game when adjusted for inflation.
Welcome to the DemandFactor Buyer’s Guide 2025, your roadmap to navigating the future of B2B marketing. In a world where innovation is accelerating and buyer expectations are evolving, success is no longer about keeping pace — it’s about staying ahead.
↗Parceling the B2B market means finding leads with similar traits, needs, and behaviors. Understanding these demographic factions helps businesses connect with potential customers, prioritize resources, tailor messages, develop products, and adjust sales processes.
↗The sales funnel is a fundamental marketing strategy that doesn’t fully address buyer behavior. The “dark funnel” is a new approach focused on tracking undetected customer behavior, and prioritizing client satisfaction.
In B2B marketing, the dark funnel refers to all those hidden activities that happen outside traditional tracking. These include private conversations, incognito browsing, or word-of-mouth referrals that never appear in analytics dashboards. For marketers, ignoring these invisible interactions means overlooking significant buyer intent signals that could shape strategy.
Unlike the traditional funnel, which emphasizes visible stages like awareness, consideration, and purchase, the dark funnel captures behaviors that influence decisions before prospects ever engage directly with your brand. Social media mentions in private groups, discussions within buying committees, and peer recommendations are powerful but nearly impossible to measure. Recognizing their role helps marketers refine their approach and avoid relying solely on last-touch attribution models.
To shed light on this hidden pipeline, B2B companies can leverage intent data, implement user-friendly share tracking tools, and conduct customer surveys to uncover referral sources. Pairing these insights with closed-loop reporting enables teams to connect early engagement with measurable outcomes.
Ultimately, the goal is not to eliminate the dark funnel—it cannot be fully tracked—but to understand its influence and adapt strategies accordingly. By embracing its complexity, businesses can improve personalization, strengthen account-based marketing, and ensure a more consistent buyer journey that builds trust long before prospects reach the purchase stage.
↗Understanding and meeting consumers’ preferences and interests is the base of a successful business. Honest advertising increases consumers’ engagement and loyalty to your brand.
↗Every business needs clientele to buy its products or hire its services. However, the issue of finding and then reaching out to an audience, let alone keeping people engaged long enough for them to become your customers, is an art form in and of itself. That is why collecting data surrounding these processes has become a science for marketers in the prospect-nurturing business.
↗The B2B buying process has evolved, and buyers no longer want to feel like they are being pushed through a sales funnel. Procurement groups have expanded and have more stakeholders, and those members usually do a lot of research before they start reaching out to a business.
↗In today’s competitive landscape, the synergy between demand generation and performance marketing
has emerged as a driving force behind successful revenue-focused strategies. By blending
the relationship-building prowess of demand generation with the precision of performance marketing,
organizations can forge a dynamic revenue-centric approach that fuels customer engagement,
conversions, and sustainable business growth.
In today’s data-rich digital landscape, businesses have access to a wealth of information that can significantly impact their marketing efforts. A data-driven marketing strategy is a powerful tool that allows companies to make informed decisions, optimize campaigns, and drive meaningful results.
↗Marketers, content creators, and small business owners spend a lot of time meticulously crafting their marketing materials.
Imagine holding that excellent piece of content marketing that will enhance your digital metrics and ROI in your hands, but there is one problem…
Visibility. The nemesis of all marketing initiatives.
↗In the realm of demand generation and performance marketing, the right vendor can make all the difference. Selecting a partner that can provide consistent support throughout every stage of the funnel is crucial for driving success and achieving optimal results. In this whitepaper, we will explore why it is important to work with the right vendor who can deliver effective demand generation and performance marketing strategies as a true partner, ensuring success at every critical juncture of your marketing journey.
↗In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, Channel Partnerships stand as catalysts for growth. Whether you are a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) or a Managed Service Provider (MSP), this comprehensive guide is tailored to help channel partners leverage collaborative lead generation for sustained business expansion.
↗In the competitive landscape of business, the ability to convert leads into closed deals is crucial for driving revenue and sustainable growth. However, not all leads are created equal. High-quality leads play a vital role in increasing conversion rates and boosting sales success.
↗Performance marketing has become an essential strategy for businesses looking to drive measurable results and maximize their return on investment. When it comes to the channel, implementing effective performance marketing strategies is crucial for success. From planning to execution, channel partners can leverage performance marketing to boost sales, increase brand visibility, and achieve their objectives.
This guide explores the full spectrum of performance marketing best practices designed to help channel organizations move beyond traditional promotional tactics and adopt data-driven approaches that deliver real impact. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear, measurable objectives that guide campaigns and ensure alignment with broader business goals. Understanding the target audience through research and buyer personas emerges as another critical factor, enabling partners to create highly personalized and resonant campaigns that drive engagement and conversions.
The discussion extends to selecting the right digital marketing channels—ranging from search and social media to email and content marketing—that maximize reach and effectiveness. The role of compelling, action-oriented content is highlighted as central to attracting attention and prompting decision-making, while conversion tracking, analytics, and ongoing optimization ensure campaigns remain efficient and cost-effective. Finally, the guide underscores the value of collaboration among vendors, partners, and internal stakeholders to amplify reach and accelerate results. By embracing these strategies, channel partners can unlock the full potential of performance marketing, achieve sustainable growth, and strengthen their competitive edge.
↗Demand generation is a crucial aspect of B2B marketing, and channel partners play a significant role in driving demand for your products or services. However, ensuring trackable performance in demand generation activities can be a challenge. It’s essential to have a clear understanding of where your leads are coming from and how they progress through the sales funnel.
↗Channel partners play a vital role in the success of many businesses, acting as an extension of your sales and marketing efforts. However, to truly maximize the potential of your channel partners, it’s essential to empower them with demand generation skills. By turning your channel partners into demand gen masters, you can create a powerful network of brand advocates and drive significant business growth. In this blog post, we will explore actionable strategies to transform your channel partners into demand generation masters.
↗When it comes to demand generation, many businesses focus solely on attracting and nurturing customers. However, it’s equally important to recognize the power of demand generation in building and maintaining a strong partner network. By implementing effective demand generation programs tailored to your partners, you can strengthen relationships, drive mutual success, and unlock new growth opportunities.
This whitepaper explores how businesses can leverage demand generation to create a thriving partner ecosystem. It emphasizes the importance of understanding partner needs and objectives, establishing open communication, and aligning initiatives with their goals. By tailoring strategies to address specific challenges and audiences, organizations ensure that partners feel supported and equipped to succeed.
The resource highlights the impact of co-marketing initiatives such as joint campaigns, events, and co-branded content, which expand reach and amplify engagement. It also examines the value of marketing enablement tools, deal registration programs, and structured incentive models that motivate partners to actively generate leads and close opportunities.
Ongoing communication, shared learning opportunities, and collaborative forums are presented as key drivers of sustained engagement. Equally critical is measuring and optimizing program performance, tracking metrics that demonstrate partner contributions and guide future improvements.
By investing in demand generation tailored to partners, organizations can foster stronger relationships, enhance loyalty, and drive sustainable growth across the entire partner network.
↗Building long-lasting relationships with buyers is essential for boosting your company’s ROI. Yet 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.
The buyer journey isn’t straightforward—in fact, 90% of buyers loop back and repeat different tasks more than once throughout the whole process. That’s why every demand generation strategy needs an omnichannel approach to target your ideal buyers at each point of need.
Only around 5% of leads may be in market at any point in time. That’s why prospects need nurturing to help them progress down the sales funnel before they’re ready to buy. To put it simply, lead nurturing helps marketers continue to educate, inform and build solid relationships with B2B leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey, answering their questions before they make a purchase decision.
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