The Great Marketing Rethink of 2025

Right now, marketing teams are getting their 2025 budgets, and let’s just say nobody’s jumping for joy. According to Gartner, budgets shrank by 15% from 2023 to 2024, and this coming year is continuing that downward trend. At the same time, expectations for marketing results have only increased, with 73% of marketers feeling the pressure to achieve more results with less budget.

But don’t you have to spend money to make money?

Not quite. If you work in the tech sector, you probably remember a time in recent history when the goal was “growth at all costs” as companies chased high valuations – not profitability. Marketing invested in expensive top-of-funnel campaigns with elusive metrics, from big billboards in even bigger cities to glossy digital ads – all to give the perception of market dominance (even if the math didn’t exactly support that story). Pressured by the public obsession with unicorn companies, CEOs often made costly, last-minute pivots inspired by their competitors’ flashy moves – sometimes in the middle of the night, two days before a launch. Basically, it was a bonfire of marketing dollars.

Those days appear to be over.

A combination of economic challenges and the introduction of generative AI has put an end to discretionary spending, so maybe don’t try to book Snoop Dogg as the speaker for your next user conference. Investors have closed their pocketbooks to high-valuation companies that prioritize user counts over profitability, and as a result, executives are scrutinizing real metrics like customer acquisition costs – not impressions. This new sober approach to profitability has implications for every team, but maybe especially for marketing.

Now, it’s time to rethink what we know about marketing strategies and funnels.

The Creative Conundrum

Some marketers worry that budgetary constraints will make them less creative since there is no wiggle room for trial and error. On the one hand, you want to stand out from the crowd by trying a new campaign approach, but on the other hand, you can’t be 100% sure it’ll work until you try it. So, is innovation even in the budget anymore?

The answer is no…unless you make sure that it is.

Sometimes budgets look a little bleaker than they actually are because funds are usually spread across high and low-reward activations. When you focus your marketing dollars solely on high-reward activities and innovate within those parameters, you may find your budget isn’t so small, and there is indeed room for innovative campaigns. But to do this, you need to rethink the basics and get more precise.

Here’s what that could look like:

1. Go Back to Marketing 101
   As you plan your 2025 marketing activations, it’s important to reassess:

• Who your ICPs really are
• What they actually need
• How to move them down the funnel faster
  
  As marketers, we sometimes like to cast a wide net, but often we’re trying to be too many things to too many people. Get the basics right and dedicate your budget to the demographics, product marketing activities, and content initiatives that will capture and engage your niche audiences. This might mean that you have to shuffle your team a little bit to make sure that everyone is working on the high-reward initiatives – but the results are likely to be more fulfilling.

2. Use AI for Personalization
   A lot of marketers talk about personalization, but very few are actually doing it. Funnily enough, not many people are using AI to actually deliver on tailored customer journeys – but we should be. Take a look at your customer journey reports and identify the areas where you are losing people (think of detailed product use cases or integration how-to guides). Next, allocate a day to train your GPT model on your company’s resources, such as style guides, eBooks, and brand materials, to align its output with your standards. Use clear, specific prompts to generate drafts for the missing content and have your team polish the drafts—a process that takes hours, not weeks. The best part is that it doesn’t have to cost anything.

3. Maximize Every Piece of Content
   It's easy to forget that repetition is the secret to great marketing when you're in the trenches. Many marketers default to creating something new for the sake of new without getting the most out of a message or idea. So, when your team has created a piece of content that works, you don’t have to try to reverse engineer it and create new content–literally chop it up and use it in different ways across your different channels. If a webinar series caused a lot of viewers to take the next step in the funnel, edit the video down into its five best moments and share it across LinkedIn posts, in email campaigns, or embedded in downloadable guides. No time to write a fresh white paper? Break down an existing one into snackable formats for social or blog content. This approach not only allows you to cost-effectively reach new prospects, but also maximizes the value of every piece of content. Again, this costs you almost nothing.

4. Double Down on Cost-Effective Channels
   Marketing activities like webinars, email campaigns, and organic social are basic for a reason: they can deliver great results, even on a very small budget. Before you invest in new channels, dive deeper into making these low-cost channels work better for you. Maybe this means breaking out your ICPs and building deeply personalized webinars, trying new thought leadership angles on socials, or incorporating bite-sized product how-tos into email campaigns. Once you get those channels optimized and generate qualified leads, you’ll have measurable results to show your executive team and you can feel more confident allocating budget to test new channels.

5. Squeeze More Value Out of Top-of-Funnel Campaigns
   Top-of-funnel (TOF) campaigns are usually measured in impressions, and it’s difficult to track how they’re actually driving leads. That said, you still need TOF campaigns for brand awareness, making conversations with prospects much easier when they’ve heard of the company. Your staff will grade TOF campaigns the hardest; if there are no leads associated with these campaigns, the budget for them will go away. So, be proactive about connecting TOF campaigns with other marketing initiatives to maximize their value and prove how they help move your prospects down the funnel. For example, if you’ve invested in PR – don’t expect that this will naturally create inbound traffic. Instead, proactively use press mentions in all of your marketing channels to build trust with current leads: share on social media and tag the publication, make a splash by highlighting them in emails and newsletters, display them prominently on your website, and mention them in your webinars.

Lower budgets may feel oppressive, but there are silver linings to this new fact of marketing life. We no longer have to feel the anxiety of creating hype–we can focus our resources on building a healthy pipeline. And besides, some of the best creativity comes when we have constraints.  

Anthony Poliseno is the Chief Marketing Officer at Magnolia, a leading digital experience platform provider helping brands create connected digital experiences