Explaining The Forrester’s 2025 Marketing Budgeting Guide
Marketing research giant Forrester recently debuted its 2025 Budget Planning Guides, with insights for technology, marketing, customer experience, digital, and sales leaders into where to increase and decrease investments in the coming year.
And where the theme of the last few years’ budgeting strategy was “wait and see,” the firm says 2025 will finally see expanded marketing budgets and spending. 91% of global tech decision-makers and 87% of global marketing decision-makers are planning to boost their budgets in the year ahead.
But given the still-volatile market, it all begs a few critical questions: Should we be spending more on marketing? Where should we be investing any expanded resources? And, perhaps most importantly, is there a way to transform our approach to B2B marketing without substantially increasing our spending? (Spoiler: Yes. Read on for more on that.)
I resonate with many of Forrester’s takes on its 2025 budget forecast, but I also have a particular perspective as a longtime marketing organizational design and transformation expert.
Here, I’ll offer my take on some of the organization’s key recommendations, along with deeper insights into how you can overhaul your marketing operations and capabilities without significantly stretching your budget.
Forrester: Strengthening cross-functional alignment will deliver connected experiences.
Forrester reports that leaders whose marketing, digital, and customer experience teams are highly aligned see 1.6x faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4x better customer retention. And the firm encourages experimentation with platform teams that break down silos for 2025.
My take: I wholeheartedly concur: We can’t be working in silos or thinking about our cross-department teamwork as transactional (e.g., “What can sales do to deliver on my marketing vision?”). Real marketing success is based on trusted communication and actual relationships across teams.
However, even the best-intentioned marketing and sales alignment can fail without a well-defined strategy for delivering connected experiences.
If you want to see that increase in revenue growth and customer retention, you have to glean and clearly show the market and customer insights that demonstrate what a connected customer experience means for the organization’s buyers. When you solidify your strategy, only then can you truly drive efficiency and deliver value to stakeholders.
Forrester: Investing in capabilities and frameworks is important for AI governance and trust.
Forrester suggests setting up guardrails and policies for data access, usage, sharing, storage, and retention, along with investments in security and privacy.
My take: This is all important, of course, to maintaining trust with our clients and partners, but I recommend that before investing in new capabilities and frameworks, you should take inventory of the ones you already have.
Many organizations have technology that includes AI — they just aren’t fully leveraging it. Another point to be made here is that before investing, establish how AI will be used to deliver more value to the buyer/customer, and how your usage of AI is going to help drive growth. Marketers shouldn’t be chasing AI without a purpose.
Forrester: Get rid of bespoke or isolated tech stacks.
Shedding your unoptimized martech stacks that have likely led to high overhead in cost, support, security, and training is certainly one way to move forward. But even Forrester warns that addressing your technology sprawl and technical debt will require some upfront investment.
My take: It’s not always that simple: Existing tech stacks are integrated, and making a change can be costly and disruptive.
You should be critically evaluating whether what you currently have isn’t providing the capabilities you need, or if you’re just underutilizing it (Gartner reported last year that marketers were using just 33% of their organization's martech capability).
Perhaps what you’re lacking is internal training of how to use these technologies. Or maybe there are less costly integrations that could solve your problems — or both.
Marketers looking for platforms that can replace multiple disparate platforms will find that MaaS offerings are often the perfect solution, as they bring in outside expertise and technology without burdening your in-house staff.
These outsourced professionals already have certification in a wide range of martech tools and platforms, best practices gleaned from working across different industries and niches, and knowledge of AI and all the latest technology tools. It’s a cost-effective way to free up your team to focus on customer engagement strategies and big-picture ideas.
No matter how you reorganize your martech, though, make sure you’re clear on every decision you make, and how it contributes to the greater, bottom-line impact — because you’ll have to communicate that impact to your CFO and C-suite.
Forrester: It’s time to experiment with AI agents for marketing.
As AI evolves to become more autonomous, marketers should research how these can improve their organization’s customer experience.
My take: I support the idea of experimenting with AI as it continues to develop, but I also think marketers need to carefully think through the use cases — it’s not right for everything — and keep a few key things in mind:
- Lack of human insight: We cannot rely on AI to interact with our customers on its own. AI lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior, making it ill-equipped to navigate complex customer emotions or unpredictable market shifts. I foresee many companies leaning too hard on AI to “free them up” from customer service or engagement, then finding that their new problem is upset customers who feel neglected and turn to competitors who are adept in coupling AI with human expertise. This is again an area where MaaS can carry the weight for your marketing team, rather than adding more to their plates.
- Unintended biases: AI can unintentionally amplify biases, leading to inaccurate targeting and potentially damaging brand reputations.
- Data privacy risks: Mishandling personal data with AI agents can result in serious compliance issues, risking trust and legal consequences.
Final Thoughts
Though many marketing leaders may be increasing their spending in 2025, Forrester’s 2024 Budget Planning Survey found that only 35% of B2B marketing decision-makers report expecting a budget increase of more than 5% next year; the majority (47%) expect an increase of just 1-4%.
I think Forrester Principal Analyst John Arnold says it perfectly: “Don’t make plans that rely on budget increases to fuel incremental marketing performance in 2025.”
By forming a well-defined cross-functional strategy for delivering connected experiences, taking stock of how you’re utilizing AI and marketing technologies, and thinking through how AI agents can optimize your business, you’ll give yourself a much clearer path forward — one where you can decide whether increased spend is necessary, or if it’s simply a matter of getting creative with where you focus your current budget.
The throughline through it all is allowing room for experimentation as technologies continue to quickly evolve. And that’s where marketing-as-a-service MaaS) can shoulder the burdens of extensive in-house training or replace the overheads associated with agency retainers at far less cost.
By leveraging MaaS firms like 2X, organizations can access a spectrum of marketing capabilities, enjoying streamlined marketing operations that allow their in-house teams to focus on core competencies while benefiting from the vendor’s specialized expertise.
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