The MSP landscape is constantly evolving, and with how competitive it can be, marketing has become increasingly important for businesses looking to grow above the market average.
Our marketing and sales support program, GROW, has been helping partners adopt effective marketing strategies that allow MSPs to stay competitive without having to significantly increase marketing budgets.
Through working with a wide variety of partners, and researching other trends in business-to-business marketing, we’ve compiled a list of the top trends, how these may affect your marketing, and what GROW can do to help you get ahead in 2025.
B2B Marketing Trends in 2025
The Buyer Journey is Becoming More Complex
In 2015, Hubspot research found that the average B2B purchase decision was made after 8 touchpoints. In 2019, Forrester raised that to 17 touchpoints, and in 2023, most sales required 27 touchpoints.
While the number of touchpoints is increasing, the number of people involved in the decision-making process is also increasing. In 2025, it is expected that up to 13 employees will be involved in the decision-making process.
These two concepts combine to create a more complex buyer journey in 2025. To combat this, and reduce the time to purchase, businesses need to apply a consistent approach to marketing and sales, targeting a broader audience.
For our partners, a consistent marketing approach ensures that your prospects will be involved in enough interactions to have a true understanding of your business and its value proposition, the technology solution they are going to purchase, and how both compare to the competition.
Targeting a broader audience will mean pursuing not just the person writing the check, but all the influencers in their decision-making process. When marketing, the message and channel will need to be adjusted to suit the technical ability and goals of the audience.
GROW is ready for this trend to continue with a wide variety of content, targeting different personas within the business, and content that can be used across websites, email and social media, delivering holistic multi-channel campaigns.
Content is (still) King
In a recent Content Marketing Institute (CMI) report, it was found that in 2024, 87% of businesses stated that content marketing helped create brand awareness, 74% found that content marketing generated leads and 62% stated that content marketing helped nurture the marketing qualified leads generated.
These are the goals of all MSPs, and with the buyer journey requiring additional touchpoints, there’s no doubt that having a bulletproof content marketing strategy will still be essential to be successful in 2025.
Unsurprisingly, in the same report, CMI found that the number 1 challenge that B2B organisations face regarding content marketing is a lack of resources.
For our partners, we find that this fact has consistently rung true in 2024, and will continue into 2025. Most partners know that they need to be doing more with their content marketing, but simply cannot justify the increased spend in headcount to make the most of the opportunity.
GROW aims to help all partners solve this challenge, by allowing partners to spend less time focusing on content creation, and more time on marketing and sales execution. In our free GROW foundation tier, we have 40 campaigns, totalling over 1,000 pieces of content ready to use.
GROW Premium, supplies partners with 35 pieces of content a month, ensuring that you always have something to post that will be relevant to your customers, prospects and where they are in the buying journey.
Intent-Based Marketing Will Ensure a Faster Time to Value
Whilst high-quality marketing content will increase brand awareness and generate leads, in 2025 an intent-based approach will be increasingly important, especially for MSPs and IT providers.
Intent-based marketing is a strategy where organisations will target customers and prospects with messaging that relates to their business, tech stack and content viewing habits. Intent data can also be referred to as customer propensity data, which is the likelihood of an organisation to purchase a specific product.
Larger organisations, with greater marketing budgets, will utilise a combination of third-party intent data providers and their own first-party data to collect information such as firmographic and technographic data to give a 360-degree view of their target audience.
For smaller organisations, this simply isn’t feasible, however, Microsoft partners have access to Cloud Ascent data which will supply intent and customer propensity data for your existing customers.
The Cloud Ascent data, found in the Microsoft Partner Center, uses web crawlers and machine learning to generate sales and marketing predictions for each of your customers, split by cloud product family. What this means is that you can generate a list of which of your customers you should target for cross-sell or upsell campaigns.
Using the data with an account-based marketing approach speeds up the buyer journey and takes out some of the guesswork when it comes to deciding an audience to run a campaign with.
GROW is ready to help partners make the most of this opportunity with Cloud Ascent reviews, available as part of our Azure Horizon and Copilot Voyager partner programs, where we will show you how to best use intent data and what campaigns would be relevant to the different segments.
Email Marketing will Surpass SEO
As we move into 2025, we’ve progressively seen a decrease in the effectiveness of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies, and the exact opposite for email marketing.
SEO has been an essential component of many businesses’ marketing strategies, as it can deliver organic traffic, without needing to pay-per-click. However, with increasing competition and AI tools allowing shady websites to generate massive amounts of web content in a short time frame, it is harder than ever before to rank on page one of Google or Bing.
Email marketing, whilst still highly competitive, gives our partners a way to have the same web content reach the target audience, without needing to compete as closely with large enterprises with seemingly unlimited marketing budgets.
In 2025, focusing efforts on email marketing, with a mixture of brand awareness and educational content, will likely provide a significantly greater ROI than SEO.
GROW is ready to help partners with email marketing with a suite of email templates, either as standalone emails or emails that can link to blog posts hosted on your website, all of which can be automated from within the Go To Market Hub.
Our automation engine allows for complete customisation of the design of the email, and personalised fields to add a personal touch to your email marketing strategy.
For partners that already have invested in an email marketing platform, it is simple to download content from GROW to reuse within your own platform.
How GROW Can Help
When Infinigate Cloud partners sign up to access GROW content, the registration form includes the question ‘Do you have in-house marketing resource?’. In 2024, 65% of partners answered ‘No’ to this question.
For partners that do not have a Marketing department or Marketing Manager, GROW gives you everything you need to get ahead in 2025. Our Go To Market Hub enables you to select a campaign that is relevant to your goals as a business and your target audience, then automate the entire process, so you can create and schedule a 4-week marketing campaign in 1 hour. Our GROW Premium subscription gives you access to weekly content, allowing you to pick a topic each week and remain consistent with your marketing approach.
For the 35% of partners that do have in-house marketing, GROW is here to make your lives easier. As shown above, most businesses struggle with having enough resources to create enough content to run consistent campaigns. This content can be used as-is or tailored to the specific campaign you are running, without needing to start from scratch.
GROW Foundation includes campaigns for all vendors that Infinigate Cloud distribute, with new campaigns being added every month. This ensures that you can run campaigns back to back and never lose momentum.
Our top 6 campaigns we would recommend partners to kickstart 2025 are:
- Microsoft Azure: Scalable, Secure and Sustainable
- Department Use Cases for Copilot for Microsoft 365
- SCOUT – Introductory Marketing Campaign
- Mimecast Email Security – The SMB Guide to Email Security
- Driving Growth and Innovation with Microsoft Fabric
- Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud – Outsourced Ransomware Protection
In GROW Premium, each week there are two new topics, which include a blog post, email template, social media posts and imagery, as well as monthly branded infographics and quarterly branded eBooks. The topics covered in this tier include cybersecurity, data & AI, modern workplace, cloud infrastructure, business applications, digital transformation and more. All partners can trial GROW Premium for a month, free of charge, which can be commenced by booking a call.
Our most popular topics of 2024 were:
- Optimising IT Infrastructure: The Key to Scaling Your Business
- Protecting Your SMB: The Role of Cyber Essentials
- AI Adoption: Ensuring Success when Implementing Copilot for Microsoft 365
- Data Governance in 2024: Why It’s More Important Than Ever
- Navigating the Unexpected: A Blueprint for Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Azure
If you want to get ahead in 2025 and stay ahead of the latest MSP marketing trends, contact the GROW team, or book a demo.