Unlocking Growth in 2025: Key B2B Marketing Benchmarks You Can’t Ignore

Discover the insights that will help you optimize your budget, drive demand, and measure success like a pro.

I have a confession: I love a good benchmark study. Like, really love them. If there’s one out, I’ve likely read it, analyzed it, and made decisions based on what I’ve seen.

My career has spanned organizations both large and small, and when you’re part of a smaller company (<$50M in revenue), finding a benchmark that applies to you can be difficult. From a funnel and bookings perspective, I knew how we were doing and what could be done to optimize every step of the way. I knew, without a doubt, how we were performing relative to ourselves. However, being able to compare my metrics to peer companies was never really an opportunity. Forrester, Gartner, and other consulting firms focus on working with large enterprise organizations. So when they conduct benchmark surveys or reports, they pull data from their audience, large, global marketing organizations with bigger budgets, teams, and tech stacks. As a result, everything from budget allocation to marketing contribution, overall marketing and GTM metrics, growth rate, and headcount was always way off.

That’s why I was so excited to see the 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmarks from BenchmarkIt.

Throughout November and December 2024, BenchmarkIt collected data from 323 B2B technology companies to benchmark marketing budget and productivity metrics across various categories. All information was collected anonymously and aggregated across all participant-contributed data, and their online tool allows you to cut the data based on multiple values, including company size. As a result, I was able to see key metrics that were relevant to the smaller companies I work with (and have been part of).

Why Are Benchmarks Important?

A good benchmark study can help your business stay relevant, competitive, and efficient. They guide strategy, reveal opportunities for improvement, and provide insights that drive smarter decision-making. Here’s why they’re indispensable for businesses looking to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve growth:

• Guide Strategic Decisions: By providing a clear understanding of industry standards and best practices, benchmarks act as a reference point, ensuring that your marketing approach is competitive and in line with current trends. I never enter a budget and strategy planning season without relevant benchmarks.

• Measuring Performance: Benchmarks allow you to compare your performance against industry norms and top-performing companies. This helps identify areas where you might be underperforming, offering actionable insights on where to invest more resources or refine your strategy.

• Identifying Gaps and Opportunities: By understanding what peers are doing, you can spot gaps in your own strategy and find opportunities for improvement.

• Justifying Investments: Every marketing leader is asked to justify their investments at some point during the year. Having benchmarks handy can help make the case.

• Tracking Progress Over Time: Benchmarks serve as a historical reference, allowing you to track how marketing efforts evolve in comparison to industry trends over time.

• Setting Realistic Goals: Using benchmarks to set performance goals ensures they are grounded in reality. Without benchmarks, goal-setting can become aspirational and disconnected. While I love a stretch goal, benchmarks ensure those goals are realistic.

9 Key Learnings

There is some great data in the 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark study, and here are my key takeaways:

1. Increase Marketing Budgets and Focus on Growth: Median marketing budgets have risen from 9% to 10% of revenue, with top-performing companies allocating between 16% and 20%. The biggest budget increases were driven by <$20M and $100M - $250M segments, with ownership of a BDR/SDR organization creating a wider variance in budget. This investment correlates with faster growth, highlighting the importance of marketing in driving business success. As budgets grow, it signals a strong focus on leveraging marketing to fuel business expansion.

2. Demand Generation + Events Take 50% of Marketing Program Budgets: This is an important benchmark for anyone building a budget. Irrespective of company size, demand generation is the top budget category. As companies scale (>$5M), the percentage of budget allocated to demand generation increases. Once companies hit $100M in revenue, they begin to decrease the budget allocation to demand generation and reallocate those dollars to communications and marketing operations.

3. Growth Rate Plays a Role in Budget Allocation: There’s a direct correlation between growth rates and marketing budget allocation. In the 30% and above growth rate segment, the top quartile allocation is significantly higher. Even when eliminating smaller companies (<$50M), we still see an increase in marketing spend as a percentage of revenue for higher-growth companies.

4. Technology Allocations Are Decreasing: As companies scale, the percentage of marketing budget allocated to programs grows, while investment in people and technology decreases (as a percentage of revenue). Will AI take from people or programs? Recent research from Jasper AI highlights that 23% of companies are investing 15% - 20% of their budgets in AI in 2025, up from 11% in 2024.

5. Product-Led Growth (PLG) Companies Have Bigger Marketing Allocations: PLG companies are investing a larger percentage of revenue in marketing than other models. They spend much more on programs (52%) and a smaller percentage on people (32%).

6. Attribution Models Remain Messy: All marketers have a love/hate relationship with attribution models, and this study shows that models are still “fractured.” Companies are using first-touch, last-touch, inbound, and multi-touch, with bigger companies and, surprisingly, those <$5M, using multi-touch models.

7. Inbound Leads Are Highest for Lower Deal Sizes: This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Similar to when companies scale in size, as ACV increases >$50K, the reliance on inbound leads decreases. Finding ways to maintain or increase the percentage of new bookings from hand-raisers is a critical factor in decreasing CAC.

8. Pipeline, ARR, and MQLs Are Still King: The top three marketing metrics reported are pipeline generated (62%), opportunities generated (51%), and new ARR bookings (36%). 34% of companies reported that MQLs are the metric they watch. It’s time to move away from MQLs as a measure of success and focus on Cost per Opportunity, the Marketing CAC ratio, and pipeline conversion metrics.

9. CFOs Are More Likely to Approve Marketing Budgets When the ROI Is Predictable: In an era of efficient growth, only 52% of marketing teams measure marketing cost per pipeline. This is surprising to me. CMOs must understand how their marketing budget converts to a dollar of new ARR or a dollar of qualified pipeline.

You can review the study and explore the interactive tools here. There is also a link to the webinar the authors hosted to discuss the findings.

Benchmarks are more than just numbers—they are insights that can propel your marketing strategy forward. By aligning your company’s marketing efforts with industry standards, you can ensure you’re optimizing every dollar and making smarter, data-driven decisions.

Ready to dive into the 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmarks and see how your metrics stack up? Check out the full study and explore the interactive tools to see where you can level up your marketing efforts in the coming year.

Other Articles You May Be Interested In