Here's Your 2025 Content Playbook

Hey, hope you’re having a great day!
Aaron from Postdigitalist here.
We’re slowly arriving at the end of 2024, and most of our partners have already started preparing for 2025. Are you preparing for the year ahead too?
In this issue, we’ll do a quick recap of this year’s top B2B SaaS “marketing trends” and anticipate some changing tides for 2025.
2024
Generative AI and warm outbound—powered by visitor identification—are two of the biggest trends we identified in 2024. Both reflect a shift toward smarter, more targeted strategies, and we expect them to define the landscape moving forward.
Would you like a side of GenAI with that?
This year marked the rise of "GenAI" – Generative AI everywhere. Product teams around the world prioritized AI-driven features, often with mixed results. Many of these features focused on generating short text or synthesizing information, but user satisfaction has been inconsistent. Why? Because some teams sacrificed core, value-adding optimizations for flashy but unnecessary AI integrations.
Generative AI sparked a surge of interest in content production, especially within the media industry. Major names like Sports Illustrated experimented with AI-generated articles, but the results were often underwhelming—riddled with inaccuracies, hallucinated details, or even references to non-existent products.
That said, 2024 has also brought a more measured, responsible approach to AI in content marketing. It’s clear that Generative AI is here to stay, but the focus should be on using it for repetitive, low-value tasks—things like turning interviews, internal documents, or structured data into a digestible first draft. The best outcomes come from pairing AI with human editors who refine and elevate the content to make it truly competitive.
As we look ahead, brands that respect their users and treat the internet as a shared space will balance AI with human oversight. Those that don't? They'll keep flooding the web with mediocre AI content—and they'll experience the consequences in 2025.
Know your visitors
This year, we witnessed the popularization and doubling down on visitor identification tools. These tools are designed to detect website visitors who might be qualified leads and engage them through warm outbound efforts.
The surge in visitor identification tools is a direct result of warm outbound emerging as the smarter alternative to traditional cold outreach. Unlike the old "spray and pray" approach of sending cold emails to a loosely assembled list, warm outbound focuses on users who have already demonstrated potential interest in your product—or a product like yours.
Instead of spamming a list of contacts from random companies, sales teams now rely on buying intent signals. On-site activity has proven to be one of the strongest signals, and visitor identification tools are the go-to solution for capturing and leveraging this data.
We even wrote a guide about this phenomenon and how to use visitor identification tools effectively for SEO. Read the guide ↗
2025
With a little help from your friends
The rise of Generative AI has unlocked unprecedented speed and volume in content production. As a result, we’re seeing more content than ever before—but the average quality has dropped to new lows.
In this sea of low-value content, provenance is increasingly murky. Was this written by a person? Or is the "author" just a fake name with a stock photo, churning out scraped content from third-party platforms?
In this context, three strategies will stand out for B2B growth:
- Word of mouth
- Real user-generated content
- Creator and vendor partnerships
To thrive, brands must turn real customers and allies into ambassadors. This means offering strong incentives and, in many cases, helping them build their personal brand while leveraging your brand’s credibility. Ambassador and creator partnerships will become essential, along with more customer- and network-centric approaches to social proof.
Instead of relying on questionable testimonials or generic five-star reviews, B2B brands will focus on building trust through authentic connections—tapping into networks and facilitating introductions between prospects and trusted individuals.
This kind of low-scale, highly targeted social engineering will be key as the Internet becomes a less trusting place. We’re seeing a shift back to the skepticism of the early web days, where unreliability was the default.
Small audiences with high engagement
In today’s sea of endless content, users are overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed. Gen Z, for example, is even turning to “dummy phones” as an escape from the constant bombardment of notifications and noise.
This fatigue extends beyond content consumption—it’s reshaping how people interact with the web and brands. Users are tired of searching for value and coming up empty-handed. This shift will also impact search behavior, but we’ll explore that in the next section.
For now, the takeaway is clear: brands should focus on building small, highly engaged audiences. Platforms like Substack already exemplify this trend, where creators and thought leaders cultivate tight-knit communities with high engagement rates.
On a personal note, I run a Substack newsletter with under 1k subscribers, but my open rates are over 50%. These are people I know, people who DM me on X/Twitter, and with whom I have real conversations. If I were to sell something to this audience, I’d be in a stronger position than if I had thousands of followers with low engagement—and no way to tell the bots from the humans. With GenAI, the number games got easy, so quality-focused brands need to find a new way to compete.
In an internet increasingly polluted by GenAI and fake accounts, small, authentic, high-engagement audiences are pure gold. This approach fosters trust, builds real relationships, and cuts through the noise.
The long-tail
Recently, ChatGPT launched SearchGPT, a direct competitor to Complexity. It’s an AI-powered conversational search engine embedded within the most widely used AI tool in the world. In response, Google introduced "AI Overview," a feature that synthesizes top search results directly on the search engine results page (SERP). This means users no longer need to click through to a site to access basic information.
We produced a video breaking down the impact of these developments on SEO, but here’s the short version:
- Users seeking quick, generic answers with no commercial intent will no longer visit your site.
- These users will stay on the SERPs, consuming information directly from AI summaries.
While this may sound like a setback, it also creates an opportunity. Diversifying your traffic sources is now more important than ever, but SEO can still drive highly qualified traffic—if you adapt.
The key is to focus on long-tail queries and create content that addresses specific, high-value needs. Generic content won’t cut it anymore. Instead, prioritize precise, well-researched, and deeply useful content that speaks to an audience with clear intent.
This shift ties back to what we discussed earlier about smaller, higher-quality audiences. SEO-driven audiences may shrink, but their relevance and value will grow. In this new landscape, better audiences > bigger audiences.
Talk to an expert
Interested in understanding how to leverage these trends to drive growth at your company? Book a free consultation ↗