The five biggest challenges facing demand gen marketers include personalization, budget constraints and sales-marketing alignment. That’s according to the 2025 State of Demand Gen Report from The Marketing Geeks.
Marketers also identified challenges around effectively scaling campaigns and data integration in the report.
By now, we’re well aware of the issues marketing teams face when developing creative or personalized campaigns. So it’s no surprise report found marketers across roles cited creative and personalization and as major challenges. Nearly half (48.8%) of director/VP roles said developing creative or personalized campaigns was a top challenge, followed by 32% of demand generation marketers.
Marketers in the survey also cited scaling campaigns effectively as a significant challenge. Again, nearly half (46.5%) of director/VP respondents cited scaling campaigns was a challenge.
Fortunately, the 2025 State of Demand Gen Report offers some ideas for marketing teams trying to once and for all overcome these challenges. Perhaps the most interesting concept is one the report calls “attraction-driven marketing,” or ADM.
Marketing with authenticity, trust and value
ADM prioritizes authenticity, creativity and building meaningful relationships with customers. But to do this involves moving away from transactional paradigms.
For marketing teams who are finding the traditional metrics-focused approach is no longer sufficient, focusing on understanding the unique needs, challenges and aspirations of customers seems like an appropriate alternative.
In the report, 70% of respondents indicated a likelihood of prioritizing authenticity and storytelling, while 65% of respondents rated educational content as “very important” for audience engagement.
The challenge with such approaches is they simply aren’t as measurable as MQLs and pipeline, which are among the transactional metrics driving B2B marketing at many organizations. There is some hope, however, that leadership is willing to see things differently. The report also found 60% of CMOs emphasized the role of trust-building through authentic storytelling.
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AI tools to improve scale and performance
AI tools have the potential to help marketers make gains against some of their familiar challenges. AI can help improve personalization, optimize user engagement and streamline decision making. The report found 55% of respondents said AI-powered tools helped them improve campaign performance.
But AI (like many martech tools) relies heavily on data, both the data it creates and the data marketers feed it. That makes the proper management, hygiene and integration of that data critically important, and that’s another familiar area where marketers say the face significant challenges.
Fifty percent of respondents indicated said a lack of data integration is a challenge, particularly for enterprises with fragmented tools and data silos.
Problems around data are a common refrain in marketing circles. The 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey (no registration required) found that after cost, the features marketers said were most important when looking for a replacement for a martech app were often related to data — data management, integration, APIs and data centralization.
But for all of the problems with data integration, marketing technology itself ranked highly among CMOs who were asked what they believed was the most important factor in generating demand.
A familiar foe: Sales-marketing alignment
Thirty percent of the respondents in the report emphasized misalignment between sales and marketing teams. Among heads of marketing, nearly 43% said sales-marketing alignment was a top challenge.
The report goes on to suggest the creation of cross-functional teams that include input from product and sales teams. The question is: Does working more closely together improve alignment?
Many organizations in B2B are consolidating into revenue departments that include marketing, sales and customer success, but the problem of misalignment continues to rear its head.
Download the 2025 State of Demand Gen Report from The Marketing Geeks website (no registration required).
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