Social Pros Podcast · Convince & Convert

The Top 5 Marketing Trends for 2025 Based on Research with Todd Lebo

March 21, 2025·38 min·3 clips

A user described a personal finance tool as an 'emergency preparedness' product for their family — a framing the product team had never considered.

Research comes first here. The episode introduces Ascend2 as a research agency helping B2B brands make original research content, build branding and thought leadership, and get more mileage out of the work after the report is done. Lebo's method is plain-spoken: picture the executive summary first, then work back to the questions that would actually support it. Segmentation does much of the heavy lifting. With 25 survey questions and four or five ways to segment the answers, one study can create about 200 data sets worth looking at. Then the digging starts. Lebo argues that marketers should keep poking at different cuts of the data, because the best story may not be in the first pass. The AI section stays refreshingly practical. The host steers away from the shiny creative examples and toward repetitive work, faster service, scaled content, and quicker customer responses. That is where AI starts to feel useful instead of vague. Lebo agrees that marketers are already using automation to do more across channels than they could manage only a couple of years ago. The next move is revenue. He expects AI value to shift from efficiency and scale toward revenue generation, revenue increases, and ROI. The episode keeps coming back to usefulness. Thought leadership is treated as raw material for stories, segments, and market evidence, not just a report to publish and forget. The closing cleaning example lands the point: when research finds the right phrase, a product's value can suddenly make sense to the people it is for.

As heard by us

A practical guide to turning survey data into sharper marketing stories.

Social Pros keeps the focus tight: it shows how B2B teams can work backward from an executive summary, slice survey data in different ways, and keep digging until the story becomes clear.

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Why you'd press play

You want research that starts with an executive summary and works backward to the right questions.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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