Employee Engagement and Benefits Marketing: How HR Tech Vendors Win the Buyers Who Buy These Tools

It is October. The CHRO of a 4,000-person services company has 17 demos on her calendar this quarter. Eleven of them are engagement platforms. Six are benefits decision-support tools. By demo number four, she is muting her camera between pitches because every vendor is opening with the same slide: a stat about Gallup engagement scores, a promise of “27% productivity lift,” and a logo wall featuring three companies she has never heard of.

She is not a difficult buyer. She is a buyer who has heard every version of this pitch, and she is trying to find the one that is not lying to her.

This is the market HR tech vendors are selling into right now.

Engagement and benefits are two of the loudest, most crowded categories in B2B software. They are also two of the hardest to market well, because the buyers are uniquely sophisticated, the outcomes are uniquely hard to prove, and the gap between what vendors claim and what employees experience has gotten wide enough to be its own news story. (Gallup found U.S. engagement dropped to a 10-year low of 31% in 2024, and global engagement fell to 20% in 2025. The market is not getting healthier. The marketing has not caught up.)

This page is for the people building, marketing, and selling those platforms. We are going to walk through what makes this category structurally hard, who you are selling to (it is not who most vendors think), positioning that does not collapse into category sameness, messaging that holds up to a skeptical buyer, the channels that work, the channels that waste money, and how to measure the whole thing without leaning on metrics that no one trusts anymore. At the end, there is a 90-day plan you can run.

We are Red Branch Media. We have spent the last 15 years marketing HR tech, including a meaningful share of the engagement and benefits platforms you are competing against. We are going to be specific.

The HR tech buyer has heard every pitch — they’re not looking for inspiration, they’re looking for the vendor who isn’t lying to them.

The Engagement and Benefits Categories Are Structurally Hard To Market, And Most Vendors Are Making It Worse

There is a reason your campaigns feel like they are pushing against rubber. The category itself has three structural problems that no clever creative can solve.

The first is sameness. Every engagement platform claims to lift productivity, reduce turnover, and improve culture. Every benefits platform claims to drive utilization, reduce cost, and improve experience. The claims are not wrong, exactly. They are just identical. Deloitte surveyed 14,000 leaders across 95 countries and found 81% of executives say human sustainability is critical to their business, while only 27% of employees see their employer making real progress on it. That gap between vendor claims and user satisfaction is exactly where vendor marketing is operating. You are pitching outcomes the buyer is already skeptical their last vendor delivered.

The second is committee. Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying report found that average B2B purchases now involve 13 stakeholders across two or more departments, with 86% of purchase processes stalling and 81% of buyers reporting dissatisfaction with their selection. For HR tech specifically, that committee includes HR, Finance, IT, Legal, and increasingly the C-suite. Each one has different priorities, different success criteria, and different reasons to kill the deal. Marketing that pitches one of them well and ignores the rest is marketing that loses to a competitor who covered all five.

The third is skepticism, and this one is the most acute. Gartner found HR technology has been the top budget priority for HR leaders three years running, but only 24% feel they get maximum value from their investments, and nearly half say HR tech has damaged HR’s reputation internally. Read that again. Half of HR leaders think the tech they bought hurt their credibility with the rest of the business. The next pitch you send into that environment is not starting at zero. It is starting in the red.

The shift from “perks” to “total wellbeing” was supposed to fix this. Employers added EAPs, mental health benefits, financial wellness, fertility coverage, and decision-support platforms. The marketing followed: every vendor pivoted to wellbeing language. The problem is that the McKinsey Health Institute’s survey of 30,000 employees across 30 countries found that only 49% are “faring well” on holistic health, and the factors that move outcomes are team and job design, not perks programs. Adding programs without changing the underlying experience produces what employees now openly call wellbeing washing. The marketing language got more sophisticated. The credibility got worse.

“The engagement and benefits market is not suffering from a content problem. It is suffering from a sincerity problem. Buyers can read a mission statement at 40 paces. They are not buying inspiration. They are buying proof, and most vendors are still selling vibes.” — Maren Hogan, CEO, Red Branch Media

Stop Selling To “HR.” Start Selling To The Five People Who Make the Decision

The phrase “HR buyer” is doing a lot of work in vendor marketing, and most of that work is wrong. There is no single HR buyer for engagement or benefits tech. There are five distinct decision-makers, and each one cares about different things, fears different things, and gets fired for different things.

The CHRO is the budget owner and the strategic sponsor. SHRM’s 2025 CHRO Priorities & Perspectives Report surveyed 212 CHROs and ranked their top 2025 priorities as leadership and manager development (51%), organizational design (30%), employee experience (28%), and talent management (27%), with 61% citing wage inflation pressure and 59% expecting to deepen wellbeing investment. A separate Gartner / Evanta survey of 1,300 CHROs put leader development, culture, and strategic workforce planning as the top three, with engagement only ranking fifth at the enterprise level. What this means for vendor marketing is concrete: pitching a CHRO on “engagement” alone is pitching them on their fifth priority. Engagement has to ladder to growth, manager effectiveness, or culture (the things they defend in the boardroom). Mercer’s 2024 Voice of the CHRO study found the share of CHROs expecting tech to be “significantly more important” jumped from 60% to 84% in a single year, while only 17% felt prepared on technology before taking the role. CHROs need teachers, not pitchers. Content that genuinely educates the category will outperform feature comparisons every time.

The VP of People is the operational owner. They run the function day to day, and their performance is judged on retention, engagement scores, and the annual employee survey. Their fear is being the one who recommended the tool that did not work. They want proof that other VPs of People at companies like theirs have implemented your platform successfully and survived. Case studies and references are not nice-to-have for this persona. They are the deal.

The Total Rewards Leader (or Director of Compensation and Benefits) is squeezed in two directions at once. Mercer’s 2024-2025 Global Talent Trends Study found EVP and employee experience are the #2 HR priority globally, while “combating increased health and benefits costs” remains a persistent tension on 19% of HR agendas. Their job is to make benefits better and cheaper at the same time, and any vendor that pretends those goals are not in tension is going to lose them in the first 30 seconds. Messaging for this persona has to acknowledge the squeeze and offer a real answer to it.

The Benefits Manager is operational and tactical. They live inside the platform, run the open enrollment cycle, work with the broker, and field employee questions. They are not the budget owner, but they are the person who will tell the VP of Benefits whether your product works. Your messaging to them is about reducing administrative pain, not strategic transformation.

The Employee Experience Lead (a role that did not exist at most companies five years ago) is increasingly the buyer for engagement-adjacent platforms: recognition, pulse, internal communication, employee advocacy. They are usually mid-career, digitally fluent, and the most likely member of the buying committee to read your content. They also have less political capital than the CHRO, which means they need ammunition (data, case studies, ROI models) to advocate internally.

There is a sixth buyer most vendors ignore: the broker. In benefits tech especially, brokers are not just influencers. They are gatekeepers. LIMRA and EY’s April 2025 research found 79% of employers rely on brokers and advisors to identify and select benefits, with nearly 60% expecting to rely on them more in five years, and 4 in 10 employers saying they would change carriers if products did not connect to their benefits tech platform. If you are selling benefits tech to mid-market and you do not have a broker channel strategy, you have a strategy that ignores 79% of how the market buys.

Forrester’s April 2025 research on B2B buying networks found 35% of Millennial and Gen Z B2B buyers report 10 or more external influencers in their last decision, including consultants, analysts, and peer networks. The buying committee extends past the org chart, and your marketing has to extend with it.

Positioning That Does Not Collapse Into “Engagement Platform For Modern Companies”

Walk the floor at HR Tech this year and count how many booths use the word “platform.” Now count how many use “AI-powered.” Now count how many use “modern.” This is the market you are positioning into.

The structural reality is brutal. HR Executive’s 2024 coverage of the Josh Bersin keynote noted the average large employer now runs 93 employee-facing apps, up 57% in three years. S&P Global’s 2025 HR Tech Market Monitor put the market at $94B with 160+ employee experience vendors alone, and an HHI of 448 confirming high fragmentation in EX, people analytics, and talent intelligence. Sapient Insights’ 2024-2025 HR Systems Survey tracks 200+ vendors across 12 HR tech categories from 3,300+ organizations covering 25 million workers, and they have been documenting the gap between vendor claims and user satisfaction for years. You are not fighting two competitors. You are fighting 92 other apps already deployed inside your buyer’s organization, plus a category-leader gravity well that pulls undifferentiated entrants down.

BCG’s 2024 analysis of B2B SaaS found HR was the fastest-growing software segment in 2023, but 39% of SaaS companies cite differentiation as a top risk, and personalized marketing drives 40% faster revenue growth than generic approaches. Translation: HR tech is growing fast, but undifferentiated vendors lose to category leaders even when their products are objectively comparable.

So what works?

The three positioning archetypes that hold up in this category are the data-led platform, the culture-first platform, and the manager-enablement platform. Each one is a wedge against the generic “engagement platform” label, and each one resonates with a specific buyer in the committee. The data-led platform sells to the analytical CHRO and the People Analytics function (it is built on rigor, benchmarks, and predictive insight). The culture-first platform sells to the EX Lead and the values-driven CHRO (it leads with belonging, recognition, and narrative). The manager-enablement platform sells to the operational VP of People (it solves the structural problem that managers, not employees, are the engagement variable). You can have elements of all three, but you cannot lead with all three. Pick the wedge that maps to your strongest customers and own it.

The pressure test is simple. Take your homepage hero, your pitch deck slide one, and your most-clicked LinkedIn ad. Hand them to a colleague along with the same three assets from your three closest competitors, with the logos removed. If your colleague cannot tell which one is yours, you do not have positioning. You have category placeholder copy.

McKinsey’s 2024 research on B2B winners found buyers now use approximately 10 channels in their journey, up from 5 in 2016, and more than half want a true omnichannel experience. Positioning has to hold up across all 10. Inconsistency from your homepage to your sales deck to your demo to your customer success kickoff is itself a differentiation failure, because it signals you do not actually know who you are.

HBR Analytic Services and LeanData’s 2026 study of 522 B2B leaders found 83% say go-to-market is “very important” but only 38% rate execution as “very effective”. In a market where every vendor knows positioning matters, execution discipline is the wedge. Whoever runs their positioning consistently across every touchpoint wins, even against a competitor with better strategy on paper.

Messaging That Survives A Skeptical Buyer

Now we get to the hard part. Once you have positioning, you have to translate it into messaging that does not get auto-discounted by a buyer who has been pitched 17 times this quarter.

Start with the ROI conversation, because every vendor in this space gets it wrong. The honest version of the engagement ROI story is the Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th Edition, which analyzed 736 studies, 3.35 million employees, 53 industries, and 90 countries, and found that top-quartile engaged business units saw 23% higher profitability, 18% higher sales, 51-78% lower absenteeism and turnover, and 32% fewer defects. That is rigorous. That is defensible. A sophisticated buyer will accept it. What they will not accept is the vendor-invented “boost engagement by 27%” stat with no methodology behind it. The first one builds credibility. The second one signals that your marketing team is hoping no one googles the source.

For benefits and wellness specifically, you also need to acknowledge a citation that sophisticated buyers will weaponize against you if you do not handle it first. The Song and Baicker workplace wellness RCT published in JAMA in 2019 studied 32,974 employees across 160 worksites and found no statistically significant effects on clinical outcomes, healthcare spending, absenteeism, performance, or tenure after 18 months. That study is six years old and it is still the cite a skeptical CFO will throw at you when you make a wellness ROI claim. Vendors who acknowledge it (and then explain why their model is structurally different) earn instant credibility with the analytical buyer. Vendors who pretend it does not exist look unserious.

The outcome language that lands in 2026 is not generic productivity. It is utilization, eNPS, and trust. MetLife’s 23rd Annual Employee Benefit Trends Study (EBTS 2025) surveyed 5,579 employees and 2,567 HR decision-makers and found trusted-and-cared-for employees are 3.8x more likely to feel holistically healthy, 2.4x more engaged, 1.9x more productive, and that positive benefits experiences drive 2.1x more trust during downturns. Notice what that data does. It connects benefits utilization (a metric your platform can directly influence) to outcomes the C-suite cares about (engagement, productivity, trust). That is the chain you want your messaging to walk the buyer through.

The McKinsey Health Institute’s 2025 Thriving Workplaces report found wellbeing improvements correlate with 10-21% productivity gains, the global value at stake is $3.7-$11.7T, and one Kyan Health case showed an 11.6x annual ROI. That is C-suite ammunition. Your job is to translate your product features into language that ladders up to those numbers, without overpromising what you specifically can deliver.

The “wellbeing washing” problem is the messaging trap that is sinking the most vendors right now. Gallup’s 2024 wellbeing research found just 21% of employees strongly agree their employer cares about their wellbeing, 81% of employees with EAP access have never used it, and 31% do not even know whether they have one. Read that one more time. The wellbeing programs employers are paying for are largely unused, and most employees do not even know they exist. Vendors who position around closing utilization gaps (engagement of the benefit, not just the existence of the benefit) are pitching the problem. Vendors who pitch “we add another wellbeing program” are pitching the problem the buyer already has.

Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends found 89% of executives claim human-sustainability progress, but only 41% of workers agree, and 53% of workers and managers report burnout. The leadership self-report and the employee experience are diverging fast. Smart vendor marketing messages directly to that gap. It says, in effect, “we know what your leadership thinks is happening, and we know what your employees are feeling, and our platform is built for the gap between those two things.” That is the messaging that lands in 2026.

Half of managers say they give weekly feedback. Only 20% of employees agree. That gap is the real product opportunity in HR tech right now.

The Channel Stack That Works In HR Tech (And One That Wastes Money)

Channel decisions in HR tech marketing are where the gap between best practice and common practice gets the widest. Here is what the data says about each channel, ranked roughly by leverage.

Content and SEO are the centerpiece, full stop. Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveyed 3,484 executives across seven countries and found 73% of decision-makers say thought leadership is more trustworthy than marketing materials, and 60% have begun buying from a vendor they were not considering after reading thought leadership content. The 2025 update went further: 71% say TL is more effective than conventional marketing, and 53% say if TL quality is high, brand recognition matters less. For challenger HR tech brands, this is the most important sentence in this whole pillar page. You can punch above your weight on content quality. You do not need brand recognition to win deals. You need content that says something the category leader is not saying.

The HR-specific search topic clusters that work are the ones tied to the buyer’s job. Top of funnel: “employee engagement strategy,” “benefits communication,” “manager training,” “open enrollment best practices.” Middle of funnel: “engagement platform comparison,” “benefits administration software,” “recognition platform ROI.” Bottom of funnel: branded queries plus comparison terms (“[Your Company] vs [Competitor]”). What does not work is generic SEO content that any wellness blog could have written. The category is too crowded for that to rank, and the buyers are too sophisticated for it to convert.

Email and nurture work, but only when segmented by role. Generic “thought leadership newsletter” sends are getting deleted. CHRO sequences need to lead with strategic content. Total Rewards sequences need cost and utilization angles. Benefits Manager sequences need operational and tactical content. The same email sent to all three is an email optimized for none of them.

Paid media works on LinkedIn and almost nowhere else for this category. LinkedIn’s 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report found top B2B marketers are increasing brand investment, with better creative driving 61% engagement and 55% share of voice gains. The 2025 benchmark found 78% of B2B marketers now use video, mature video strategies correlate with 2.2x higher trust scores, and testimonials, brand storytelling, and short-form social video are the top performers. Targeting that works: HR job titles, HR-specific groups, and account-based audiences seeded by your customer base. Targeting that wastes money: broad “decision-maker” or “C-suite” targeting that pulls in CFOs and CIOs who are not the primary buyer for your category. Search ads on high-CPC engagement keywords ($300-$800 CPC) only make sense if you have a clear path from click to demo, with content that converts skeptical buyers, not generic “request a demo” landing pages.

Events still matter, and SHRM is still the single highest concentration of HR buyers in the country. SHRM Annual 2024 hit approximately 26,000 attendees in Chicago, an all-time record, with 400+ speakers and 375 sessions, and SHRM 2025 drew 20,000+. HR Tech and Transform are the other two events with enough density to justify the spend. Beyond those three, event ROI gets thin fast. The play is not just having a booth. It is the speaking slot, the curated dinner, and the analyst meetings on the side.

Analyst relations have changed, and most vendors are over-investing in the wrong end of it. TrustRadius’s 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect surveyed 2,164 buyers and 243 GTM pros and found 86% of enterprise shortlists feature pre-known brands, 56% of buyers had peer conversations versus vendors’ guess of 34%, and analyst report usage hit a seven-year low of 16%. Translation: traditional analyst-report buying influence has dropped, peer reviews have risen, and vendors are systematically over-spending on Gartner inclusion and under-spending on customer advocacy. That said, Josh Bersin and Sapient Insights still matter for HR tech specifically because they are the analysts HR buyers read. Generic industry analysts? Less so.

Customer marketing is where this category lives or dies. 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report surveyed 4,510 buyers and found 94% rank a preferred vendor before any seller contact, 77-80% of deals go to the Day-One shortlist leader, and buyers set 85% of their requirements pre-sales. Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying confirmed 92% of B2B buyers begin their journey with a vendor already in mind. What that means for your channel mix is uncomfortable for most marketing leaders to absorb: by the time a buyer fills out a demo form, the deal is largely over. The work of getting on that Day-One shortlist happens months earlier, through content, peer conversations, customer references, and brand visibility in the community. Vendors who treat customer marketing as a “post-sale” function are mis-budgeted by an order of magnitude.

Marketing Benefits Tech Is Its Own Discipline

Benefits tech marketing is not a sub-genre of engagement tech marketing. It is a different discipline with its own calendar, its own buyers, and its own regulatory floor.

The annual enrollment cycle structures everything. Benefits content lives or dies on whether it shows up at the right point in the cycle (pre-OE planning in Q2-Q3, OE execution in Q4, post-OE analysis in Q1). The vendors who dominate the SEO and content game in this category are the ones running content calendars built around the OE cycle, not generic monthly publishing schedules.

The market is overwhelmingly self-insured at the enterprise level, which changes the messaging entirely. KFF’s 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey of 2,142 employers found 63% of covered workers are now in self-funded plans (79% at large firms), and 48% of large employers have expanded mental health resources via EAPs or vendors like Headspace and Lyra. The 2025 update documented average family premiums hitting approximately $27,000, up 6%, with new detail on menopause support, GLP-1 coverage, and primary-care models. Self-insured employers carry full claims risk, which means they need precision tools and plan-level decision support. Fully-insured mid-market buyers need different things, and they buy differently (typically through brokers). A single benefits messaging strategy that ignores this split is going to underperform in both segments.

The communication gap is the most concrete thing benefits tech vendors can sell against. The 2025-2026 Aflac WorkForces Report found a 7-point YoY drop in employee benefits understanding, with only 46% of employers communicating year-round versus 34% of employees who say they receive year-round communication, and year-round comms improving understanding by 13 points. NAMI’s 2024 Workplace Mental Health Poll found 92% of employees say employer mental health coverage is important to culture, yet 1 in 4 do not know if their employer offers it, and 31% of entry-level employees with access do not know how to use it. That is your messaging right there. The benefits exist. Employees do not know they exist. Your platform closes the gap. That story lands harder than any feature comparison.

Decision-support is the category creating real adoption. MetLife’s EBTS 2025 reported 64% of employees with access used MetLife’s Upwise decision-support tool during enrollment, and 84% of those completed the recommendation flow. Mercer’s 2024 National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans found per-employee health benefit cost reached $16,501 in 2024 (+5%), 65% of large employers offer 3+ plan choices, 49% deploy navigation services, and GLP-1 coverage is now at 44% of large employers. The plan complexity is exploding, which is exactly why navigation, decision-support, and communication tech are real categories rather than features bolted onto a benefits admin platform.

Financial wellness has graduated from voluntary perk to mainstream strategy. EBRI’s 2024 Financial Wellbeing Employer Survey found 77% of employers offer or plan to offer emergency savings within 1-2 years, 83% say financial wellness has at least some impact on mental, emotional, and social wellbeing, and 70% have explicit cost-benefit analyses for these programs. Bank of America’s 2024 Workplace Benefits Report found 47% of workers feel financially well, up from 42%, but with a persistent gender gap (53% men vs. 36% women) and 76% saying cost of living is outpacing wage growth. WTW’s 2024 Best Practices in Health Care Survey projected health costs to rise 7.7% in 2025, a decade high, but only 34% of employers plan to shift costs to employees; 41% are using alternative plan designs and 38% are expanding mental health offerings. The market signal is clear: employers are choosing plan design innovation and member-facing tools over blunt cost-shifting, and benefits tech that helps them do that is on the right side of the trend.

And the broker is the channel you cannot ignore. LIMRA’s 2025 research confirmed 79% of employers rely on brokers, ~60% expect to lean on them more in five years, and 4 in 10 would change carriers if products did not connect to their benefits tech platform. If your benefits platform’s GTM strategy does not include co-marketing with brokers, broker-facing tools, and broker training resources, you have a strategy that ignores the dominant channel for mid-market benefits tech sales.

Marketing Engagement Tech Is About Managers, Not Employees

If there is one shift in engagement tech marketing that is happening right now and most vendors are missing, it is this one. The conversation has moved from employees to managers, and the vendors who are still pitching “give your employees a voice” are several years behind the buyers.

The data is overwhelming. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report found global engagement at 21% in 2024, with manager engagement specifically dropping from 30% to 27%, only 44% of managers globally reporting they ever received training, and an estimated $438B in lost productivity in 2024 alone. Gallup’s foundational research, drawing on hundreds of companies, 27 million employees, and 2.5 million work units, found 70% of variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager, and only ~1 in 10 people have high natural management talent. The variable that moves engagement is the manager. Not the survey. Not the recognition program. The manager.

Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends found 73% of organizations recognize the manager role needs reinvention, but only 7% are making great progress; managers spend roughly 40% of their time on admin and only 13% developing people; 36% feel insufficiently prepared. Gallup’s 2025 Workplace Challenges report found 50% of managers say they give weekly feedback, but only 20% of individual contributors agree, and 50% of U.S. employees are “thriving,” a record low. That 50%-vs-20% feedback perception gap is the most concrete, citeable proof point in the category. “We have a feedback process” does not equal “employees feel heard.” That is the gap engagement and performance platforms exist to close, and it is the gap your messaging should be aimed at.

McKinsey’s 2024 research on middle managers found 44% cite organizational bureaucracy as the cause of negative experiences, and high-performing-manager companies generate higher shareholder returns. This reframes your platform’s value proposition. You are not “another tool managers have to use.” You are administrative relief that frees them to do the thing only humans can do, which is coach.

For pulse survey, recognition, and performance management vendors specifically, this is the angle that escapes the “we are not another survey tool” trap. The reposition is not to compete on survey features. It is to anchor on the manager problem and position the survey, the recognition, or the performance review as a manager-enablement layer rather than an employee-facing program.

Gallup and Workhuman’s 2024 Recognition and Retention research tracked 3,447 employees from 2022-2024 and found well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to turn over, while only 10% of employees have ever been asked about recognition preferences. The earlier Human-Centered Workplace research from Gallup and Workhuman found employees who receive great recognition are 20x more engaged than those who receive poor recognition, with five strategic recognition pillars (fulfilling, authentic, personalized, equitable, embedded). Recognition vendors get a clear ROI story plus a personalization wedge against legacy award-catalog incumbents who treat recognition as a transaction rather than a strategic capability.

Gartner’s November 2024 Hype Cycle for HR Technology tracked 30+ innovations, with AI in HR, AI-enabled skills management, and HR Virtual Assistants leading, and noted non-AI platforms are “increasingly lagging,” with Internal Talent Marketplaces at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. For engagement vendors, this gives you analyst-backed framing for why your AI-native or manager-centric architecture is structurally different from another survey tool, without having to rely on your own marketing claims to make the case.

What HR Tech Buyers Are Tired Of Hearing

This section is going to be uncomfortable. It is supposed to be.

The “boost engagement by 27%” stat is dead. So is “improve retention by 32%,” “increase productivity by 21%,” and any other invented-precision number that is not tied to a published methodology. Buyers can google. They will. When they do, they will find that your stat traces back to a single customer case study with no controls, and your credibility takes a permanent hit. Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer surveyed 32,000 respondents across 28 countries and found business is the most trusted institution but trust sits below 60%; the 2025 update found 61% of global respondents hold a moderate or high sense of grievance, and high-grievance respondents see business as 81 points less ethical and 37 points less competent. Vendor marketing-speak starts in a deficit. Made-up stats deepen it.

The case study that moves a deal forward is the one with named buyers, real numbers, and an honest discussion of what did not work. The case study that gets ignored is the one with anonymous quotes, vague outcomes, and zero acknowledgment that implementation took six months longer than planned. Sophisticated buyers are pattern-matching for sincerity. They have read 50 case studies this year. They know what a real one looks like.

The “AI-powered” trap is the most acute messaging problem in HR tech right now. Josh Bersin’s 2024 AI Trailblazers research identified just 30 HR vendors with “working, high-value AI,” an implicit acknowledgment that most AI-in-HR claims are not real, and that the “buy Workday and turn it on” plug-and-play AI era is over. California Management Review’s December 2024 paper from UC Berkeley Haas analyzed AI-washing as a peer-reviewed phenomenon, identifying four cultural traps that produce exaggerated AI claims and calling on CEOs to act as ethical gatekeepers. MarketingProfs documented that the SEC and DOJ have begun acting against false AI claims, while Deloitte data shows 62% of consumers trust companies more when they are transparent about AI use. Deloitte’s January 2025 State of Generative AI in the Enterprise survey of 2,773 executives across 14 countries found more than two-thirds say 30% or fewer of their GenAI experiments will scale in the next 3-6 months, with regulatory compliance now the #1 GenAI barrier.

What that all means: vague “AI-powered” claims are not just annoying anymore. They are legally and reputationally dangerous, and HR buyers have seen enough failed AI pilots to be openly skeptical. The vendors winning right now are the ones being specific about exactly which models they use, exactly which problems those models solve, and exactly where they choose not to use AI because it would not help.

“Stop telling me your platform is AI-powered. Tell me what your AI does, what it cannot do, and what your customers are getting from it that they were not getting last year. If you can’t answer all three of those in two sentences, you don’t have an AI story. You have a slide.” — Maren Hogan, CEO, Red Branch Media

TrustRadius’s 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect found 56% of buyers (71% enterprise) had peer conversations vs. vendors’ estimate of 34%, analyst-report usage at a 7-year low of 16%, and 73% of tech buyers say they regularly or sometimes see fake reviews. 6sense’s 2024 Global B2B Buyer Experience Report confirmed buyers are roughly 70% through the purchasing process before vendor contact, 81% have a preferred vendor by first contact, 85% have requirements set, and the average buying cycle is 11.3 months with an 11-person buying group.

The actionable insight from all of that is uncomfortable but clear. Your marketing is being evaluated by buyers who have already made up their minds before you ever talk to them, who trust their peers more than your content, and who are watching for any sign of marketing-speak that signals you are not serious. The way you win is not by being louder. It is by being more honest, more specific, and more useful than the 16 other vendors in their inbox.

Measure What Maps To Revenue, Not What Is Easy To Count

The measurement conversation in HR tech marketing is broken in a specific way, and fixing it is a precondition for everything else.

Forrester’s December 2024 research published via Forbes found 64% of B2B marketing leaders say their organization does not trust marketing measurement for decision-making, and Forrester predicts another 20% decline in trust as buying complexity, AI inflation, and underinvestment in reputation metrics compound. The CFO does not believe your marketing dashboard. That is the starting point. What you do about it is the question.

The MQL is largely useless for this category, and clinging to it is actively making your reporting worse. 6sense’s 2024 Buyer Experience Report found 80% of buyers initiate first contact with a vendor already preferred, consultants and analysts are involved in 70% of purchases, and there are hundreds of pre-contact research interactions invisible to MQL systems. The “lead” you are counting in your CRM is downstream of all the work that mattered. MQL volume reporting is the equivalent of measuring how many times someone walked into your store, after they had already decided to buy from your competitor.

The replacement is the buying-group-based revenue waterfall. Forrester’s 2024 framework for the B2B Revenue Waterfall replaces the lead-based demand funnel with an account- and buying-group-based model, recognizing that 80%+ of B2B purchases involve groups of three or more. Their related research on demand programs operationalizes the shift from MQL handoffs to stage-based opportunity management, with specific guidance on aligning marketing investment to buying group progression. For HR tech specifically, where the buying committee is 5-13 people and the cycle is 6-18 months, this is not optional. It is the only model that maps to how your customers buy.

The dashboard a CMO in this space should be presenting to the board has four sections: pipeline contribution by source (with influenced revenue, not just sourced revenue), brand and category metrics (share of voice, branded search, analyst inclusion), customer marketing leverage (advocacy participation, reference utilization, expansion-influenced revenue), and the experiment portfolio (what you are testing, what you have learned, what you killed). Notice what is not on that list: MQL volume.

LinkedIn B2B Institute’s research recommends approximately a 50/50 brand vs. activation budget split, and finds that brands with share-of-voice above their share-of-market grow, while emotional messaging wins long-term and rational wins short-term. HBR research from McKinsey authors found B2B and B2C companies treating brand and advertising as a top-two growth strategy are 2x more likely to hit 5%+ revenue growth (67% vs. 33%), and top-quartile growth companies invest 3x more in marketing. The empirical case for measuring brand and activation separately, rather than collapsing both into MQL and pipeline metrics, is well-established. The vendors who do this consistently outgrow the ones who do not.

Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey of 402 CMOs found marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of revenue, 59% of CMOs say it is insufficient, paid media accounts for 30.6% of spend, and martech spend is at 22.4% and declining. When budgets are flat, every program has to demonstrate revenue contribution. The ones that cannot get cut. The ones that can get protected and grown.

A 90-Day Plan You Can Run Starting Monday

If your engagement or benefits tech marketing has any of the symptoms described in this guide (positioning that sounds like everyone else, messaging that gets auto-discounted, channels that feel busy but produce thin pipeline, measurement no one trusts), here is the diagnostic and execution plan.

The first 30 days are entirely diagnostic. Audit your positioning by collecting your homepage, your top three competitors’ homepages, and your most recent pitch deck. Strip the logos. Hand them to five people inside your company who do not work in marketing and ask them to identify which is yours. If three or more cannot, your positioning is the work. Audit your messaging by pulling your last 10 pieces of customer-facing content and tagging each with the persona it speaks to and the specific outcome it promises. The pattern you see (or do not see) will tell you whether your messaging architecture is intentional or accidental. Audit your channels by mapping every program to a specific revenue outcome it has produced or is forecast to produce in the next four quarters. The programs that cannot be mapped are candidates to be cut. Audit your measurement by listing every metric in your CMO dashboard and asking, for each one, “would the CFO bet a quarter of budget on this number?” The ones that fail that test should be replaced.

The second 30 days are about consolidation. Chief Martec’s 2024 State of Martech report tracked 14,106 martech products (up 27.8% YoY driven by GenAI), with average stack sizes shrinking 4-25% as organizations rationalized, and 82.7% of stacks relying on specialist apps over central-platform features. The market signal is clear: rationalize before adding. Identify the top three programs that are working and double down on them. Identify the bottom three and cut them. Pick one positioning hypothesis and align every customer-facing asset to it for the next quarter. Replace one underperforming dashboard metric with one buying-group-based metric.

The third 30 days are about execution discipline. Bain’s April 2025 research on the B2B Growth Divide surveyed approximately 1,300 senior commercial executives and found B2B winners (with 2x sector growth) share four traits: AI used for outcomes, sales-play execution, intelligent pricing, and long-term productivity; 82% of companies claim they run sales plays but only 21% realize their full value, and companies with a real Sales Play System grow 2.2x faster. Pick one repeatable GTM motion (a campaign, a customer expansion play, a vertical-specific entry play) and run it with discipline for 30 days. Document what works. Document what does not. The companies that grow are the ones with a small number of plays they execute consistently, not the ones with a large number of plays they execute occasionally.

Forrester’s 2025 Budget Planning Guide for B2B Marketing Executives uses an invest/divest/experiment framework: invest in AI, privacy compliance, partner ecosystems, and customer retention; divest from silo-creating activities; experiment with revenue transformation, KPI redesign, and sustainability. McKinsey’s October 2024 research on the marketing operating model surveyed 100+ C-level marketing executives and found only 27% have mature operating models, while the 42% with robust models cite a clear link between marketing and business outcomes as their biggest differentiator. Gartner’s December 2024 research on CMO priorities surveyed 395 CMOs and found their top priorities are bridging strategy and operations, elevating enterprise-wide impact, and maximizing yield through customer-journey investment, with only 14% of CMOs effective at market shaping but those who are seeing 2.6x higher revenue and profit performance.

April Dunford’s March 2026 guide to advanced B2B positioning surfaced four non-obvious lessons that map directly to a positioning audit: account for the status quo (vendors lose roughly half of deals to “no decision”), align positioning across the full buying committee, separate positioning from messaging, and revisit positioning after product evolution. Whichever framework you use, the principle is the same. A 90-day plan that produces a sharper market position, a tighter channel mix, and a measurement model the CFO can defend is a 90-day plan that pays for itself many times over. A 90-day plan that just adds activity is the problem you started with.

LinkedIn’s 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report found 67% of CMOs expect a marketing reorg in the year ahead, with data analysis as the fastest-growing skill being added, and social (36%), in-person events (18%), and email (12%) leading as most-effective channels. The marketing function is being rebuilt. The vendors who use the next 90 days to rebuild deliberately will outpace the ones who use them to keep doing what they were already doing.

What You Do Next

If you got this far, you are either in the middle of these problems or about to be. The HR tech market is not getting smaller, the buyers are not getting more credulous, and the gap between vendors who execute well and vendors who execute generically is widening every quarter.

We are Red Branch Media, the anti-agency agency. We have spent 15+ years marketing HR tech, including engagement and benefits platforms specifically. We have an 89% client retention rate, which is a metric we trust because we calculated it ourselves and we know what is in the denominator.

If you want help running the 90-day diagnostic, sharpening your positioning, or building a channel and measurement model that works for this category, we are happy to talk. The first conversation is free, the second one usually is not, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit before either of us spends real time on it.

Talk to us about HR tech marketing →

You are allowed to want a marketing function that produces real pipeline without sounding like every other vendor in the category. The buyers want it too. They have been telling you so all year.