Dec '24 edition | Strategy, Marketing, Gen AI, 2025 reports

Where is the money in 2025? What service offerings will be in demand based on market tech trends? Discover a hypothesis validation approach and a content-generation paradigm for better SEO.

Hello there! ??

This month, I focus on market trends, marketing strategies, and approaches your business must leverage to stay competitive in 2025

Let’s dive in!

??Wiseboard achievements

+1 new client: We signed our biggest client to date—a 500-headcount outsourcing company.

+3 new advising projects:? Tracks in Marketing, Partnership Management, and AI in SDLC.

+2 new advisors joined: Our pool now totals 269 expert advisors.

?? New expertise unlocked (+4)

Sharing the latest expertise to our service catalog that your company can hire:

1. Tax Strategy and Optimization

Optimize tax strategies across multiple legal entities to minimize exposure and enhance efficiency. Develop tax-efficient dividend distribution plans for shareholders, considering international treaties and local regulations. Manage tax implications of employee relocations to avoid double taxation and ensure seamless transitions.

2. HealthCare domain verticalization development

Analyze the HealthCare market landscape, segments, and sub-segments; validate existing hypotheses and challenge delivery capabilities. Build a stakeholder-focused value proposition and messaging for the most promising segments. Create a go-to-market strategy and action plan tailored to the chosen vector.

3. AI in DevOps as a service setup

Define a scalable “AI in DevOps” service offering aligned with client needs. Gain technical and strategic guidance for pilot implementations, focus on automation and cost optimization, and receive pre-sale support for effective positioning.

4. Solution architecture at Presale

Get expert support with discovery, needs analysis, and solution formulation during the presale stage. Challenge internal teams to create competitive proposals that are neither overestimated nor overbudgeted.

Let me know if anything from this list aligns with your needs—I’ll help you out.

?? Available talent for hire

Wiseboard has active recruiting pipelines for our clients:

1. Account Manager / Client Partner?
2. Delivery Manager / Senior Delivery

Let me know if any of these resonate with your current hiring needs.

?? Market observations

1. Where Is the Money in the next 3-5 years?

“What niche can we enter? Where will our services be most demanded among mid-sized enterprises, given we are 120-headcount outsourcing in Ukraine?”

— this is a common challenge faced by most business founders.

For this purpose, companies request niche market research to estimate subsegments and identify relevant use cases aligned with their delivery capabilities.

However, the biggest challenge here is to properly package the company’s delivery capabilities into value offerings that resonate with targeted stakeholders’ pain points. In fact, these offerings must convey confidence and competency—without relying on “fake it till you make it” tactics.

As a successful example, a company specializing in Data Science developed a replicable service line:

1. Data scraping
2. Data structuring
3. Insights radar
4. Further Maintenance and custom feature development

This strategy extended client lifetimes and enabled the company to apply the same service offerings across other market segments.

2. Rebranding Traditional Outstaff Services

At the same time, many companies are rebranding traditional outstaff services into something “not so boring” with offerings like BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) and EOR (Employer of Record).

The biggest challenge here is having a robust staffing and HR administration process to ensure speed and quality.

For example, a 190-headcount company secured 65 vacancies in 2024 but only closed 25 due to staffing inefficiencies.

Each vector has its own challenges—let me know if you need assistance navigating them.

??Advisors’ spotlights

#Marketing strategy

The problem isn’t mid-sized enterprises outreach, but their? conversion?.

50-300 headcount companies often struggle to convey mid-sized enterprises since they work with bigger vendors (especially banks, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics).

A smarter approach for you is to target Tier 2 suppliers who serve your desired clients. These suppliers are often more open to collaboration and can serve as gateways to larger opportunities.

How to Approach This:

1. Break Down the Market into a Value Chain:

Learn the entire ecosystem and identify suppliers who can benefit from your services. Focus on areas where your solutions address specific pain points in the value chain.

2. Offer Narrow, Ready-Made Solutions:

For example, IoT in manufacturing for Tier 2 suppliers can be

• Predictive maintenance for factory equipment.
• Cloud Integration for IoT Data Management
• IoT-enabled quality control systems for subcontractors.
• Asset Tracking Solutions, etc.

Each solution should be packed into a buyer persona-specific value offering.?

3. Build Strong Client Partnerships:

Establish trust with Tier 2 suppliers to gain referrals or access to broader supplier networks connected to your ICP.

Takeaway:?

Don’t aim directly at large enterprise clients. Instead, position yourself as a reliable partner for their suppliers, delivering value that makes you indispensable in the ecosystem. This strategy often yields better long-term results.

#paid

Service / Value Offering Validation approach

Before investing in marketing channels, first define your working offer. Test what drives leads, and then build organic traffic. Investing in SEO without knowing which offer works or who your target audience is will waste both time and money (which happens very often across immature companies).

Oleksii Honсharov, Wiseboard Marketing Advisor, recommends using paid campaigns for hypothesis validation.

Start by selecting a small, focused set of keywords and testing them in AdWords.

Budget Tip.

• Avoid broad keywords, competitive niches, or expensive locations.
• Limit your test to a few keywords to control your budget.

Budget Calculation Example:

Cost Per Lead (CPL) × Number of Keywords = Total Budget

Start small and analyze what works. For keywords that don’t perform, investigate the reasons—it’s often an issue with the keyword, landing page, or offer itself.

Or be prepared for the following costs with a large, highly competitive keywords list (assuming your landing page and offer are effective):

Then calculate the total budget for 1 contract based on your existing sales funnel conversions.

Recommendation:?

Focus on a few low-competition keywords where you are confident you can convert leads.

How to identify a working keyword:

• A keyword is effective when your CPL is between 0–2x your target.
• If the CPL exceeds this range, pause the keyword and investigate why (e.g., is it the keyword itself, the landing page, or the offer?).

Run campaigns until hypotheses are tested:

• Don’t stop campaigns prematurely. Run them continuously until you generate enough SQLs to confirm or refute your hypothesis.
• Avoid starting and stopping campaigns frequently—it disrupts data collection and analysis.

Tip:

• Launch paid campaigns only after setting up end-to-end analytics. This will help you track where your leads are coming from and which keywords are converting.
• Once your AdWords campaign is optimized and delivering results, shift focus to organic traffic. Build a list of working keywords and offers, and create high-quality content to reduce your CPL over time.

Extra Tip:

Since any paid campaigns targeting enterprise clients are expensive — make your primary goal to build a strong client partnership function within the company to develop the project “tail”, hence increasing LTV.

Need help with building a marketing strategy and/or setting up a working marketing framework??

Jump on a call with Oleksii

#SEO

Content quality over quantity.

— this is what constantly says to our clients Yevhen Zatiychuk, Wiseboard SEO Advisor.

Ranking at the top isn’t the hardest part—staying there is. Google’s algorithm evaluates whether your content satisfies user intent. If a user opens your page and doesn’t return to search for other sites, your content is deemed valuable. If they do, the algorithm assumes your content didn’t meet their needs, and your ranking suffers.

This is why generic content writing strategies and AI-generated articles won’t work.?

You need a more strategic approach — brief your delivery teams, clients, Account Managers, Project Managers, and industry leaders to gather insights and write one high-value article that addresses stakeholders’ needs.

Even if your site contains some high-quality content, it may still fail to convert because the bulk of low-quality content drags down your rankings. Google considers that your site generates generally low-quality content and decreases your ranking.

What to do?

• Remove or rewrite low-quality content to improve your overall site credibility.
• Focus on producing fewer but higher-quality pieces that satisfy user intent.

One company had to delete ? of all content and pages, rewrite some of the remaining content, and create new articles using a more targeted approach. Only after this effort did they see a significant increase in rankings and targeted traffic. (An example in the picture below):

Need to assess your content quality and overall SEO? Jump on a call with Yevhen

Another SEO advice from Ihor Hryhorenko, Wiseboard SEO advisor.

If your website isn’t yet generating sufficient organic traffic, consider publishing some of your content on LinkedIn Pulse.?

LinkedIn’s high domain authority on Google and other search engines, well-optimized, high-quality content published on Pulse has a strong chance of ranking highly for relevant keywords.

This approach is beneficial even for websites that already rank well. By publishing on LinkedIn Pulse, you can occupy two positions in the search results: one through your own website and another via LinkedIn Pulse. This strategy not only increases your overall traffic but also removes one position from competitors in the top 10 rankings.

Need to enhance your SEO? Jump on a call with Ihor

?? Worth learning

1. SoftServe’s report:?

Harnessing Gen AI’s Value: A New Era for Financial Services

Main outline:?

Gen AI is reshaping financial services, but only 33% of companies are realizing its full value—this is the opportunity for IT outsourcing.

Key business challenges like limited technical expertise, fragmented data, and inadequate infrastructure open doors for strategic IT partnerships.

Position your company as a go-to partner, offering Gen AI-ready solutions and expertise to help clients overcome these challenges and unlock real value.

2. The Unisys “Top IT Insights for 2025” report

Main outline:?

In 2025, businesses will embrace natural language AI, edge computing for faster data processing, hybrid cloud strategies, and quantum-safe encryption to address emerging security risks. Sustainability in AI, regulatory compliance, and hybrid work models will also reshape how companies operate.

Based on that, IT outsourcing should focus on offering AI and edge computing solutions, mastering hybrid cloud services, and preparing for quantum security challenges. They must also help clients meet sustainability goals, navigate regulations, and create tools for effective hybrid work setups.

That's all for this month. If you found this update valuable, please share it with others who might benefit.

If you feel your business faces challenges or plans to grow this year – let’s jump on a call; I’ll help you out.

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Wishing you the highest achievements in 2025!

And I’ll be there for you.

Artur Founder & CEO at Wiseboard

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