Table of Contents
Introduction, Ten Useful Trends in Digital Marketing for 2025
I’ve been writing reviews of the latest digital marketing innovations for well over 10 years now; spurred on since they seem to be helpful based on the comments on LinkedIn and when presenting them. I hope that’s because I try to keep them practical. They’re also a way to keep readers of my books in the loop during the gap between new editions. This last year we’ve published the Eighth edition of Digital Business and E-commerce Management and next year the ninth edition of Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. Ten Useful Trends in Digital Marketing for 2025
I guess, I must enjoy the challenge too, since for many years, there weren’t significant new trends, more of an evolution, but that changed last year with the growing usage of Generative AI which was the most exciting innovation of recent years. Entering 2025, there are lots of new challenges for digital marketing that marketers will need to grapple with in the year ahead. More challenges than opportunities I would say.
As ever I’ll keep the predictions rooted in what’s happening now with the early adopters and research on adoption and trends including our Future of Digital Marketing report we’ve produced in partnership again with Technology for Marketing and eCommerce Expo. You can download the report at the end of this article.
We will go through how AI is REALLY being used in marketing, digital maturity, Martech, and the growth of the Zero Click Marketing concept. We’ll begin with the bigger strategic issue around how we manage digital marketing and then dig into which channel tactics are most effective towards the end.
1. Lack of a clearly articulated digital strategy
This is not a new phenomenon; in the more-than-fifteen years in which we have been advising on and researching adoption of digital marketing planning, we have found that the proportion of businesses without a planned approach stays similar, so there must be significant barriers to integrating planning in organizations.
We still see that near half-42% of businesses don’t have a digital marketing strategy, yet they are doing digital marketing.
It’s good to see that over half do have a strategic approach. The ultimate aim should be to use an integrated strategy, but it can be useful initially to have a dedicated digital strategy in larger organizations, or to plan for and make the case for investment in digital marketing before it becomes integrated.
To help address this challenge, back in 2010 we defined the RACE Growth System to structure improvements to marketing effectiveness – read more in this article on the RACE Digital Marketing Framework or download our free planning template.
2. A gradual increase in digital maturity
The previous chart is a symptom of a bigger malaise, which is a surprising lack of digital marketing maturity in many businesses. All this activity and investment is aimed at improving digital marketing capabilities, so in the research we asked where people were now with using digital marketing and where they would be in the future.
Business responses in our survey reveal that, across all pillars, about half are rated at the lower levels of 1-2 with an average of 2.4 out of a maximum 5, showing clear room for improvement. For small and medium businesses with limited resources, we suggest that level 3 is a good aspiration to compete. In such businesses where the digital contribution is high and leads or sales are imperative to online business success, it’s important to note that our recommendations should lie in levels 4 and 5.
Finally, to provide an indication of how businesses are looking to enhance their capabilities in the future, we asked respondents to repeat the analysis for 2025. The contrast between the two charts is marked, and suggests that many of the businesses at levels 1 and 2 are conscious that they need to improve their capabilities, and are planning to invest to achieve a higher-level in 2025.
We expect this to go more slowly. Of course, it’s human nature to want to improve, but in reality, there will probably be barriers to this degree of improvement for a lot of businesses. No surprise, the top barrier to improving is lack of resource, showing that 2025 should be about Smarter Marketing – another digital marketing management trend.
3. Smarter Marketing SOPs
One of the facets of Smarter Marketing is not to reinvent the wheel when you don’t need to. We are a supporter of SOPs as supporting continuous improvement and efficiency, and our RACE framework defines the SOPs that matter for digital marketing, using templates which businesses can apply to their organisation.
We didn’t ask about SOPs in the main survey, but our LinkedIn poll suggests many are using them, but equally many aren’t. A few years ago, I found out about them where they were being used in the United States applied to E-commerce. It’s a great fit since there are many repeatable processes in an online retail store. I think they are less well known in the UK and Europe, but interest is increasing based on the popularity of the post below I wrote about them.
4. Smarter Marketing with Gen AI
We have seen how resourcing is the biggest limitation in increasing digital maturity, so this is a driver of this trend which we can simplify to ‘doing more with less’. This is forced upon many by the competitive environment which means that less budget and people resources are available for marketing. This also links to the previous trend since Gen AI is a great fit for defining your SOPs and partially automating them.
This trend has probably been accelerated by Generative AI, since it provides a free tool that time-pressured marketers will often want to lean on proactively while their managers may be leaning on them to use it to increase their priorities. We have many guides on Smarter Marketing with AI on the site and a free cheatsheet available to Free members on using ChatGPT for marketing.
In our survey, we asked to see whether Generative AI was living up to the hype. I’m not sure whether it’s surprising or not, given that around half of the businesses we surveyed weren’t using GenAI at all. Are they to be congratulated for realising that the quality of their marcomms were fall or chastised for being behind the curve. I tend more to the latter, unless they’ve tried it, but have come to the belief that it is not ready for them.
What this research says to me is that those using it should be taken to task over how they use it – either without training or an AI governance policy. Don’t they remember the GIGO acronym from tech pre-history?! We certainly believe controls are vital to maintain quality as we show in our AI for marketing governance policy template and associated article which wasn’t written by AI – apart from collaborating on the structure, a fine example of Smarter Marketing.
5. The Marketer Assisted by AI
This is hot on the heels, in popularity, from the previous Trend. In our report, we compare the popularity of the wide range of applications of AI in marketing since AI can support the ‘AI-assisted marketer’ in so many ways beyond Generative AI for copywriting. For example, to support with planning and reporting. We ran a surprise on LinkedIn to ascertain how many were using it to support this process and also to support analysis and reporting.
The most common applications of AI, though, came from using it to support copywriting for email marketing, organic search, and social media, with over half the respondents reporting this as an application they made.
6. Composability of Martech
What’s that then you’ll be asking. I picked up the term from Martech guru Scott Brinker who said: “What an amazing time to be working in marketing and martech! Our entire industry is blossoming like the wildflower “super bloom” happening in California this spring, fed by the rain, rivers, and sunshine of generative AI, universal cloud data warehouses, and software composability”. Well, I’m not so sure that is so good, but what is composability. It really is what we called interoperability in IT. It is defined as:
“A software architecture pattern that allows organizations to build software systems from small, independent components that can be combined. It contrasts with the traditional, monolithic solutions, which are rigid and often deliver pre-defined functionalities only.
That this is important is illustrated by two figures from Scott’s own research that illustrate the limitations of the monolithic cloud solution often bolted together from different tech acquisitions.
Even while there’s a trend away from CRM platforms toward more data-centered platforms like CDPs and data warehouses, regardless of the platform, this is a problem, and people use other modules for core functionality. These are all for good reasons, like in the research, things like effectiveness, usability, and functionality.
7. Marketing with zero clicks
If you’ve heard of this concept, it’s likely been via Rand Fishkin, ex of Moz and now of Sparktoro. Zero Clicks originally referred to the falling proportion of people clicking through from Google. Here are the latest figures from SparkToro which show us that for the keywords tracked, fewer than 60% of searches leads to a click on Google.
Previously this was because of the SERPs features such as the Related Questions rich snippets which according to Mozcast now feature in 90% of keyword searches they track. If people see the answer to their question on the SERP, then they won’t click through resulting in falling traffic to destination sites. As our next trend shows, AIOs have reduced this further.
More recently, the Zero click concept has been extended to other platforms such as social networks whose goal always was to keep people on the platform. Rand even went so far to say:
He’s advocating that people invest more in awareness-building, brand-building and PR and use content marketing as the primary objective of content marketing – rather than SEO.
It suits him to say this since SparkToro is an insights tool that can support you in these activities. I don’t agree that digital marketing is changing fundamentally, since using exceptional content marketing to support PR and SEO has always been a strong tactic. But certainly there is a trend.
8. AI in the SERPs, use of AI reduces search use
AI generated results have featured in Bing for what feels like years now, but its only in mid 2024 that Google rolled out AIOs, which is SEO speak for Google’s AI overviews you see at the top of the SERPs. These seem likely to increase Zero Clicks, but it seems that many people do want further details-so it’s good that Google recently made sure that the recently recommended site for AIOs does not feature sites already in the top 5-they generally were poor quality.
At the same time, we can imagine that the volume of searches will reduce if people are turning to AIs to answer their questions, particularly like Perplexity where that is providing a similar user experience to a search engine.
However, in some niches such as programming, business, and marketing, the impact is likely to be much more significant.Moreover, with the announcement in July 2024 that OpenAI is going to launch SearchGPT, there really will be an accelerating trend toward the replacement of traditional search queries with AI search queries.
9. The vanishing cookie-free future
This is another long-standing one, that I think is difficult to get excited about unless you work in attribution or adtech. You will know that for many years, we have been promised a cookieless future. You maybe also spotted that Google announced in July 2024 that it will retain Third-Party Cookies in Chrome after years of planning alternatives….
Contrasting with plans starting in 2019, when it introduced the Privacy Sandbox that set off a rash of speculation and consideration of other options for the ‘Cookieless Future’, Chrome will instead offer users new options for managing their cookie preferences while retaining the Privacy Sandbox as integral to its approach.
This is BIG news, since the extension of third-party cookies means continued access to this valuable data for targeted advertising. It’s good news, because techniques such as retargeting and conversion attribution are likely to be more accurate than the alternatives which were going to replace them. There will also be less immediate onus on businesses to understand and make changes; it’s a ‘stay of execution’. The trend remains; astute businesses will make full use of the time to understand and choose alternatives.
10. Many people still find digital marketing optimization to be too difficult.
To understand the extent to which there is use of insight to test, learn and improve the effectiveness of digital media experiences, content and messaging we asked marketers to categorise their approach to testing for each. Similar levels of testing exist across all four of these pillars but few have a continuous structured program which is line with what we saw about maturity earlier.
Conclusion
2025 could be a goldmine in the digital marketing arena. Embracing such action-oriented trends not only helps one stay on top of things but also calls for deep-rooted connections to be built with the audience. The mantra is to begin now and be flexible.
FAQs
Which digital marketing trend will be biggest in 2025?
Because AI-driven marketing can optimize and truly personalize efforts, it truly stands out.
How can small companies adapt to these developments?
Invest in one or two trends which best match your goals and use affordable tools to mold yourself into the trends.
Which tools will be helpful for AI-powered marketing?
Good starting points for implementing AI into your strategy include HubSpot, ChatGPT, and Salesforce.
How would one optimize for voice search?
Ensure that your site loads fast, and use conversational keywords.
Why is marketing sustainability important?
Because customers prefer brands with shared beliefs, such as protecting the environment.
