How Marketers Are Adjusting For 2025 (And Beyond)

Thursday, 16 January 2025, 9:23 am
Article: Hugh Grant

Another year is behind us, which means forward-thinking marketers everywhere are speculating about how they're going to change their strategies and approaches in 2025 and beyond. What new trends, technologies, and other influences are dictating the future of marketing? And how are the best marketers responding?

The Biggest Trends in Marketing

These are some of the biggest trends to anticipate and capitalize on in marketing:

· New perspectives. Unfortunately, marketing teams everywhere suffer from groupthink and status quo bias. The combination of these two effects leaves many marketing departments following the same, familiar, unimpressive strategies for the same, familiar, unimpressive results.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and other organizational leaders are waking up to this, making proactive efforts to bring in new perspectives and experiment with new ideas. Fractional CMOs serve this role almost perfectly. A fractional CMO typically has all the knowledge and experience of a traditional CMO, but they can be hired and utilized as consultants.

If you choose the right fractional CMO, you can get access to completely new insights from a voice outside your organization – and ultimately reshape your marketing approaches for the better. This is one of the most flexible and versatile approaches, since it allows you to tweak your marketing campaign in numerous ways, both now and into the future.

· Integrated plans. Many marketing departments, especially in larger organizations, tend to treat individual marketing strategies and channels as isolated silos. But in a modern context, where customers engage with your brand in many different ways, this approach is insufficient. It's much more effective to have integrated plans, which encapsulate all of your marketing objectives and ideals as a consolidated whole. Obviously, you'll need to think about the nuances of each individual tactic, but you also need to think high-level and globally so you can integrate those tactics together in an effective way.

· Cross-departmental initiatives. Similarly, organizations have long considered marketing to be distinct from departments like sales and customer service. In many ways, this is still advantageous. But if you want to generate more demand and sales, you also need to see the considerable overlap between these departments and attempt to integrate them. Even simple changes, like encouraging departments to share data with each other, can lead to massive improvements across departments.

· AI tweaking. For years now, marketers have been trying to harness the full power of artificial intelligence (AI). AI tools in marketing are capable of advanced data analytics, automation, content development, and much, much more. But right now, the AI bubble has stagnated, and marketers have been forced to reexamine some of their assumptions about how best to utilize AI. Moving forward, many marketers and advertisers are going to update their strategies and perspectives, using AI more strategically and in combination with uniquely human ideas.

· A new generation of data. Marketing data and analytics are still central to success in any marketing or advertising environment, and that's unlikely to change in the future. However, to gather ample data and make full use of it, it's important to change how you think about marketing data. Previous sources of consumer data are no longer available and new sources are springing up all the time. Simultaneously, your competitors are often looking at the same datasets and drawing the same conclusions. If you want to be competitive in this type of environment, it's important to improve not only the data you gather but also how you look at it, aiming for rational, yet novel insights.

· Channel selectiveness. The omnichannel approach has been popular for more than a decade now, and it's still incredibly valuable. However, many marketers have failed when they have simply tried to spam their brand messaging across as many channels as possible. Instead, successful marketers are shifting to become more selective in the channels they harness. It's much better to have a single effective channel than 10 ineffective ones.

· Adaptability and agility. The world is constantly changing, with new trends and new technologies rolling out on a seemingly daily basis. That's why the best marketers in the industry are focusing on adaptability and agility, so they can dynamically react to whatever happens to come next.

· Zero click search compensation. Today, less than 60 percent of searches on Google lead to a click to a website. This has led to considerable disruption in the world of search marketing, and marketers are already starting to adapt. If you want to capitalize on search visibility without netting search traffic, you need to be able to position your brand in different ways.

What Comes Next?

It's hard to tell what comes next in the marketing industry, especially when there are so many chaotic variables to juggle. However, it seems likely that the most successful marketers in 2025 and beyond will be ones who not only identify but also anticipate and plan around the major changes to come.

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