Digital Marketing Trends for 2025

As marketers, we know that the pace of change can be relentless.

The array of digital channels available offers so many opportunities to communicate with customers. However, this can sometimes mean you’re wearing many marketing hats while keeping a lot of balls in the air.

There’s no denying the massive impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on digital marketing. New tools and platforms are emerging and evolving constantly that can help with many aspects of your role. However, this is not the only change that marketers face.

Marketing budgets dropped in 2024, a challenge that’s going to continue into 2025. This means that marketing teams need to do more with less, while still delivering on performance.

That’s why it’s so important to know what’s coming! It not only keeps you up to speed with digital marketing developments, but it can help you see opportunities to leverage a channel or tactic to outshine your competitors (and make your job a little bit easier).

In our analysis of digital marketing trends in 2025, we’ll explore the following five key areas:

In social media, we look at the battle between X, BlueSky, and Threads, the rise in employee-generated content, and why customer content is more important than influencers.

AI will continue to evolve, but it’s about using the technology effectively to avoid AI fatigue. We’ll also explore the rise of AI agents, and see how AI is changing ecommerce and your ad campaigns.

When it comes to digital marketing skills, 2025 will see the growing value of soft skills, the necessity to refine AI skills and knowledge, and the importance of expanding your knowledge outside of marketing.

Search marketing trends will focus on the growing importance of social search, voice search optimization, and the rise of generative engine optimization (GEO).

In content marketing, we look at the success of AI and human-generated content, why older content matters, and the rise of a new audience segment – Gen Alpha (people born after 2010).

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1. Social media trends

Social media users are dedicated, spending an average of 2 hours 19 minutes per day across 6.8 different platforms. This equates to 14% of their waking lives according to Datareportal.

That’s an audience that deserves the attention of any marketer. And it gives brands the opportunity to connect with customers from every demographic at scale.

So let’s look at what you should watch out for in 2025.

The battle between the real-time platforms

The decline in popularity of X has been well documented. Now, two social platforms – BlueSky and Threads – are gaining ground as people and companies leave X in droves (reporting poor content, low engagement, and moderation issues as reasons).

BlueSky was created by X’s previous founder, Jack Dorsey, and is attracting users who value ad-free spaces, content control, and niche communities. It’s also simple to use and is aiming to be “a great home for journalists, publishers and creators”.

“Despite all the attention BlueSky is getting, they've only got 24 million members globally. That is not a huge figure, so we'll have to keep an eye on that to see if that grows over the next year, which I'm pretty sure it will,” said Alison Battisby, Founder of Avocado Social on the DMI trends webinar.

Meta’s Threads is also positioning itself as a platform to empower content creators. Its user numbers have continued to climb this year and now it has 275 million users – nearly ten times more than BlueSky!

Social media fans like Threads because it’s simple to use and allows people to pose a question, have a discussion, or have a bit of banter (much like X used to). Plus there’s opportunities for companies through organic content, with potential for paid opportunities down the line.

“Once Threads hits a billion, they plan to look to monetize it through ads. There has been huge development [on the platform] this year, with almost daily new features coming out; customizable feeds, some list style content, and algorithm trending topics. So they are working very hard on making it a viable competitor to X,” said Alison Battisby.

Expert tip: Brands that perform best on Threads are those posting text-only humorous or educational content as it gives social media users a break from the mass of video content across other platforms.

The rise in employee-generated content (EGC)

Employee advocacy is more than a buzzword: It’s a powerful strategy to leverage your company’s individual voices to build brand presence, connect with audiences, highlight social issues, and even help achieve business goals.

This is especially true on LinkedIn as it’s the perfect social platform for employees and employers to share EGC content. And the B2B network is seeing sustained growth every year predicted to surpass 800 million users in 2025.

“A platform that’s underutilized or underappreciated is LinkedIn. LinkedIn organic is just killing it for me. Every single one of my prospect calls said that they heard about me on LinkedIn and their newsletters are working really well,” said Peter Murphy Lewis, on the upcoming DMI trends podcast.

As consumers want more transparency from companies – 94% are more likely to be loyal to a brand that’s completely transparent, reports Forbes – employee-generated content (EGC) shows the real stories of people working in a company.

Alison Battisby believes that “this type of content is very popular because it showcases very relatable people. They're genuine perspectives and this allows for more faces and stories to be told from behind the scenes of the brand.”

It also builds trust, and many brands are embracing EGC through behind-the-scenes footage. Here’s a great example from IKEA.

Expert tip: Avoid creating heavily scripted EGC. It needs to feel natural and be entertaining.

Collaborate with customers, not influencers

While influencer marketing continues to thrive, many companies are looking for other ways to engage with their customers.

As a step up from user-generated content (UGC), some brands are collaborating with their customers to take a community-first approach. This results in content that’s been created by the customer, which can then be used in an ad or featured on the organic feeds of the brand.

“In 2025, we'll see brands begin to shun big name influencers in favor of nurturing their communities. Brands are going to invest more in nurturing relationships with loyal customers, loyal followers, the people that are always logging in to engage with them or watch their videos and stories and we're going to see more collaborative content,” said Alison Battisby.

Beauty brand REFY has embraced this approach and recently hosted an exclusive retreat in a branded villa in Mallorca for their closest community members. This not only helped build connections with members, but also showed REFY as a stylish and aspirational brand.

Screenshot of REFY community member retreat - Brand Insider

Expert tip: Consider investing in private communications with VIP fans. This could be broadcast channels and live content to invite customers to join for exclusive announcements, interviews, and promotions.

2. AI and digital marketing trends

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now an integral part of marketing, whether you’re using a lot of tools or not. The technology is built into many systems that marketers use, such as social media, customer relationship platforms (CRMs), and search engines.

Research from Marketing Week found that 54% of marketers use AI in their current role. This is significantly up from a year ago, when just over a third (37%) had used the technology.

It’s no longer about if you should use it, it’s about what AI tool or platform will help improve your daily tasks and enhance your role. So what are some of the AI trends you should know about in 2025?

Be aware of AI fatigue

The advancement and adoption of AI across industries has meant that marketers have had to adapt fast.

They have had to grapple with this new technology as management pushes them to use AI to be more effective, efficient, and productive – a promise that seems to be called out by the media consistently.

But the reality is that learning to use AI properly takes time! It can also create more work for marketers as they try to figure out how things work or use a range of tools or platforms to get the best results.

This has resulted in AI fatigue – a sense of weariness towards technology. It’s up to marketing leaders and their team to figure out what tasks AI can best help with, rather than create more work or challenges.

“Rather than seeing AI as this dystopian view as peddled by Elon Musk of robots coming to take our jobs, they will carry out tasks for you. They're not particularly creative. They're not particularly strategic. They don't operate well on small amounts of information. There's a few models that are getting better at it, but they can't think like we do,” said Jim Lecinski, Clinical Professor of Marketing at Kellogg School of Management on the DMI trends podcast.

Expert tip: Take a bird’s eye view of the company to find areas or processes that could benefit from AI. This will free up marketer’s time to focus on elements that are more creative and strategic.

The rise of AI agents

AI is a series of complex technologies, and its capabilities lend it to being able to control other systems to become AI agents.

An AI agent is a software program that can interact with its environment, collect data, and use that data to perform tasks to meet goals by choosing the best actions to achieve those goals.

“2025 is the year when AI goes from saying stuff to doing stuff through the rise of agents,” explained Brian Corish, Experience Architect at Accenture Interactive.“For example, previously you could use ChatGPT to create content, you then had to copy and paste that content or translate it. Now [ChatGPT] will run the whole campaign, open and control different platforms and even A-B test content.”

Expert tip: Use AI agents to pull and analyze data from Google Analytics or Meta, create a report, and send it to the team every morning to measure campaign performance. This enables marketers to double down on campaigns that are working and tweak or abandon ones that don’t.

AI is transforming ecommerce

AI is transforming ecommerce by allowing retail brands to enhance the customer experience, streamline business processes, and deliver a seamless omnichannel experience.

Effective ways AI can enhance ecommerce include:

Tailored recommendations: Use AI to analyze purchase history, customer behavior, and preferences to provide highly personalized product recommendations.

Chatbots and virtual assistants: AI-powered chatbots can handle customer inquiries, provide support, and guide users through purchases.

Dynamic pricing: You can adjust prices in real time using AI algorithms based on demand, competition, customer behavior, and other variables to maximize profitability.

Visual search: Customers can upload images to find similar products for a more intuitive shopping experience.

Voice commerce: Integration with voice assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant allows customers to shop through voice commands.

Customer segmentation: AI can group customers based on data patterns to enable targeted marketing campaigns.

Product descriptions and content generation: Automate the creation of product descriptions to save time and be consistent.

Sentiment analysis: Analyze reviews and feedback to understand market sentiment and improve products or services.

Email and marketing automation: Use AI tools to optimize email campaigns by analyzing user behavior to determine the best timing, content, and frequency.

Hyper-personalized ads: AI enables targeted ad campaigns that adjust in real time based on user interactions and preferences.

“E-commerce interfaces in 2025 are going to rapidly advance with AI,” said Jim Lecinski. “For example, if I want to take a wedding invitation and upload a photo of that to a fashion clothing website and say this is semi-formal attire. I have my Visa card, you know my budget, you know where I live, you know the date of the wedding; get me semi-formal attire in my size.”

AI can give advertisers more control

AI can significantly enhance ad campaigns by optimizing various aspects of the advertising process, making them more efficient, effective, and tailored to target audiences.

“I think there's going to be more machine learning-based campaigns that do more of the heavy lifting like on Meta, there's Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, there's Performance Max campaigns. So they're much easier for people to maintain than ad campaigns of the past,” stated Nikki Lindgren, Founder and Managing Partner of Pennock on the DMI podcast.

By using AI, advertisers are going to get more control, so marketers with the greatest strategic thinking will get the most value. At the moment, it's hard to know whether your money was spent on Gmail or ads for example.

AI will help provide more visibility there, so you can go back to the AI and tell it to stop spending so much on Gmail if your audience doesn't convert there. What about trying Google Maps?

3. Digital marketing skills and job trends

The skills marketers need are always evolving to keep up with internal and external environments.

It will come as no surprise that cultivating AI skills is top of the list for 2025. But it’s not just about using every new AI tool or platform, it’s more about focusing on the ones that matter to your role and can help drive business success.

That’s why 54% of CMOs and marketing leaders cited ‘AI strategy development and AI in digital marketing’ as the top skills that their teams lack in our 2024 Global Digital Skills & Training Report: Insights from Corporate Leaders report.

But what other skills and job trends should you know about for the coming year?

Soft skills are essential

Obviously technical skills are important as a digital marketer. Even as a generalist, you need to understand SEO, use GA4 to pull and analyze data, and create and schedule posts on social media platforms.

But many employers are now looking for soft or practical skills that they believe are ‘durable’ and essential for business growth – especially as AI can take over the more repetitive and basic tasks.

In fact, LinkedIn’s Global Marketing Jobs Outlook Fall report found that ‘human’ skills continue to gain importance. It named ‘collaborative problem-solving’ as the top marketing skill of the year - a growth of 138% since 2021.

“To make a mark in a business quicker, marketers need to brush up on their soft skills. Train yourself up in soft skills and be more purposeful about it. I think that will help you gain a competitive advantage,” said Mischa McInerney.

Expert tip: Create opportunities to cultivate soft skills – such as volunteering, using active listening, finding a mentor, participating in learning activities such as workshops or conferences, or taking a course like leadership and management or strategy.

" 2025 will be the year when marketers and users of AI break out of the productivity box and start exploring the transformative growth box. "

- Jim Lecinski, Clinical Professor of Marketing at Kellogg School of Management

Refine your AI skills

Marketing Week’s Language of Effectiveness survey discovered that:

46% of marketers already use AI for market research

44% use machine learning to produce different campaign assets

44% use it to optimize creative mid-campaign

This shows how widely adopted AI is across marketing for a range of tasks. In 2025, there’s a need to refine those skills and dig more deeply into tools that you find useful.

For example, suppose ChatGPT is helping speed up research for content, check existing content, or create blog outlines. Then you could experiment with the tool and learn how to create prompts to optimize your digital marketing strategy.

It’s also about ensuring that AI upskilling is a team effort. While you may have an AI expert on your team for the more advanced tasks, it’s important for everyone to have working knowledge of the technology.

“There's a need for everyone to upskill in the business for AI adoption to become more pervasive. For a company to use AI as a competitive advantage, everyone needs to have a certain level of skill, knowledge and a fluency in AI terminology to adapt it quicker,” stated Mischa McInerney.

Expert tip: Research the AI tools and platforms you use on a regular basis or want to start using. Follow experts on LinkedIn, read in-depth blogs, watch expert walkthroughs, or consider completing an advanced AI course.

You need to know more than just marketing

As a department, marketing needs to generate leads, raise brand awareness, and drive sales.

All of these will impact the bottom line and growth of a business. This means that modern marketers need to know more than just ‘marketing’.

Jim Lecinski believes it’s important to take the time to learn the fundamentals of marketing, but also learn how to drive growth for a business. If you're stuck in the world of tactics or implementation, those are the jobs that are going to be automated.

“Marketers need to start getting savvy about the financial aspects of a business. A lot of marketers say, ‘I'm not a finance expert, I'm a marketer.’ If you're in marketing, you need to understand finance. You also need to know the strategies that can drive incremental profitable growth,” stated Jim Lecinski.

4. Search marketing trends

Search marketing has seen dramatic changes in the last few years, and 2025 is going to be no different.

As the way people search for information online changes, Gartner predicts that by 2026 traditional search traffic will drop by 25%. That’s going to have a huge impact on businesses that rely on using SEO to rank content in search engines.

To remain visible online, marketers need to know the search marketing developments to watch and leverage this year.

Social search is getting bigger

While search engines were once the only way for people to find information online, consumers are now turning to social platforms, especially the TikTok-loving Gen Z generation.

“People are behaving differently when they search any type of query on a search engine, but they're also utilizing more platforms in their searches. Social search has become a big thing and people are utilizing TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, for more of their searches,” says Luke O’Leary.

There’s also a rise in generative AI conversational searches which allow people to search the way they speak. For example, you could ask “where can I go with 2 kids and a dog for a walk in London on Sunday?” Instead of Google breaking that query up and displaying reams of information, an AI Overview will show key information to consider with links to dig deeper.

What are the Digital Marketing Trends for 2025?

Expert tip: Develop social SEO strategies that enhance your content and presence on platforms by integrating keywords into your profile and posts and creating quality content people want to link to and visit.

Voice search keeps growing

" 51% of voice shoppers use it to research products, with 22% buying directly using voice. And 17% use it for reordering items "

- Connecting with Shoppers in the Age of Choice, Narvar

With so many households owning voice-assisted devices like Alexa and Google Home, the way people are using them has evolved.

It’s no longer just about finding out the time or requested music. Consumers (particularly younger consumers) are turning to voice search to find products and services and enter into conversations that drive transactions.

For example, the future of voice search could be that people can ask a voice assistant to create a meal plan for a family for five days. Instruct it to keep it simple, with preparation taking no more than 20 minutes per meal. Ask it to create recipe cards with visuals, order the ingredients, and have them arrive by 12 o'clock on Thursday.

“That's really efficient. You've got all the recipe cards into your inbox as a busy mum. That's exactly what you'd be looking for, convenience and it’s a way to shop in a zero-click fashion,” says Mischa McInerney, CMO of the Digital Marketing Institute.

Expert tip: For brands, it’s about finding ways to slip into voice search. Think about how a brand can be part of a conversation. Is it through local SEO, keywords, or developing conversational content?

Start thinking about generative engine optimization (GEO)

One of the latest developments in search marketing is generative engine optimization (GEO), which is the process of optimizing your website’s content to boost its visibility in AI-driven search results from Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini.

According to Gartner, 79% of consumers are expected to use AI-enhanced search within the next year and 70% already trust generative AI search results.

“2025 is the year when marketers will have to get serious about not SEO, but GEO. Google is now on an AI interface, but of course we've got now Search GPT and Perplexity and lots of other players,” says Luke O’Leary.

Expert tip: For some queries, Google now uses generative AI in over 20% of its search results and displays it in AI Overviews. Find out what AI Overviews really mean for search.

5. Content marketing trends

As marketers, we know that content is a crucial part of our activities. Content helps us to communicate to our target audience, it helps us tell a story that attracts and influences, and it can turn a prospect into a loyal customer.

It’s easy to churn out content, but harder to create great content that resonates with an audience. Also, with so many channels out there, it’s about using the right content at the right time to the right people.

So what are the content marketing trends to leverage in 2025?

Older content matters

Many marketers and companies can be confused about why content isn't performing in the same way. It could be that top-performing assets have lost traction or aren’t getting as many clicks from search results. Or maybe people are just not engaging with it in the same way.

The solution isn’t to ignore it and create new content, however! It’s about reinvigorating the existing content so it’s more up to date or more relevant. Neil Patel research found that updating content can have as much as a 106% increase in traffic.

“You have to constantly revitalize pieces either with new information into the space, keeping a freshness to it, or in a bigger stage, adding elements as the web's behavior matures,” said Luke O’Leary.

“One thing we've seen with the TikTokification of the web is that people expect more stimulating content, adding in more rich imagery, infographics, and video content to go with the text they're reading has become really important.”

Expert tip: Conduct a content audit to see what content has fallen in terms of performance, and earmark it for an update. Try to include original data such as surveys or research, as this boosts your authority and is favored by Google and others in searches.

Human + AI-generated content perform best

If you write any content, you probably already know about AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s NotebookLM, and Claude. All of these tools can not only help generate content, but they can conduct research, sense check, and even analyze content to give you feedback.

The problem is that consumers tend to distrust AI-generated content. It’s not as successful as human-generated content when it comes to ranking, because Google is cracking down on ‘low-quality or spammy content’, which is what aligns with a lot of AI content because it’s repetitive.

“50% of consumers are able to spot AI generated content and the biggest problem with that is that 52% of people are less engaged with content when they suspect it’s written by AI,” said Luke O’Leary, Vice President of Media Strategy & Operations at NP Digital on the DMI trends webinar.

Neil Patel blog

So what’s the solution? Combining AI-generated and human-generated content to offer high-quality content adds new information to the space and includes proprietary data such as original research to make it more engaging.

This approach will help to take the leg work out of the more time-consuming stages such as research, creating a draft outline, or seeing content gaps. This frees up time to focus on crafting high-quality content that’s useful to your customers and feeds into Google E-E-A-T quality rating to rank highly on a SERP or feature in an AI Overview.

Expert tip: Check out our walkthrough on Google’s NotebookLM to get an idea of what it can do. It can even generate an authentic-sounding podcast if you feed it content.

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Gen Alpha is coming

Gen Alpha refers to people born between 2010 and 2025, coming right after Gen Z. Many experts believe this generation are ‘upagers’ – a group that’s more socially aware at a young age, and become consumers more quickly.

As a result, brands and marketers need to start having some serious conversations about who this cohort is, how they are different, and what they need to do to appeal to them.

‘Generation Alpha:the real picture’ report believes that the top priorities for this cohort are helping people, treating everyone the same, diversity in media, and sustainability.

“So, what does this mean if I'm a brand that I need to teach, train, educate, tell something to my Gen Alphas?” asks Lecinski. “I'm not sure an Instagram post is going to be sufficient. I think there's different ways that we have to engage them, touching on our social values and allowing them to engage with a community digitally.”

Expert tip: Gamification appeals to Gen Alpha so it’s worth thinking about how you can incorporate that type of content into your marketing activities.

Have a look at Crunch Labs founded by Mark Rober that designs build boxes to encourage kids to ‘Think Like an Engineer’ and uses gamification to drive engagement.

Conclusion: Digital Marketing Trends 2025

2025 is shaping up to be an exciting and transformative year for digital marketers. New technologies and platforms are reshaping how brands connect with audiences, and the pace of change shows no signs of slowing.

The one thing we’ve learned from talking to our experts is that staying adaptable and curious is essential. AI is becoming a cornerstone of marketing, from automating tasks to creating more personalized and impactful campaigns. Even if AI isn’t part of your role today, it will be soon, so now is the time to explore these tools and build your skills.

Think about which trends resonate most with your goals and focus on how you can incorporate them into your strategy. Whether it’s engaging on emerging platforms, crafting more authentic content, or mastering data-driven insights, the opportunities for growth in 2025 are immense. The key is to take action now to stay ahead of the game!

Our digital marketing experts

Digital marketing experts consulted for this piece as part of our trends webinar and our upcoming trends podcast were:

Alison Battisby, founder of Avocado Social and DMI Lecturer

Mischa McInerney

Brian Corish, founder of AI-focused consultancy, Elemental Intelligence & Digital Marketing Institute Global Champion

Jim Lecinski

Luke O’Leary

Nikki Lindgren

Peter Murphy Lewis

Clark Boyd

Will Francis, DMI Lecturer and host of the DMI Podcast

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