6 Actionable Digital Marketing Trends 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 I present 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.

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. As we enter 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 always, I’ll keep the predictions grounded 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’ll review how AI is REALLY being used in marketing, digital maturity, Martech and the growth of the Zero Click Marketing concept. We'll start with the bigger strategic issue around how we manage digital marketing and then dig into which channel tactics are most effective towards the end.

This article was originally written in September 2025, but is updated to include some of the lastest trends during 2025 which are summarized at the end of the article.

Trend 1. Lack of a dedicated digital strategy

This is a long-standing trend, over the fifteen+ years we have been advising on and researching adoption of digital marketing planning, we have found the percentage of businesses without a planned approach has remained similar, suggesting there are significant barriers to integrating planning in organizations.

We still see nearly half (42%) of businesses don’t have a digital marketing strategy, but they are doing digital marketing.

It’s good to see that more than half of businesses 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 with this challenge, around 2010 we defined the RACE Growth System for improving marketing effectiveness - learn more in this article on the RACE Digital Marketing Framework or download our free planning template.

Trend 2. Digital Maturity increases (slowly)

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.

Results for businesses in our survey show that, across all pillars, around half of businesses are rated at lower levels of 1 to 2 (average 2.4) out of a maximum of 5 showing clear room for improvement. For context, for small and medium businesses with limited resources, we recommend that level 3 is a suitable aspiration to compete. For businesses who have a high digital contribution where online leads and sales are vital to their success, we recommend that levels 4 and 5 are necessary if the case for investment is made.

Trend 3. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for Smarter Marketing

One aspect of Smarter Marketing is to stop reinventing the wheel if you can avoid it. We're an advocate of using SOPs to support improvement and efficiency and our RACE framework defines the SOPs that matter for digital marketing and uses templates that businesses can apply to their organization.

We didn't ask about SOPs in the main survey, but our LinkedIn poll suggests many are using them, but equally many aren't. I found out about them several years ago where they were being used in the United States applied to E-commerce. This is 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.

Trend 4. Smarter Marketing fuelled by 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.

Likely this trend has been accelerated by Generative AI since it provides a free tool that 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 veer more to the latter unless they have tried it, but decided that it’s not ready for them yet.

The research suggests to me that those who are using it should be chastized for how they are using 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 essential to maintain quality as we show in our AI for marketing governance policy template and article which wasn’t written by AI (apart from collaborating on the structure, an example of Smarter Marketing).

Action: Review whether you have a governance approach for Generative AI that defines which tools you use for which activities by which people and put in place checks to make sure AI isn't compromising your content quality