What are the 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 . 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  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:

1. In social media, we look at the battle between X,  and Threads, the rise in employee-generated content, and why customer content is more important than influencers.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Search marketing trends will focus on the growing importance of social search, voice search optimization, and the rise of generative engine optimization (GEO).
5. 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).

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 .

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 decline in popularity of X has been well documented. Now, two social platforms –  and Threads – are gaining ground as people and  in droves (reporting poor content, low engagement, and moderation issues as  was created by X’s previous founder, Jack Dorsey, and is attracting users who value ad-free spaces, content control, and niche phone number list communities. It’s also simple to use and is aiming to be “a great home for journalists, publishers and creators”.

“Despite all the attention  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 , Founder of Avocado Social on the

Meta’s 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

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 .

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.

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 wUAE Phone Numberorking 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  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.

While  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 the 11 best b2b lead generation strategies of 2025 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 .

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.

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.

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 will help improve your daily tasks and enhance your role. So what are some of the AI trends you should know about in 2025?

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 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  Clinical Professor of Marketing at Kellogg School of Management on the

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.

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 r example, previously you could use  to create content, you then had to copy and paste that content or translate it. Now  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 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 by allowing retail brands to enhance the 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 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 . “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 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

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?