When organisations are forced to cut costs, the marketing budget is often the first to get the chop. After another year of high inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty, marketers will be looking to 2025 with trepidation.
But there is a growing number of tools and technologies to help CMOs and their teams to make the most of their budgets. Here, five experts share their insights on how marketers can win in 2025.
Moving from efficiency to effectiveness
One of the challenges for marketers recently has been navigating the swing between efficiency and effectiveness.
Over the past few years, there’s been an emphasis on efficiency, but we’re starting to see the focus come back to effectiveness. Doing right things – those with the greatest effect – is much better than doing the wrong things really efficiently. Effectiveness is what we’re really focusing on in 2025 and we’re seeing that across the industry.
Next year will be about making sure we’re not just focusing on the short-term wins, but also on the brand-building efforts that are more effective in the long term. Some of the brands that are performing really well are the ones that have kept their eyes on longer-term brand activities.
AI’s potential in the creative space
Looking at the broad arc of AI, there are a lot of businesses that have invested heavily and now expect a return on that investment.
2025 will be all about how AI is socialised in many businesses. In a lot of organisations, AI has been more of an efficiency play and therefore its greatest impact has been on commercial and operational processes. AI adoption by creatives has lagged behind in many businesses. Next year, we will start to see rapid socialisation of AI in the people who are creating and ideating.
I have a lot of conversations with clients around AI in terms of automation and efficiency. I hope next year to have more conversations around effectiveness. If you focus solely on efficiency, the conversation is about how to make average work perform better. If you turn your attention to effectiveness, however, the focus becomes how to make great work perform as it should.
Another interesting thing I’m looking at is AI agents. Some clients think AI agents are a means of performing basic, low-value tasks. There are others who think of agents as collaborators, teammates and potential star performers. That latter group is going to grow next year and we’ll get some very interesting conversations about how far AI can go without human intervention.
The rise of connected brands
Going into 2025, marketers are realising that marketing is much more complicated than it used to be. With so many different channels, identifying audiences, keeping them engaged and staying culturally relevant is a lot tougher. To reach these audiences, you need strategists, behavioural scientists, economists and marketing-technology experts – not just traditional marketers.
One question for leadership next year will be how to create these teams. It’s really important to have people who can see the full picture and be proactive in joining the dots.
Clients are definitely buying into the need to have connected brands. There was a time that you would deal with different channels separately, whereas now ensuring that everything is showing up for the consumer in the relevant way is very important. It isn’t easy to find people who truly understand connected brands, so there will be more investment in upskilling the people who have the right mindset and growth mentality in 2025.
Using data to prevent budget wastage
Given the state of the economy going into 2025, marketers are under real pressure to demonstrate ROI. The measures brought in by the new Labour government may have stifled short-term plans and growth but, in long-term, it seems that companies are more open to diversifying marketing spend.
As we move into next year, there will be a greater need for precision targeting. With cookies going, there is a desire for better data and better results. The winners will be the marketers who can take the data they have and do some really clever targeting. The problem of marketing-budget wastage will become even more relevant in this economy.
There are examples of brands that spend their way through tough times and come out the other side having gained market share. But brands should instead focus on ensuring their advertising is data-driven and hyper-localised, so as little investment as possible is wasted.
B2B marketing embraces creators and video
In 2025, B2B brands will finally invest more in influencer marketing. B2B businesses are betting big on the creator economy, which is projected to hit $500bn (£393bn) by 2027. Influencer marketing is a primary driver of this growth. In the year ahead, we’ll see B2B brands reallocate their budgets to influencer marketing. Six in 10 (61%) B2B leaders say they will increase spending on influencer content in the near term. B2B brands are recognising that buyers trust real people. Thought leadership from influencers and expert voices plays a critical role in the buying process and ultimately helps to drive purchases.
B2B marketers will also bet big on video to improve ROI. With 81% of B2B ads failing to gain adequate attention or drive recall, B2B marketers are turning to video storytelling to humanise their brands, improve ROI, build trust and stay top of mind with new buyer groups, including gen Z. Our research reveals that 63% of B2B buyers say short-form social-video content helps to inform buying decisions and 55% of B2B marketers say that short-form social video produces a high ROI. In the year ahead, we will see more B2B marketers and CMOs leverage video to build thought leadership, testimonials and case studies and product demos.
