Four Trends to Feed 2025 Marketing Planning  

We regularly have the great fortune to spend time with clients at their marketing leadership offsites. As they assess how effectively they have delivered against their current year plans, it is equally critical that they begin to look towards emerging trends that impact next year’s marketing plans.  

Marketers today are wrestling with seismic change in understanding rapidly changing customer experience needs, marketplace disruption, competitive landscape and organizational challenges. At least 40% of U.S. CEOs expect CMOs to focus on five key growth challenges: revenue, market share, competition, reputation and company narrative.  

The expectations for return on investment have never been higher. Navigating the noise and delivering business outcomes is the CMO’s new mission. It requires new skills, insights, measurement and tremendous focus on execution. In our recent analysis of key trends facing marketing leaders, we found four emerging trends for 2025 planning to build your strategy for staying ahead.

1. Integrate Brand and Demand  

More and more clients are evolving their annual marketing plan to integrate brand and demand into a single growth plan. Some are even substituting the customer journey for the funnel as the backdrop to uncover gaps or identify more opportunities at every touchpoint. Our ongoing research, ”Brand and Demand Marketing: A Love Story” backs up this approach to break down silos and plan brand and performance plans together. Winning organizations are 3X more likely to take a fully integrated approach to connect brand and demand. Whether you’re preparing a brand or product launch or need to find other routes to growth, this could be the year you take integrated planning to a new level, building stronger relationships across the organization and a foundation for bigger impact. You’ll hear much more from us both on launching brands and how to integrate brand and demand as our latest research report launches.  

2. Provide Marketing’s POV on AI 

AI in marketing being top of mind won’t be a surprise to any marketer reading this post. It is estimated that AI will drive $100 billion in revenue by 2027. With more money than ever being funneled into new AI technology, it should be apparent that the impact on customer experience, insights and new ways of working will reshape how marketing is delivered. With a perpetual need to drive more personalized communication in the market and meet the insatiable need for content that resonates with buyers, AI holds great promise to deliver more with less resources. The C-Suite is grappling with broad-ranging opportunities to leverage AI technology, and the marketing leader is uniquely positioned to think through the firm’s position on AI, how it can be used to enhance customer touch points and how AI can drive more scale in marketing efforts. AI can be integrated into nearly every section of your 2025 plan. See how we started to organize use cases here to maximize AI’s value.  

3. Embrace the Next Wave of Data-Driven Marketing 

Delivering data-driven marketing and advancing customer insight remain a key domain of the modern marketing leader. Understanding the customer has been a staple of marketing’s role within the organization and there are more ways than ever to get more data on customer wants and needs. However, efforts to capture customer data and find prospective customers in the wild are growing more complex and challenging. More companies than ever before are embarking on building sophisticated first-party data understanding and reach. In addition, marketers are developing new lead generation and management capabilities that deliver more contextually relevant and personalized experiences. All of this is happening with a relentless focus on attribution, measurement, and the ability to prove business impact. More than half of brands (60%) quantify the value of engagement on social in terms of revenue impact, 57% use it to track conversions and sales directly resulting from social efforts and 51% use it to optimize their product development or marketing strategy. Data enrichment, identity management and the ability to leverage new technology are the newest set of differentiating skills that marketing leaders are addressing. 

4. Rethink Effectiveness in an Ever-Evolving Media Landscape 

Worldwide ad spending will grow nearly 10% in 2024, for a total of $992 billion. Almost 70% of that will be spent on digital advertising, which will see a spending increase of more than 13%—well above its 2022 and 2023 growth rates. As ever, diverse forms of media play a key role in the toolkit for marketers, with continued growth in out-of-home (OOH), fueled by digital OOH and eyes on emerging retail media. An evolving landscape in how media is delivered and regulated is creating significant disruption and opportunity. Global advertising spend continues to increase, as cookie-based advertising is being turned off, FAST TV is emerging, the influencer market is maturing, and there are a swath of regulatory and legal decisions pending. Each of these changes brings opportunity, a need for new capability building, impacts on budgets and an increase in marketing leadership needs.