Marketing in 2025 has largely been shaped by a stack of technologies that are changing how people discover brands, how brands speak to people, and how performance is measured. Here are five developments that stood out to us this year…

AI-driven hyper-personalisation
With generative AI now a firm favourite across marketing workflows, we’re all now putting out vastly more content on every platform. Brands can create infinite variants of ads, emails, landing pages and social posts at very low cost. But with content being produced at such scale, it needs to be even more relevant and personal to cut through the noise. AI is helping this happen by stitching together behaviour, preferences and context to deliver personalisation at scale. 

Social is moving down the funnel
In 2025, audiences are spread across competing platforms and brands have had to diversify their presence accordingly. At the same time, trust has expanded away from influencers and we’re seeing more employee and user-generated content perform well, because they feel closer to real life and carry more credibility. Perhaps the biggest change is that social has become a sales tool, not just a brand building tool  TikTok Shop and other social commerce formats mean discovery and checkout happen in one scroll, making social a true conversion channel. 

5G and newer phone tech

This year, faster mobile internet and quicker processing on devices mean things can happen almost instantly on your phone. So, brands can react to what you’re doing in the moment, like sending a useful offer when you walk near a store, without delays or lags. 

This means campaigns can be more flexible and less pre-planned and fixed; you can respond in real time, based on where someone is and what they’re doing, not just what you hope they’ll do later.

First-party and zero-party data 

Even though the whole “cookies” situation keeps changing, the main point is that people want more say over their data, and the rules are getting stricter. So the brands doing well in 2025 are the ones that ask clearly and give a reason to say yes; things like signing up in an app, joining a loyalty scheme, telling you their preferences, or opting in to share location.

And, when someone chooses to share their info, it tends to be more accurate, more reliable, and way more useful than data you bought from somewhere else. That makes it easier to give people marketing that actually feels relevant.

More data has helped marketers figure out what’s actually working

Marketing tools are giving us a much clearer view of how people move from first seeing a brand to buying and creating loyalty. We can spot patterns quicker, test ideas more easily, and get better at identifying what’s working. 

So marketing teams can do more of what’s working well and  stop spending on what isn’t. 

AI search and “zero-click” results are changing how SEO works

A lot of people now get what they need straight from an AI summary at the top of Google, or by asking a chat tool instead of clicking links. That means fewer people are visiting websites the old way.

So, marketers have had to adapt SEO strategies to incorporate AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and creating content that AI tools want to pull from to make their brand show up inside those summaries. 

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So it seems that 2025 is the year marketing became both more automated and more human. Technology is giving us scale, speed and precision, but it’s trust, relevance and real value that decide who gets the results.

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