Trends for 2025: What Does the Future Hold for Digital Marketing

The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving, driven by new technologies and shifting consumer preferences. To remain competitive, it is crucial to adapt strategies in line with these changes. Companies that overlook digital marketing trends risk losing customers and missing opportunities to capture new market segments.

Trends highlight effective marketing methods that reduce costs and help boost sales profitability. For instance, a McKinsey study revealed that companies actively monitoring and adopting modern technologies and trends experience faster profit growth compared to those that do not. Additionally, HubSpot reports that the majority of marketers note a significant increase in ROI when incorporating current trends into their strategies.

Research indicates that anticipating trends and integrating them into strategies positively impacts businesses. That’s why we’ve explored what trends lie ahead in 2025 and what to expect from the marketing of the future.

What trends will shape 2025

The upcoming year is expected to bring key trends that will define business strategies and customer interactions. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.

Artificial intelligence, ML, and hyper-personalization

In recent years, AI and machine learning have become integral not only to daily life but also to business operations. It’s hard to envision the future of marketing without these technologies. Investments in these areas will continue to grow, and those who effectively leverage their potential will gain a significant competitive advantage.

By 2026, 80% of companies expect AI in marketing to become a primary growth driver, with widespread adoption across marketing departments. Brands will rely on algorithms to personalize content, conduct predictive analytics, and optimize advertising campaigns. Chatbots and virtual assistants will become essential to the customer experience, automating interactions and support. Predictions for 2025 include:

• Enhanced segmentation algorithms: AI will enable the creation of more detailed customer segments, ensuring precise audience targeting.
• Personalized recommendations: AI will facilitate hyper-personalized offers based on user behavior analysis.

In the near future, AI is expected to process significantly more information. It won’t just gather purchase data but will analyze user behavior across platforms, identify emotional reactions to advertising materials, and even predict future needs. For brands, this heralds a new era—an era of hyper-personalization. Companies will be able to offer customers solutions and products before they even recognize their own desires.

Generative content

The generative AI segment is experiencing exceptionally rapid growth, with an annual increase of 73.3%. This is twice the rate of overall AI investments and 13 times faster than the general growth of the information technology sector.

AI will continue to be actively used not only for analytics but also for content creation. This includes texts, images, videos, and even audio, all generated based on specific parameters and data. In recent years, the idea of tools like ChatGPT has become commonplace. AI is already capable of creating articles, graphics, and even entire marketing campaigns tailored to the preferences of target audiences.

Trends in generative content for 2025:

• AI-powered video creation: Generative models will be widely used for producing video content, such as clips featuring virtual presenters or videos edited entirely by neural networks.

The Altcraft team has implemented video generation for blog articles

• Interactive elements: Generative content will increasingly incorporate more complex elements, such as surveys, quizzes, tests, and much more.
• Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR): Generative technologies will become an integral part of AR and VR marketing campaigns. They will create engaging experiences for users, enabling them to interact with products in a three-dimensional space.

Data privacy and marketing automation

Data protection in 2025 remains one of the key trends as digital technologies become an integral part of our lives. Safeguarding users' personal information is no longer just a legal obligation but a critically important factor influencing consumer trust and brand reputation. Data breaches raise serious concerns among users, and the number of threats to personal information continues to grow each year. Therefore, secure data storage is a top priority for companies.

There is also a noticeable trend toward abandoning cookie collection. For instance, Google announced the end of third-party cookie support in its Chrome browser by 2025. This marks the beginning of a new phase in online advertising and data privacy. As a result, companies will need to update their marketing strategies and focus on first-party data. This can be achieved through owned channels such as loyalty programs, corporate websites, email marketing, and mobile applications.

In this context, customer data platforms (CDPs) become especially important as they integrate user information from various sources into a unified, profiled database. Selecting the right tools for this process is also critically important. CDPs like Altcraft offer the capability to collect, store, and analyze consumer data, which in turn facilitates more effective customer engagement and minimizes risks associated with data breaches.

Data automation was covered in detail in the article.

Microtargeting through IoT (Internet of Things)

With the growing number of connected IoT devices, companies are expected to collect vast amounts of consumer data. Applying machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to analyze this data will enable more precise audience segmentation and consumer behavior prediction. For example, devices will become more predictive in selecting temperature settings, lighting preferences, or even musical choices based on user habits.

Advertising through IoT will feel more natural due to its integration into people's daily activities. Even now, a recommendation reminding someone to buy new water filters is perceived more as helpful information rather than intrusive advertising.

IoT technologies are already being used to determine users' locations through geolocation. For instance, when someone walks past a store, they might receive a notification about discounts or special offers.

IoT-based advertising, relying on precise targeting and data analysis, has the potential to significantly increase ROI. More targeted marketing leads to higher engagement and, consequently, an increase in sales.

Short videos, UGC, and EGC

Short vertical videos will remain popular in the coming year. They continue to be one of the key tools in companies' marketing strategies.

User-generated content (UGC) will also gain momentum as brands strive to build more genuine and honest relationships with their customers. Companies will integrate UGC to increase trust and engagement, as potential customers tend to trust the opinions of other users more.

Lululemon’s UGC

In addition to UGC, companies will continue to adopt EGC (employee-generated content). This format involves not just employees, but key staff who have an in-depth understanding of the brand, its values, and culture. They share their perceptions of the product and provide insights into their personal experiences working with the company. This type of content is perceived by consumers as more genuine and trustworthy.

For example, Anthropologie is actively using the EGC format for TikTok

Summary

All in all, success in digital marketing in 2025 will directly depend on how quickly companies can adapt to changes and implement new technologies and approaches. Key trends will remain artificial intelligence and machine learning, which will complement and enhance each other. Neural networks will play a crucial role not only in data analysis but also in developing recommendations for more effective customer engagement across various touchpoints — from social media to offline stores and email campaigns. Marketing automation and an omnichannel approach will continue to be essential trends in handling large amounts of data, helping companies create more personalized customer experiences. Tools like Altcraft Platform will become reliable assistants in this process.