The State of Marketing 2025 Statistics
Overall Strategy & Effectiveness:
- 82% of marketers felt their marketing strategies were effective in 2024.
- 92% of marketers plan to maintain or increase investments in brand awareness in 2025.
- 65% of marketers reported that addressing social issues in marketing campaigns in 2024 was effective for their brand.
Target Audiences & Personalization:
Millennials are the primary target for over 70% of marketers in 2025, with interest in targeting Gen Z also increasing year-over-year. Interest in marketing to Gen X and Baby Boomers has decreased by over 30%.
- Sustainability matters to younger generations: 64% of Gen Z and 63% of Millennials are willing to pay more for environmentally sustainable products. 1 in 4 have lessened ties with a business due to unsustainable practices.
- Personalization pays off: 96% of marketers report that personalized experiences increased sales.
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Data-Driven Marketing:
The top reported advantages of using data to inform marketing strategy are: reaching target audiences more effectively (35%), increasing the ROI of marketing efforts (34%), and planning media mixes more effectively (32%).
Content & Channel Trends:
Video Dominance: Short-form video was the top-performing content format in 2024 and delivers the highest ROI (21%), followed by images (19%) and live-streamed videos (16%).
Podcast Growth: 91% of marketers plan to maintain or increase investment in podcasts and audio content in 2025. 46% of weekly podcast listeners have purchased a product advertised on a podcast.
Top Social Platforms:
Marketers plan to invest most heavily in YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok in 2025.
Influencer Marketing: Micro-influencers (10k-100k followers) were the most successful for both B2B and B2C brands in 2024. Facebook yields the highest influencer ROI (28%).
Emerging Channels: The top channel brands plan to use for the first time in 2025 is AI chatbots.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact:
AI adoption is widespread but challenging: 92% of marketers say AI has impacted their role, yet 54% feel overwhelmed by implementing AI tools.
Only 47% feel they have a clear understanding of how to use AI in their strategy, and 47% have a clear understanding of how to measure its impact.
Top AI use cases include content creation, research/data analysis, brainstorming, and learning how to perform tasks like debugging code.
AI is changing search: Nearly half of marketers have seen a positive impact on web traffic due to consumers using AI for search. 31% of Gen Zers primarily use AI platforms for online information seeking. If you want to zoom in specifically on how AI is reshaping small business operations in 2026, our
AI statistics breakdown covers the latest adoption numbers from LinkedIn, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
Future Trends:
1 in 4 marketers plan to use AI to turn text into multi-modal campaigns, and 1 in 5 plan to explore AI agents for automating marketing workflows. An overwhelming 86% of leaders believe AI-generated influencers could replace human ones by the end of 2025.
