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.
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.
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.
