A/B testing is an industry go-to for discovering your customers’ preferences. The usual way to do this is to isolate a specific variable (eg copy, visual, audience, channel, pages) and to see which performs better with everything else being equal.
If you have an underperforming email marketing campaign for instance, you could create two templates to send to customers to see which yields click-throughs.
As we step into 2025, the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. Technologies like AI are reshaping strategies, while emerging challenges such as AI-generated scams and spambots demand urgent attention.
Sustainability, consumer privacy, and innovative e-commerce models will also play a pivotal role in shaping the industry.
Here’s a look at the key trends marketers need to watch in 2025.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way we do marketing. For some, AI-content tools help to generate campaigns that are faster, more precise, and tailored. Tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney make it easier to churn out social media posts, articles, ad copy, and visuals without having to craft each line individually. This has helped to improve the productivity of marketers everywhere.
But there’s a flip side. AI isn’t just in our hands—it’s in the hands of scammers too. Ever received an email that felt too real to be fake? That’s the power of AI-driven scams. These phishing attempts and spambots don’t just look convincing; they act like real people, tricking businesses and consumers alike. For us marketers, this means doubling down on cybersecurity and being crystal clear with our audiences about how we protect their data.
AI is a tool, a challenge, and an opportunity. How we use it—and protect against its misuse—will define our success in 2025.
And then there’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Remember the days when you’d craft content hoping it lands on Google’s first page?
Now, tools like ChatGPT are giving users instant answers, cutting out the middleman. For us, this means writing content that’s not just good but speaks directly to the questions people are asking. Structure and clarity are the names of the game if we want to stay visible in this AI-driven search world.
With AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini delivering direct answers, SEOs need to evolve their strategies to remain relevant. Here are some recommended strategies to stay relevant in the age of AI-fueled searches:
By focusing on areas AI cannot replicate, SEOs can maintain their competitive edge and continue to drive value for users in an increasingly AI-dominated landscape.
In 2025, social media continues to be a dynamic landscape, presenting both opportunities and challenges for marketers. Platforms like TikTok have transformed into comprehensive ecosystems, seamlessly integrating entertainment with e-commerce. Live shopping events on TikTok have generated substantial sales, exemplifying the platform’s influence in merging content and commerce.
However, not all platforms are experiencing the same trajectory. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has faced criticism over recent algorithm changes. Users have expressed dissatisfaction, noting that their feeds are increasingly populated with content from accounts they don’t follow, leading to a less personalized experience. This shift has prompted some users to reconsider their engagement with these platforms.
Additionally, the rise of AI-generated content and bots is reshaping the social media environment. Platforms are leveraging AI to automate interactions, aiming to enhance user engagement. While this automation offers new avenues for content creation and interaction, it also raises concerns about the authenticity of online engagements.
In an age where users are inundated with content, standing out requires more than clever targeting. It demands authenticity, consistency, and genuine connection.
Brands that prioritize transparency and actively engage with their communities will cultivate loyalty that goes beyond a single platform’s quirks. Trust isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the bedrock of meaningful relationships in the fast changing social media landscape.
Privacy remains at the core of digital marketing, with significant shifts forcing marketers to rethink how they collect and use data.
With tracking pixels becoming less reliable—due to browser restrictions like Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and Google Chrome’s phasing out of third-party cookies—marketers are pivoting to first-party data strategies. For example, brands are now leveraging loyalty programmes, gated content, and direct opt-ins through website interactions to build richer datasets.
Starbucks, for instance, uses its app to track customer purchases directly, offering targeted rewards and promotions based on behaviour.
Transparency has become a necessity, not just an expectation. Brands are increasingly adopting clear privacy policies, consent banners, and communication campaigns to explain how customer data is used. Companies like Spotify and Netflix excel in this area, demonstrating that transparency doesn’t just meet legal requirements—it builds trust and loyalty by showing consumers the value of sharing their information.
At the same time, global privacy regulations are tightening. Enhanced GDPR standards and new data protection frameworks in countries like China and Singapore require businesses to adapt or risk penalties. Strategies like conducting regular data audits, ensuring compliance documentation, and providing staff with privacy training are becoming non-negotiable.
With the decline of tracking pixels, marketers are shifting towards owned channels. Building stronger email lists and Telegram Channels through sign-up incentives, creating subscription-based content models, and developing community platforms (like Discord or branded forums) are becoming effective ways to maintain consumer connections.
Video continues to dominate digital marketing, with live-streaming taking centre stage as a dynamic tool for engagement and conversion. The shift towards real-time, interactive video experiences is reshaping how brands connect with audiences.
Live-stream shopping has exploded, particularly on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. These sessions are no longer just about showcasing products—they’re immersive, real-time shopping experiences where viewers can engage directly with hosts, ask questions, and make purchases seamlessly.
For example, beauty brands like Sephora have used TikTok live streams to demonstrate products in action, driving impulse buys through limited-time offers and clickable links. This blend of entertainment and commerce is proving incredibly effective, with live-stream events generating millions in sales globally.
Interactive video ads are transforming passive viewing into active participation. These ads allow viewers to make real-time choices, such as selecting product features or storyline outcomes, creating a personalised experience.
Brands like Netflix have experimented with interactive formats to promote shows, while retail companies use similar strategies to highlight product ranges. The result? Higher engagement rates and deeper brand recall.
With mobile consumption leading the charge, vertical videos are the format of choice across platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. These videos are designed for quick consumption, optimised for smartphone screens, and aligned with shorter attention spans.
According to data from HubSpot, vertical videos enjoy 58% higher engagement compared to horizontal formats. Brands like Nike have capitalised on this trend with short, punchy videos that grab attention instantly, showcasing products in creative, scroll-stopping ways.
In 2025, websites and landing pages need to continually adapt to meet user expectations and deliver better results. Here’s how they’re changing:
AI-driven tools can now tailor websites to individual visitors. Product recommendations, dynamic content, and behaviour-driven CTAs make every interaction feel more relevant. For example, e-commerce sites display items based on browsing history to increase conversions.
Speed is crucial. Sites that load in under 2 seconds see better engagement and rankings. Strategies like compressing images and using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) ensure pages are quick and responsive.
Static designs are giving way to interactive tools like live chats, calculators, and quizzes. These keep visitors engaged and turn casual users into leads. SaaS brands often use ROI calculators to connect with decision-makers.
With most traffic coming from mobile devices, websites are designed to be simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate on smaller screens. Features like sticky CTAs and thumb-friendly layouts are now standard.
Structured data improves visibility in AI-powered searches. Accessibility features like alt text and keyboard navigation enhance usability for everyone, aligning with ethical practices and boosting search rankings.
By focusing on speed, relevance, and usability, websites and landing pages remain essential tools for businesses to connect with their audiences effectively.
Web and app designs are becoming more than functional; in 2025, it’s a space for creativity, personalization, and seamless user experiences. These emerging trends have started to influence how websites look and feel, making them more engaging and relevant.
Digital marketing in 2025 promises to be as dynamic as ever. The rise of AI-driven risks, evolving consumer expectations, and the continued dominance of video and social commerce demand that marketers stay agile.
By balancing innovation with responsibility, brands can seize opportunities while mitigating emerging threats in this exciting new chapter.
What are you most excited about in the year ahead? I’d love to read your thoughts!
Do you know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can vastly improve your social listening capabilities?
AI’s implementation across multiple industries is fast becoming the norm these days. This is because it speeds up data analysis and amplifies operational efficiency.
Content is at the core of every successful marketing strategy. Yet, as brands generate more content across diverse channels, understanding what truly resonates with audiences has become a complex challenge.
Enter predictive artificial intelligence (AI) — a transformative tool shaping the future of content strategy by helping marketers predict trends, refine messaging and make more informed decisions.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the bread and butter of digital marketing, with 72% of organisations integrating AI into at least one business function (McKinsey & Company). However, many marketing teams are barely scratching the surface of what AI can do.
In a field where understanding customer needs is the lifeblood of success, AI acts as both a microscope and a compass—digging deep into data while pointing teams towards smarter decisions. Tools powered by AI don’t just save time; they automate tasks, personalise customer interactions, and uncover insights that would take human analysts days, if not weeks, to discover.
Here’s how your team can embrace AI tools to build stronger customer connections and keep pace with today’s fast changing digital landscape.
For a start, your strategy should leverage AI to enhance your marketing campaigns, optimize efforts to deliver on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and improve client engagement to reach your business goals.
There are numerous ways for you to tap on AI-powered tools for strategies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email Marketing, Content Creation, and Analytics. Here are some of the best tools to look into for these different areas:
Do also consider how you can tap on the best practices in programmatic advertising to optimize your efforts.
Through all of these tools, it’s easy to conclude that you can use AI for a wide range of digital marketing tasks. The benefits include automation, improved customer experience and targeting, and even enhancing relationships to give your business expertise and promote loyalty.
AI tools can help you to tailor your content to your consumer’s journey. Optimizely is an AI tool with content personalization that creates meaningful experiences to drive conversions. You can use personalized content in blogs or articles, emails, product descriptions, and video content.
Your business can build personalized digital content that is based on your prospect’s interests and behaviors online. It improves your marketing strategy by honing in on what will draw in your ideal clients since it deeply understands trends that give your strategy a bigger impact.
AI can also automate certain tasks, like identify and organize images and videos. It also helps analyze data so your business can continue refining and adapting its content strategy.
Do also consider AI chatbots to generate conversations and provide customer service. These can be extremely helpful in saving you time and costs, simply by addressing common scenarios with your products and services that can be handled more efficiently.
Chatbots handle Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and can help your customers do things like track orders or manage their accounts. They free up time for your staff to allow them to focus on other pertinent tasks at hand, while improving your response times.
Monitoring these AI tools helps your company to maintain its human touch. Consider deploying more advanced AI chatbots that tap natural language processing (NLP) to understand human queries and provide accurate answers and solutions.
With machine learning technology, you can easily do data analysis to identify patterns, forecast trends, and predict customer behavior. It works by collecting data, preparing it and applying algorithms and variables to supply accurate prediction.
Through this, it can learn patterns, behaviors, and relationships that your business can use to create more effective marketing campaigns.
AI has transformed marketing automation from handling basic tasks to delivering sophisticated, data-driven insights. Beyond simple tools like ChatGPT, AI now streamlines time-consuming, repetitive activities such as email personalisation, lead scoring, and customer segmentation.
This allows marketing teams to shift their focus to strategic and creative tasks, fostering innovation and better campaign outcomes. Advanced platforms further use machine learning to predict customer behaviour, optimise ad targeting, and personalise content at scale, ensuring more effective and efficient marketing efforts.
AI is changing the face of influencer marketing by simplifying the once-complex process of finding the right partners for your brand. It can analyse large datasets to identify influencers whose audience aligns with your target demographics, evaluate engagement quality, and predict the potential impact of collaborations.
CommPRO is one such tool that analyzes massive datasets to quickly locate influencers who may be able to connect with your brand’s audience. This data-driven approach ensures that brands can easily connect with influencers who resonate with their audience, driving higher ROI and campaign success.
Many leading brands are integrating AI tools into their digital marketing strategies to improve their customer experiences and streamline marketing operations. Here are two standout examples:
Starbucks wanted to find a way to bring better offers to its audience through its widely used app. Customers have the option to use a service called “My Starbucks Barista” to place orders for pickup that uses chatbot innovation and voice technology.
Users can even adjust their orders in real time to ensure every detail is just right, combining convenience with personalisation to enhance customer satisfaction.
Shopping for necessary tools and equipment while doing home improvement can be complex and challenging. Lowe’s took on that challenge by incorporating an AI innovation that offers its customers a more seamless and helpful shopping experience: LoweBot.
The AI-driven technology is a robot assistant found in-store where you can quickly locate what you need or work with one of their assistants. It uses cameras and sensors that capture and process data about that particular store so that it can quickly answer questions and make your shopping that much easier.
There are many AI tools available that can aid your digital marketing strategy. You must assess your business needs and customer desires so that you can make effective choices about which tools to invest in to take your business to the next level.
Looking ahead, AI is likely to expand its capabilities into areas traditionally dominated by human input, such as creative content generation, relationship-building, and strategic planning. While these developments are still in progress, the technology already provides measurable improvements in campaign effectiveness and operational efficiency.
By adopting AI with a focused approach, businesses can enhance their ability to meet customer needs, improve marketing performance, and adapt to a rapidly changing digital landscape.
Donna is a seasoned marketing professional with expertise in digital marketing strategies and consumer engagement. Her interest for crafting targeted writing ensures brands connect meaningfully with their audiences. When not working, she loves playing guitar and attending music festivals.
Wish to tap Artificiall Intelligence (AI) for your marketing efforts? What should you consider before leveraging on AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, CoPilot, and many others?
The recent rise of artificial intelligence has completely shaken up the marketing industry. Today, you can find chatbots to handle customer queries, generative tools to produce content marketing, and analytic programs to break down the consumer data you collect.
However, before you shut down your marketing team and shift to AI-led operations, it’s worth considering whether or not AI will actually improve the quality of your marketing efforts. In their current state, many generative AI programs remain riddled with errors and may produce work containing falsehoods.
Additionally, audiences tend to favor work produced by humans. This may mean that switching over to generative programs damages your brand reputation and undermines your image. As such, you should proceed with caution and only use AI when you’re sure it will have a net positive impact on the long-term growth of your firm.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term used to describe computing that mimics human-like cognition. Generative AI is a sub-branch of those efforts to mimic human intelligence that creates content based on user inputs and historical data. These generative programs use machine learning algorithms to “think”. At their core, these ML programs are defined by their use of:
With these tools and techniques, users have found it a lot easier to deploy generative AI in their marketing activities.
While these facts may lead you to believe that you no longer need your graphic team or writers, a quick search online will reveal that AI falls some way short of the efforts of real content marketers — at least for now. Big brands like Sports Illustrated have landed in hot water after being caught using AI to create profiles for fake writers, and publishers like Wizards of the Coast have been forced to ban the use of AI after discovering that their artists had been using programs to push out new content quickly.
Crucially, this doesn’t mean you should turn your back on AI during the content creation process altogether. Instead, consider using AI to empower your content creation team. For example, if you currently rely on a fleet of writers to produce your blog content or marketing materials, consider investing in tools like Grammarly and Jasper AI. These tools empower, rather than replace, real marketers and improve the quality of their production by offering real-time editing suggestions.
Finding new leads for your firm is crucial when you work in marketing. However, lead scoring and data analytics can take hours to complete if you’re entirely reliant on human marketers. Similarly, human marketers require time away from the desk, meaning that new leads that pop up in the wee hours of the night may be left to cool while everyone’s asleep.
Today, you can use AI to embolden your lead-generation efforts by investing in tools that automate the process. For example, many modern AI tools can score incoming leads in real-time based on variables like historical data and user behavior. This can quickly sort your hot leads from your dead ends and will ensure that you are able to focus on the folks most likely to convert.
You can also use these AI tools to enrich your data and predict changing trends in your industry. For example, if you collect a large volume of data from social sources, modern AI tools can stitch together data from other sources like surveys and email forms. This will give you a more comprehensive understanding of user intention and may aid your efforts to create marketing content based on hard data.
That said, you will likely need to improve your data-cleaning efforts to make use of AI for lead generation and maintenance. If you feed bad data into your analytic programs, don’t be surprised when it produces poor results. Investing in data cleansing tools and intentionally retraining your AI program to parse out useless data points is key to your efforts and ensuring your team is empowered by data that is relevant and accurate.
It’s clear that, though caution should be exercised, AI is fundamental to marketing companies making the digital transformation. ML programs can personalize advertisements for folks online, natural language processing algorithms can aid consumers with accessibility concerns, and generative software can edit and suggest revisions during the content creation process.
However, pivoting towards AI shouldn’t be undertaken rashly. Rather, marketing teams that want to increase their use of AI should treat the digital transformation as a journey. This means that marketing managers should move through distinct phases when rolling out new tech, including:
Following this process-oriented approach will help you make good use of well-established AI tools and will give you time to on-board new programs properly. This can help you target problems that are specific to your firm and will ensure that you’re aware of existing and emergent solutions in the marketing industry.
Embracing AI for marketing can seem intimidating if you’re new to the idea of automation. Get the ball rolling by using well-established tools that empower your team and enable them to be more productive.
As AI programs become more sophisticated, consider utilizing more transformational tools that change the way you work. Just be sure to maintain strong human supervision, as most consumers show a preference for human-generated content and may turn away from your firm if they discover you’ve been using AI to gain their personal data through illegal means.
BIO: Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest in the United States. She enjoys writing about better living through education and technology. She is frequently lost in a mystery podcast.
Heard of the Marketing Mix (MM)? Well, most business students would be familiar with the 4 Ps — Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
However, do you know that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to power up your Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)?
Can machine learning help to strengthen content personalisation in digital marketing? How can such algorithms be deployed to improve one’s digital marketing results?
Marketers, designers, and business owners should strongly consider investing in personalized content creation if they haven’t already done so. People are inundated with emails, online ads, and sponsored articles, often feeling discouraged as much of what they encounter seems irrelevant or unworthy of their attention.
In the ever-evolving landscape of the digital world, search engine result pages (SERPs) have become the heart and soul of online discovery. As internet users, we rely on search engines, and in particular, Google, to deliver accurate, relevant, and reliable information at our fingertips.
However, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to assert its dominance in the technology realm, questions have emerged regarding its impact on Google’s SERPs.