Tight marketing budgets, teething issues when implementing AI, and trouble keeping up with consumer needs have all created a challenging digital marketing space for marketers in 2024.

Yet, despite these hurdles, trends are emerging which offer brilliant opportunities for marketers to get closer to their customers.

Our Digital Marketing Trends 2025 report covers the top trends that will shake and shape the digital marketing industry, backed by social media data, statistics, and survey data from digital marketing professionals.

In this blog, we'll give you a sneak peak into some of the key digital marketing trends from the report. We also outline some actionable pro tips for you to make an impact with your digital marketing campaigns in 2025.

You can read all of the digital marketing trends in our new report here. 

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Digital Marketing Trends 2025

Level up your 2025 digital marketing strategy.

Trend: A boom in unexpected collaborations

Brands are collaborating in unusual ways – and fans are loving it.

Tapping into overlapping audiences via brand collaborations is nothing new in the digital marketing world. And recently, these collaborations seem to be taking of on social as brands level up their creativity.

These seemingly strange partnerships, which occur between brands that span industries and interests, help to create hype, capture audience attention, and even attract completely new demographics.

From skincare brand Cerave releasing an influencer marketing collaboration with celeb Michael Cera to e.l.f and Liquid Death coming together to create a limited-edition, coffin-shaped make up box which boomed on social media, unexpected marketing campaigns are a hit.

According to our Digital Marketing Trends survey, 36% of marketers agree that surprising brand collaborations will be an influential digital marketing trend in 2025.

Brand collaborations help digital marketers to harness existing customer bases – tapping into customers which are loyal, engaged, and more likely to trust partnered brands. And this creates plenty of opportunities for marketers to benefit from increased reach.

There will be plenty of brands sitting adjacent to yours that aren't competitors – brands in different industries or selling different products, but that have a near-perfect audience crossover for your brand. So, why not tap into this?

Collaborations are more than a sum of their parts – and unexpected partnerships seem to stretch even further.

Pro tip

Planning an unusual influencer marketing campaign? Or looking to maximize your digital marketing efforts with an unusual brand partnership on social media? Make sure you tap into FOMO. To generate extra hype for your products, try out limited-edition items to get customers even more excited about your new partnership. This is bound to amplify your digital marketing efforts.

Trend: Marketers try to balance AI with authenticity

Balancing artificial intelligence with authenticity is a vital skill for digital marketers to master.

Consumers are big on authenticity. People want to buy from people – and they always have. Yet, with recent advancements in artificial intelligence making digital marketing a little easier, teams need to be careful to not lose personal brand-to-customer connections in the process.

A massive 71% of marketers agree that challenges with leveraging AI without losing the ‘human touch’ will be an influential digital marketing trend in 2025. This makes it one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers right now.

Some predict that there’ll be a backlash from consumers against AI-generated content or interactions, which is certainly happening in some spheres. And brand's that fall behind with their AI implementation face criticism when tools aren't meeting customer expectations.

What’s clear from the conversation around AI and digital marketing is that authenticity, connection, and trust are non-negotiable.

Right now, AI is a tool that everyone in digital marketing is learning to master. But to do it right, marketers need to make sure they keep authenticity top of mind.

Pro tip

Feeling stuck with how to implement AI into your digital or content marketing strategy? Begin by considering your customers. If you’re going to let artificial intelligence take on a task, make sure you’ve given it the context it needs to create a good experience for the audience who sees the result. As the old saying goes: “Garbage in, garbage out”.

Trend: Brands are showing bold creativity at events

Events are sparking bold creativity in 2025.

With authenticity booming in 2025, consumers are demanding genuine connections with the brands they love. And one way digital marketing teams are fostering these connections is by taking things off-platform via in-person events. Events which showcase bold creativity are dominating.

According to our survey, over 60% of marketers agree that live experiences – especially ones that are led by bold creativity – will be an influential digital marketing trend in 2025. Brands are pushing boundaries and creating experiences that are immersive, memorable, and (importantly) share-worthy for social media.

Whether you're running a one-off pop-up shop or putting on a special workout class, there are plenty of ways your brand can get creative – while also tapping into exclusivity. Customers want to feel valued, and in-person events allow the time and space to do this.

The rise of these events also means that digital marketing teams will need to focus on localizing content for niche audiences, like translating social media posts for different markets. In fact, this year so far, localized content and events have gathered over 5.24 million online mentions.

Implementing in-person events to complement your digital marketing strategy can be ideal if you're struggling with social media content creation. You can generate user-generated content (UGC) and get your employees to create videos and take photos which can produce hype for your brand on social media.

Pro tip

Want to level-up your in-person events? Try working with local influencers. Give them early access, and sign them on to preview events to help generate anticipation among attendees, as well as to extend your reach to broader audiences.

Now we've outlined the top digital marketing trends, let's see how your brand can implement them effectively.

Your 2025 digital marketing strategy will hopefully be jam-packed full of campaigns dedicated to your audience. So, rather than adding in more, try to integrate the trends from our Digital Marketing Report seamlessly into your existing strategy.

Add an unexpected influencer marketing collaboration into your existing social media plan, or try to be more authentic with an AI-heavy campaign. This way, you'll be able to tap into these digital marketing trends much easier.

Be agile

Being agile in digital marketing is almost a prerequisite – things change on the daily. This is especially true in social media marketing. So keep these trends top of mind throughout 2025, and be prepared to activate should the right opportunity come up.

Perhaps you have an unexpected product launch which needs to create a buzz, or you want to discover new ways to connect with your audience on social media platforms. When the opportunity arises, give these trends a second look to see which will suit your needs.

Measure the impact

Leverage digital marketing analytics to properly assess the ROI of integrating these trends into your marketing channels. This can help you decide which types of digital marketing trends fit best with your audience and which to avoid.

Having these digital marketing trends in your arsenal for 2025 means you're already one step closer to better connecting with your customers. So, why not bookmark this list of the latest digital marketing innovations to help boost your efforts throughout the year?

A customer-centric approach should be at the core of your digital marketing strategy, and tracking consumer opinions with social listening tools like Brandwatch will be key to staying ahead of the competition.

Interested in more of the latest digital marketing trends that will have an impact in 2025? Read our report to get the full list, including: 

  • All of the trends, backed with data and quotes from marketing experts
  • Real-world examples of brand campaigns to inspire you
  • Helpful tips on how to incorporate these trends into your digital marketing strategy 

Get ready for 2025 and read our Digital Marketing Trends report.