The 2025 marketing trends that will help your team hit their goals

Highlighting value will be essential amidst stagnating budgets

In the current business climate, budgets are expected to remain largely unchanged in 2025 — while expectations for marketing departments will remain high. According to a 2025 survey from Sagefrog, 57% of overall marketing budgets are expected to stay the same or decrease this year. 

In fact, overall marketing budgets have remained at their lowest levels in recent years. A 2024 Statista survey showed that in September 2024, the percentage of company revenue devoted to marketing was only 7.7%, the lowest share for an autumn edition of the CMO survey since 2018. 

These statistics mean that as marketing budgets are projected to remain flat, marketers will be forced to push creative and organizational boundaries to meet their goals, thinking strategically to achieve the most impactful results. 

Marketers need to deeply understand their audience’s business goals and current landscape. The first step is to realize that your audience might be under similar budget pressure. Because of this constraint, pointing out the value and impact your product can deliver will be essential. If a prospect’s budget is fixed, can you highlight how much more impact you can deliver than ever before? That’s the type of marketing that’s going to move your prospective buyers into the customers category. 

Recently, I shared my tips for marketing to marketers, which involves building a relationship of familiarity and trust with your potential buyers that will eventually result in them choosing to purchase from you. Putting that strategy into action in 2025 will give your team an edge in appealing especially to those savvy marketing customers. 

Collaborative work management platforms will be the key to unlocking productivity

Here at Wrike, I know we’re biased. But it’s still hard to comprehend how organizations can still be operating without collaborative work management software that truly meshes with the way they need to work. Using our platform allows my team to get more done in less time and enables us all to focus on high-impact work. 

To accomplish more with stagnating budgets in 2025, organizations will need to adopt collaborative work platforms to streamline collaboration and accelerate project completion using data that informs their creative campaigns. 

Another emerging trend is a new reliance on innovative workflow solutions that help marketing teams maximize impact by aligning marketing tasks with corporate priorities that will result in high-value outcomes. All-in-one project management platforms enable this type of alignment and provide a solid foundation for teams to scale smoothly, eliminate wasted time, and focus on the most important work. 

Marketers will need to get serious about employing generative AI

It’s hard to talk about generative AI as a trend but, in 2025, marketers are going to show who’s mastering it and who’s getting left behind. Generative AI will change the face of marketing in 2025 — for those who embrace it, invest in it, learn how to leverage it, and make it a priority in their daily marketing work. 

Over the next year, generative AI will allow for more sophisticated and personalized ways of reaching audiences. We know that buying preferences among our target audiences are constantly changing, and marketers who adapt and figure out how to use generative AI to shift their targeting will thrive. The use of generative AI in marketing will enable the faster development of more creative variations for hyper-targeted, personalized experiences.

Focusing on using generative AI within your marketing teams in a more concerted way is naturally going to lead to spending shifts across core categories. Generative AI will fundamentally change the way that customers go about their buying journey, and consequently how marketers communicate with customers. Managing these changes will likely increase marketing spending toward more strategic creative endeavors, including new campaigns, thought leadership content, and ways to connect existing and potential customers directly with the product in a meaningful way.

I have a few tips to share that will help your teams put AI into practice in 2025. 

Build in time for generative AI experimentation

As you’re formalizing your planning for 2025, make sure you build in time for your marketing teams to experiment with incorporating AI into their workflows. More sophisticated uses of AI, such as lead scoring, competitive assessments, customer journey mapping, and campaign optimization will only be possible with dedicated time. 

I’m recommending that my marketing team sets aside 10-15% of their capacity to plan experiments, including how generative AI can help them push the boundaries of our creative campaigns and reach our target audiences in innovative ways. Without dedicated time for experimentation with generative AI, marketing teams are going to be at a significant disadvantage. 

Follow best practices when using AI 

As marketing departments continue to allocate resources to exploring AI, they’ll need to be increasingly aware of its associated privacy and data security risks. Our team has put together a host of resources to help you ensure your teams stay on the right side of privacy and data issues. 

We have a really useful blog post that walks you through how to create internal AI usage rules, as well as a comprehensive free eBook on harnessing AI safely and effectively that will help you better understand how to create policies and governance to promote safe and ethical AI use. These tips will help your team ideate with GenAI and AI and continue to develop new and strategic ideas that lead to successful business outcomes. 

Keeping an eye on these critical marketing trends will empower your marketing team to exceed your goals in 2025. And, when you’re ready to jump into Wrike’s work management software as the foundation for your most impactful work yet, we’re available to chat with you about how Wrike can meet your 2025 needs.