19 Marketing Trends Shaping 2025 [Backed by New Data]

We’re rounding into the second half of 2025, which means it’s a good time to take a look at the marketing trends forecasted for this year to see how accurate the predictions were. We surveyed nearly 5,000 global marketers to learn their priorities, goals, and challenges in 2025. Here’s what we found.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gold dust for marketers in 2025. It offers exciting improvements to automation, efficiency, and personalisation. However, implementing it can prove a major headache. “AI isn’t just marketers’ biggest priority. It’s also their biggest challenge,” said Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce.

Aside from artificial intelligence, we’ve also seen significant shifts in email marketing, data analysis processes, mobile messaging, and much more. Let’s dive into 19 of the top marketing trends to watch in 2025.

If you want to learn more, all of the industry trends you’ll find in this guide come from research conducted by Salesforce in our State of Marketing Report (9th Edition), 50 Email Best Practices for Marketers, and Sixth Edition Connected Shoppers Report.

In our State of Marketing Report, we found that 75% of marketers are either implementing or experimenting with AI. More revealingly, high performers are 2.5 times more likely to have fully implemented AI within their digital marketing efforts.

Predictive and generative AI may be relatively new concepts, but they’re already a priority for the most successful marketers. Why? Because, unlike traditional marketing tools, artificial intelligence doesn’t just fix one problem or provide one opportunity. Once implemented properly, it can benefit and streamline nearly every aspect of your marketing strategy.

For instance, generative AI can power personalised AI-driven content generation, segment audiences for more efficient targeting, analyse campaign performance to recommend optimisations, and provide personalised customer service at scale. And, importantly, it can do all of this automatically with minimal human intervention.

Take Fisher & Paykel, for instance. With the help of Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform, the luxury appliance brand deployed an AI agent that could respond to customer queries 24/7 via a live chat, drawing from a knowledge base of more than 10,000 articles to diagnose and resolve complex issues in less time.

The versatility of artificial intelligence means it’s no longer just a nice-to-have; it’s the engine behind modern marketing and a growing priority for businesses of all sizes.

Learn more: How Agentic Automation Helps You Build Lasting Customer Relationships.

AI may bring countless opportunities, but it also poses unique challenges. How can we ensure we’re using it ethically and responsibly?

98% of marketers say trustworthy data is essential for effective AI applications. It must be free from errors, manipulation, and bias to prevent data integrity issues. Aside from ensuring AI models can do their best work, this also helps to maintain customer trust by showing you’re using AI responsibly.

Concerningly, 41% of CMOs are most worried about data exposure or leakage from generative AI. This worry is why we built Agentforce as a privacy-first AI, designed to protect customer data at every step with the Einstein Trust Layer. The trust layer helps keep data private and secure with safe access to information (secure data retrieval), real-time context checks (dynamic grounding), and no data storage after use (zero data retention). These all help teams get the most out of generative AI without compromising trust, safety, or compliance.

Beyond data best practices, there’s also the broader issue of trust. Consumers are sceptical about AI adoption, which means marketers need to carefully toe the line between automation and ethics.

The question of what’s acceptable and what’s off-limits when it comes to AI ethics is still under debate. For instance, Australia’s Liberal Party recently used tools like MidJourney and Runway to create fully AI-generated election ads. This was a bold move, but it was also divisive, opening up broader conversations about transparency and ethical boundaries in AI marketing.

The balance between AI, data integrity, ethics, and consumer trust will continue to shape both how the general public perceives AI and how marketers use it for business success. What’s important in 2025 is to be transparent in your use cases and your commitment to protecting customer data, as well as demonstrating AI ethical best practices — I.e. advocating for laws to protect creator (photographers, artists, authors, designers, etc.) copyrights and using AI to work alongside team members (rather than replace them).

Centralising customer data is essential for businesses because it creates a single source of truth, leading to better campaigns and more personalised customer experiences. Yet, despite this, only 31% of marketers are satisfied with their ability to unify data sources.

Why the disparity? Many businesses worry they need to go it alone, tediously transferring information bit by bit into a data warehouse. However, with centralised data platforms (CDPs) like Data Cloud, organisations can now automatically bring real-time data from across the organisation into a single, actionable view.

Look no further than Uber Eats to see why this type of data unity is so powerful. The brand’s service data was previously spread across 30+ global systems, which made it difficult for reps to resolve order issues and disputes. This led to lost time and dissatisfied customers.

Uber Eats leveraged MuleSoft and Service Cloud to automatically unify their data across their entire global ecosystem onto one screen. When a customer has a problem, the platform can now fetch all of the data required for reps to solve the issue in real-time. This gives reps everything they need to resolve cases faster in all of the brand’s locations across the globe.

In content marketing trends, email is still the most-used outbound marketing channel (80%), but its function is evolving. Brands are weaning off the batch-and-blast approach in favour of personalised email campaigns covering every aspect of the customer journey, from onboarding to customer retention and loyalty.

Take a post-purchase customer journey, for instance. A business might open with a thank-you message, followed by tips on getting the most out of the product. A week later, they send a custom product update based on purchase history. A month after that, they ask for feedback and reward the customer for their brand loyalty. Each step is automated but highly personalised.

This shift comes at the perfect time. Consumers now want more than the occasional newsletter in their inbox, with 88% saying they want personalised offers and experiences. That means businesses need to harness data across all of their content operations and create tailored email journeys at every touchpoint.

To scale content production while maintaining personalisation, many businesses now leverage email content marketing tools. With Salesforce’s email marketing platform, for example, marketers can design personalised emails for each stage of the sales pipeline, and then schedule them to send automatically following specific triggers. All of this helps you optimise your content strategy and save time while delivering personalised experiences to build long-term relationships.

AI tools also offer much-needed help here. As well as helping with marketing and content personalisation, artificial intelligence can support audience segmentation, product recommendations, AI content marketing efforts, and data cleansing. All of this saves valuable time for marketers while giving them all of the tools they need to deliver seamless customer journeys at scale.

Top marketers now personalise across six channels on average, including social media, digital ads, video, websites, mobile messaging and email. This compares with just three average marketing channels for underperformers.

Marketers can no longer rely on a one-off strategy for social media alongside a separate paid search campaign. Customers want their journey to feel engaging and, most importantly, interconnected. As such, organisations need to find a way to intertwine relevant content across every touchpoint to create a sustained, seamless customer journey based on data.

A surprising 43% of marketers still rely on disconnected campaigns to reach their audience. While one-off strategies might earn fast clicks, they rarely build long-term loyalty. Brands can shift this by moving from isolated moments to sustained, connected campaigns that create a lasting, meaningful experience for customers.

Australian beauty giant Mecca offers a masterclass in life-long customer engagement with its Beauty Loop program. Once a year, stores are flooded with people eager to pick up their free box of mini products — a gesture that makes customers feel valued and introduces them to new favourites. The event also sparks a ripple effect online, with people sharing their boxes and encouraging others to head in-store to join the experience.

Open rates and click-throughs were once considered the most important metrics available to the email marketer. But with recent privacy changes such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection and Google phasing out third-party cookies, tracking these KPIs is no longer reliable.

Instead, marketers are now shifting their focus to the metrics that are driving business value, such as customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion rates, and pipeline influence. In short, email strategies are now judged on their contribution to your revenue, not just how many clicks they generate.

Despite this, only 48% of marketers are actively tracking CLV, and that makes sense. Although it’s a powerful performance indicator, it can be difficult to track without the right data. Tools like Salesforce Marketing Intelligence can help to bridge this gap by tying data to revenue outcomes through conversion rate tracking, customer value, and multi-touch attribution.

Marketing intelligence is a strategic differentiator for modern businesses, but 71% of marketers are still evaluating their channel performance in silos.

The best marketing teams are moving away from static reports and spreadsheets, instead opting for agile, unified reporting platforms, shared taxonomies, and data storytelling. All of this unifies marketing analytics, aligns teams, and helps organisations make smarter, more evidence-backed decisions.

Real-time, visualised consumer insights offered by a platform like Marketing Cloud, for instance, mean teams can act in the moment and adjust their business strategy mid-flight rather than waiting until the end of a campaign to see what worked.

How does this look in practice? The World Economic Forum integrates 64 systems, such as those for event bookings, communications, and member management, all in one place. This unified view leads to 75% fewer dashboards and stronger digital marketing insights that consider the whole picture.

As privacy regulations get tighter, brands are beginning to double down on the channels they actually own. In this space, mobile marketing is leading the charge.

Mobile messaging is now outpacing email marketing growth across key industries, with 81% of marketers now looking to prioritise mobile in the coming year. This includes strategies like SMS and push notifications, as well as mobile-app messaging, offering a personal and immediate way to build a connection with your audience while maintaining first-party data.

Charlotte Tilbury’s collaboration with Snapchat is a great example of this shift to a mobile-first approach. The beauty brand delivered highly personalised engagement by using AR-powered filters for virtual try-ons.

It did all of this in a platform that its ideal customer already uses, all while limiting ad spend. This is the ideal blueprint for brand ambassadors looking to maximise the impact of their owned media.

Playing it safe isn’t a viable digital marketing strategy in 2025. 89% of marketers say they need to innovate constantly just to stay competitive, and that extends beyond creative content.

Today’s most forward-thinking marketers are redefining the digital marketing industry, breaking down silos with strategies like:

• Cross-functional data strategies, wherein IT, service, marketing, and sales all work from the same foundation to achieve a unified view of the customer.
• Consolidated performance data across all channels so they can see what's working and what isn’t at a glance, all in one place.
• AI to test, learn, and personalise at scale, plus automatically adjusting creative execution, timing, and targeting based on real-time data.

All of this leads to faster feedback loops and more agile, personalised marketing campaigns powered by strategy rather than guesswork.

Bonds are the perfect example of a brand that took this kind of innovation to the next level. Through their collaboration with Robert Irwin, the Australian underwear company worked to drive brand awareness and announce their arrival in the U.S., while also pushing their product through local relevance, popular perceptions of Australians, and humour.

Consumers want brands that align with their values, and sustainability is right in the middle of the conversation. Businesses have a huge opportunity to market their sustainability initiatives through purpose-driven storytelling. This will be especially important when targeting the Gen Z and Millennial demographics, both of which expect brands to stand for more than profit.

Purpose-driven marketing is shaping the future of campaign strategy. SBS’s Media Sustainability Challenge offers $500,000 in advertising inventory to the best TV campaign promoting sustainable behaviours. This is both a bold step toward conscious living and a way to showcase SBS’s own brand values.

On the AI side of things, purpose-driven marketing also has its place. During Climate Action Week in Sydney, Salesforce spoke about how sustainable AI can reduce energy use and emissions across marketing operations.

In short, sustainability is necessary for the planet and also smart for business. Combining these initiatives with purpose-driven marketing gives organisations the chance to push for change while also building trust and brand reputation.

Among the top social media marketing trends, video content creators have a lot to be excited about in 2025 as the niche continues to get more interesting.

Short-form social media platforms continue to dominate customer attention. Think TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. That said, the key change is how this short-form video content creation is being used — not just to entertain and inform, but to engage, convert, and even transport.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are at the crux of this change. These technological advancements let social media managers create everything from interactive content to enticing brand experiences. Take a look at Tourism Australia, for instance, whose immersive campaign features 360-degree VR footage of iconic landmarks with Chris Hemsworth.

Customers can also use these short videos to interact with brands and make purchases in real time, all without ever leaving the screen. All of this creates a more layered shopping experience, letting high-quality content marketers bring social media users deeper into the brand story (and closer to the point of sale).

Influencer marketing is moving away from celebrity endorsements towards smaller, niche creators with highly engaged audiences.

Micro-influencers are much cheaper — that much is a given. But they’re also often perceived as more trustworthy. The target audience sees the creator as a regular person, rather than a brand, so their ads feel more genuine and credible. All of this helps content resonate on a personal level, often leading to a much higher conversion rate at a lower cost.

Along with this, partner programs and user-generated content (UGC) will continue to be lightning in a bottle for brands. Unboxing videos, clothing try-ons, how-tos and creative showcases all build trust and create their own viral loop.

Any successful marketer should include this in their social media management strategy. In the digital era, your existing customers are often your most powerful social media marketing tool at your disposal.

The possibilities of using AI in email marketing have moved past basic personalisation. AI is now central to how sophisticated marketing teams connect with their customers.

Tools like Salesforce’s Email Marketing Platform allow marketing teams to use AI to automatically segment audiences based on real-time behaviour, generate dynamic content tailored to individual customers, and proactively clean databases to remove outdated contacts or duplicates.

This intutative automation not only saves marketing teams time, but directly improves campaign ROI by using real-time data to segment audiences and personalise content at scale. When your email platform automatically groups contacts based on behaviour like purchases, engagement, or conversations with your support staff, emails can be hyper-relevent and better timed. That relevance reduces unsubscribe rates and increases conversions, without requiring marketers to manually manage lists or build segments from scratch.

One-off testing is no longer enough. Leading marketing teams have adopted continuous testing as an essential part of their strategy, running ongoing A/B and multivariate tests on CTAs, preheaders, send times, and journey paths.

Australian retailer The Iconic is a great example of what this looks like in practice. Their team continuously tests everything from homepage layouts to product recommendations and email offers, fine-tuning each touchpoint in real time to improve engagement and conversions.

Rather than waiting until the end of a campaign, marketers are now adjusting pacing, spend, and creative elements in real-time based on live data. This shift is designed to avoid overspending and maximise performance throughout campaigns, letting teams optimise continuously rather than after the fact.

60% of B2B marketers now use account-based marketing (ABM) to acquire new customers. However, one factor that significantly slows down ABM is the storage of customer data across different platforms.

When sales, marketing, and service teams are all working from different systems, it becomes significantly more challenging to deliver a consistent customer experience. Teams end up wasting time looking for customer details, messaging becomes fragmented, and customers feel the gaps.

The best marketers solve this by working from a single source of truth, which is a platform where sales, marketing, and customer service can all access the same real-time customer data. Instead of switching between disconnected tools, teams get a complete view of the customer. A unified platform like Salesforce makes this possible by connecting data across departments, ensuring that every interaction is consistent, relevant, and informed.

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have made it easy for customers to move from scrolling to buying without ever leaving the app.

Brands are now experimenting with live shopping events, shoppable posts, and embedded checkout features that move customers to buy, not just like. For example, Oz Hair & Beauty ran a live shopping event that combined exclusive discounts with interactive content and real-time purchasing.

For brands, a challenge in 2025 will be building social commerce strategies that are as measurable and performance-driven as their core e-commerce channels. The line between discovery, engagement, and purchase is getting blurrier, and customers will expect that the entire journey, from seeing a product on their feed to checking out, happens without friction.

Search is going to move beyond typing to voice and visuals. With voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant now in homes across Australia, businesses need to start optimising content for how people actually speak, not just how they type. This is especially important for local businesses, where voice search often drives fast, high-intent traffic.

On the visual side, tools like Google Lens are changing how people discover products. Customers can now search directly with a photo, cutting out steps between seeing something they want and finding where to buy it.

Heading into 2025, brands that optimise their visual content and metadata will have a significant advantage, making it easier for customers to go from spotting a product in real life to buying it in a few taps.

Marketing automation of yesterday still relies on rules and triggers set up in advance, such as: if someone clicks this, send that. The problem with this, is that marketers need to be able to predict a leads next move, and let’s face it, people aren’t that easy to predict.

AI agents are transforming how marketing teams automate the customer experience. Agentic AI refers to intelligent digital assistants that can make decisions and take action independently, learning from data to drive sales and improve customer engagement.

TripADeal’s recent pop-up in Sydney gave a glimpse of what this can look like. Visitors could plan a holiday by talking to an AI agent. It pulled from live data, adjusted as people chatted, and handled the whole process without the need for users to click through options.

Another way digital marketers are using autonomous agents is to adjust their ad campaigns in real time to improve ROAS. Depending on the customer, the Agentic AI switches out the creative, pauses low performers, rewrites copy, and adjusts the time they are delivered the ad. This typically takes up hours of a digital marketers day, but with Agentic AI they can focus on working with their team to develop the ad creatives and oversee operations, all while getting a better return.

We've explored 19 trends shaping the second half of 2025 — from the rise of agentic AI to the shift toward lifecycle marketing, first-party data strategies, mobile messaging, and real-time personalisation. The common thread across all of them is simple, the businesses that succeed are the ones that move early, adapt quickly, and keep the customer at the centre of everything they do.

At our Future of Marketing with Agentforce World Tour, VP of Digital Nick Rosen shared that marketers need to start thinking now about what the next two to three years will look like with AI agents working alongside them. And as Mark Henderson, CEO of Fisher & Paykel, reminded us during his presentation, even as the tools evolve, the best marketers will always lead by putting their customers’ needs first.

If you want a hear in detail how these changes are already taking shape, and what they will mean for your business, you can watch the full session here.

If you’d like to learn more about the key trends and insights we’ve outlined in this guide, our State of Marketing Report (9th edition) is a must-read. It contains more information on everything we’ve discussed, plus some additional trends shaping the future of digital marketing.

Want to take a deeper look at what’s ahead for the digital marketing landscape? Dive into the Future of Marketing with Agentforce, or browse our upcoming events to learn how you can deliver exceptional customer experiences in the age of AI in marketing.

Looking to get ahead of the curve when it comes to your online marketing plan in 2025? Salesforce Marketing Cloud features a suite of tools to help you personalise every moment for customers at every stage of the lifecycle. Watch the demo today to learn how Salesforce can help your business grow.