Digital Marketing
7 min

Mission 2025: Tactics and Trends for Marketing Breakthroughs

Grayson Gilcrease Grayson Gilcrease Senior Content Writer

The landscape of brand marketing is undergoing a seismic shift. Gone are the days when brands could dictate the narrative from the top down, relying solely on flashy campaigns or bold ideas to capture consumer attention. Instead, today’s brands need to craft authentic connections with their audiences and foster long-term loyalty, not just short-term recognition.

From the rise of personalization to the growing dominance of social commerce and predictive AI, marketers must adapt to an evolving environment where personalization and data-driven strategies are key.

To understand the major trends shaping the future of brand marketing in 2025, Tommy John’s Consulting Chief Marketing Officer Jann Parish, Thrive Causemetics’ VP of Performance Marketing Claire Perez, and Wpromote’s VP of Strategic Innovation Christine Schrader got together to share their predictions.

We’re diving into the strategies that will define the next era of marketing so you’re ready for whatever comes your way this year.

Brand marketing will shift toward more personalized awareness tactics

Today’s consumers crave personalization and authenticity, which is likely why WARC found that nearly 73% of marketers are planning to increase their investment in brand ambassadors. It isn’t enough to reach your target audience with your creative and messaging; if you want to succeed in the long term, you need to create an authentic connection.

In the past, brands pitched ideas the way Don Draper did in Mad Men: coming up with a campaign in a silo and sending it out to consumers. If the company liked the messaging, it was good enough. But that’s no longer the case. According to Claire Perez, “You have to think carefully about how you message and interact with people.”

Rather than just broadcasting a message far and wide, you need to be mindful of how and where you’re showing up. To maximize your impact, you have to understand the context: what your target audience is already doing in the channel that you’re saying “hello” in.

If you’re shoehorning your message into a channel without considering why your audience is there in the first place, you won’t be able to adjust your message to fit the tone of their feed. That means campaigns that fall flat, wasting your time and money.

To win in 2025, it will be key to find the right mix of brand-building and performance marketing so you can be a meaningful part of the conversation, whether that’s working with brand ambassadors who already have access to your ideal audience or getting to know your customers on a more personal level. 

Shoppable video and social commerce will boom

Once you’ve introduced yourself to your audience, it’s time to dive deeper into how they make purchasing decisions. Are they going to your site? Are they clicking through an ad? Did they find you on social?

Because the customer journey and how people shop are constantly changing, new ways of buying like social commerce will gain ground in 2025. Statista even forecasts that social commerce revenues will surpass $1 trillion USD by 2028.

This is a major opportunity for marketers since the growth of social commerce and the rise of personalization in brand marketing can go hand in hand. Leveraged the right way, these tactics can create a powerful flywheel for brands.

Focus on building a strong connection to your audience through social strategies like engaging brand ambassadors and tailored messaging to create the personal touch customers crave, right on the platforms where they’re already buying.

Within social commerce, shoppable video content is another rising force brands can take advantage of. Done right, shoppable video is a seamless experience that makes it easy for people to go from watching to buying in just a few clicks, regardless of the platform they’re on.

Think of it as the new late-night TV infomercial; customers can impulse buy products right from the couch or bed they’re watching from. But don’t count this tool out for longer-term connections either–if the customer is satisfied, they just might come back for more.

Brands will look to omnichannel experiences to reach more customers

The social commerce trend coupled with a return to brick-and-mortar stores and the rise of retail media gives consumers more options than ever in all aspects of the shopping journey. 

For younger generations, Brooks Bell found that the distinction between online and offline shopping is blurred, making an omnichannel strategy the key to giving your customers a seamless experience. Depending on your distribution, your consumers might have a wide range of places where they can purchase your products.

So what’s going to get them to purchase directly from your site? For Jann Parish, it’s all about loyalty and making sure that the experience on your retail site is “something special” for the consumer. 

To engage today’s customers, you also need to be investing across channels. Christine Schrader said, “It’s not just looking at investment in a silo, because that can end up pitting channels against each other.”

When different channels are fighting for budget, attention, and recognition (not to mention every team wanting to attribute success to their specific channel), nobody wins. You need to look at how your data is organized so you can gather crucial insights across the different platforms and ensure you’re putting your budget into the most impactful places.

Remember, a brand activation is just that first big hello. You can then use media and learnings from that activation for retargeting, so you can pop back into people’s heads. The brand marketing journey is multi-faceted; if you’re not taking advantage of all the available channels, you’re missing out on meeting your audience where they are.

GenAI will unlock the potential of predictive AI

This wouldn’t be a blog about 2025 marketing predictions if we didn’t mention AI. While most marketers and advertisers have been focused on the power of gen AI, our experts predict that the real growth is going to come from combining genAI with predictive AI.

Jann Parish reminds us that “AI is not here to create brand tone and manner.” For that, you need people–no question. But AI can help you iterate against your branding to make sure that it’s landing effectively in your media choices. 

Not only can gen AI help ideate for your creative and messaging, but it can also help improve the accuracy of predictive AI models by incorporating unstructured data and generating synthetic data so you can simulate business scenarios

Regardless of how accurate a predictive model becomes, you can’t forget about human oversight, or you risk making costly mistakes that turn customers off.

Intrigued by our 2025 predictions? Check out the full on-demand webinar for a deeper dive on these trends and more.

Digital Marketing Strategy Trends

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