4 Of The Biggest Marketing Challenges for 2025

It’s officially 2025, and as always, marketers are busy ringing in the new year by launching their 12-month strategies.

As we hustle to execute our tactics and campaigns, we have to be mindful of the new challenges we’ll undoubtedly face this year. The only constant when it comes to marketing is change, and sometimes that change can throw your strategy a curveball.

If you’re not expecting it, it can cause a big swing and miss, costing you budget, reputation and market share. But, if you can see the curveball coming, you can knock it out of the park.

That’s why we put together this list of the biggest challenges marketers can expect this year. Keep an eye out for these and you’ll make sure your 2025 strategy is a home run.

1. Determining how to capitalize on AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more than just a buzzword, it’s become an essential business tool. This is especially true for marketing.

Content creation, process automation and analytic reporting all can be scaled with AI, and its potential is nearly limitless.

Like any new technology, it needs to be applied thoughtfully and practically to your marketing strategy, balancing efficiency with quality to maintain your brand’s integrity and differentiating yourself from the competition.

The challenge presented by AI comes in the form of integrating it with your marketing strategy. Many marketers know they need to start using AI, but don’t know where to start.

Identify potential blind spots and weak points in your strategy, and think about ways that AI can strengthen them. You don’t want to “do AI” just to do it, it has to be used strategically to streamline your team’s process and impact performance.

Suggestions: For small businesses, AI can help streamline your social media strategy by helping craft organic posts. Larger companies can incorporate AI feedback into their content strategy to better appeal to your target audience.

2. Personalizing at scale

It’s 2025, we can do better than using someone’s first name in our e-blasts. People are exposed to so much advertising stimuli now that unless you’re able to personalize your brand’s experience, you’ll get lost in the noise.

Most marketers understand the importance of personalization, but it’s time intensive and cost prohibitive. That is, until now.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools allow us to segment our audience with meaningful demographic filters and leverage automation to scale personalized messages.

They offer a sophisticated way to tailor your message to your target audience based on the data you’ve collected.

In addition to email marketing, we can now customize communications such as social media posts, chatbots and widgets, videos and even landing pages.

It’s no longer “spray and pray”, now we can send specific groups of contacts content that resonates with their unique interests, needs, and pain points.

Suggestions: Sharpen your personalization by breaking your contacts down by important demographic data and craft content that appeals to their specific attributes. For B2B, this could be job title, company size or industry. For B2C, think about different messages for female vs. male, household income or location. Once you have these defined, leverage a CRM tool to distribute at scale to the platforms these audiences use most.

3. Proving ROI at a granular level

Calculating the Return On Investment (ROI) for marketing has historically been a pretty simple formula. Take your gross income and compare it against your marketing budget, and that percentage tells you how well your marketing strategy performed.

Marketers have always faced pressure to report on ROI, and for most, it’s still a blind spot due to how difficult it’s been to track it at a granular level that executives expect.

Last year, we made a breakthrough in ROI reporting at BroadBased and can now offer our clients detailed revenue tracking by specific marketing tactic.

By leveraging AI technology with our clients’ key lead tracking metrics like phone calls, form fills and chats through their websites, we can offer full visibility into the ROI funnel like never before.

Suggestions: Start pulling together lists of new customers that can be referenced against the leads in your CRM tool and call tracking software. These lists can be merged to find matches, which means that a lead can be confirmed as a customer.

4. Consistently producing video that focuses on unique insight

It’s no secret that video content has become integral to modern marketing strategies. Video helps establish your company as the subject matter expert in your space, showcase your brand’s personality, and serve as an introduction to your prospects before they ever meet you.

But similar to personalization, the challenge with video lies in how to scale it. Between scripting, production and editing, video can require a large time and budgetary commitment.

The good news is, video has become easier to incorporate into your marketing strategies for several reasons.

First, people’s expectations with regard to video production have changed. We no longer are put off by a webcam or mobile phone video. In some ways, this style of video can seem more authentic, and it’s considerably easier to produce vs. high-production video.

Secondly, modern video editing tools make editing material easier than ever, and can be automated to include new video clips into pre-formatted templates.

Finally, source material from video can be curated from the unique insight your company and team talk about every day wth customers and prospects. This is a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition because you can talk about specific problems you helped your actual customers solve.

Suggestions: Add a section for video into your marketing strategy’s content calendar so that it becomes part of your content process. When you have team meetings, survey the group on topics that would be valuable to your target audiences and develop video subjects from there.

These are the four main challenges we see in our crystal ball as we head into 2025, and there will undoubtedly be more to come. But best practices exist for a reason, and the most effective marketing strategies are flexible to handle the ebbs and flows that we’ll surely see.

If you’d like BroadBased to take a look at what you have planned for 2025, get in touch to schedule a complimentary consultation.