Struggling with your marketing strategy? You’re not alone. Here’s some things to think about in 2025

According to HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing, 82% of marketers felt their marketing strategies were effective in 2024. That begs the question as to whether they will continue with the same strategies and programs going forward? There will be overlap, but there’s always something new to think about.
So, what are marketers focused on this year? Of course, AI is playing a key role, but it’s not everything. According to HubSpot SVP Marketing, Kieran Flanagan, marketers need to scale attention instead of traffic. He believes the science of marketing will be automated by AI, giving marketers more time to focus on craft.
Making the case for AI
Flanagan’s comment explains three of the top five marketing strategies for 2025:
- Use AI to turn text into multi-modal campaigns
- Use AI-powered reporting tools to evaluate the ROI of campaigns.
- Use AI to automate marketing strategy and execution.
These are not brand-new strategies. Marketers spent a good part of 2024 trying to understand how AI can help them improve their strategies, including finding the right audiences and how to reach them best, how to scale content creation, and how to scale marketing campaigns and programs.
If 2024 was about experimenting for the sake of experimenting, this year must be about putting actionable plans into place and actively testing and adapting to find the best way to leverage AI. The HubSpot study found that 54% of marketers feel overwhelmed by the prospect of implementing AI tools into their processes and workflows.
The answer to this feeling is not to provide them with a clear path forward. That path is going to be different for every company. The answer lies in giving marketers the tools and training they need to figure things out for themselves and providing the room to create experiments that map to business objectives. These experiments must include well-defined goals, strategies to monitor and adapt, training for the entire team, and continuous measurement.
For example, if a marketing team’s biggest challenge is activating enough campaigns or programs, look at AI agents to help automate certain marketing activities. If their biggest challenge is understanding their audience or ICP and the customer journey, then use AI to help identify key audiences and map their journey.
There are many ways marketing can use AI to advance their work, but doing everything at once could cause more problems than delivering effective solutions. Roadmaps aren’t just for technology implementations.
How content will help marketers succeed in the attention economy
The last two top 2025 marketing strategies relate to content and are:
- Create content that reflects brand values.
- Create more personality-led content, including working with creators and generating authentic engagement.
We continue to live in an attention economy, and it’s getting harder and harder to capture the attention of our audiences. This is mainly because everyone sounds the same. By sounding the same, I mean not only what they are saying but also how they are saying it—the advice, the information, the format of the content. Standing out is incredibly difficult.
What’s the answer? Some say it will be creating more short-form video content, others engaging creators or influencers to help promote products and services (with a lean towards micro and nano influencers), and others say it’s time to get that podcast off the ground.
In B2B marketing, LinkedIn has become the place to be if you want to reach B2B audiences. But it’s become overrun with posts from people who want to tell you how to do things the “right way.” And it’s getting tiring. Marketers are also looking to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram (for short-form videos), but again, breaking through will not be easy.
What makes a brand stand apart from its competitors? Do they have a brand story that is really all that different? We talk about brand storytelling as if every brand has something fresh and new to say. All they have to do is say it, and people will pay attention. But take a look at the websites of a set of brands that sell the same product. Check out their social media – organic and paid. Can you tell what sets them apart? What their brand story is?
I bet you can’t. Because marketers are stuck. They haven’t figured out what makes them stand out. They don’t have brand values or a brand story that’s all that different from their competitors, at least not a story that will draw in their audience or ICP.
Or marketing is disjointed from the rest of management, and while they understand the product or service they are marketing, they don’t fully understand why it was created and what problems it was built to solve. This happens with small and large brands, but it’s even truer for mid-to-large brands, with more layers between marketing and the CEO.
Does using influencers or creators help alleviate these challenges? It doesn’t. Just because a popular LinkedIn-focused creator pitches your product in a lively video-sponsored post doesn’t mean you’ve figured out storytelling.
All this to say, brand storytelling is hard. Really hard.
My take
My, how things shift so fast. Wasn’t it just yesterday we were telling marketers they needed to get more analytical and smarter with data? So marketers started learning data analytics, journey orchestration, and using data to determine how to engage customers. Now, we’re telling them to let AI do it so they can focus on being more creative.
The truth is that marketers have to be able to do both. Yes, they can leverage AI to help them, but they should not rely on it to the point that they can’t understand it without AI. Think about what Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio, said about developers and AI:
The second thing that I advise computer science students asking me similar questions is you need to learn the basics without AI. You need to learn how to be a software developer before you earn the right to use an AI tool because you need to be able to look into the code. You need to be able to look into the product that you have generated and know if it’s good or not.
Marketers need to take the same advice. They need to know how to do the work without the AI to know if it’s delivering the right results when it does it for them.
As for content creation and making the brand stand out, there are several things to look at, and I’ll do that in upcoming pieces, so stay tuned.
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