The year is 1997. Bristol-Myers Squibb, a U.S. pharma company, is desperately trying to promote a drug called Excedrin. So they do what no one else has ever dared to do. They launch an online marketing campaign, deploy it in the vastness of the internet, and wait. And aha — it blows up, so much so that 30,000 people immediately sign up for their online customer list.
Of course, martech trends have evolved greatly since the “spray and pray” era. We now have human-like chatbots for lead generation, podcast tech that has listeners clinging onto your every ad, and a Metaverse that’s on the brink of becoming a marketer’s Mecca. At present, the martech possibilities for marketers are, quite frankly, limitless.
To take advantage of this situation and beat the competition, you must stay on top of future trends in martech. But before revealing which ones are worth their weight in gold, we’ll first look at the drivers behind the ongoing evolution in martech.
Key Drivers of Change in Martech Technology
Some of these martech drivers are nothing new. Others will seem completely novel. Either way, it’s important to familiarize yourself with all of them so you can make better sense of each martech trend — down to the minutest detail.
Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
Not too long ago, simple automation was the only evidence of AI in marketing. As we speak, highly advanced AI tools like natural language processing have become more than just nice-to-haves — they’re essential to most marketers’ customer engagement strategies.
The statistics have it. As of July 2024, 65% of CMOs were already using some form of generative AI for strategizing and content. That trend is bound to continue in 2025. Another study by AI at Wharton indicates that AI adoption across sales and marketing has more than doubled from a year ago. That’s the highest jump for any business function through that period.
As these AI innovations continue to mature, so does their impact on a variety of marketing use cases. We’ll soon witness an era where handling data en masse, assessing competitor campaigns, and crafting deeply personalized experiences will require near-zero human input.
The Role of Personalization
Marketers, it’s 2025, not 1995. That means customers expect highly personalized experiences across all touchpoints, not just where it benefits your martech strategy.
As marketing technologies evolve, brands will undoubtedly harness more sophisticated AI tools to serve content and offers that resonate with each consumer’s preferences, desires, and behavior. Powering this new wave of personalization is none other than first-party data.
Essentially, that’s data that’s been amassed directly from customers through interactions on websites, apps, and loyalty programs. Of course, there are some ethical and legal obligations to fulfill. But once you jump that hoop, it could be a treasure trove of deeply relevant information for crafting to-the-heart marketing campaigns.
Importance of Data Analytics
The era of harnessing and utilizing data manually and in an ad-hoc manner is firmly behind us. We’re already seeing evidence of that in the top AI advertising trends.
A prime example of data analytics done right is predictive analysis. This technology utilizes AI to sift through and assess patterns in customers’ historical data. The goal is to try and predict future buying patterns by looking through purchase history and online activity. Predicting these behaviors can help your brand keep its martech budget to a minimum by putting out messages only to the right audience, on the right platform, at the right time. AUDIENCEX’s own suite, AUDIENCEX Intelligence (AXi), has built-in predictive analytics, enabling marketers to build out segments with high conversion probability through custom audience modeling.
Beyond that, data analytics is proving to be an invaluable tool for:
- Compiling customer journeys
- Crafting targeted personalization
- Anticipating product or service demand
- Monitoring and evaluating campaign performance
- Creating new strategies, products, product features, and revenue streams
- Aligning product features and marketing campaigns with customer expectations
These use cases will certainly expand in complexity and volume as new data analytics platforms hit the market and the current ones evolve. It’s up to you to align yourself with a top-tier analytics suite or risk getting left in the dust.
Customer Data Unification
Not having a holistic view of customers is a marketer’s worst nightmare. This often happens when data is siloed across disparate platforms. The need for unification has never been more urgent when you consider just how fast customer data is growing in variety, volume, and complexity.
The unification of customer data has to be an all-platforms affair. We’re talking:
- Websites
- Mobile apps
- In-store interactions
- Social media
Marketer, say hello to customer data platforms (CDPs). CDPs excel at pulling together divergent data into one, all-action platform. Think of it as a way to get a comprehensive picture of your target consumer’s preferences, which you can use to craft highly relevant real-time content and messages.
Omnichannel Marketing Strategies Expansion
Another notable driver of the ongoing martech ecosystem evolution is omnichannel marketing. Its inherent strategies are expanding rather rapidly.
A few years ago, marketers perceived omnichannel marketing as a simple three-step process:
- A prospective buyer discovers the brand through a well-placed ad on social media.
- The prospect clicks on the ad and lands on the product’s page on the brand’s website moments later.
- The prospect then picks up their order in-store.
Sure, it’s a strategy that worked at some point, but its relevance is quickly fading. The next generation of marketing technologies will go above and beyond to incorporate quickly changing consumer preferences across messaging, platform choice, and ad placement.
Some of the newer omnichannel strategies include:
- Platform diversification that covers online marketplaces, review sites, and larger retailers.
- Versatile content marketing campaigns that include everything from video content to educational blog content.
- A deeper understanding of customers through first-party data and incisive analytics.
Generational Shifts in Technology
Step aside, Gen X and baby boomers. Gen Z and millennials have now taken your place as the most dominant consumer group. If a recent report by NielsenIQ is anything to go by, the global purchasing power for Gen Z is expected to reach a whopping $12 trillion by 2030.
These younger consumer groups have, for the most part, grown up experiencing tech at its best. When interacting with brands, they expect instant responses, seamless experiences, and high levels of personalization. Anything less is reason enough to ditch a brand.
The next generation of marketing stacks will need to meet these lofty expectations and exceed them. Why exceed them? Because Gen Zers are already reshaping marketing norms by favoring authentic, fun, richly interactive content such as TikTok videos. They’re already a step ahead. This shift will inevitably force marketers to rethink their marketing automation strategies in totality.
Evolving Customer Behavior and Expectations
Surely you don’t expect customers to have the same expectations and preferences they did a decade ago. That means you’ll have to give your marketing stack an overhaul and adopt newer technologies that better reflect what consumers prioritize now.
At this very moment, customers are all for:
- Instant gratification
- Complete, cross-platform transparency
- Quick, personalized interactions
- Experiences that feel natural and intuitive
- Highly responsive, round-the-clock support
Shoppable Videos and Social Commerce
Social commerce is the result when social media and commerce join up. Given the typical social media user spends a minimum of 2 hours and 23 minutes every day on social media, it makes perfect sense to explore this powerful intersection.
Platforms like TikTok are already experimenting with shoppable videos that allow users to swiftly purchase products directly through video content. The goal? To capitalize on a buyer’s interest right when it’s ignited, rather than waiting for later when it could be gone for good.
Upcoming Trends in Martech To Watch Out for in 2025
Now that you know what exactly is driving the current sweeping changes in martech, let’s get into the specific trends you should watch out for.
AI Chatbots
2025 will likely be the year marketers fully utilize AI chatbots outside of the customer service department. An area that could greatly benefit from chatbots’ quickly growing sophistication is lead generation. We’re on the cusp of bidding goodbye to manually qualifying and engaging leads.
The beauty of AI chatbots is that you can create and train one yourself. You lay down the rules and tell the bot exactly what to do in certain situations.
The benefits of AI chatbots for marketing include, but are not limited to:
- Collecting basic lead qualification details
- Instantly qualifying high-intent prospective buyers
- Cultivating and upselling users
Voice Search and Visual Search Capabilities
We’ve already witnessed these two making waves in the top trends in mobile advertising. So it was only a matter of time before the marketing space caught up.
When deadlines are fast approaching, it’s often too hectic for a marketer to manually launch instructions across their tech marketing stacks. Typing is simply too strenuous. Voice search takes the legwork out of making queries. The latest martech comes with voice-enabled assistants for more convenient feature search and activation.
Visual search works in a rather straightforward manner: You upload an image instead of running a text-based search. Then an AI-power recognition tool will do all the work, surfacing the exact insights you’re looking for.
Influencer Marketing Platforms
Forget about influencer marketing agencies for a moment. Influencer marketing platforms are the newest kid on the martech block, and they can do everything that agencies do — minus the hefty subscription charges.
However, not all influencer marketing platforms are worth investing in. Here’s a five-step capabilities criteria to help you arrive at the right fit:
- Pinpoint: Can it discover influencers based on preset user criteria?
- Communicate: How well can you utilize the platform to connect with influencers to discuss prospective partnerships?
- Engage: Is it capable of engaging an influencer for a no-pay initiative like crafting a blog post?
- Employ: How well can it engage an influencer for a paid initiative such as shooting content?
- Measure: Does it have a built-in ROI calculator that incorporates high-level analytics for gauging campaign performance?
The best martech solution for influencer marketing must check off the five capabilities, not just a few. That’s how you know it’s capable of helping you nail the right influencer for the right price and with zero logistical hassle.
Automated Ad Campaigns
Gone are the days when the future of advertising, and indeed marketing, looked bleak. We expect manual-driven ad campaigns to exit the stage in the coming months and pave the way for fully automated ones.
The upside of this new AI-powered form of advertising is that it’ll empower marketers to create and optimize ads on the fly. Rather than manually tweaking ad copy or adjusting targeting criteria, marketers can rely on predictive analytics to do all the heavy lifting on their behalf.
The top characteristics of automated ad campaigns that make them indispensable for savvy marketers include:
- Dynamic ad creation
- Real-time ad optimization
- Audience segmentation and targeting
- Cross-channel integration
- Top-tier reporting and analytics
- Conversion tracking and attribution modeling
Innovative Podcast Tech
As the podcast consumption market continues to grow exponentially, sophisticated podcast tech has become essential for targeting this rich and nuanced audience pool. As we speak, 134 million people in the U.S. listen to podcasts every month, representing 59.2% of the total digital audio listeners.
With that in mind, we’re likely to see more and more podcast hosting platforms come 2025, with integrated advanced analytics taking center stage. These go beyond basic download numbers to provide marketers with rich, actionable insights on listener behavior, audience engagement, and content performance.
Expect to see interactive podcasting tools with built-in polls and surveys too, as well as programmatic podcast advertising for ad placement optimization.
The Future of the Metaverse
The Metaverse is still in its infancy, but by the time 2025 picks up steam, it could be a significant portfolio for futuristic marketers.
Virtual reality and augmented reality are swiftly gaining traction outside of the Metaverse. Brands that are already acquainted with these capabilities will find immense value in joining the Metaverse, as they’ll be able to:
- Host events
- Create virtual stores
- Create gamified brand-centric experiences
- Formulate richly immersive 3D marketing environments
When you consider that the Metaverse has more than 600 million users globally, capitalizing on this platform ceases to be a matter of “if” and becomes “when?”
Big Data Analytics
Data is growing at a pace never seen before, and most of it is too big and complex to glean insights manually.
We predict a full bloom of big data analytics in the coming year. At the very least, these tools will enable marketers to uncover insights and forecast consumer trends faster and more accurately than a human ever could.
Better yet, newer big data tools will be more accessible and user-friendly than their predecessors. The very top ones will go a step further to incorporate generative AI to expedite the data-to-insights process.
Predictive Analytics
As we previously mentioned, predictive analytics removes the guesswork from behavior forecasting by tapping into existing customer historical data. In 2025, predictive analytics tools won’t just forecast customer actions and preferences — they’ll be used as a baseline for supercharging lead scoring and acquisition.
How will they pull this off? Simple: by prioritizing leads based on prior engagement and history, allowing marketing teams to only pursue high-potential prospects.
The Importance of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
CDPs, as we highlighted, are incredibly helpful when it comes to unifying and orchestrating customer data across touchpoints.
By 2025, we foresee CDPs acquiring an even higher stake in the martech ecosystem by bringing a higher level of sophistication to the game. They’ll integrate with other martech tools so marketers can improve targeting and create highly personalized experiences — no matter the complexity of buyer paths.
Blockchain Technology in Digital Advertising
At its core, blockchain technology utilizes an immutable, decentralized ledger to keep an unbreachable record of transactions. This level of transparency could be a game-changer for advertisers in 2025.
Blockchain tech can elevate how marketers track, verify, and qualify ad clicks and impressions. This way, they’re able to keep fraudulent activity, such as fake clicks or bot-generated views, at bay. You can then optimize your marketing efforts by sealing all the loopholes where your hard-earned funds might be falling through.
Challenges in the Evolving MarTech Landscape
The future of martech might be brimming with exciting opportunities, but it’s not all sunshine and roses. Here are a few challenges marketers might bump into and how you can steer clear of them.
Managing Digital and AI Maturity
As AI and automation become pivotal to marketing strategies, brands must ensure their teams are well-prepared to utilize these technologies effectively. There has to be a balance between tools, teams, strategy, execution, responsibility, and agility. It’s the only way they’ll thrive.
Balancing Personalization and Privacy
There are ever-stringent GDPR and CCPA data privacy regulations to follow, but the benefits of personalization are simply too promising to ignore.
The marketer that’ll succeed in 2025 is the one that’ll strike a formidable balance between these two extremes. And it starts with adopting transparent data practices and seeking consent.
Overcoming Data Integration Issues
As the number of data sources reaches an all-time high, brands will face the seemingly insurmountable task of integrating disparate data systems. In order to deliver a rich and unified customer experience, marketers must find a way to tear through siloed data and facilitate seamless integration between various platforms.
Discover a Cutting-Edge Marketing Advertising Platform
With AUDIENCEX’s enterprise-grade marketing advertising platform, navigating the hiccups of our ever-evolving industry becomes a whole lot easier. We’ve made sure of that by incorporating programmatic capabilities and seamless omnichannel media access into our suite. Add to that a highly responsive team, and you’ve got the dream advertising mix — tried, tested, future-proof, and ready to take budding brands to the next level of customer engagement.
The future is here. Let us help you conquer it, one martech trend at a time. Reach out today to find out more about our cutting-edge marketing suite.