5 emerging Digital Marketing strategies for 2025

Digital marketing is one of the fastest moving and fastest growing professional fields, and there’s a pretty good reason for that: as soon as new digital technology exists, people will figure out a way to sell stuff with it. Or on it. Or through it. 

As such, digital marketers need to be on their toes and up-to-date with the latest advances in AI, LLMs, AR, VR and programmatic advertising. It’s not enough to be a savvy marketer anymore – you need to be tech savvy, too.  

Here are 5 emerging trends in digital marketing for 2025.  

1. AI-powered hyper personalisation 

Aggressive personalisation fuelled by oceans of consumer data was arguably the biggest shift in digital marketing over the last 15 years. AI is just super-charging that trend. With the latest AI marketing tools, digital marketers can now engineer real-time, highly customised customer experiences across platforms, from dynamic email campaigns to personalised TikTok content. This goes way beyond tailored product recommendations: natural language processing (NLP) chatbots are now commonplace, and a lot of brands are starting to dabble in dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) for ads that adapt content to the specific user. Interestingly though, one in three digital marketers still hasn’t embraced generative AI, or doesn’t use it regularly – expect that number to shrink over the next 12 months. As the saying goes: it won’t be a question of losing your job to AI, but rather losing your job to someone who understands AI better than you.  

2. Immersive AR and VR experiences  

From virtual fitting rooms for ecommerce stores to home décor previews for paint companies, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are really starting to shake-up product-based digital marketing. Especially when it comes to ecommerce customer journeys, event activations, and branded experiences. Like most digital tools, AR and VR are unlikely to replace your programmatic bread-and-butter, but they offer brands a unique opportunity to influence consumer behaviour. Combine this tech with hyper-personalised, AI-driven content, and you’ve got some serious conversion potential on your hands. If you’re looking to jump on this trend, consider hosting virtual events, showrooms, or product launches in a VR environment. You could also develop interactive AR campaigns on Instagram and TikTok to boost engagement and offer your customers a try-before-you-buy experience.  

3. Strategic integration on all cylinders  

This one obviously carries across tech, across platform, across industry, and it’s been true for a long time: marketing doesn’t mean much if it’s not 100% aligned and integrated with the wider business strategy. Before companies jump on the latest AI marketing trends, they need to think long and hard about stuff like: AI governance, specific use cases, ROI and key metrics for investment, and how to create a cohesive brand when every customer is getting served personal, AI-driven content. Even something as simple as creating an on-brand prompt library, to maintain consistent AI outputs from various marketing teams, is going to be crucial. Hyper-personalisation is all well and good, but the risk is that your brand becomes unfocussed and (ironically) generic.  

4. Voice search optimisation 

“Hey Siri, what’s the point in investing in great SEO and content optimisation if no-one can find me with voice search?” That’s a problem a lot of digital marketing teams are struggling with right now. With the rise of smart speakers and advanced image recognition, consumers increasingly rely on voice and visual search for shopping and discovering new content. And this trend isn’t going away. According to the latest stats, 51% of shoppers use voice search to research products, with 22% buying directly using voice technology, and another 17% using it for reordering items. If you’re not optimising for voice search, you’re not optimised. Full stop.  

Brands need to start implementing image search functionality on ecommerce sites, and (obviously) backing up their images with high-quality metadata. For voice search, make sure you’re optimising your web content with conversational keywords, and answering specific user queries through well-structured FAQs.  

5. Web3 and decentralised marketing  

Web3 technologies, like decentralized social media platforms and NFTs, are creating new opportunities for direct audience interaction and brand loyalty programs. And if you’re not playing in this space yet, your competitors probably are. That doesn’t mean you need to rush out and release your own branded NFTs, but you should probably start looking to hook some early adopters. If you’re not familiar with the term, "Web3", refers to the use of blockchain technology to create more user-controlled, transparent, and decentralized advertising platforms, where users have greater agency over their data and the ads they see. This often comes with the potential to earn rewards for engagement through crypto tokens, effectively removing the reliance on centralized intermediaries like Google and Facebook. Basically, it’s the next logical phase of the internet.  

If you want to dip your toe in this space, consider experimenting with Web3-based loyalty programs or rewards such as tokenized discounts. You could even go the other way, and offer transparency through blockchain-based supply chain tracking, or limited-edition digital goods.