Next Big Marketing Trends for 2025 and Beyond

What are the next biggest marketing trends right now?

Marketing in 2025 is being rewritten by three powerful forces: generative AI moving from hype to hard ROI, AI-powered search and assistants changing how people discover brands, and a privacy-driven shift toward first-party data and trusted relationships . Around them, the creator economy, short-form video, and new safety expectations are reshaping how marketers actually show up in people’s lives.

In plain terms, the next wave of marketing is less about new channels and more about how people experience your brand: personalized but not creepy, fast but still human, helpful in search and chat answers, and clearly respectful of their data. The marketers who win this decade will be the ones who treat AI as a co‑pilot, invest in creators and communities, and design every touchpoint for a world where algorithms summarize, filter, and often speak on their behalf.

Big picture: AI is becoming the default layer of marketing, but trust, privacy, and human creativity are what will actually differentiate brands.

How is generative AI really changing marketing (beyond the hype)?

Over the past two years, generative AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Gartner forecasts that global spending on generative AI will hit about $644 billion in 2025, up more than 70% from 2024 , as companies embed it into products, workflows, and customer experiences.

In marketing departments, that shift is already visible. A survey from SAS and Coleman Parkes found that over 80% of marketers are actively using generative AI tools, with more than 90% of CMOs reporting a clear return on investment from their use in personalization, content creation, and campaign optimization.

Yet this is not a simple success story. Gartner expects that roughly 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025 because of poor data, weak risk controls, rising costs, or unclear business value. Other research shows that many companies now scrap almost half of their AI proofs of concept before they ever reach production.

The next big trend, then, is not just “more AI.” It is operationalized, accountable AI in marketing that is tied to specific customer journeys and revenue outcomes. High performing teams are already using generative AI to test hundreds of creative variations, rewrite web pages for different segments, and generate predictive audiences, while also putting guardrails in place for brand voice, legal risk, and data governance.

Best practice: Treat GenAI as a co‑pilot with guardrails—start with clear use cases, measure ROI, and bake in brand and compliance rules from day one.

How will AI search and assistants change SEO and content strategy?

Search is quietly going through its biggest change since the arrival of mobile. Generative AI assistants are being woven into traditional search and into standalone chat interfaces, which means people increasingly ask questions in natural language and expect a synthesized answer, not a list of links.

Gartner predicts that conversational assistants and generative AI will start to replace parts of traditional search and force both paid and organic tactics to evolve . Marketing leaders are being urged to invest in content that can feed AI summaries, not just rank in blue links, and to adapt as search algorithms favor depth, authority, and clear answers over keyword stuffing.

In practice, this means the next big content trend is answer‑engine optimization . Brands are restructuring articles around clear questions and concise answers, adding schema markup, and building topic clusters that help both search engines and AI models understand context. Instead of chasing dozens of shallow posts, leading teams are publishing fewer, deeper resources designed to be quoted and summarized by AI tools.

At the same time, AI assistants are arriving inside mobile apps, customer portals, and even cars. Gartner expects CMOs to build AI experimentation directly into their mobile roadmaps, which will matter for search too, because users will ask their favorite assistant instead of typing into a browser. The brands that win in this world will make their content easy for assistants to pull in, and will track visibility inside these emerging environments, not only in traditional search console dashboards.

Key insight: The fight for the top organic position is becoming a fight to be the trusted source inside AI-generated answers.

Why are privacy, trust, and AI safety becoming core marketing strategies?

While AI expands marketers’ reach, it also raises the stakes on privacy and safety. Consumers are more aware than ever that their data fuels personalization, and they are increasingly willing to walk away from brands that are careless with it.

Regulators are moving in the same direction. Recent Gartner research found that 61% of U.S. citizens rate secure data handling as “extremely important” for government digital services , a signal of how central data security has become to trust in any digital experience, public or private. For marketers, this is accelerating the shift away from third‑party cookies and opaque tracking toward first‑party data, value exchanges, and explicit consent.

At the same time, AI is being weaponized. A 2025 report cited by TechRadar noted that 62% of organizations have encountered AI-driven attacks in the past year, with deepfake audio and video among the most common . That reality is forcing brands to think about verification, watermarking, and clear disclosure when content is AI generated.

The next big trend here is trust‑first marketing . CMOs are moving privacy messages from the fine print into the brand story, showing how they protect customer data and where AI is being used. They are also building governance for AI outputs, from review workflows to ethical guidelines, because a single careless chatbot reply, fake endorsement, or hallucinated legal claim can damage a reputation overnight.

Caution: As AI-generated content floods feeds, brands that cannot prove authenticity and protect data will struggle to hold attention and loyalty.

How are creators, communities, and video content evolving as growth engines?

Even as AI automates more of the back end, the front end of marketing is becoming more human and more visual. The creator economy continues to grow, and brands are increasingly moving budget from broad influencer blasts to long‑term partnerships, co‑created products, and community‑driven storytelling.

Video is at the center of that shift. HubSpot’s 2024 video marketing report found that 73% of marketers say video helps them reach overall business goals, and 83% are using short‑form video formats like Reels and TikTok. Short clips also deliver the highest ROI and lead generation performance among video formats in the survey.

Generative AI is amplifying this trend rather than replacing it. In the same HubSpot research, marketers cited short‑form video as the top content type where generative AI tools are most helpful, especially for scripting, clipping, and repurposing content across channels. That means a single live conversation, webinar, or podcast can now spawn a week’s worth of platform‑native posts, each tuned to a specific audience.

The deeper trend is that brands are turning customers and employees into creators. Instead of polished, one‑way campaigns, we are seeing lo‑fi behind‑the‑scenes clips, employee‑hosted explainers, and customer stories filmed on phones but distributed at enterprise scale. AI handles the editing, subtitles, and channel formatting. The human voice is what makes it worth watching.

Best practice: Combine creators with AI. Let humans own the ideas and on‑camera presence, and use AI to scale production, testing, and localization.

What should marketers actually do next?

Taken together, these trends point to a simple but demanding mandate. Marketers need to become fluent in AI while doubling down on what only humans can do: insight, story, and trust.

Over the next one to three years, the most successful teams will be those that align AI investments tightly with customer outcomes, rebuild content and SEO for an answer‑driven world, and treat privacy and authenticity as core parts of their value proposition . They will also recognize that creators and communities are not just media channels but partners in shaping the brand.

If there is a single through‑line to the next biggest marketing trends, it is this: technology will keep evolving at a dizzying pace, but competitive advantage will come from how thoughtfully you combine that technology with human judgment. The tools will be widely available. The way you choose to use them will not.

Key takeaway: In 2025 and beyond, the edge belongs to marketers who are both AI‑literate and deeply human‑centered.