Hot or Not? Marketing Trends for 2025 Stress Tested – Trend #5: Continued focus and investment in ‘digital optimisation’

Are the marketing trends that everyone is talking about all they’re cracked up to be?  We’ve stress tested them to see if you should be following them, or doing things a different way in 2025.  In this series we look at the top five marketing trends – read on for Trend #5 and then visit our Food For Thought page for the rest of the series.

Trend 5: Continued focus and investment in ‘digital optimisation’

The focus on maximising return on investment through increasingly granular ‘digital optimisation’ will continue, as brands prioritise immediate returns and efficiencies over longer term brand building.

Stress-test result: Focus on the bigger picture and avoid getting lost in the weeds of optimisation

Our research report ‘Marketing Vulnerabilities in Tech and IP-led Companies’ found that businesses are prioritising immediate or short term returns over long-term sustainability—even when their marketing is led by a senior marketer.

This isn’t necessarily surprising when you consider that nearly 70% of ad spending is allocated to digital advertising, which is typically a bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) play intended to generate leads or sales.

This focus on BoFu channels, and continuously maximising ROI, is driving the wider emphasis on ‘digital optimisation’.

Of course, all businesses want to generate more revenue from their marketing efforts, but for smaller scale-up businesses there’s a danger you disappear into the weeds and forget to look at the bigger picture—do people know what you actually stand for as a brand?

BoFu digital channels can represent a quick route to market, but if it’s easy for your business to take advantage of, the same is true for your competitors.

The key thing to consider is that if everyone has the same route to market, it’s going to be difficult to create salience and stand out to your target market.

The temptation to prioritise digital advertising platforms can be strong, particularly if there’s pressure on senior marketers to deliver against growth goals.  But marketing teams and brands alike should remain open-minded, and dedicate time to finding new ways to reach audiences. This often requires a proper understanding of marketing return and risk versus reward, as well as having the right agency partners or marketers in-house to tap into opportunity.

“Hooking all of your activity back to a strong creative platform to set your brand apart—make your digital assets work harder, so they’re delivering to build your brand as well as revenue.” – Lisa Wood

The best attention-grabbing media is not necessarily digital, so you should be making a case for non-digital media as part of the marketing mix.

Related to this point is what Jade Tambini refers to as the ‘marketing task wheel’, an endless loop of disconnected tasks that are driven by the demands of senior stakeholders. As marketers, we’re often under pressure to ‘do more’, whether that’s daily optimisation tweaks to digital ads, posting to social media or sending out more marketing emails.  However, at the Technology for Marketing 2024 conference one of the key themes was that ‘less is often more’. Instead of getting stuck on the marketing task wheel, we should be simplifying strategies and focusing on key objectives that are aligned with business goals.

Prioritising quality of work, rather than increasing the quantity of tasks, alongside targeting key channels, will deliver more sustainable results, particularly in the B2B market.

Key takeaways

1. Brands are prioritising short term results over long-term sustainability, but they’re losing sight of the bigger picture as a result.

2. It’s hard to stand out from your competitors when everyone has the same route to market.

3. Stay open-minded to leveraging non-digital channels as part of your marketing mix.

4. Avoid getting stuck on the ‘marketing task wheel’ because of pressure from senior stakeholders.