Martech in 2025

What will be the emerging martech trends in 2025?

You’d be hard pushed to find a 2025 predictions article that doesn’t mention AI, especially for marketing and martech. AI will of course continue to be a key trend in 2025. Everyone wants to be involved in its use, but marketers are now focusing on how to use it – therefore, we’ll begin to see more concrete use cases. Equally, expect to see some of the AI hype die down – the initial wave has passed, a period of disillusionment is occurring, and AI will now become more mainstream in different forms.

But it’s not the only trend to watch out for. The tough economic landscape is driving marketers to rethink how they can best optimise their tools and campaigns, while technology providers have reacted to this with new B2B platforms and offerings this year, the results of which are likely to be felt in 2025.

What will these martech trends look like in 2025? And what will be their impact on marketers?

A focus on optimising tech and measuring ROI

With unrest in multiple global markets, marketing budgets are being squeezed tighter around the world. Consequently, marketers will be looking to optimise their existing technologies; this optimisation will include gaining leverage with new features and balancing technology expenditure with gains in results for improved and more personalised communication, leading to the relevant expected increase in revenue.

ROI is and will continue to be a key theme for marketers. Now, it’s a case of being more strategic with martech and looking at ways to justify its integration or maintenance – for example, using a flexible pricing model with an outsourcer rather than going for a fixed retainer.

In building the case for martech and proving its value, measuring its effectiveness in helping marketers with their work and how it contributes to revenue will be crucial – and not only for its impact on marketing. Marketers are now looking at its integration with other teams such as sales and client services to join up the dots and report more accurately.

The year of CDPs and personalisation

2025 is also set to be a big year for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), especially in the B2B space. Heading into next year, we’re seeing a trend for more requests for assisting on CDP implementations and optimisation projects. Many organisations have invested in CDPs already, but are looking at better and more advanced tools now available in the market. Or, they have been investigating the feasibility for implementing a CDP.

This highlights a wider trend of companies and marketers focusing on data and personalisation, especially with changes around third party cookies. Essentially, good quality and accurate data helps marketers to do better marketing and personalise campaigns. This is a well-known fact. But achieving this depends on having an effective and value-adding CDP that standardises all of the sources of marketing contact, account and opportunity data into one place.

New B2B tech and a major comeback

The rise of Adobe’s new B2B technology offerings in 2024 will be felt across martech in 2025, namely with Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform B2B Edition. B2B organisations can finally access purpose-built tools and will be eager to catch up with B2C technologies, which tend to be stronger for journey orchestration and unification across multi-channel for omnichannel personalisation.

Moreover, Microsoft is looking likely to make a comeback in 2025. It has been pushed down the ranks over the last decade in martech, almost barely competing with Adobe, Salesforce or HubSpot. But its recent efforts in improving the customer experience in its platform – and linking its CDP product with its marketing automation product (MAP) – means that it has a compelling product lineup that almost works seamlessly with its CRM product. We’re seeing an upward trend in incoming requests for support on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (its CDP), which now includes Dynamics 365 Marketing (its MAP), and I see that trend continuing into 2025.

AI to take hold across mainstream platforms

2025 is set to be the year AI takes hold across mainstream platforms, especially for B2B organisations. AI is now embedded into all vendor technology at multiple levels. So, to choose who to partner with, marketers should be on the lookout for new and growing technology vendors in the AI space which are offering close integrations with their existing technologies and providing ‘leapfrogging’ campaign execution against fellow competitors.

Trust has been a major blocker for most large organisations with AI adoption. But as the understanding of how the big vendors are protecting enterprise data grows, we will see larger organisations taking up native AI functionality and looking to bring these into their content workflows for the creation of text, images and video. Equally, the adoption of automated translations and version iterations has great potential to grab the attention of marketing teams wishing to achieve more with less budget.

2024 was the year of AI theory and education. In 2025, organisations should be shifting past the procurement of new AI technology and into its implementation.

More for less in 2025

Emerging from all the hype, AI will continue to play a key role in 2025; organisations are starting to understand how it can be applied to deliver value and all marketing vendors are embedding it into their technology. But in the B2B space especially, a combination of tighter budgets, a need for new customer data sources and a range of new B2B offerings by Adobe and the return of Microsoft will see the rise of CDPs and a closer alignment between B2B and B2C marketing strategies.

This will all fall under a ‘more for less’ strategy taken by marketers to optimise their existing martech and prove its ROI, not just for their department but across their organisation. As ever, new martech trends will surface next year, but these evolutions in strategy and tools in 2024 make these core areas for marketers to keep tabs on in 2025.