The State of Marketing in 2025

The pace of marketing innovation has exploded in the past three years, but not without friction from the public and businesses alike. Whether you enjoy artificial intelligence or not, it is here to stay. The value it provides, while simultaneously burning through resources at an unprecedented rate, is too valuable for businesses to pass up. The markets are defined by speed, automation, and data driven strategies, which are the pain points AI solves best. AI and tech advancements are reshaping how content is created, delivered, and even optimized. However, trust and authenticity will always remain central to effective marketing/ Small and mid-sized businesses are both facing an intimidating amount of opportunity in adapting. This is the state of marketing in 2025.

Routine segments of marketing, like content generation, design assistance, and customer segmentation are commonplace in artificial intelligence agents. The utility and integration of AI has been sort of an arms race in the business sector. It seems like every company has integrated AI into their website or workflow. Tools like ChatGPT, Sora, Midjourney, and DeepSeek are reducing production costs by automating mundane workflow tasks commonly done by humans.

Data analysis is a big one for companies, they seem to be offsetting work in that sector to almost exclusively AI agents to improve personalized emails, content campaigns, and outreach efforts. Still, human oversight remains necessary, AI has not quite grasped nuance, relevance, and tone. Even ChatGPT’s newest product, Agents, is recommended to be integrated slowly at first in more statistical areas of a business’ workflow. 2025 has brought many changes, but marketing is rapidly evolving with new AI tools being released every day.

New platforms are driving marketing execution

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are constantly being integrated with AI from email creation to lead scoring. Tools that help you link to and post from your social media accounts are pooping up every day in app stores. Data dashboards have also been improved wildly over the last few years. AI has even begun A/B testing campaigns and can focus on conversion optimization, and many platforms are rapidly adopting these AI tools in 2025.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also being overrun with newly released AI agents that can automatically optimize your blogs, metadata, alt-text behind images, and even the titles of your web pages. This lack of manual work from humans is returning a large return on investment, but Google is starting to punish websites that use AI generated content. A field most thought was untouchable by AI, video production, is having a revolution with cloud editing and scripting assistants. Closed captioning has never been easier thanks to AI in 2025.

Humans are still required for, well, human activities. Connection, credibility, context, and character all play a role in sales and marketing. AI hasn’t developed a personality yet, so it struggles with long, nuanced phone calls or emails. While AI may be locked to a computer, and it can do a world of things there, it cannot physically hand out a flyer. AI cannot give someone their business card at a trade show. AI cannot staple a poster to a cork board at a grunge rock theater. Forget even the physical manifestations like posters and brochures, AI cannot joke around about a local sports team, it can’t talk about game plans for a weekend beer festival with other enthusiasts. There are physical limits to AI, and the humanity of marketing will always remain to some extent.

Other things artificial intelligence fails at is influencer marketing. There have been some incredible advancements in generative video, but the public has created a huge resistance to AI generated influencers on TikTok, YouTube, and Meta applications. Strategy and editing can be enhanced by AI, but it has yet to replace that human element. We recommend learning more about the “uncanny valley” and how humans find human-like entities more off-putting than clearly inhuman ones. Basically, mechanical robots are easy to spot, and we accept that they are robots, but androids that are almost human freak us out.

Technology is powerful, but it will not replace the whole marketing process. Small teams can compete more efficiently by embracing AI tools, but it will not replace human interaction completely. Using core messaging, story, customer service, and brand consistency will still be managed by humans. The smartest strategies blend automation with human-centered touchpoints.

Marketing agencies will need to manage this balance of AI-powered automation and a human face to their strategies. As a business, partnering with agencies or consultants can help balance efficiency and authenticity with your marketing strategies. Humans are still the most important facet to marketing.

Marketing in 2025 is going to be a blend of human and artificial intelligence, there is no escaping the return on investment currently. AI and automation will continue to advance, but consumers will remain aware to all artificially created posts, pictures, videos, and content. Creativity, empathy, and relationship-building will always remain an irreplicable human asset. Moving forward, the best marketing strategies will be built on clarity, adaptability, genuine connection, and humanity.

If you have any questions on implementing AI into your business or marketing agency, you can always reach out to us here at Acclaim. We are always excited to talk about the newest up and coming tools being developed in the world of artificial intelligence.