It’s the end of the year, which means it’s budget season for most businesses, and right on schedule, the think pieces are popping up about marketing budgets in 2025.

We recently read this report from the folks at NP Digital, a global digital marketing agency, who surveyed 11,093 marketers about their 2025 marketing budgets. If you love charts and nitty-gritty numbers, check out the detailed report. We want to talk about what we found most interesting among the data: as our world becomes increasingly digital, marketers are prioritizing targeted, genuine connections in their 2025 marketing budgets. 

What do we mean by that? Throughout the report, themes emerged from the tactics those surveyed planned to increase their investment in or keep it the same. Marketers want to increase targeted communication like emails and targeted ads. They also want to ramp up helpful, informational, and entertaining content, a long-term tactic to build relationships and grow brand affinity. Finally, they want to focus on customers they already have because those customers can provide better bang for your buck in terms of repeat purchases and referrals. 

So, when analyzing what you plan to spend on marketing in 2025, we encourage you to ask yourself, “Am I just blanketing my city with marketing, or am I creating genuine connections?” Here’s how you can do that, with results from the survey:

Despite Potential Shakeups In Search, Marketers Still Believe In Delivering The Right Search Results, To the Right People 

Even though the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google is looming, marketers still believe in the fundamentals of SEO and its impact on business. 44 percent of those surveyed plan to increase their traditional SEO budgets next year, while 97 percent plan to invest in SEO efforts for new AI services like Search GPT. If you aren’t caught up on the new frontier for search, check out our blog post on the topic. 

This emphasis on SEO shows us as marketers that we’re still in the business of delivering helpful information to potential customers who need it when they need it. Think about how much more interested your gym customers would be if they searched for and found a list on your website of the “five best exercises for stability and mobility” instead of simply running across an ad for your gym in a magazine. That’s what SEO is all about, and it’s related to the next point!

Content Is Still King, Although Legacy Organic Social Is No Longer The Crown Jewel

As the avenues for customers to consume content multiply, 63 percent of the surveyed marketers said they planned to increase their content marketing budgets, and another 33 percent said they would keep it the same. That doesn’t leave many who plan to reduce their budget, but one interesting note is that the same folks largely said they planned to decrease their organic social media budgets (58 percent). How can these two ideas exist at the same time? Simply, newer, shinier content channels have their attention. For example, podcasting continues to dominate content marketing budgets, as does video creation. We suspect that those who answered they planned to decrease their organic social media budgets were thinking about legacy platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X, rather than newer, video-focused platforms like TikTok. It is worth noting that 42 percent of marketers planned to increase their organic social media budgets or keep them the same, showing that organic social is still table stakes in business marketing. So, don’t ignore it next year.

While legacy social media is still table stakes, those apps are more about mass communication than newer content platforms, where the riches are in the niches. People love the personalized feeling that comes from playing in their niched-down, algorithm-driven content playgrounds which is probably why attention is turning that way.

Before You Shout It From The Rooftops, Make Sure You Share It In An Email

Most marketers surveyed plan to keep their email marketing budgets the same in 2025, specifically 59 percent. And when asked why, the answer was simply because their email marketing was working! In addition, the 28 percent who said they planned to increase their budgets cited the constant algorithm changes in platforms like social and search for their reason to invest more heavily in the humble, stalwart email. In case you were doing the fast math, yes, that does leave 13 percent who did want to decrease their email marketing budgets, but they explained that they were simply planning to save some money by switching to a more affordable email marketing platform or cleaning their email lists. 

There’s no doubt in marketers’ minds that email marketing is one of the sharpest tools in their toolbelt, and it perfectly fits the theme of personal connection. We love email marketing because it’s a way to send personalized communication directly to a customer. And by personalized, we don’t just mean “Hi FIRST NAME HERE.” We mean emails with new products that match past purchase history or deals that you know they’ll like. We mean abandon cart reminders with that thing they almost purchased. We mean sharing your business news with customers, to make them feel like a friend. In fact, do your email list a solid and share your news with them first, before you share it with the masses. It takes a lot to opt into an email list and you should reward them for that.

New Gen’s Paid Advertising Is Targeted, Not Universal

It may come as no surprise that most of the marketers surveyed said they planned to increase or keep their paid digital advertising budgets largely the same. After all, digital paid advertising is one of our easiest levers to pull with direct ties to ROI, so it’s a great performance marketing tactic. Similarly, we were unsurprised that these marketers planned to decrease their budgets in traditional paid advertising like cable TV, radio, print, and billboards. Traditional paid avenues are much larger lifts and exist more in the “spray and pray” space than the more satisfying, targeted methods of paid digital advertising.  

However, the generational shift to paid digital advertising has nuances. For example, money is moving away from cable TV commercials to streaming, which to most people is synonymous nowadays. And while radio and podcasts aren’t necessarily synonymous, they are at their core the same thing, and podcast ads are the second-largest growth area according to the survey. Also, Google ads are becoming expensive, so smaller businesses may get priced out of those over time. Finally, social media platforms are volatile, so while you may be increasing or keeping your ad spend the same in some of them, be prepared to switch gears if the landscape changes. Plus, there’s the variable of influencer ads, which people tend to trust more than traditional ads in their feeds.

No matter which paid path you choose, don’t forget to tailor your message to the platform, the podcast genre, the social media behavior, or the search terms, to name a few ways you can deliver something specific. A personalized ad is much more likely to catch someone’s eye and create a connection with your business than the same tagline across all media.

Marketers Are Seeking ROI In Customer Retention

We’re particularly encouraged by three areas of spending mentioned in the survey: conversion optimization/user experience, remarketing, and community building. As customer loyalty and retention is one of our favorite marketing talking points, you could see how we’d get excited over the fact that in a pool of more than 11,000 marketers, the overwhelming majority said they were investing in these areas, with 59 percent, 89 percent, and 81 percent respectively. 

Investing in optimization and improving ROI is a great way to combat the rising costs of paid tactics you’re also employing. Simply put, if you better optimize your site and focus on the paid tactics with the best ROI, you can get the best bang for your buck. Similarly, remarketing ads take customers who have already interacted with you and feed ads back to them, which is far more effective than constantly trying to get the attention of strangers. 

The last area—community building—is a little more difficult to connect back to ROI, but it’s important to the long-term health of your business nonetheless. Community building includes staying in touch with customers through all sorts of channels, increasing customer loyalty, and leading to repeat purchases. These marketers specifically said they believed in-person community-building events were “back and more powerful than ever,” which is fun news for everyone involved, don’t you think?

Final Thoughts

While we’ll never encourage you to do only what everyone else does for your marketing, we hope these points are great thought-starters for what might work best for your business, within your budget. If you’re going to spend your limited time and hard-earned money on marketing, make sure you’re creating connections with what you’re doing. And of course, if you need help planning from some folks who have been around the marketing plan block a few times, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!