State of Online Marketing 2025 Report

What a year, huh?

In 2023, we started our Q4 report by mentioning the uncertain economy, cautious spenders, and the rise of AI as top challenges of 2024. This year, it might feel the same old. 

But is it?

We’ve asked fellow readers with skin in the game to evaluate this year’s hot topics with us—and the findings are, well… interesting. And maybe not as gloomy as it might sound.

Let’s jump into the charts!

Key takeaways

🟦 75% of marketing teams didn’t grow in 2024, but a third of companies did report operational improvements.

🟦 Daily AI usage jumped to 42%. Users widely adopted AI for analytics (78%) and copywriting (70%).

🟦 Marketing budgets saw minimal changes, with marketers concentrating on Meta Ads, Google Ads, and SEO. Smaller teams are prioritizing fewer channels.

🟦 Marketers have two main concerns—economy and channel overload. At the same time, salary expectations are modest, with 60% of respondents anticipating slight increases.

🟦 Many expect growth in hyper-personalized marketing, CTV ads, and alternative platforms, alongside a revival of traditional storytelling and in-person strategies.

🟦 Most marketers believe that AI could lead to burnout or content quality issues if mismanaged. They also expect stricter regulations on AI.

The overall marketing sentiment

Before we go into rationale, let’s first touch upon the feeling.

For the first time, we’ve decided to utilize a new type of chart to better showcase the overall sentiment that’s looming over the online marketing industry.

For starters, let’s see how our fellow marketers feel about their salary growth:

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Not great, not terrible, eh?

Now let’s feel the pulse of the budget:

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Finally, here’s how the industry feels about AI:

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Okay, now let’s leave the empathetic side and break down the sentiments further.

Everything is leaning in a positive direction overall. Let’s dive deeper and see if we can uncover why.

Marketing departments are stagnating… Mostly

You can call it stagnation, you can call it stability. 

In any case, almost 75% of all respondents didn’t see their team grow at all this year—not by one person.

The majority of marketing teams (65%) have remained the same this year, with only 22.5% seeing growth. Out of those, teams that grew by 10+ more people are statistically insignificant.

On a positive note—downsizing wasn’t that prominent (12.5%). 

But when it did happen, it was tectonic, with around 10% of all respondents claiming their teams shrunk by 10+ people. Ouch.

What does this mean:

• Some growth is visible, but a significant portion of the industry is still “contracting” or at a standstill.
• Economic uncertainties, shifts to automation, or new market pressures may explain the stagnation and downsizing trend. More about that later.
• All this could signal a transition phase for the marketing industry, where resource reallocation and efficiency take precedence over uniform growth.

Overall, the marketing industry appears to be optimizing existing resources to weather the storm, with some conservative growth showing that there’s room for optimism.

And speaking of which… 

Marketing operations are looking positive

The marketing efficiency correlates with the stagnating trend but with a more positive outlook.

We’ve already concluded that stability is the norm and half of all responding companies are maintaining operations without significant change. 

However, a third of all respondents are seeing improvements—which is encouraging. 

Combined with stagnating marketing departments, we could conclude that teams might be doing more with less, possibly through adopting AI, automation, and streamlining processes. 

There is too much work for small teams but no one can manage the headcount to deal with it. The work is bringing in less ROI and takes too much, so the industry needs to change. Is it with the help of AI? I don’t know.

– A survey responder

The Crew’s Opinion: It wouldn’t be outlandish to assume that teams are doing more with less. 

…which can backfire in the long run if marketers start feeling pressured with unrealistic expectations.

AI is becoming a key element of today’s marketing

If AI were a character arc, we’d say it would be Severus Snape. 

Started out as the villain, ended up being a helpful friend. 

At least that is this year’s sentiment:

When we wrote about AI adoption in the summer, one report said 36.6% of marketer respondents never used AI for their operations. 

Now by the end of the year, it’s only 9.35%. At least among Stacked Marketer readers. 

Today, almost 42% of all respondents use AI every day, indicating that soon half of the marketing industry will have AI in their day-to-day ops.  

“We will return to a point where our focus is upon general marketing values of good creative, good copy and effective messaging rather than whether AI is coming for our jobs—it’s not.”

—a survey responder

Let’s go a bit more in-depth.

All departments are adopting AI

It appears that everyone—from top-level executives to influencer marketers—is using AI at least a few times every month. 

The interesting bit from this chart is that there are still copywriters, content marketers, and email marketers who don’t use AI at all. 

Meaning that some still don’t trust AI even for brainstorming or “filling the gaps.”

At the same time, designers and other creative-related departments aren’t backing away from AI. Another intriguing trend.

Analytics and copywriting see most AI utility 

This is an important point.

Just because some marketing writers don’t use generative AI, it doesn’t mean that most others don’t.

Let’s see:

In previous Data Stories, we’ve noticed where AI is the unsung hero—analytics. 

This survey shows it first-hand with 78% of respondents saying they’ve adopted AI analytics. 

This is what we wrote back in July:

ML and LLMs can analyze loads of customer data quickly and find patterns or trends, and better predict customer behavior. On top of that, LLMs can also deconstruct charts and find angles you might’ve missed.

Predictably, copywriting comes second with almost 70% of respondents leveraging it, while around half of all respondents use AI for image generation. No surprises here.

AI in Customer support is still underutilized with only 10% and so is data collection (19%) and market and competitor research (27.3%).

Most marketers agree AI has improved their performance

And it’s not even close:

But, there’s a sliver of orange and red there of marketers who feel AI decreased their performance.

A small sign that AI is a tool, not a magic bullet.

So knowing when and how to use it will make a difference.

Everyone’s loving AI

Executives especially:

There’s a lot of green here. 

Besides paid advertisers—who admittedly lost some liberty with new regulations and automation taking over—most marketers feel that AI has made them more efficient.

It also makes sense that executives feel big improvements with AI—especially when we combine it with increased marketing efficiency despite the lack of teams’ growth. 

There must be some correlation there.

Marketers are concerned with the economy and too many channels

You’d think marketers would worry about the rise of AI—but that’s so 2023.

Now, everyone’s more concerned about the state of the global economy. That’s because everyone’s more or less feeling it—and experiencing it with stagnated growth or downsizes. 

30% of all respondents are afraid that the ongoing economic climate will affect budgets. 

A valid concern, as we’ll see later.

However, a quarter of respondents think there are too many marketing channels to handle while the teams are stagnating. Everything’s connected.  

We did talk about this earlier this year, and it still appears to be a major problem.

The Crew’s Tip: Don’t overload your team—or yourself—with too many marketing tasks on various channels. Try to allocate your focus and resources on what’s working and extract maximum value from that first. 

Marketers are still optimistic about salary bumps

The end of the year looks better than what was initially expected at the start.

And despite some marketers going out of work, most marketers do have a brighter look at the future ahead…

Almost 60% of all marketers believe their salary will increase next year.

Out of those, 30% believe the pay rise will be slight (up to 10% increase), while almost 15% think they’ll see a significant cash injection to their pay. 

Less than 2% expect a decrease, while 1.5% think they’ll be out of work.

However, 37.6% believe that their salary will stay the same. This sentiment aligns with what we’ve seen from the rest of the survey.

There’s stability in the industry, and positive signs but no hypergrowth.

The Crew’s opinion: If you’re not expecting huge bumps in your salary and you are content with stability, you’re doing nothing wrong.

Likewise, you may want—or expect—at least a 10% increase in the following year as you’d just follow the wave of 30% of your peers. 

The industry is still volatile, but most layoffs and bad signs appear to be behind us. So now we’re back to a positive trend, hopefully.

And what’s clear is that you don’t have to settle for lower, even in this climate.

But there was more optimism last year…

In 2023, we did a similar survey to this one.

Back then, we asked our readers about their salary expectancy for next year—and now we compared it to this year’s expectations.

Last year, three quarters of all respondents expected a salary hike. This year, it’s 16% less.

Additionally, 23% expected their salary to stay the same. Now it’s 37.6%. Which shows that the feeling is not as favorable towards the industry. 

You can also see 1.64% of respondents thinking they’ll be out of work. Something that we didn’t see last year—with more respondents. Interesting.

The Crew’s opinion: It seems people were more optimistic last year. But after a rough 2024, that optimism faded. 

Is that feeling warranted? As you can see from the earlier charts, marketing ops have improved and some marketing departments have slightly grown.

Either marketers were too optimistic last year, or they are too pessimistic this year.

In other words, the overall sentiment takes some time to adjust to the reality of our industry and its changing trends.

Budgets are flatlining but not decreasing

Usually, Q4 is when the budgets go up. But not so much this year:

Most respondents said that their marketing budgets will stay more or less the same—which is less than 10% change in either direction. 

This is quite telling. Even last year when the industry started feeling the decline in budgets, 10% more respondents saw an increase in budgets—with 50% not changing anything.

So this year we’re seeing more of an evenly distributed marketing budget compared to previous years. 

Why? Possible reasons could be:

• Less ad money
• Frugal spenders making up for lower ROI
• Ad campaigns for Q4 starting way earlier, sometimes even in Q3

…and more. 
In any way, this year’s Q4 seems to be less “vital” when it comes to ad spend and more evenly spread-out. At least when it comes to our readers.

What are budget expectations for next year?

For this, it’s best to look at responses based on the initial budgets:

Overall, the medium businesses ($100k-$500k monthly budget) appear to be the most confident, with 35% expecting some form of budget increase and only 6% expecting a decrease.

Mega budgets ($500k+) also expect an increase (40%) but 22% expect a decrease as well. With 6% expecting their budget to halve. So there’s a lot more oscillating among the bigger ones.

Smaller budgets fluctuate, but the smallest businesses with up to $10k budgets have it the hardest—with almost a quarter expecting a budget decrease. 

With the increase in inflation and the dollar, and the decline in paid media results, the alternative investment market in media such as podcasts, newsletters, and micro-influencers will gain even more strength, taking a larger share of the media budget

– A survey responder

The Crew’s Opinion: As usual when the economy shifts, the “little guy” is hit the hardest. 

Therefore, if you have a small business client, make sure you’re mindful of the challenges they have and temper expectations. 

Also, if you’re a small business yourself, try to optimize your budgets as much as possible and double down on what’s working.

Meta, Google, and SEO remain the strongest channels

The king stays the king at the end of 2024.

The triumvirate of Meta Ads, Google Ads, and SEO are still the channels that take up the most of the marketing budgets:

Meta Ads are still the most popular, with some marketers willing to allocate almost all the ad budget to the platform.

Interestingly, only 17% won’t spend their budgets on SEO which once again proves that SEO isn’t “unalived”—to use the Zoomer vocabulary.

YouTube, Native Ads, and TikTok will see some portion of ad budgets, but digital billboards may also see a decent amount of ad dollars coming in.

The Crew’s insight: The lack of high-budget allocations suggests marketers are hedging their bets in multiple channels but besides the “big three,” there’s still a lot left untapped.

On one end, smaller teams don’t have resources to stretch over multiple channels, but in case you do have excess budget, this can be an opportunity to try something new.

You know the drill. Less competition means cheaper ads.

Readers’ takeaways

Finally, let’s have a designated section for you—the reader.

Among the 450+ respondents, almost half had their personal predictions about the state of marketing for next year. So we read them, put them on paper, and summarized them.

We’ll try to bring the overall sentiment, but also directly quote some compelling and thought-provoking comments.

On AI dominance…

Most Stacked Marketer readers think AI will keep disrupting the industry in 2025.

They feel AI will be more and more present in all aspects of marketing—from content creation and personalization to media buying and data analysis. 

Furthermore, they believe that not adopting AI is a direct risk of going out of business.

However, AI is still viewed as both an enabler and a challenge. Many predict it will flood markets with low-quality content, eroding trust and making it harder for quality to shine.

Finally, the majority expects stricter regulations on AI-generated content and a growing demand for transparency to rebuild consumer trust. 

On AI disrupting search…

A few interesting opinions surfaced about AI—and OpenAI in particular—disrupting the traditional SEO.

Here are some takes:

• “OpenAI will disrupt Google search and shift more users to using it for everyday purposes—which will eventually hit overall ads performance and scale”
• “Google will decline in market share and power while AI search will increase exponentially.”
• “Organic search will continue to change and maybe Google will be broken up.”

On emerging trends…

Our readers feel that there will be an increased focus on niche and hyper-personalized marketing. And this is mostly driven by—you’ve guessed it—AI capabilities.

However, they predict growth in video marketing, CTV ads, and alternative platforms and search becomes less reliable. 

Plus, there’s a slight feeling that a shift is happening from large, centralized platforms to newer technologies and decentralized systems. 

• “The alternative investment market in media such as podcasts, newsletters, and micro-influencers will gain even more strength, taking a larger share of the media budget” 
• “CTV ads will become even more of a dominant player, even for nonvideo ad placements.” 
• “There will be quantum upheaval as product consumers take massive charge influencing product designing and manufacturing.”

On going back to fundamentals…

AI is transforming the landscape, but there is a parallel movement advocating for a focus on traditional marketing values: authentic storytelling, strong creatives, and meaningful connections.

In fact, more than one responder predicted a wider return to in-person conversations and even “old-fashioned pen and paper.”

Channels like direct mail and in-person engagements may see a revival as brands seek to differentiate themselves in a crowded, AI-driven market.

All eyes on 2025

Today, the marketing industry is marked by a bit of a slowdown. 

If you’re a “glass half full person,” you could call it stability amidst economic pressures. However, the fact is teams are doing more with less. 

On top of that AI adoption is surging, and budgets are steady but cautious. While the “big three” channels dominate, untapped opportunities remain for those willing to innovate. 

With all these variables taking place at the same time, we can call the current state of marketing—uncertain, but stable.

What can you do? Well, keep reading Stacked Marketer, for starters.

And since you’re a Stacked Marketer Pro member, you’ll already get delivered top-notch education and insights throughout the year. Just like this one.

Onwards and upwards into 2025!