Despite the Crisis, Marketing Budgets Continue to Rise

If you’re wondering what marketing methods will be used by professionals in 2025, you’ve come to the right place. Drawing on various studies, including Nielsen’s, we’ve provided some key figures to help you better understand the digital marketing landscape . You’ll be able to observe the rise of streaming and the complexity experienced by many specialists in measuring an increasingly fragmented audience.

Some essential figures

For this year 2025, four major lessons can be drawn from studies and surveys carried out among marketing professionals:

• Increased marketing budgets: 64% of marketing professionals anticipate an increase in budgets.
• The Future of Streaming: Most experts have integrated streaming into their media mix, but 42% believe this spending is inefficient.
• ROI on digital channels: While digital channels are ubiquitous, only 54% of marketing professionals are confident in the ROI of these channels.
• The proliferation of measurement tools: Marketing measurement platforms are multiplying and 62% of professionals use different solutions together.

What are the budget trends?

Various trends are emerging in marketing this year. Understanding them allows you to better adapt to these trends and maintain the performance of your digital marketing by adopting best practices and avoiding identified pitfalls.

The rise of digital spending

It’s clear that the challenging economic climate is having an impact on the marketing sector. 69% of professionals consider 2023 to be uncertain , which is impacting their planning. Despite this situation, more than half of them are planning to increase their budget.

Budgets will increase across four marketing categories. Comparing 2023 to 2022:

• Display will increase from 14% to 21% (+7%);
• Video will increase from 16% to 21% (+5%);
• OTT/CTV services will increase from 13% to 18% (+5%);
• Social media will increase from 19% to 24% (+5%).

The essential video channel

The numbers seem to show a strong increase in video marketing. However, it is streaming in particular that is driving significant growth in marketing spend . Consumers are spending a lot of time consuming content via television.

Some figures are quite eloquent in this regard:

• Americans watched over 19 million years of streaming content in 2022;
• Streaming in Mexico represents 15.2% of total television usage ;
• In Thailand, streaming accounts for almost 50% of the audience ;
• More than 70% of Australians aged 14 and over use the internet to stream videos.

According to Zenith Media, this growth will continue at a rate of 4.8% per year, reaching 30% of the total global advertising market by 2025. Subscription video-on-demand services will be directly impacted, as advertising on this channel will represent nearly $13 billion.

The difficulty of measuring overall ROI

Performance measurement is central to a successful digital marketing strategy. However, it is difficult to make informed decisions by measuring all cross-media investments .

This complexity of holistic ROI measurement leads 52% of global marketing leaders to focus on reach and frequency metrics.

How can this simplification phenomenon be explained? These figures perhaps illustrate the lack of use of martech technologies. In 2022, Gartner showed that only 42% of professionals in the sector used all the martech tools at their disposal.

The challenge of getting a complete picture of performance

However, not everything can be blamed on the failure to exploit the potential of martech tools. At least four factors must be considered to explain the lack of confidence in ROI:

• Nearly 40% of marketers believe that understanding cross-platform reach is not important to determine whether the campaign is actually reaching the target audience;
• 23% say they have qualitative audience data that allows them to make the most of media budgets;
• Most experts use specific tools to measure each marketing channel. Nearly 14% use four or five measurement technologies to measure each platform and perform cross-media analysis;
• Gaining a holistic view across channels is essential, with 71% of professionals saying it is important to access comparable metrics across devices and platforms.

What best practices should we adopt in 2025?

The various figures and trends from marketing studies allow us to formulate recommendations for the current year. These recommendations will help us maximize the potential of available marketing tools and channels.

Don’t underinvest in marketing and branding

Despite economic uncertainty, it’s crucial to maintain a sufficient budget to deploy effective and targeted digital advertising. This way, you don’t want to make the same mistake as nearly 50% of brands that missed out on the opportunity to maximize their ROI in 2024 because they underinvested.

With a sufficiently high budget, you will have a better chance of achieving the goals of marketing experts in 2025 :

• Customer acquisition;
• Brand awareness;
• Customer retention.

Measure the effectiveness of all channels

As we have seen, the video channel has become essential . It is therefore essential to adapt to trends and use comparable metrics to test and measure the effectiveness of your strategies.

Audience fragmentation and cross-media analysis make performance measurement complex for 62% of marketing managers . For this reason, it is necessary to use tools, solutions, and metrics that do not take media into account.

Increase the reach of the marketing strategy

It’s clear that one of the key efforts of marketers is to target the right audience to increase ROI. A study of 15 brands and 82 digital campaigns in the United States yielded valuable insights into reach:

• Increasing campaign reach increases costs and does not guarantee a better ROI ;
• Increasing targeted reach increases campaign ROI ;
• Advertisers can use reach analysis to understand which audiences to target ;
• By focusing on the most qualified audiences, we improve efficiency and ROI.

Therefore, increasing reach is a very effective way to increase the ROI of an online campaign. To avoid problems related to channel and audience fragmentation, it is best to use measurement solutions that cover all platforms and devices.

An alliance of complexity and opportunity

Within online marketing, the rise of connected TV and streaming services is very significant. This opens up new opportunities, but complicates marketing strategies. Indeed, there is increasingly complex data to measure, as audiences and channels are fragmented and difficult to measure.

It is more necessary than ever to acquire an accurate view of the target audience at the individual level in order to obtain data precise enough to plan a successful strategy and measure ROI effectively and calmly.