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In 2025, marketing and technology are inextricably linked. The practice of marketing today — automated, personalized, and fast-moving — can only happen successfully with the right technology.
The basic tenets of marketing don’t change from year to year, but strategies and tactics are both shaped by and influence the technology choices that marketers make. Software options abound and can easily overwhelm a marketing team, even as teams are being asked to reach prospects and contribute to sales more than ever before.
The MarTech Landscape in 2025
[Source: Grand View Research]
There are a few broad trends in marketing technology in 2025 to shape planning and purchasing for success:
Data-driven
The tools now exist for marketers to collect, refine, analyze, and incorporate tons of data into their marketing tactics. There’s no reason not to make better decisions using all that data, instead of relying on gut instinct or outdated ideas or methods.
Customer-first
Putting the customer first is a tried-and-true tenet of marketing, but technology advancements make it possible in 2025 to truly reach and engage each customer in a cohesive way, using personalization techniques and tools like AI, first-party data, and predictive analytics.
Unified tools
After a few decades of software development, many marketing teams are struggling to get the most out of a mess of disparate legacy technologies. For many, this is the year they’ll unify and simplify the martech stack.
What else to know:
- The global marketing technology market size is expected to reach $1,379 billion by 2030, a CAGR of nearly 20% from 2025.
- The social media tools segment led the market in 2024, making up more than 22% of the global martech revenue.
6 Marketing Technology Trends for A Better Strategy in 2025
If marketing technology in 2025 seems overwhelming, it’s not only because your team is small, the budget is tight, or you’re being asked to tackle too many challenges at once: It’s also the sheer volume of the marketplace. The most recent Marketing Technology Landscape report counted more than 14,000 martech applications across 49 categories — a massive increase from 2011, when just 150 applications were listed.
So, where should a marketer start in identifying and then implementing trending technologies? These following trends can bring a ton of value, and each business will approach adoption their own way based on goals, industry, and budget.
1. Hyper-Personalization at Scale
The convergence of brand importance, AI, big data, and machine learning have led to hyper-personalization as key for modern businesses. Consumers are moving quickly, taking non-linear user journeys across multiple channels per day. It’s essential for marketers to deeply understand their audiences by collecting the right data, segmenting audiences accordingly, and reaching them on their preferred channels with the right messaging and offers.
Using AI-driven technology helps brands to hyper-personalize down to the customer, predicting customer behaviors based on real-time and past data. Marketers can create product recommendations on a landing page, send carefully timed emails during the buying process, and much more. Precise targeting leads to better customer engagement, more effective marketing campaigns, and higher ROI, and understanding customer behavior trends can help marketers make changes quickly and increase conversions. But, solid technology is necessary to do all of this at scale.
Here’s what else to know:
- 73% of consumers prefer to buy from brands that use personal information to make their shopping experience more relevant.
- 80% of consumers prefer retail emails to include recommendations based on previous purchases.
- Personalization can deliver 5-8x the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales 10% or more.
2. AI
It’s ubiquitous in technology conversations in 2025, and for marketing technology in particular, AI has already found several use cases of value. These include direct prospect or customer interaction, such as in chatbots or customer service agents, as well as more behind-the-scenes work in automation.
[Source: Ascend2]
AI is generally used for marketing in at least one of these ways:
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- Generative: Tools like ChatGPT can help marketers brainstorm copy, and LLMs offer marketers a way to query datasets in a conversational way. Data can be presented simply, showing anything from average ad spend to campaign performance by channel.
- Targeting: AI enables hyper-personalization tactics which, at scale, would likely not be possible for most marketing teams in terms of time and resources.
- Automation: Marketing automation tools often incorporate AI to make it possible to remove the burden of manual tasks from teams.
- Customer service: AI chatbots have become commonplace as a way for marketing teams to connect with customers at any time without adding to or using tight resources.
- Predictive: With data analytics technology and ML models in place, marketers can forecast results based on detailed past data. Predictive AI technology can offer a huge boost to marketing teams, especially in times of uncertainty, to make better decisions about their strategy.
Here’s what else to know:
- 60% of marketers say AI and ML will have the biggest impact on marketing strategies in the next five years.
- 34% of marketers use AI for ad optimization and 33% for chatbots.
- 61% of marketing executives say their top concerns about using generative AI are data privacy and security.
3. First-Party Data and Privacy-Centric Marketing
First-party data has become more essential, and more valuable, in understanding prospects and customers. First-party data comes directly from customers, so it’s more accurate, and collecting first-party data helps businesses stay compliant while building strong, trusting customer relationships. It’s key to privacy-centric marketing, which customers demand and regulatory bodies insist upon.
[Source: The Nielsen Company]
There’s a lot of opportunity to build brand and customer loyalty when gathering this data, as well as using it for better personalization alongside other technology like predictive analytics. A single source of enterprise truth for data — like a customer data platform (CDP) — is the foundation for using customer data wisely. Successful marketers have to make sure that data is fresh and integrated, with a company-wide strategy for customer engagement. That way, customers will only get the right messages at the right time in their buying journey, and marketers won’t waste time on manual data work.
Here’s what else to know:
- 86% of companies recognize the importance of first-party data.
- 64% of U.S. customers say they’d provide their email address for a $20 discount, and 31% would share their full name.
4. The Convergence of MarTech and AdTech
As part of building the data foundation, technology (and the teams using it) has to be integrated and synced across the business. There are many ways to annoy and lose customers with disparate technology siloes — sending multiple unrelated emails in one day, the purchase and return departments unable to communicate, and much more. Many of these common issues stem from separate martech and adtech stacks, whether it’s from lack of internal communications, legacy software tools not working together, or both.
Martech generally refers to the technology and tools that marketing uses, such as a CRM, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. Adtech refers to the tech used for advertising and buying media, including any digital campaigns and optimizing spending. In addition to improved customer experience, bringing these technology stacks together is the only way to capture true attribution numbers and measure performance accurately. The customer experience should be the gold standard for teams building unified stacks, and combining team goals to get to that excellent experience can then help the wider business meet its goals. And, perhaps most importantly, a unified platform saves a lot of wasted budget and resources internally.
Here’s what else to know:
- The global ad tech market is projected to reach $2,547 billion by 2032, and the martech market is projected to reach $296 billion by 2030.
- The global ad tech market is expected to grow at a rate of 22% through 2030, with martech projected to grow 18.5% through 2032.
- Nearly 29% of U.S. ad agencies said they used six to seven ad tech and martech tools as part of their tech stack, and 17% used more than 10.
- Disconnected or misaligned ad tech and martech tools can lead to a 10-13% loss in resources.
5. No-Code/Low-Code Solutions
With a strong need for an integrated data stack comes the need for marketing teams to be more self-sufficient in their technology adoption and usage. While some platforms are easy for marketers to maintain, others require a lot of continuous, hands-on help from engineering.
Marketing teams should ask probing questions up-front as they’re choosing new technology, particularly when transitioning away from legacy tools. Low-code and no-code technology options abound, with many more platforms available than a decade ago. As marketing itself becomes more complex, and has to move much faster, marketing teams can design a tech stack that doesn’t need a lot of tech support built into it. Relying on engineering or other teams can put up a costly roadblock when marketers need to respond to customer signals in the moment.
Here’s what else to know:
- Low-code tools are responsible for more than 65% of application development.
- 70% of new business apps will use low-code or no-code technologies this year.
- 80% of non-IT professionals are developing IT products and services, with more than 65% using low-code or no-code tools.
6. Voice Search and Commerce
Smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and iPhone’s conversational assistant Siri are commonplace among consumers. With these tools established, alongside a robust podcast industry, marketers should consider voice search and commerce as a tactic in their strategy. This may include optimizing content for voice search, using long-tail keywords and natural language.
Voice commerce includes the field of audio marketing, which may include podcast sponsorships or streaming service ads, depending on the product, audience, and industry. As with any of 2025’s marketing trends, marketing teams should use all the data at their disposal, target appropriately, and conduct testing to see what works on this channel.
Here’s what else to know:
- 32% of consumers use voice assistants weekly.
- The global voice commerce market is projected to reach $714 billion by 2034.
- 74% of voice assistant users have completed at least part of a buying process through conversational AI.
- 71% of consumers would rather use voice search than manually typing queries.
Key Data Trends From Taboola’s Perspective in 2025
Taboola’s foundation in advertising technology over the years has uncovered a few essential trends to tackle in 2025:
Better Performance
Poor data integration, or decisions made on gut instinct instead of data, are too common among businesses even in 2025. The opposite of this can be transformative for a marketing team. Instead of chasing diminishing leads on search or social, a data-driven performance marketing strategy focuses on using data to identify and reach the prospects more likely to convert. It’s much easier for a marketing team to grow and gain budget when it can show clear ROI over time.
Better Decisions
Every marketing tactic chosen means another might not get done, or not get the attention it should. Marketing has always involved guesswork — before big data and sophisticated technology, gut instinct was often the only way to build a strategy or allocate budget. But, all the data available now makes it possible to architect a buyer’s journey, and all the included touchpoints, using data about past actions.
Modern marketing will require data-driven decisions as buyers’ journeys become less linear and common advertising channels become oversaturated. The data can tell a story, so a successful martech stack will allow teams to access that story and build upon it. The data we’ve gathered at Taboola lets publishers and advertisers make better decisions and reach more prospects.
Key Takeaways
Marketing technology reflects the bigger tech landscape in many ways, with AI, user focus and privacy, and rich data all in the spotlight. Whether teams are building their tech stack from scratch or phasing out legacy tools, customer data should be the focus — capturing it safely, using it responsibly, and making data-driven decisions to succeed.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Where is MarTech headed in the next five years?
The next five years offer lots of room for growth and experimentation for marketing technology. Customer privacy, AI usage, strong data foundations, and hyper-personalization will all continue to mature as marketers access more sophisticated technology and use continuous testing to understand what customers respond to.
What are the trends in voice search optimization for marketers?
Voice search optimization is on the rise, with big implications for traditional SEO practices. Voice search is more conversational than text-based searches, so marketers can use long-tail keywords and make sure they’re optimizing for natural language and the short questions users may be asking their phone or smart speaker.
How is generative AI being used in marketing?
The use of generative AI in marketing is still emerging and maturing as marketers explore what’s possible, and what makes sense for their business. At a basic level, marketers can use gen AI to help create new messaging and imagery. Gen AI offers opportunities for personalization at scale and streamlined workflows, such as removing manual work for email sequences, as well as conversational data analysis to quickly understand campaign performance and other customer contacts.
