Looking ahead to 2025, what should marketers expect? One thing remains a near certainty: Data collection isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Data is the key to the future, but it can be difficult to get the most out of it. Here, we’ll discuss some best practices you should focus on to maximize your data—and your marketing campaigns—in 2025.
What Are the Challenges Marketers Are Facing with Data?
Many marketers—perhaps including you—have the same complaint: “I have so much data, I don’t know what to do with it!” While the amount of data that can be collected in the Digital Age is a gold mine, extracting valuable insights from data that’s of differing quality and in different formats and programs is still an issue. And then there’s the matter of what goals you want to achieve with that data: How can you successfully enable actions based on the insights you collect in a way that feeds back into your business objective of designing consumer-focused strategies that win, serve, and retain customers?
According to Forrester, many companies are facing the same data-related hurdles. In a recent webinar featuring Forrester and Resonate, expert analyst Zeid Khater noted that 31% of companies are finding data siloes to be problematic, while 26% reported legacy systems hindering the data analysis process. An addition 26% said their company had weak processes for ensuring data quality, and 23% noted they were stymied by the processing limitations of their technology and team.
Data Silos
The technology that’s tried to solve some of these issues, like data siloes, has been, in a word, disparate. (Sometimes it even creates an additional data silo while it’s trying to fix the first one.) Furthermore, many of these solutions wind up inhibiting the analytics that will produce those valuable insights.
Mismatched Tech Stacks
Organizational problems also hinder analytics. Many companies have the data but aren’t able to link the insights they glean to a specific customer. Others have too many unconnected data sources or an inconsistent level of quality among those sources. Data also comes with inherent privacy concerns, gaps, and access issues, and it’s expensive to source, store, and manage, especially for recurring projects like brand tracking studies.
Technical Aptitude
Then there are the personnel issues. You may have heard about the need for marketers to upskill when it comes to AI—part of this involves refocusing on the value AI can provide to the customer rather than just thinking about how AI tools can help the company be more efficient. Companies report that 30% of their marketers lack data skills and literacy and that 13% of their executives don’t really understand the data they collect. Another 22% say they’re unable to hire the right technical experts—whether it’s due to budget constraints, difficulty finding the right talent, or something else. The bottom line is, if you’re going to use data to enhance the customer experience and achieve your goals, your employees need to be empowered to make insights-driven marketing decisions.
Overcoming Challenges & Making the Digital Transformation Worth It
So, why is it important to be aware of and actively working to overcome all of these challenges?
The digital transformation got a big boost during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies in both regulated and unregulated industries made big investments in digitally transforming their systems and processes, and that shows no signs of slowing down: According to Forrester, 73% expect to increase their investment in the next 12 months. Simply put, to make the big spend worth it, you need to ensure you get crucial components like data and analytics right. AI—both predictive and generative—can help solve common problems and provides a lot of value to marketers, especially when best practices are followed. Below, we’ll discuss a few expert-recommended ones marketers should put in place for 2025.
4 Best Marketing Practices for 2025
1. Correct mis-timed experiences with automation.
Modern consumers expect a seamless experience when they purchase from a brand. They have no patience for latency, and if they’re inconvenienced, they’ll find another company that offers them the experience they want.
Speed is of the essence here, and AI is a fantastic tool so you can inject your process with automation and increase your speed to insights. Those mis-timed, mis-triggered experiences—like ads or emails sent to the wrong customers at the wrong time—can be corrected with AI. Furthermore, AI can also democratize some of the available marketing technology to empower employees who don’t have a data literacy background, better enabling them to understand the data and craft a high-quality customer experience.
2. Turn to AI for personalization.
Personalization has a lot of benefits, but it’s also difficult to do, not to mention costly. And there’s no one magic bullet that results in a personalized customer experience: It usually involves multiple actions, tools, and strategies. However, it’s crucial for marketers to optimize next-best experiences for customers and to ensure the company retains its most valuable customers by increasing lifetime value, or LTV, the total value a customer brings to the business over the duration of their relationship with that business.
AI can provide a lot of value to a company’s personalization efforts: It produces dynamic insights from data by identifying patterns and anomalies in customer behavior and streamlines customer engagement with the company by offering, among other things, a fast way to get answers about products. AI tools can help marketers map out customer journeys before they happen, and they also make it both easy and possible to provide consumers with personalized content, including written, video, and auditory content.
3. Level up by focusing on NBX.
Personalization is a critical part of something that’s a hot topic in the marketing industry right now, next best experience, or NBX. Focusing on what the next best experience will be for a customer has promised to be a big area of investment in 2025, and companies that are trying to figure out NBX are considered to be higher on the spectrum of marketing savvy. Of course, there are some challenges: companies find themselves struggling with misaligned incentives, departmental competition, and project siloes. Make sure your NBX strategy keeps these common issues in mind before you get started, and ensure the right metrics are in place. LTV is your North Start to increase revenue and improve customer experience and engagement, so make sure you understand which attributes make a high-LTV customer for your company and focus on those. One expert tip is to combine the attributes of a high-value customer into formulas on lead scoring and ideal client profile analysis.
4. Find the right data partner.
Partnering with an experienced consumer data company is a great way to make sure you have the right data, the best insights, and the analytics expertise you need to be successful. Look for a company that offers privacy-safe solutions that are constantly updated and can provide insights on thousands of customer attributes to give you a whole-picture view of the audiences you’re trying to target.
Resonate has been the leader in AI-powered data for over a decade, and our suite of tools and solutions puts the power of prediction and the ability to act on consumer insights into the hands of our clients. Whether you’ve already built a data processing infrastructure but need help scaling it or you require something to be created from the ground up, our new solutions let you accelerate your business by letting you tap into a dynamic predictive model. Our data is updated on a nightly basis, thus giving you the advantage of being able to understand how everything that’s going on in the world is affecting consumers and thus, your company. Backed by our power of dynamic learning and the ability to keep pace with consumers, you’ll know what the next best action is and won’t be hindered by the usual limitations that come with first-party or third-party data.
Make 2025 the year you achieve the numbers and goals you set for yourself in the first quarter. Learn more about Resonate’s newest solutions—and our time-tested Ignite Platform—by scheduling a consultation with a data expert today.
