With 2025 kicking off, marketers are in the throes of formulating new strategies that will help them hit the ground running in Q1. The top priority on each of their lists? Driving profitable growth.

Of course, ticking that crucial box in an increasingly volatile and competitive marketing landscape is no easy task. So, our team of experts isolated the 4 most compelling trends and initiatives that will help you crush your 2025 marketing goals.

Let's dive in.

Our high-level advice? Lean into channel diversification and testing

Channel diversification and testing will be at the core of every initiative in 2025. Experimenting with new channels has become one of the most efficient ways to rebalance spend and uncover lucrative scaling opportunities that lead to profitable growth.

Still, as you finalize your 2025 marketing playbook, you’ll want to think carefully about the pros and cons of investing in each channel. While most channels are worth testing, they aren’t all created equal. Meta’s endlessly scalable platform is the lifeblood of paid advertising, for example, but brands are beginning to find it increasingly less profitable. Meanwhile, Google’s advertising platform is the opposite: consistently profitable but not as reliably scalable due to the natural limitations of paid search.

In addition to considering the inherent pros and cons of each channel, you should weigh which ones make the most sense for your brand to dabble in. The testing strategies you embrace will depend on a number of factors unique to your business — including your price point, product type, purchase decision profile, and, of course, marketing budget.

If you have a high budget, go ahead and test everything. But if you’re running on a leaner budget, make sure that each channel’s audience aligns on those previously mentioned points (price, product, etc.) before taking the plunge.

Top 4 digital marketing trends and initiatives for 2025

From navigating crucial updates to venturing into entirely new channels, these are the top 4 trends and initiatives to have on your radar in 2025:

1) The maturation of social commerce on TikTok

While TikTok Shops are still a nascent solution, they’re expected to make a splash in 2025. Like Meta Shops, they offer yet another opportunity to meet customers where they’re most inclined to convert. And, as more shoppers convert on-platform, your new storefront will also serve as a potent source of first-party data that you can use to improve your signal and drive more efficient ad performance.

Plus, thanks to seamless integrations with your product catalog and sales channels—including, most recently, Amazon—TikTok has made it easier than ever to replicate the shopping experience your customers already love on your new storefront.

But TikTok Shops aren’t for every brand. While the platform’s emphasis on short-form videos effectively coaxes its legions of younger users into making impulse purchases, brands with longer consideration windows may not drive as much value from their investment. If, in other words, you sell higher-AOV products that require intentional research, you're less likely to win the business of casual scrollers.

It’s also worth noting that launching TikTok Shops can be a heavy lift. Fortunately, if your brand is looking to invest in its own Shop, our team at Proxima is more than happy to expedite the process for you. We work closely with the TikTok team and can leverage our connections to get your Shop launched quickly with little effort on your part.

Once your storefront is up and running, we’ll also help you drive steady traffic to it. With our data-enriched AI Audiences—built from a vast cross-store dataset of 80M+ eCom shoppers—you’ll have no problem driving high-intent users to your Shop.

2) Staying in step with Meta’s platform updates

Let’s face it: Meta’s advertising platform may be scalable, but it’s not as profitable (or reliable) as it once was. To make the most of the platform in 2025, it’s imperative to keep up with every update and test new features when available.

And now just happens to be a great time to do that. In fact, Meta’s latest rounds of updates are designed to make your targeting more precise than ever.

Here are three changes that every marketer should be aware of:

• 3P analytics integrations: This update enables you to sync platforms like Google Analytics and Northbeam with Meta’s ad system. With this feature, you’ll not only be able to compare campaign performance across channels but also give Meta more data to train its AI models. And more data means a stronger signal and more efficient campaigns.‍
• Incremental attribution opt-in: Rather than optimizing every campaign for volume, marketers can now prioritize incremental conversions. This makes it easier to highlight the true impact of their ads beyond standard attribution models.‍
• Conversion value rules: With this update, you can adjust the value of your bids for different customers within a single campaign. If you want to bid more for high-LTV customers and less for lower-value customers, you can easily do so without having to target them separately.

In addition to these updates, Meta has also shipped a number of other creator- and partnership-based improvements worth checking out.

While these updates could materially improve your Meta performance, you shouldn’t rely on them alone. Diversifying your Meta ads strategy and enriching your data feedback loop with a tool like Proxima helps you avoid concentration risk and maximize the return on every advertising dollar you spend.

In fact, our AI Audiences are just the tip of the iceberg. This year, we’re launching a predictive Conversion API (CAPI) pixel we’re calling ConversionIQ. Early tests are driving massive performance improvements on Meta. We’re talking +2x ROAS lift and +80% CPA reductions, all while scaling spend.

ConversionIQ sends your high-value storefront events back into Meta, so you’re optimizing off the things that matter. It trains Meta’s optimization algorithm to enter you into the high-value auctions you actually want to win (rather than the ones it thinks you’re likely to win).

Take it from leading pet wellness brand, Finn. In a pilot of ConversionIQ, they saw a 47% reduction in NC-CAC and a 72% improvement in NC-ROAS. Based on conservative estimates, this could mean they’ll yield $58K in incremental purchase revenue from their current Meta spend of $152K/month—for a whopping 39x in-period ROI.

3) An explosion of app-based marketing with AppLovin

Did you know that the average consumer spends 4 hours a day on mobile apps? That’s 1.5 more hours a day than they spend on social media. With this stat in mind, it’s no wonder brands are increasingly turning to app-based marketing solutions like AppLovin to reach new reserves of untapped eyeballs.

However, we still recommend approaching this opportunity with caution. While all signs point to a promising acquisition channel, AppLovin remains an unknown entity with ambiguous ROI. Until there’s more data on refund and repurchase rates—and especially on the LTV of the platform’s primary users—proceed with caution.

Also, keep in mind that it requires a $600K monthly paid media budget. For this reason and because AppLovin, like TikTok, primarily caters to impulse buyers, it’s generally best suited to bigger brands selling low to mid-AOV products.

4) Embracing the impact of Connected Television (CTV)

CTV may have come onto the scene in the 2010s, but 2025 will see brands turning to it with renewed attention. A mix of old and new, CTV brings all the personalization of digital marketing to the classic TV format—which may be why it now accounts for 40% of paid TV advertising.

If you’re skeptical of CTV’s traditional spray-and-pray advertising methods, you can rest assured that there are plenty of tools designed to dial in your targeting and placements. And if you’re looking to leverage data enrichment to improve CTV performance, Proxima is here to help.

That’s right: We’re currently iterating with a number of leading eCommerce brands to fine-tune this process. Most recently, we’ve helped one of the largest flower delivery companies in the US profitably scale their CTV spend. And we’d love to help you do the same.

Make 2025 your most efficient advertising year yet with Proxima

If you want to start the year with some quick marketing wins, look no further than Proxima. See why leading eCommerce brands across countless verticals trust our team to scale their paid media strategy.

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