How Marketers Are Spending Their Money in 2025 (We Asked 11,093 Marketers)

With inflation slowly coming down and many geopolitical changes, we were curious to see how companies plan to adjust their 2025 marketing budget.

So, we surveyed 11,093 marketers to see how they plan to invest their marketing dollars and what they plan to do with their budgets per channel.

And, of course, we wanted to know the “why”.

Let’s see what we found out.

Earned media

Let’s look at each channel separately.

SEO

44% of marketers plan to increase their SEO budget. The number 1 reason was that most marketers believe SEO is still alive and doing well, as AI results haven’t affected most people’s traffic drastically.

As for the 39% that plan to keep it the same, the number 1 reason was because it is working.

And for the 17% decrease, there were a few reasons…

• The fear of algorithm changes, which they didn’t like how their traffic could go up or down, and they have mainly experienced a downward trend.
• The second most common response was that they were afraid of what search results would look like in the future due to AI.

Organic Social

25% of marketers are planning on increasing their organic social budget. The biggest reason was that organic social is a great way for people to learn about your brand, even if it doesn’t result in “direct conversions.”

17% plan on keeping it the same. The most common reasons were you have no choice but to be on social platforms because it is where the attention is and because social media is a great way to communicate with your customers.

As for the 58% that plan to decrease their budget, the main reason was that their reach is continually getting worse year after year, no matter what they try.

Content Creation

63% plan on increasing their content budgets, and there were three common responses:

1. They need to spend more money to keep up with all the format types needed for all platforms.
2. They felt human-created content performed better than AI content, so they are increasing their budget after previously decreasing it in hopes that AI could help with the burden.
3. Podcasting is an essential channel with much more influence than before, so more budget is needed to invest in creating a podcast.

33% plan on keeping their budget the same. The number 1 reason was you could repurpose the content for multiple campaigns and formats, so they felt the investment was worth it even if it didn’t perform as well on the social web.

4% plan on decreasing their budget due to AI, and their goal is to have AI help create more content.

AI SEO

A whopping 97% plan on investing in SEO for AI platforms like ChatGPT and SearchGPT.

They are newish channels that most marketers haven’t been targeting in the past, and they feel they are worth an investment at this point.

Only 2% plan on keeping their budget the same. Most of these marketers have already been investing in leveraging these AI platforms for sales and want to continue doing the same moving forward.

As for the 1% that plan on decreasing, the number 1 reason was they haven’t seen any positive results from ChatGPT or Perplexity recommending their company, product, or services.

Email marketing

28% of marketers plan to increase their email marketing budget due to:

• List size is growing, so their cost is growing.
• They feel it is more important to collect emails than ever due to so many algorithm changes on other platforms.

59% plan on keeping their budget the same. The biggest reason was that it is working, and it is an important channel that drives sales.

13% plan on decreasing their email marketing budget. The biggest reason was they believed they could save money by switching vendors or scrubbing their email list.

CRO and UX

59% plan on increasing their budget due to the following reasons:

• To combat the rising cost of ads.
• A good UX impacts SEO rankings.
• There is a need to improve ROI in a bad economy.

21% plan on keeping their budget the same. They feel the investment is worth it, and it has helped improve the ROI over time.

20% plan on decreasing their budget, and the reasoning behind this was interesting. The number 1 reason was because they felt they had optimized their conversions already, and they didn’t feel they could get much more of a lift.

Community Building

81% plan on increasing their community building budget. These were the most common reasons why:

• With AI, human connection is slowly decreasing, and marketers feel staying in touch is more important than ever.
• Customers no longer only interact on your website or through phone. There are many channels you have to leverage to stay in touch.
• Some felt that in-person events were back and more powerful than ever.

Only 3% plan on keeping their budget the same. The main reason was because they felt it was working, but due to economic reasons, they couldn’t increase the budget.

16% decreased their community budget. The main reason is economic difficulty, and community is a harder channel to place an ROI on.

Paid Ads

There are a lot of different paid advertising channels, so we focused on the main ones.

Let’s start with paid search.

Paid Search

52% of marketers plan on increasing their paid Google ad spend, and 64% plan on increasing their paid Bing ad spend.

The main reasons were:

1. It costs more over time.
2. It works, and there is a direct ROI.
3. Bing is less competitive than Google even though it doesn’t have the volume.

As for the group that was maintaining their budget, the most common response was because it works. The second most common response was that they couldn’t get more funding allocated to paid search due to economic hardship.

As for the decrease, 38% of marketers plan on spending less on Google, and 7% plan on spending less on Bing. The most common responses included:

• It is too hard to make a profit with rising costs.
• Shifting budgets to more affordable platforms.

Social Ads

The graphs regarding social ad spending are all over the place.

X was the winner, with marketers planning to increase their budget by 55%. The most common response was because ads on X were affordable.

The second most common response was that they feel X is more politically accepted than before.

When you look at the other platforms, the biggest reason for the increases is that they work, and the goal is to scale up the ads to drive more revenue.

As for maintaining the budget, the responses were a bit different for most social networks.

• Facebook – most marketers wanted to maintain their budget as it works, but in most cases, this group didn’t want to increase it as they felt there were other social networks where the money would be better spent.
• Instagram – people felt it was worth being on Instagram. Still, the biggest reason for not increasing was many marketers felt influencer marketing and working directly with people on Instagram produced a better ROI.
• YouTube – main reason for maintaining economic reasons and they didn’t want to decrease as it is working.
• TikTok – similar to Instagram, marketers felt it was worth maintaining, but there was a better ROI working directly with the influencers.
• X – this one was a bit different, a lot of marketers choose to maintain until they could see what would happen with X traffic in 2025 when it wouldn’t be an election year. They felt X may not have the volume to increase their spending.
• Pinterest – the biggest reason for maintaining was they couldn’t scale their Pinterest ads any further without breaking their ROI.
• Snap – the biggest reason for maintaining was they felt the money would be better spent on other networks, but they didn’t want to decrease their Snap budget due to the ROI being good compared to different channels. When we followed up and asked why not scale further if the ROI was great, most people commented back with “Snap doesn’t have the volume to scale up”.
• LinkedIn – not everyone was advertising on LinkedIn. The majority are in the B2B category and felt they had to maintain as there weren’t as many options for B2B companies. And the main reason for not scaling was they couldn’t get the numbers to workout from an ROI perspective.

Now, as for the budget decreases on these social platforms, it could summed up by two common responses:

1. Ad costs are rising, which is hurting their return on ad spend. So naturally, they have no choice but to decrease their spending.
2. Marketers felt influencer marketing was cheaper than paying the networks directly and provided a better ROI.

Traditional Ads

There were a lot of commonalities in the budget movements here, even though they were different channels.

The most common response for increasing was with the mass exodus into everything going digital, and people felt there were opportunities to buy ads at discounted pricing.

As for maintaining the budgets, marketers felt:

• These channels were a great way to differentiate their brand.
• They are effective channels for targeting their ideal demographic (the majority said elderly demographic).

As for the decrease, the main reason was that companies were shifting to digital. For example, instead of ads in a physical newspaper, many marketers felt the money would be better spent on direct purchases on the digital news website.

Or with television, many marketers aren’t stopping TV, they are just moving their ad buys to CTV due to better metrics and reporting.

Other Ad Channels

The budget increase for podcasting, influencer marketing, and CTV wasn’t shocking, as that is where the attention is going.

But the increase in remarketing budget was interesting as we didn’t expect it to increase by 89%.

The main reason is that ads are getting more expensive, and it is cheaper to run ads to content and then spend money on remarketing to bring those people back to sell your product or service.

In other words, many marketers are trying to make cold ad traffic warmer by leveraging remarketing.

As for the decreases, they were mainly due to economic reasons or the ROI not being as high.

With influencer marketing, the main reason for the decrease was due to the pain of managing the process internally and the cost of labor to maintain all of their influencer relationships.

Conclusion

Overall, marketers in both B2B and B2C plan on increasing or maintaining their budget through 2025.

Only 17% of B2C companies plan to decrease their overall budget, and only 15% of B2B companies plan to reduce their budget.

The most common responses on why included the economy, lack of funding, or more challenging to get loans.

But overall, most marketers and companies are optimistic on 2025, hence they increased of maintain the budgets.

Their main reasons for feeling optimistic are that inflation is slowly going down and interest rates are also slowly going down.

We hope this helps you with your 2025 planning. And if you want my agency, NP Digital, to help you out, feel free and reach out to us.