How Marketers Are Spending Their Money in 2025
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.
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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.
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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:
They need to spend more money to keep up with all the format types needed for all platforms.
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.
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.
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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.