Is Your Digital Marketing Ready for 2025? Prepare for the Future

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Author: | Chief Operating Officer

Preparing for the future requires structuring your marketing efforts strategically to achieve success in 2025. Whether you are a marketing leader or a business owner, it is important to take time to step back and assess your approach in order to find areas where you can not only beat your competitors but also increase your revenue.

First of all, focus on three main areas of your marketing operations:

  1. Budget: Is your spending plan effectively driving your sales and revenue targets?
  2. Resources: Do you have the right team members and collaborators to meet your objectives?
  3. Channels: Are your actions delivering the outcomes you need?

Looking at these base areas can result in changes that will improve your marketing performance.

Budget Assessment

It is important to recognize that your marketing budget is a tool to support your quest for growth. To be effective, it must be aligned with your revenue goals. It is dangerous to have a misaligned budget because it means that some resources are being squandered while some opportunities are being missed, while a well-structured budget will position you for success.

The following questions will help you assess your marketing budget:

  • Have realist revenue targets been clearly defined to guide the strategy?
  • How much of the growth plan depends on digital marketing efforts?
  • What is the annual budget and are the funds sufficient to cover marketing staff, partners, tools and promotions?
  • Is the budget aligned with the growth goals?
  • How is the budget allocated across campaigns and are investments made appropriately?
  • Which parts of the budget are most effective and where are opportunities for improvement?

Reviewing Your Resources

Marketing efficiency is only possible when there is the right balance of internal resources and external partners. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and the way they are used determines the outcome.

Considering internal teams, ask these questions:

  • Which roles are best suited for in-house handling and which should be outsourced?
  • Does your staff you have the right skills and expertise?
  • Is the team knowledgeable about the trends and tools?
  • Are the members of the team performing their tasks efficiently?
  • Are costs reasonable when compared to the results obtained?

When it comes to working with external partners, ask these questions:

  • Can specialized skills such as SEO or paid advertising be better handled by third parties?
  • Have the partners you have chosen performed well in the past?
  • Are the costs of doing business with them reasonable?
  • Do the partners understand your company’s goals and align with your vision?

Evaluating Marketing Channels

It is very important to audit your website and marketing channels in order to ensure that the strategy being employed is in line with the set goals. Different channels – AI and search, shopping, display, video, social, audio, email, referral, affiliate – are meant to be employed in different ways, but often overlap. These channels work together to guide users from awareness to conversion. Visitors often interact with multiple touchpoints across campaigns, so it is important to evaluate how each channel contributes to your marketing performance.

When conducting the audit of each marketing channel, ask these questions:

  • Are you using this channel and if so, does it fit with your marketing goals?
  • Who is in charge of the channel and responsible for its performance?
  • What actions are being taken to get results from this channel?
  • How much time and cost are being spent on this channel?
  • What are the key performance indicators of this channel?
  • Is the performance meeting your goals?
  • What is the ROI?

In 2025, marketing success requires a holistic approach across all marketing channels. By analyzing your budget, resources, and channels, you can find ways to improve the strategy and increase results. Aligning expenditure with objectives, using the appropriate resources, and optimizing channel performance all contribute to the development of an effective marketing system. By auditing, adjusting, and acting on insights, your efforts will drive growth and help you deliver great results.

The upcoming posts in this series will provide a detailed method to audit your organic marketing channels and a guide to audit your paid advertising channels.

Chief Operating Officer

Aaron Wittersheim, Chief Operating Officer at Straight North, brings over 30 years of expertise in digital marketing, business strategy and technology to help businesses grow. He leads the agency’s operations, focusing on service delivery, operational improvements and IT infrastructure. Aaron specializes in aligning strategic goals with operational execution to drive efficiency and deliver measurable results.  

Aaron’s early passion for technology and business drove him to build web servers and develop websites that generated sales leads and ecommerce revenue for businesses. As the founder of Whoast, Inc., a digital marketing firm acquired by Straight North in 2009, Aaron built deep expertise across SEO, PPC, social, email, referral, affiliate, web development and conversion optimization. He has helped startups, mid-market companies and Fortune 500 corporations optimize operations and achieve revenue growth.

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