What’s One Digital Marketing Trend I Actually Trust?
I get asked this a lot, usually by people expecting a list of ten buzzwords. I only have one real answer, and it’s not what most “top trends” articles push.
Every year, someone publishes a list of digital marketing trends you “can’t ignore,” and every year half of them quietly disappear by December. So when people ask me which one I’d actually bet on, I try to answer honestly instead of naming whatever’s trending on LinkedIn that week.
My answer: personalized marketing built on top of AI in digital marketing — not AI replacing the work, but AI making it possible to treat people like individuals again at a scale that used to require an army of analysts.
Why this beats the other shiny stuff
AI marketing tools have gotten genuinely good at spotting patterns in how people behave — what they click, what they ignore, when they’re actually ready to buy versus just browsing. That’s not new in theory. Big retailers have done basic personalization for years. What’s changed is that it’s no longer only for companies with huge data teams. A small brand can now run personalized marketing that used to be out of reach, without hiring ten people to make it work.
That matters more than another platform update or another content format everyone rushes to copy.
Where social and video fit into this
I’m not dismissing social media marketing or short-form video marketing — they’re both doing real work right now, especially for reach and discovery. Reels, Shorts, and TikTok-style clips are still how a huge number of people find brands they’ve never heard of. If your audience skews younger or lives on their phone (most people do), ignoring short-form video is a mistake.
But reach without relevance just burns budget. The brands getting the most out of social media right now are the ones feeding what they learn from those platforms back into how they personalize the next message — the ad, the email, the landing page. Video gets someone’s attention. Personalization is what keeps it.
What I’d actually tell someone starting out
Don’t chase every new AI marketing tool that launches — pick one or two and actually learn what they’re good at
Use short-form video to get discovered, not as the whole strategy
Treat social media marketing as the top of the funnel, not the finish line
Spend real time on personalized marketing basics: segmenting your audience properly, testing messages against different groups, and actually reading the data instead of guessing
None of this is flashy advice. It’s not going to trend on its own. But it’s the difference between marketing that performs and marketing that just looks busy.