The marketing landscape continues to evolve at lightning speed in the second half of 2025. CMOs are under growing pressure to demonstrate ROI as budgets shrink and AI tools flood the market with bold promises and mixed results. According to IBM’s 2025 CMO Study, 64% of CMOs are now held accountable for company profitability, indicating that marketing leadership is more connected to business strategy than ever before.
That shift in accountability is reshaping priorities. Privacy changes are redefining how data is collected, AI’s impact is a moving target, and proving the correlation between marketing activities and revenue is more difficult than ever. In response, successful CMOs are tightening their data strategies, redesigning their teams, and focusing on technology that drives measurable outcomes.
Here’s where top marketing leaders are focused in the second half of 2025, and how to align your strategy to stay competitive.
Operationalizing AI Across Marketing Strategy
A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that in mid-2024, most marketers were still in the early stages of AI adoption. This meant experimenting with off-the-shelf tools and struggling to scale effectively.
One year later, that narrative has shifted. According to Jasper AI’s “State of AI in Marketing 2025,” 63% of marketing leaders are already using AI, and another 27% plan to adopt it within six months. That puts over 90% of teams on the path to real-world application, moving beyond pilots into active use.
AI tools that streamline routine tasks are no longer big news. The real challenge now is knowing where AI can create meaningful business impact, especially when measurement and use cases are still unclear.
Leading CMOs are addressing this by focusing on specific applications tied to revenue and retention, like predictive lead scoring, churn reduction, or dynamic campaign optimization. Instead of launching broad, exploratory pilots, they’re starting small, setting clear goals, and scaling from proven results. Success comes from treating AI as a practical solution to real marketing problems, not just a new tech experiment.
Doubling Down on First-Party Data
Third-party data is getting more expensive and less reliable. And with new privacy regulations continuing to roll out, the trend is unlikely to reverse. No surprise that 69% of CMOs are reworking their data strategies right now as a result, according to IBM research.
What are smart marketers doing in the second half of 2025? Investing in the data they collect themselves, like email engagement, CRMs, loyalty programs, and insights from social media posts. They’re building systems that make customer preferences easier to collect and more useful across teams.
This isn’t just about staying compliant. It’s about powering better marketing. First-party data is helping leaders power segmentation, improve customer retention, and drive more efficient campaign performance.
That’s because customers don’t just want faster experiences. They want to be seen, understood, and served on their terms.
Balancing Personalization and Privacy at Scale
Customers today expect brands to recognize them across channels and communicate with relevance. But they also expect their data to be protected and used responsibly. IBM research into 2025 marketing trends calls this the “Triangle of Trust:” personalization, proactiveness, and protection.
Brands must hit all three to deliver on what consumers want most.
CMOs are responding by building scalable personalization frameworks that respect privacy preferences. That includes opt-in data practices, preference centers, modular content systems, and behavioral triggers that go beyond basic segmentation.
“The brands that will win aren’t those with the slickest apps or the fastest checkouts, but those that make customers feel valued, understood, and secure in every interaction.” – IBM’s 2025 CMO Study
Building this kind of nuanced customer experience takes more than just understanding what consumers expect. It requires the right infrastructure, and the trend is clear. Investing in technology that can deliver personalized experiences at scale (while also maintaining privacy and security) is worthwhile in 2025.
Rethinking Team Structure and Skills
Strategy means little without a team built to execute. In 2025, data literacy now outranks creativity on many hiring roadmaps, reflecting a broader shift toward data-driven decision-making.
But technical fluency alone isn’t enough. CMOs today are focused on building agile, cross-functional teams aligned to customer journeys (not just traditional channels) to enable faster decisions and more intuitive messaging.
The strongest teams combine human empathy with the ability to draw insights from complex data, and they’re increasingly fluent in using AI to improve the customer experience.
Building this kind of hybrid team, one that blends creative thinking with analytical skill, is no small feat. That’s why many leaders are investing in upskilling internal talent while bringing in flexible partners to close capability gaps and stay ahead of the curve.
What This Means for Digital Marketing Teams
Digital marketing leaders must evolve alongside the CMO agenda. That means tying campaign KPIs directly to revenue impact, aligning with sales and operations teams, and adopting agile frameworks that allow for real-time optimization.
Gone are the days of channel silos. Today’s digital teams need full visibility across the funnel and the ability to pivot fast. That requires collaboration, performance transparency, and a mindset shift from execution to enablement.
The internal disconnect between strategy and execution often shows up here, and closing that gap is where high-growth organizations win.
How emfluence Helps CMOs Strategize and Deliver
In 2025, being a CMO means juggling constant change. You’re balancing new technology, evolving team structures, rising customer expectations, and nonstop pressure to perform. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, but you’re not alone if it feels overwhelming.
That’s where emfluence comes in. We help CMOS and marketing teams cut through the noise, combining data, creativity, and digital expertise to build custom strategies that actually move the needle. We offer:
- AI Transformation: Consulting on how your website and content strategy is performing against Generative AI attributes
- AI Implementation: Consulting on where and how to apply AI across marketing strategy, using AI tools to scale content production while maintaining quality and brand voice, implementing AI-powered workflows in email, paid media, and SEO, and identifying opportunities to automate and optimize campaign performance.
- First-Party Data Strategy: Consulting on first-party data collection across channels, mapping the customer journey to identify where data is collected and where gaps exist, analyzing engagement data to inform segmentation and lifecycle strategy, and building custom dashboards to surface meaningful insights.
- Personalization: Strategic planning for where and how personalization adds the most value, developing content libraries to support dynamic experiences across personas and lifecycle stages, and providing ongoing testing, performance analysis, and creative iteration.
- Team Enablement: Acting as an extension of your team—from fractional strategy and execution support to campaign management and internal training.
- Proving ROI: Defining the right KPIs based on business goals, delivering cross-channel performance measurement, and supporting attribution modeling to prove marketing’s impact on revenue.
The most effective CMOs know when to bring in outside support, and how to use it to build long-term capability. With the right partner, you get specialized expertise without expanding your headcount, while your team gains skills they can carry forward.
At emfluence, we help you focus on what matters most, execute with confidence, and measure performance every step of the way.
Ready to move from strategy to impact? Connect with one of our marketing experts at expert@emfluence.com.
