3 Ways to Invest in Your People for Greater Effectiveness in 2025

As 2024 year fades into the rearview mirror, and 2025 already seems ready to burst onto the scene, it’s not entirely clear where marketing leadership should be focused on with training marketing teams for success. We’re not facing an obvious mandate to work from home, understand VR workspaces, or “get to know” AI like we have been in past years. So we asked some of our digital experts for their thoughts on where marketing leaders should focus their resources to build more effective marketing teams in 2025. 

Q: Now that most digital teams are past the experimentation phase with generative AI, how can marketing leaders drive adoption?

Josh Hoekwater, SVP, Client Experience: 

Unlike the metaverse, GenAI isn’t going anywhere. This often-uncomfortable truth typically leaves marketers feeling a mix of fear, uncertainty, and anticipation about how GenAI will impact their day-to-day work. Some of our biggest healthcare clients are eager to embrace GenAI, and many worry that they're already behind the eight ball. So, we counsel our clients that the most crucial step is the first one: to get started. 

We’ve found ways to help our clients jump in and continue their AI journey by encouraging them to experiment. We’ve even developed a workshop for clients that provides their teams with a mix of historical AI context, our honest take on the current state of AI in marketing, and, most importantly, real-world examples of award-winning GenAI creative work that enhanced the experience and made the idea better. It’s important to remember that none of us are AI experts, and the version of GenAI we’re using today will, in the long run, be the worst version of AI we will experience. By approaching GenAI with that kind of humility, along with an experimental mindset and some real-world inspiration, we can all share in the AI journey together. 

Q: How can digital leaders empower their teams to act more independently?

Lindsey Flanagan, Lead Analyst: 

With recent corporate upheavals, mergers, and layoffs, teams going into 2025 are having to simultaneously learn new skills and ways of working together. However, for many employees, the intimidation factor of working with data can be a barrier to independence. Enter Data Democratization: an era in which digital leaders will make sure teams are trained in data literacy and data standards, enabling them to more quickly and autonomously reach fact-based decisions.

At Genuine, we are pushing forward towards this vision by equipping our clients and their teams to establish measurement standards and best practices. We also focus on building more intuitive, self-service data tools that team members can use to access information quickly. Beyond more visual data interfaces, we’re looking at natural language analytics platforms. These platforms provide users with an interface where they can make plain text queries, and the system interprets the ask, performs database analysis for them, and answers back with quantitative insights in plain text. These assistive data platforms can speed up day-to-day activities for those with less data literacy, but they still require a level of setup and training, so it’s best to plan in advance.

Q: How can leaders incentivize marketing teams to keep looking for new efficiencies next year?

Joe Cicchetto, SVP, Technology & Development:

The concept of continuous improvement is baked into every fiber of our being here at Genuine.  This year, we ran one of our largest experiments to date – the Innovation Challenge. Five self-assembled teams competed internally to develop a prototype or concept based upon a business problem we gave them. Because we focused teams on one challenge, we saw many different approaches to solving the same problem. More importantly, it got our innovation gears turning and gave our teams an opportunity to play with new tech and new ideas.

While marketing teams may not be able to do something at this scale, there are small experiments you can give to everyone on your team. Take any one repetitive process and using a tool like Make, automate away! Make’s easy-to-use interface and premade connectors provides a no-code solution to automate any workflow. You can even experiment with AI, with a number of embedded AI tools such as Anthropic Claude and its prompt helper to make sure you get it right. Some examples could be performing research on a particular topic or competitors, automating pdf conversions to HTML for posting on the website, or even building your own marketing automation flows such as fetching leads and running a nurture campaign automatically.

Are you looking for more help or guidance with harnessing AI and reaching organization maturity to increase your team's effectiveness in 2025? Please reach out today if you'd like to talk with Josh, Lindsey, or Joe! We've got lots of firsthand experience across sectors and would be happy to chat, no strings attached.