5 key digital marketing trends for 2025

Hello.

Can you hear me above the noise?

In the crazy, loud world of digital marketing, everyone is shouting, and everyone is an expert.

And even in an economic downturn, there is still a lot of cash being thrown around.

But is that cash converting into cold hard leads and sales?

In this article, I take a look ahead at 2025 and suggest how you can focus and leverage the emerging trends to improve the return on your marketing investment.

My goal is to diffuse some of the noise for you and give you some concrete areas to focus your precious energy on.

Artificial Intelligence is the hottest topic in the business landscape and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Every business owner must leverage the power of AI throughout their entire operation if they are to remain competitive.

This involves trying out tools as they emerge and then thinking creatively about how those tools can be integrated into the business to do things better, faster and with increased accuracy.

In terms of marketing, there are some key areas where AI is incredibly useful:

Research and structure: AI is a wonderful research tool. It can save hours of time trawling the internet seeking relevant information.

Once it has delivered in a few seconds, what would take a human over an hour, it can organise the information into a structure and offer angles and ideas a human brain may not have considered.

(Side note – do not fall into the trap of thinking AI can write blog articles for you – that will be a marketing disaster and send your website to Siberia – see this article for more on that.)

Data analytics:  AI is incredibly useful for analysing large data sets and instantly giving business owners detailed insight into market segments and customer behaviour.

This is powerful for large companies who can then create tailored marketing content for each customer segment.

However, if you are an SME with a smaller number of customers who you already know intimately, beware of the rabbit hole here.

You will be offered expensive data analysis by persuasive marketing companies, but stay alert and question what you will do with that data.

Do you really have the resources to create a separate marketing experience for each customer type?

Can you do more with the data you already have?

Accuracy: AI is wonderful for improving accuracy.

Tools like Grammarly pick up spelling and grammar errors as you write, massively reducing the need for hours of highly trained proofreading and editorial skills.

The pitfall is allowing it to blindly re-structure your sentences for you.

The suggestions might be OK in a business email (although make sure the email still sounds like you when the tool has finished).

But in a piece of marketing content where you are trying to cut through the digital noise and connect with your market – the tool will make you and your business sound bland and just like everyone else. And you’ll just blend into the background…

Operational efficiency: Anyone who does any amount of marketing will know that there are a lot of moving parts, with multiple team members touching each piece of marketing collateral.

This can be an organisational nightmare.

In the hands of skilled and forward-thinking operators, AI tools can help streamline these repetitive processes and reduce labour hours on any project.

Voice search is on the rise thanks to tools like Alexa, Siri, or simply tapping on the microphone on the Google or ChatGPT search bar.

Have you noticed that when you search this way, you tend to ask a longer question?

This is called long-tail search.

It’s something we’ve always focused on in Brilliant Digital because we know it’s the best way to get a return on digital marketing investment.

By building lots of long-tail content on your website in the form of original articles, opinion pieces, Q and A pages and case studies, you automatically set yourself up to be found in voice search.

As search fractures in 2025 and beyond and people start to use alternative search engines like ChatGPT – you are already in a prime position with content these new search engines are looking for on your website.  (More on the fracturing of search here)

In these days of deafening noise, bland, generalised messages simply won’t reach your intended targets.

You’ll be just another commodity competing on price.

Personalised messaging designed exactly for each customer segment is ideal for large companies with huge data sets. As I mentioned above, these organisations can leverage AI to segment the data and understand exactly what their customer base responds to.

If you’re an SME and you already know your customer base intimately, you likely don’t have the volume of data or the resources to segment all of your marketing in this way.

Instead, your focus should be on building a stand-out brand with messaging that focuses on your key customers.

I know I talk a lot about noise, but it’s every marketer’s biggest challenge.

The video landscape is deafeningly loud, but there is a massive opportunity to connect with ideal clients amongst the scrolling masses if you build a brand with personality.

The trick is to consistently create conversational content tightly personalised content.

Be there week in and week out to offer solutions to their problems and make them feel good, and you’ll build a following.

Be careful of influencers who can ruin your brand’s reputation when they go off the rails or employees with a knack for video who can leave your business and take their brand with them.

If you’re a small business owner, you or a fellow director should be the personality in front of the camera to maximise return on investment and reduce risk.

If you have the urge and skill in front of the camera – step up and get it done. The upside, if you get it right, is big.

Is demonstrating that you are ethical and environmentally conscious important?

It’s an interesting one.

I think people like to say they prefer to do business with environmentally conscious, sustainable companies, but when it comes down to the moment money changes hands, price and value are often key drivers.

Consistently delivering a quality product or service and a wonderful customer experience are clearly vital if you are to succeed in business. These are way more important in most businesses than demonstrating sustainability.

However, if it’s your product or service versus another and all things are equal, demonstrating sustainability through your branding and storytelling could just be the secret ingredient that gives you the advantage.