Here are some of the trends that are likely to play a large role in the 2025 digital marketing landscape for organisations.
The digital marketing environment is always rapidly evolving as new advancements in technologies and platforms transform our way of working, and thus how we strategise.
In this article, we give our round-up of the 5 top digital marketing trends for 2025.
Video Content is King (especially short-form)
With over a billion hours streamed globally on YouTube in 2024 alone, it’s clear that video content is an important aspect of marketing that should not be ignored when it comes to starting a new campaign.
For clients that are looking to diversify their content range, short-form videos tend to stimulate the highest level of engagements in a time when audience attention spans are diminished.
Platforms are increasingly recognising this shift in video engagement more and more, perhaps spearheaded by TikTok and Instagram Reels, as well as YouTube Shorts and most recently even LinkedIn has embraced this.
With this in mind, when creating videos for your business or client, you should ensure that information, whether text, visual or audio, is digestible and brief, progressing steadily to ensure continued engagement.
Attention Spans Revisited
An expansion from the above point, a general awareness of dwindling attention spans, and a committment to addressing them, will be important for 2025.
Until recently this has mainly applied to younger generations, but as the broader internet userbase becomes more attuned to the social media state of play, their ‘tuning out’ skills improve too.
The Kantar Media Reactions 2024 report shows that 31% of people say that ads in social channels capture their attention, markedly down from 41% in 2023.
Brands must ensure that what they’re putting out quickly proves relevant to audiences before they have a chance to tune it out and reposition themselves towards something that grabs them more immediately.
Marketers must truly put themselves inside the shoes of their desired audiences to understand the type of content that not only appeals to what they want to see, but also that distinguishes itself from the rest.
In 2025 we’re going back to basics, re-examining our content value propositions.
Artificial Intelligence Normalised
ChatGPT is a platform that needs no introduction to most, as we have seen it make its way into the daily operations of a large range of sectors worldwide. This platform has paved the way forward for Artificial Intelligence in the digital marketing landscape, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Now, we also have platforms like Gemini, DALL-E and others providing anything from quick answers to our questions, to text-to-image content generation, and it is constantly improving itself.
From a content creation point of view, most marketers will agree that in most cases this is best left to the copywriter or graphic designer, as the technology doesn’t deliver the authenticity that a human can.
However, the use of AI goes far beyond the obvious use cases that we think of initially. Increasingly, AI has been used to automate previously time-taxing processes such as reporting and analysis as well as other administrative aspects of digital marketing, and AI is sure to build on this in the coming years.
Of course, AI, no matter how advanced it is or will be, always comes with the health warning that it should only ever support marketing processes – not be solely responsible for running them.
Highlighting the Human Side
A natural segue from the aforementioned point. Advancements in AI technologies have brought with them an increased demand for seeing the human side.
Information is easy to generate these days, but lived experiences and sentiment has a much higher value. Internet-savvy consumers know full well how to recognise them.
H2H (Human-to-Human) marketing places emphasis on the importance in interacting with consumers, who yearn for authenticity, as human beings, building real relationships.
The online arena can often feel like a bustling, sterile advertising billboard, but injecting this ‘human angle’ in your marketing is the key to separating the wheat from the chaff.
Simple ways to do this might include showcasing your team when the opportunity for it arises, using the art of storytelling to your advantage and treating your consumers like friends – not targets. The results from this will be worth their weight in gold.
Fragmentation of Search
Search continues to fragment more and more each year, taking what once was just a text search mechanism and throwing both voice and visual search into the mix, too.
By now, none of us are strangers to smart home devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa anymore, and how these devices allow us to perform searches just by voice.
Naturally, our searches now, are more conversational and detailed.
This has developed further as a result of Google’s new AI search tool, Gemini.
So for example, ‘how can i increase the resale value of my home’ may be a search query with a high volume that could be capitalised on by an auctioneers, tailoring blog content to this specific term.
Marketers must take into account the long-tail, conversational keywords used across voice search when creating and optimising content to ensure that it is considered relevant by search algorithms.
Another way in which the route to search has become more varied is visual search, whereby, using tools such as Google Lens and Pinterest Lens, consumers can gain information about an image they upload.
For example, a customer views a product in a shop. They are interested in said product, but it is outside of their price range. Using Google Lens, they may either find the same product at a better price from a different vendor, or indeed find a close-matching alternative at a more palatable price.
Visual search is becoming a powerful tool for consumers, and ensuring that your website has visually rich, metadata-optimised content will be crucial to capitalising on it.
If you are a business and looking for consultancy on your social media strategy, please do get in touch, or check out some our other blogs about Digital Marketing here.