The 2025 meta-trend: an AI revolution
Some of the most significant changes in digital marketing have been prompted – or directly caused – by the global explosion in artificial intelligence. For that reason, you can think of AI as a meta-trend for 2025, an influence that will almost inevitably change the way you market your brand.
Make no mistake, the AI revolution is as big a deal as the Internet itself was back in the 1990s. Back then, a certain high street video chain thought that they could ignore the trend towards online video streaming. Had they engaged with and adapted to it, perhaps we would all be taking out subscriptions to Blockbuster instead of Netflix!
That said, there is still plenty of debate about the direction AI is heading in. Will an AI search engine knock Google from its perch or is the impact of artificial intelligence going to be seen most in image and video creation? Will AI eventually manage and lead our digital marketing campaigns, or is it more of a powerful idea generator and number cruncher, faithfully supporting human marketers from behind the scenes?
Whatever the future of AI, we do recommend that you make use of some of the AI productivity technology out there to streamline your workload. Here are some examples to try out (although there is a stream of new tools and platforms being released all the time).
A flight from fake news?
With over 400 million users, X remains one of the top 20 social media platforms in the world. However, since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company, and its rebrand from Twitter, X’s growth rate has been decreasing year on year.
In contrast, Bluesky, once a Twitter research initiative and now a social media platform in its own right, is expanding rapidly. For example, Bluesky’s user base rocketed by 30% from 20 to 26 million in just one month. If Bluesky can maintain that kind of growth rate, they could end 2025 with more users that X!
Many Bluesky users have migrated to the platform from X, with the proliferation of hate speech and fake news often given as a reason for the flight.
SEO is stable – but for how long?
While there has been rumblings about a possible AI takeover of the search engine space, for now the rules for optimising for online traffic are broadly the same as they have been since late 2022.
That was when Google revealed their EEAT content guidelines, prompting marketers to prioritise experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust in their content. In practice, this means articles need to be long enough to answer all the questions that visitors might have about your brand, products and services.
While AI might not be quite ready to rank your webpages, keep a close eye on this space. For example, across the pond, some AI tools are direct dialing businesses to make appointments on behalf of their owners.
Learning how AI is finding and prioritising content is an ongoing challenge.
Google Ads – Making the most out of PMax
If your business uses pay-per-click advertising to get hits, you will want to know about PMax. A PMax (Performance Max) campaign is a goal-based Google Ads campaign that uses AI to automate ad placements across all Google channels, including Search, Display, YouTube and Shopping. AI optimises bidding, audience targeting and creative asset combinations in real time to maximise conversions or value based on advertiser goals.
While this sounds brilliant, it does rely on the quality of your assets, data and conversion paths. PMax improves your campaigns by comparing the performance of different ad versions, so it needs to know your goals and performance data to avoid making strange decisions.
It should also come as no surprise to find that a lack of quality videos and photos on your website will lead to a poor quality montage in your ad campaign.
The power of purpose
So far, we have focused only on the ‘how’ of digital marketing. We will finish this article by coming back to the all-important ‘why’. In 2024, dentsu published its ‘Read the Room’ report which revealed that 90% of Gen Z consumers are concerned about social issues and that 75% were more likely to purchase from brands that donated a portion of their sales to charity.
In our own work, we have found that far more clients are coming to us to promote their community-focused activities rather than focusing solely on transactions, reflecting the priorities of their audience.
Finding your ‘why’ as a brand is central to appealing to a purpose-led consumer. If you want some support with that, we would love to talk to you.
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