While a lot of strategies and tactics may be changing, the fundamentals continue to stay the same: know your audience. What I’m preaching to my team is that deep audience understanding drives everything – from knowing the right content to drive an SEM strategy to how we create organic social media posts. But in 2025, knowing your audience isn’t enough. The real opportunity lies in transforming that audience into an engaged community.
If you’re dipping your toe in the community-building pond and showcasing first-party testimonials, or diving in head first and starting a LinkedIn Group or Slack Channel, developing a community is an extremely impactful way to strengthen your brand and learn from your direct (or indirect) clientele.
Strategy Specifics for The Coming Year
The fundamental importance of knowing your audience remains as important, if not more important than ever. How you actually showcase your abilities to your audience will vary depending on the marketing channel you’re using. Let’s break down some of these changes by how they’ll impact major marketing strategies.
On the SEO/PPC (SEM) side…
We foresee another volatile year in the search engine marketing world. Through 2024, we saw enormous disruptions in the form of AI answers in search results, making us rethink how to judge successes and failures when it comes to SEO. Knowing AI is going to continue to get more complex, accurate, and prominent means we need to be able to adapt to an entirely new search environment.
Our SEO focus is on bottom-of-funnel impact. How are we impacting proven priority keywords we’ve been able to show results in actual revenue for your business? Knowing the key words and phrases your audience is searching for is crucial to being able to drive conversions and revenue — and if we can bring an engaged audience to the website and convert those into Sales Qualified Leads, the amount of organic visitors is an afterthought.
Once those specific priority keywords and phrases are identified, focus on those incrementally. Figure out the best way to improve CTR, Average Position, or make the content so strong it shows up in AI answers.
It would be a mistake not to mention that if you’re running Google Ads and you’re not incorporating conversion / revenue findings into your SEO strategy, you’re leaving money on the table. Knowing conversion rates on core, priority keywords should impact your SEO strategy to focus on what drives true results. Google Keyword Planner and third-party SEO tools can drive directional strategy, but real first-party information should be incorporated into a broader data-driven and conversion-oriented SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy.
Email Marketing is low hanging fruit for AI tools.
The AI revolution will be hitting email marketing especially hard. I’m sure I’m not the only one receiving 200 emails a day. This seems like a clear and obvious place that AI may be able to make our lives easier (AI generated email summaries, for example).
There are two things to keep in mind with this understanding:
- Develop and engage your community — make people want your content.
If your email is able to be summarized by AI in 2 sentences, then realistically, it should be. You need to include information or content that people need to actually read. That’s what engaging your community is.
How do you measure this?
Increased relevance of engagement metrics beyond open & click rates – the relevance of the open rate was diminished when Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) was released in 2021, but even without MPP, open rate isn’t the indicator of engagement that it used to be. In-email polls, surveys, and social share options will likely be utilized more to increase engagement & monitor performance - Email Marketers should engage with AI as well. Have your favorite AI of choice (Claude, ChatGPT, etc) summarize your email. If the summary is correct, then the summarization that Email Platforms provide is more likely to hit the main points you’re trying to hit.
I would also recommend incorporating advertising into your email growth strategy, utilizing whatever platform your audience is on. Lead Generation ads with a call to action that benefits readers is working wonders for our current clients, as long as you can stomach the long-term investment. This approach won’t result in immediate Sales Qualified Leads, but it does expand your owned list allowing you to effectively communicate to potential sales targets long-term.
Social Media Remains The Wild Wild West
Will TikTok be banned? Will Meta spiral into the debacle X has become?
TBD.
What we expect from a strategic POV though is more of the same. Instagram continues to gain popularity (we can gloss over that the reason is because they largely mimic TikTok trends) and there’s no real concern that it’ll be banned in the United States. What we’re aiming for in 2025 for Instagram though is authenticity.
Authenticity in content & in influencer engagement. Micro influencers will be more important than 2024 — with production value being less important than the emphasis on engaging content geared towards your audience. Your brand and employees can tout how important you are, but having others give real reviews, comments, testimonials, etc. is going to be a great way to engage your audience on social media.
Also — LinkedIn: Use It.
While it’s easy to look at LinkedIn and see self-help influencers that make you question if it really is that easy to ‘scale a brand from 0 to $200k MRR in 6 simple steps’, LinkedIn really is an extremely valuable tool for our clients. In the B2B space in particular, LinkedIn’s platform is a great area to establish your brand — both through company profiles as well as the thought leaders and employees at your company. Leaning into Employee Advocacy has been huge, and with CPMs on LinkedIn (cost / impression) continuing to rise, the free impressions through organic content can be highly valuable.
If You’re Investing Time Into Social, Invest $$$ Too.
Putting paid spend behind the content you’re creating across platforms will continue to pay off exponentially. If you’re spending time partnering with influencers, having content shoots, or just writing captions worth reading— you should put $10 behind that to boost your post, regardless of the platform, to your intended audience. If you’re unwilling to put a few dollars behind your content, ask yourself if it’s worth posting at all.
Actionable next steps from this post to improve your marketing in 2025:
Engage your audience. Great — but how?
If you have no audience or clients, you need to start monitoring where they interact, what they talk about, and pain points. Offer a service or product for free to have a 30 minute conversation.
If you have clients, talk to them. Why are they choosing you over the competition specifically? What was the trigger that made them look for your service? Where did they find that service?
If your clients love you, start showing a greater level of appreciation. Share tips & tricks to make their lives easier through a premium newsletter, or start a group on a social platform.
Writing blog content for the sake of keyword rankings, posting organic content into the vast pool of social platforms, or running ads that don’t speak directly to pinpoints is a waste of time and energy, and is starting the wrong conversations for your business. In 2025, make sure you are engaging your audience at all stages of the funnel based upon your goals for performance and brand marketing. This does not mean being all things to all people everywhere, but rather strategically engaging with your ideal audiences where they already are and when they are making a decision.
