There’s a lot of talk about AI and futuristic marketing trends, but which ones will actually help you grow your business in 2025?
We analyzed the most popular marketing trends, and in this blog post, we’ll share the marketing trend itself, examples of how brands leverage it for growth, and actionable tips for you to implement the trend into your 2025 marketing strategy.
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1. The Rise of Personal Branding
Over the past few years, there has been an explosion of interest in personal branding. Here’s the search volume trend for the keyword “personal brand.”
Many individuals have built six- and even seven-figure brands purely by promoting products to their audiences.
For example, Justin Welsh has built an eight figure course from his personal brand:
Most businesses fail because the product or service they launch has no demand, or they struggle to connect with people who want it (i.e., marketing costs are too high).
A personal brand solves both of these issues because:
- You already have an audience and therefore will have very low (if any) marketing costs.
- You already found product market fit before the product launch date because your audience already told you they’d pay money for that product/service.
Alex Lieberman is also an excellent example of an entrepreneur who has used his personal brand to launch various businesses, including his ghostwriting agency. The business idea started with a single Tweet to his followers.
In just the first few months, it crossed $70,000 in monthly revenue.
Alex’s ghostwriting agency proves that individuals with a strong personal brand can build meaningful companies with a single social media post.
Alex Hormozi is another excellent example of a B2B influencer who used his personal brand to build a $250 million business.
Employees with strong personal brands are also valuable assets to companies as they can use their network to promote the company’s products and services.
For example, Amanda Natividad is the VP of marketing at SparkToro and has over 40,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Her large following makes it easy for SparkToro to promote its product to a large audience with minimal effort.
For example, when SparkToro decided to hold its first conference, it was relatively easy to get the word out thanks to Amanada’s (and founder Rand Fishkin’s) personal brands:
Additionally most customers (82%) are more likely to trust a company whose senior members are active on social media.
How To Take Action
The secret to building a personal brand is sharing your experiences and lessons learned.
Start by taking notes each week of:
- Experiments you’ve executed
- Lessons you’ve learned
- Successes you’ve achieved
Block off time on your calendar each week to write about these experiences.
Then, share those lessons, failures, and successes on social media.
If you’re a founder, encourage your executives to do the same and build their personal brands.
To ensure executives take action, consider setting aside time each week for employees to work on their personal brand.
We also have a more complete step by step guide to personal branding.
2. More Brands Will Invest in Long-Term Influencer Partnerships
Influencer marketing isn’t a new concept, though brands are becoming more comfortable with long-term, higher-stakes partnerships with creators.
Sure, brands will continue to do sponsored ads with influencers, though many are also bringing creators onto their boards to expedite growth.
Magic Spoon is a perfect example of this. In this podcast, the founder discusses why he decided to partner with influencers and give them equity in his business:
Most notably, accessory brand Ridge partnered with YouTuber MKBHD to not only promote the brand, but also join the board as a partner and contribute to product ideas.
You can listen to the founder discuss his decision to bring a creator onto the board on this podcast, but it all started with this Tweet offering $1 million to a creator to join Ridge.
However, it isn’t just ecommerce brands investing in influencer marketing. B2B brands are also partnering with influencers with significant Twitter and LinkedIn followings.
For example, Twitter influencer and business personality, Nick Huber, began as an affiliate for the VA company, Somewhere.
Here’s an example of a post he used to promote the business:
Founder Marshall Haas stated on a podcast that Nick’s promotion to his Twitter audience was responsible for a significant percentage of the company’s growth. This led Marshall to give Nick equity in the business and partner with other B2B influencers, like Shaan Puri.
Therefore, we’ll likely see more brands partnering with influencers as affiliates or even equity partners in business to grow faster.
How To Take Action
If you haven’t done any influencer marketing, start with small deals with micro influencers.
According to Statista, nano influencers (those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers) have the highest engagement rates and tend to be more affordable, so start experimenting with small campaigns with nano influencers.
Once you’ve worked with a handful of influencers, you’ll learn more about what types of personalities and platforms work well with your audience. If you have an affiliate or sponsorship campaign that’s particularly effective, consider a longer term partnership with that creator or even bring them onto your board.
3. Omnichannel Marketing Strategies Will Dominate
A few years ago, the average marketing strategy consisted of:
- A few blog posts
- Paid ads
- Occasional social media posts
This approach worked because most customers only consumed content on one or two social platforms, and Google. Today, the average person uses about seven social media platforms monthly.
This means that brands that don’t take an omnichannel approach are missing out on valuable impressions. Additionally, many of the more traditional marketing channels, like SEO and paid advertising, are more expensive.
As a result, most brands are diversifying and hiring content remixers to reshare content across multiple social media platforms.
In a keynote speech, Alex Hormozi credited most of his growth to simply increasing the volume of content he posts across multiple social media platforms. Here’s his exact equation for growth:
55 Minutes of Social Media Content Strategy for Entrepreneurs
Short-form video content is particularly effective for incorporating an omnichannel approach, and there has been an increase in searches for these types of services.
We’ll likely see more brands hiring specialized growth experts for each platform (e.g., Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.) in 2025.
How To Take Action
Each social media platform is slightly different, so simply reposting the same content across each platform likely won’t produce great results.
Instead, start by posting quality content on one platform. Once you’ve mastered that platform, you’ll hopefully be able to drive a substantial ROI from it.
Once you have more cashflow, hire genuine experts in each respective platform. For example, if you started on YouTube and decide the next platform you want to expand to is Instagram, hire a specialized Instagram expert.
You can use a platform like Upwork to hire an Instagram expert.
An arguably better strategy is to identify the Instagram accounts you admire and then reach out to that person and ask for referrals.
For example, if you like Sahil Bloom’s Instagram account and want to post similar content, contact his team and ask if they recommend any Instagram experts.
Sometimes, these brands/individuals already use freelancers you can hire.
4. Email Marketing and Newsletters Continue To Be A High ROI Channel
One of the problems with social media platforms and even search engines is that you could potentially lose your entire audience overnight if the algorithm decides to block or shut down your account.
Additionally, these algorithms control who sees your content, so the content you publish will likely only reach a fraction of your audience.
Building an email newsletter is the solution to ensuring you own your audience and that each member sees your content.
Email newsletters also significantly reduce the cost of customer acquisition, as the only real costs involved in email marketing are the copywriter and email software.
In fact, Alex and Leila Hormozi sold most of their workshop spots through their newsletter, despite having over five million followers across various social media platforms.
There are also plenty of solopreneurs who have realized the value of email lists. For example, George Blackman launched his scriptwriting course with just 2,600 email subscribers and 7,000 Twitter followers, and it helped him earn nearly $70,000 in 48 hours.
How To Take Action
If email marketing doesn’t work for you, the problem is likely that the content simply isn’t very interesting.
Justin Welsh has earned millions of dollars from his email list, and here’s his playbook for writing captivating emails:
Once you have an email list, promote it on social media by teasing what you’ll reveal in your newsletter so that people are motivated to sign up. Here’s a great example of this practice in action from fitness coach Dan Go.
5. Experience and Expertise Will Be Essential in Content Marketing
AI has replaced most generic content, yet many people are skeptical of it due to inaccuracies.
The solution to make your content more credible and valuable is sharing expert opinions and real experiences.
Google even added an additional “E” to its quality rater guidelines, which stands for “experience.” This update launched in 2022, but it’s become increasingly important in SEO as the algorithm evolves.
An excellent example of a brand that has cracked the code to EEAT-friendly content is Ahrefs.
First, they include quotes from real experts on most of their topics. For example, they created a guide to restaurant SEO.
To make it compliant with EEAT and demonstrate real expertise, they quotes from a handful of real chefs:
Their team also constantly runs experiments and then shares what they learned from those experiments:
Since each experiment is a real experience, this perfectly fits the EEAT guidelines.
This content is also much more engaging than generic advice. Incorporating experience and expertise into your content will help viewers see you or your brand as an authority on that topic and will actively seek out your advice in the future.
How To Take Action
Here are three simple ways you can incorporate experience and expertise into your content:
- Reach out to industry experts for quotes
- Share case studies and real experiences
- Interview experts on a topic and then compile their information on that topic into a blog post or social media content.
Collaborating with experts also helps your brand build authority and credibility within the industry, which can lead to additional partnership opportunities.
Some of the experts may also have a following of their own, which can further amplify promotion.
6. Live Events Will Become More Important
A study by AMX Global showed that event marketing is the second largest marketing expenditure (behind online advertising), and most marketers expect to increase their event marketing budgets.
There are also plenty of anecdotal signs that live events and conferences are rising.
Ahrefs recently launched its own conference, and plenty of other conference hosts claim they’re selling out in mere hours:
There are a few reasons why marketers are doubling down on live events:
- Increasing cost of digital marketing: There’s more competition than ever before, making digital marketing more expensive. Paid ads and SEO, in particular, are becoming increasingly expensive, making it challenging for smaller companies to get in front of their target audience. Events make it much easier to connect one-on-one with prospects.
- Lack of trust: Many prospects are less trusting of content, as there’s now a general weariness of AI-generated content. On the other hand, it’s much easier to build trust with someone in person and convert them into a customer.
Live events won’t replace digital marketing, but they offer a unique opportunity to connect with prospects in person and accelerate other marketing efforts.
For example, you can build relationships with other industry experts, which can lead to content collaborations, partnerships, and other opportunities that can accelerate your digital marketing efforts.
How To Take Action
If you plan to attend a conference, contact some of the attendees beforehand and ask if you can record a podcast or interview them. This will ensure you make friends and build relationships at the conference and will allow you to get some great content from the conference.
Most conferences also have apps that show activities happening outside of the main event where you can connect with prospects and other industry leaders.
If there aren’t any upcoming events you can attend, consider hosting a local event yourself. You can use Nick Gray’s book, The Two Hour Cocktail, to learn how to host your own party.
Another pro tip is to attend not just industry events, but also events your prospects attend. For example, if you’re a local SEO firm and have a few clients in the construction space, consider attending some construction events.
7. User Generated Content Will Become More Important
Branded marketing messages are less compelling than recommendations from friends and other real people who have tried your products or services.
Therefore, user generated content is becoming a popular marketing strategy. As you can see, the search volume for the term “UGC” has skyrocketed over the past few years and will likely continue to grow:
The search volume for “UGC agency” has also increased over the past few years and is forecasted to continue growing:
Nik Sharma, a prominent ecommerce influencer, also sees the value of user generated content:
This particular UGC campaign paid off exceptionally well, helping them increase revenue by 74% over a 12-month period.
GoPro is another excellent example of a company that understands leveraging user-generated content. They host competitions where users submit clips of their own GoPro videos. Then, GoPro creates long form videos from this content for its YouTube channel.
Here’s an example of one of their compilation videos that earned over 4 million views:
How To Take Action
You can easily run a user generated content contest by publishing a post on social media calling for people to submit their own videos for a prize.
To earn more attention, you can do what ZipFit did and launch your UGC contest in collaboration with a handful of influencers.
Once you have user generated content, repurpose it across all of your social media platforms.
Go Pro’s Awards page is also a great resource to learn more about how their awards programs work, so you can essentially reverse engineer their strategy.
8. Long Form Video Will Thrive
More brands and solopreneurs are investing in long-form video content because video provides an opportunity to build a deeper connection with your audience, as they can see and hear a real human.
And deeper connections lead to higher conversions.
Terms like “YouTube agency” are also on the rise, suggesting an increasing demand for long form video:
A study by Social Media Examiner showed that 66% of marketers plan to increase their use of YouTube videos. A survey by the Content Marketing Institute also showed that marketers ranked YouTube as the second most effective content marketing platform after LinkedIn.
Ahrefs is a great example of a brand that’s done very well investing in long form video marketing. They have over 500,000 YouTube subscribers and a loyal fanbase from the channel:
The SEO software company, SEMrush, took a slightly different approach to long form video content. They acquired Backlinko and then collaborated with the founder, Brian Dean, to produce a series of courses:
Carry is a software and service company that helps entrepreneurs save for retirement and also use long form video content to create free courses. Here’s their free course on tax saving essentials for entrepreneurs:
And it isn’t just brands investing in long form video.
Many solopreneurs have also found success with long form video.
Sahil Bloom is a great example of an entrepreneur who began his personal brand on Twitter and has since begun investing heavily in YouTube. In the past year, he has consistently uploaded to
YouTube and leveled up his content:
Dan Go is another example of an individual with a personal brand who started on Twitter and then transitioned to YouTube. He also began posting on YouTube about a year ago, and has since built a following of over 150,000 subscribers:
A handful of brands have also been built on YouTube. For example, Epic Gardening was a simple YouTube channel and is now an eight figure business (reportedly about $45 million):
How To Take Action
There are several ways to start creating video content. Here are the three most popular strategies:
- Start a YouTube channel and post consistently once per week
- Create a course with long form video content on your niche
- Partner with an existing YouTube creator
If you’re a solopreneur, you can start filming videos yourself with an iPhone and a quality microphone. If you’re a brand, you can collaborate with industry experts and have them create the videos for you.
Another option is to have a single spokesperson at your company create videos once a week. Ahrefs adopted this strategy, and it seems to be working quite well.
9. AI Will Improve Marketing Efficiency
AI has improved the efficiency of many aspects of marketing, and here are a few of the most common ways it has impacted specific marketing strategies.
Content and SEO:
- Generate Outlines and Briefs: You can type in any keyword and many AI tools will quickly generate an outline for you.
- Identify Improvement Opportunities: Updating old content is a large part of SEO, and many AI powered tools will tell you how to improve your content with specific suggestions on sections to add, keywords to include, and word count guidelines.
- Improve Internal Linking: AI can quickly identify internal linking opportunities.
Social Media:
- Generate Content Ideas: Most social media tools now allow you to enter the idea for a post and they will create a draft for you. Buffer’s AI assistant is a great example of this.
- Social Media Scheduling: You can schedule social media posts in advance and AI will give you data to help you decide the best time to post for maximum engagement.
- Generate Hashtags: AI can quickly tell you what hashtags to use.
Email Marketing:
- Optimize Send Timing: AI can analyze all of your email engagement data and then tell you the optimal send time based on that data.
- A/B Test: You can test thumbnails, email designs, and even the copywriting of your emails.
- Deeper/Easier Email Segmentation: AI makes it easier to segment your email list based on specific user actions. For example, Maropost allows you to simply type in a segment description.
Ad Optimization:
- Improve Targeting: AI can analyze your different customer segments and historical data to show your ads to the best audiences.
- Run A/B Tests: AI makes it easy to run different A/B tests at scale and organize that data into meaningful insights.
- Generate New Creatives: You can use an AI tool like Canva to type in an idea for a campaign, and it will quickly generate a creative for you. Here’s an example:
AI has impacted virtually every aspect of marketing, though it has primarily improved efficiency rather than replacing marketers altogether.
How To Take Action
The best way to learn how to leverage AI to improve efficiency is to play with different AI tools in your space.
You can also search “how to use AI for (your marketing strategy)” to see how others use it or follow thought leaders on social media and ask them how they incorporate AI into their workflows.
AI is still evolving and will continue to evolve in the coming years, so participating in industry conversations is the best way to stay up to date.
10. Trust and Authenticity Will Grow In Importance
Many people don’t trust AI generated content. In fact, 81% say that laws should mandate any AI generated content to be labeled as such.
Similarly, studies show many people don’t appreciate their personal information being stored and used for marketing purposes – particularly if it involves AI.
This means it’s more important than ever for brands to have a personal touch with their customers and increase human interactions.
For example, one of Discover’s main selling points is that they allow you to always talk to a real human within just a few minutes.
This campaign performed particularly well, proving that customers value trust and direct human communication.
Another example of how trust and authenticity is important is the growth of brands created by YouTubers. For example, BPN is a supplement brand – a somewhat common product with thousands of competitors.
However, YouTuber Nick Bare started the brand, and many customers buy the product simply because they trust Nick. Nick also makes behind-the-scenes videos of how they actually make their products, which further helps increase trust.
You can tell that this is working just from the sentiment in the comments:
BPN realized the value of trust and authenticity and now hires real athletes to create content for the branded BPN YouTube channel.
They do “day in the life” videos, where each athlete shares their workout schedule, diet, and rest routine.
You can tell from the comments that people absolutely love these videos and it has generated a lot of positive sentiment for the BPN brand:
How To Take Action
Integrating AI into your workflows to improve efficiency is certainly important, but it also makes personal connections more valuable to customers.
One way to add more personal touchpoints is offering 24/7 customer support with real people. Another strategy to make your brand seem more human is doing content collaborations with real experts in your industry and creating behind the scenes content.
Get More Help Executing These Marketing Trends
These are the most impactful marketing trends for 2025, but executing them can be challenging.
If you want more help, here are a few options.
First, you can always read about these topics in more detail on the Copyblogger blog.
However, if you want more personalized one on one help, you can join the Copyblogger Academy. It’s a course and community where you can access step by step video courses on each of these critical topics, like personal branding, email marketing, copywriting, and more. You’ll also be able to ask the community, and its seven figure founders, Tim Stoddart and Charles Miller, any specific questions.
Finally, if you want a done-for-you marketing strategy, you can always hire the team behind Copyblogger, Digital Commerce Partners.
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