1. AI
AI (artificial intelligence) has got to top the list.
With the explosive interest and usage that ChatGPT has generated, AI has taken on a whole new meaning in digital marketing. From content creation to suit any demographic to SEO optimization, to Chatbot integration, AI has changed the face of digital marketing forever.
Learning how to leverage AI to your advantage takes time, but once you’ve learned the tricks of the trade, you’ll find that a whole new world of marketing opportunities and time-saving opens up to you.
2. Brand Humanization and Personalization
If you’ve been keeping up with several brands over the past few years, you’ll likely have noticed that one of the latest trends in digital marketing is the shift they’ve made from professional and polished, to real and fun.
Gen Zers and millennials crave the human factor and brands that have noticed this and changed their branding accordingly, have seen great success.
Practically speaking, humanizing your brand means using things like customer reviews, user-generated content, and in general, figuring out what speaks to your audience.
3. Voice Search Optimization
According to Forbes’ information on digital marketing news and trends, there are now 200 million users of voice search in the U.S. alone. Apple’s Siri is one great example of voice search. Users say “Hey Siri”, followed by any request, from asking what the weather is in the Bahamas, to a 20-minute chicken recipe, to a request to set an alarm for the morning.
4. Sustainability
In 2025, more than ever, consumers are highly concerned with their economic footprint and will shop accordingly. Brands that promote (and importantly, put their money where their mouth is when it comes to) sustainability, will gain popularity over competition in 2025.
Ways to support sustainability include supporting social causes, showing concern for sustainability in your content, and most importantly, taking practical steps to ensure that your business actively supports sustainability.
5. Ethical Marketing
Similar to the previous point, ethical marketing is something that is becoming increasingly important to consumers, and therefore imperative for brands to implement.
The modern-day customer expects honesty, transparency, and respect for human rights if they are to trust a brand.
While companies may have gotten away with overpromising and underdelivering in the past, there is little you can get away with these days without being exposed. Customers know an honest brand from a dishonest one and will even prefer to pay a little more to a company they trust than a company that has a history of deceitfulness.
6. Virtual Reality
The line between physical reality and digital reality is becoming increasingly blurred as digital technology takes over almost every aspect of our lives.
This means that VR is another one of the top digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2025.
VR is a fantastically useful and exciting tool that can be implemented in many aspects of marketing.
Take Ikea’s ‘Ikea Place’ virtual reality app that allows customers to view how furniture would look and fit in their homes from the comfort of their own homes. Imagine how many more sales Ikea makes from providing customers with this convenience.
VR is also being implemented as a collaboration tool, which has been super useful for companies that went remote since the pandemic, as they can have virtual meetings or even virtual workplaces.
7. Sophisticated Pricing
As inflation continues to soar into 2025, expect your customers to hold your prices up to the light and critically examine them against your competitors. Whilst you don’t need to consider drastically lowering your prices, do make sure they are competitive within your market.
Also, the way you market your product will impact the way your customers perceive your price. If you do a good job of portraying the value of your products, you are more likely to succeed at selling them for your determined price.
8. Native Ads
Native Ads are another example of emerging digital marketing trends and are gaining popularity for two reasons. First, more and more consumers are limiting their app exposure on social media channels, which means traditional disruptive ads are less likely to be seen. Second, native ads are not ‘salesy’, meaning that they appear as helpful content (and they should be), but subtly try to sell at the same time. This gives consumers more of a feeling of control, making them more likely to actually buy.
Native ads can take the form of blog posts, with links directed towards a product at the bottom, podcasts that mention books, downloadables, or products, or sponsored posts on the news or social media sites.
9. New solutions for data privacy
Due to the ever-further-reaching arm of online customer data tracking, people are becoming more and more concerned about their data protection. The answer to this concern in digital marketing is twofold: transparency and tighter security.
Being transparent with consumers about how you plan to use their data sets them at ease, and enforcing tighter security on the data going through your platform allays people’s fears that their personal details will end up in the wrong hands. Therefore, companies that align with data protection laws and are transparent with consumers are likely to see more trust, and subsequently, more traffic in 2025.
10. Shorter Video Content
Patience is a rare virtue these days, even when it comes to videos. Hence, the recent marketing trend is to replace longer videos with short clips on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Though longer videos provide more opportunities to get a message across, marketers are realizing that they can get the same message across more effectively but cutting to the chase.
11. Mobile Optimization
You can probably count the number of people you know who don’t own a smartphone on one hand. We’re a generation of hand-held devices and this is increasingly true as Gen Zers and millennials come to the fore. Marketers are therefore optimizing their content for mobile screens and this trend is sure to pick up steam in 2025.
12. Selling on Social Media
Since COVID, online shopping has boomed in general, and in particular, social media shopping has gone from a minor presence to a major force. Consumers of today are both increasingly present on social media and also more comfortable and happy to purchase things through these platforms.
The Complete Content Marketing Guide For 2025
Content marketing is an excellent strategy to make potential customers aware of your brand.
The ‘content’ in content marketing could be a video, blog post, podcast, or social media post.
As most potential customers often do some preliminary research before purchasing products or services, they’ll likely find your content before making a purchase decision.
If your content is helpful, those potential customers are more likely to trust your brand and buy your products or services when they’re ready to make a purchase.
The problem is that not all content marketing strategies are equally effective.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing that attracts users to your brand by providing useful or entertaining content – usually in the form of text, video, or audio.
Content marketing is valuable to companies because it helps them build relationships and trust with their potential customers and existing customers at scale.
As a result, it’s easier to sell your products faster.
The ROI of content is notoriously difficult to measure as it’s often just one step in the customer journey, but brands with strong content marketing strategies tend to have lower customer acquisition costs and generate compounding returns.
Content marketing also has a snowball effect, as those who use content marketing to build an audience see higher returns for each additional piece of content they publish.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Effective content marketing attracts people to your brand.
You might publish a video, podcast episode, or blog post, and then people interested in the topic consume it and become acquainted with your brand voice.
Once you have that person’s attention, you can build a trusting relationship with them. As a result, you can sell them products and services.
If you’re looking for content marketing and SEO services, check out Copyblogger’s agency Digital Commerce Partners. We specialize in delivering targeted organic traffic for profitable businesses.
4 Ways Content Marketing Can Help Your Business
Companies with excellent content marketing strategies have an unfair advantage over their competitors for several reasons. Below we’ll discuss just a few of them.
1. Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs
Quality content creation isn’t cheap, but you’ll see a stronger ROI from each piece of content you produce because your audience will grow.
It’s a snowball effect.
The first video, blog post, or social media post you publish might only be seen by a few people, but as more and more people find your content and become followers, each sequential piece of content you publish will be seen by more people and produce a stronger ROI.
So unlike paid ads, where you and your competitors can earn roughly the same ROI for each dollar spent, brands with strong content marketing strategies and a large audience can earn significantly more for each piece of content published.
2. Improve Lead Quality
Another benefit of content marketing is that you can filter the type of customers you attract based on the content you produce.
For example, if your target audience is exclusively CMOs, you can discuss only topics that a CMO would be interested in, like hiring great talent. You might also offer access to exclusive reports on industry benchmarks that would interest a CMO.
In contrast, paid ads force you to rely on the platforms to accurately identify your target audience. With privacy concerns on the rise and less accurate audience targeting, these platforms are producing lower returns.
3. Build a Stable Lead Pipeline
Content marketing has a flywheel effect and produces higher returns over time – especially if you produce evergreen content.
With evergreen content (content that is relevant for years), you can continue to generate returns from it even years after it was published.
So even if you stop producing content for a period of time, you’ll still likely have a steady pipeline of leads thanks to your evergreen content.
4. Increase Customer Retention and Loyalty
Content marketing is essentially a cheat code to build trust with your potential customers at scale.
The more they become familiar with your brand’s viewpoints and identity, the easier it is to trust your brand and the more likely they are to continue purchasing from your brand.
Forms of Content Marketing
Content marketing can be any type of media across a variety of platforms, though the most common forms of content marketing include:
- Long-form text (Blog posts, white papers, case studies, etc.)
- Social media posts
- Video content
- Podcasts
- Emails
Below we’ll discuss each of these types of content in detail and when you should use them.
Long Form Written Content (Blogs, White Papers, Research, etc.)
Blog posts are the bread and butter of the content marketing strategy for most B2B and even many B2C companies and local businesses. Blogging is valuable because it can help you rank in search engines for keywords that your ideal customers may search.
For example, if you sell CRO software, ranking first in Google for the term “best CRO software” will help you drive valuable leads because those searchers are clearly looking to purchase a product like yours.
The process of optimizing blog posts to rank at the top of Google is called SEO (search engine optimization).
Social Media Posts
Social media content is excellent for generating brand awareness, and many brands (particularly those in the B2C space) rely heavily on social media for audience building.
Social media marketing is also becoming increasingly popular among B2B brands as more and more people turn to individual thought leaders for professional advice and industry news.
LinkedIn’s revenue alone is an excellent reflection of the rise of B2B social media, as the platform grew 26.2% in 2022 to $14.5 billion – the highest percentage of growth it has seen in the past three years.
The benefit of social media marketing is that you can develop relationships with your audience much more quickly, as it’s a very personal form of content marketing.
The downside is that social media content isn’t evergreen, and the key to winning with social media marketing often comes down to publishing a high volume of high-quality content. This can be tricky as it’s important to publish high-quality content readers want to consume.
Video Content
Video content is also becoming increasingly common in B2B and B2C content marketing strategies, as it’s now easier than ever to record a high-quality video on even a simple iPhone.
It’s also easier to quickly build a relationship with your audience if they can see and hear you, which is likely because body language makes it easier to trust a person.
Video content is also excellent for content repurposing, as you can turn a single video into podcast episodes, social media clips, emails, or blog posts.
The downside with video content is that the best video content usually features a person, so it might not be a great option if there isn’t anyone within the company who enjoys being on camera. In addition, the person on camera will likely become the face of the brand. If that person later leaves the company, the audience might leave as well.
Podcasts
There are more podcast listeners (and podcasters) than ever before. But even with the competition, starting a podcast is an effective way to grow your audience.
When people hear your voice and stories repeatedly, it’s easy to quickly build a deeply loyal following. Podcasts also have very high retention as, unlike other forms of content marketing, the audience can passively consume your content. So, unlike videos or blog posts that require the listener’s undivided attention, they might multitask while listening to your podcast.
Your podcast will also likely become part of that person’s routine, which makes the audience even stickier. For example, they might always listen to your podcast while driving to work or working out at the gym.
Like video content, the downside of podcast content is that you’ll likely lose your audience if the podcast host decides to leave your company.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is arguably one of the best content formats because it’s the only platform you own entirely.
Email marketing is also an essential part of e-commerce performance marketing.
For example, a social media platform might change its algorithm, causing you to lose access to your audience, or a Google algorithm update could cause your blog content to drop in the search results, and you’ll lose organic traffic.
However, after someone gives you their email address, you own that list and can retarget them until they unsubscribe because you aren’t at the mercy of a platform.
Another benefit of email marketing is that the people on your email list have demonstrated interest in your company by giving you their email addresses, making them higher-quality prospects.
A Simple 5-Step Process for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Many content marketing efforts fail because they lack a solid content marketing strategy to attract the right prospects and nurture them through the buyer journey.
If you randomly begin publishing content on different platforms without a thoughtful approach to which channels you’ll focus on, how you’ll position your brand, and how each piece of content moves the customer through the user journey, you’ll likely be disappointed by the ROI from your content marketing efforts.
To solve these problems, here’s a step-by-step approach to creating a successful content marketing strategy.
Step 1: Define Your Ideal Target Customer
Content marketing only works if you attract the right customer.
Otherwise, you’ll have low conversion rates or convert customers who are a poor fit for your product or service, creating unnecessary customer support headaches and high churn.
To identify your ideal target customer, ask yourself these questions:
- What’s the title and position of the person who buys our product or service?
- What type of company does this person work at (size, industry, etc.)?
- What pain points does this person come to our brand to solve?
- What is the person’s knowledge level on this subject (this is key to avoiding beginner level keywords when you’re targeting advanced executives)?
Once you answer those questions, you’ll have a good sense of your ideal buyer persona, and the rest of your content strategy will become clear.
Step 2: Map Out Your Marketing Funnel And Choose Content Formats
Most customers don’t make a purchase the first time they visit your website, and that’s okay.
Content marketing aims to build a relationship with prospects to eventually lead them to make a purchase.
There are several stages of the content marketing funnel, from awareness (the customer is just learning about the pain point and potential solutions) to the purchase decision phase (the customer is solution aware and ready to purchase a product to solve the pain point).
1. What type of content do your customers already enjoy consuming?
Some audiences gravitate more towards specific platforms than others. For example, most people don’t go to TikTok to hire a lawyer or marketing agency. However, TikTok would be an excellent place to sell beauty products.
The good news is that you can quickly identify the most effective platforms by analyzing your competitors’ platforms.
2. What type of content will you be able to produce consistently?
Even if you know that all of your competitors are producing video content, don’t try to create video content unless you know you can consistently publish high-quality video content. The key to winning with content marketing is consistency, so selecting a form of content you enjoy is important.
Now that you know what content you’ll produce, you can map out the top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel content.
It’s also worth noting that you don’t necessarily need a different form of content for each funnel stage. For example, you can create TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content with just blog posts.
The reason it’s important to map out your marketing funnel at this stage is to ensure you have a clear call to action at each step to move the visitor forward in the buyer journey.
Step 3: Generate Content Ideas And Establish a Brand Voice
An effective content marketing plan is about more than just mapping out the types of content that it will take to produce. You have to actually have something unique and interesting to say to get people to pay attention to your content.
So the next step is to figure out how to consistently generate content ideas that are unique and appealing to your ideal audience.
We created an entire blog post on generating content ideas, but a simple framework you can use to consistently curate interesting content ideas is this:
- What is the pain point our ideal customer faces that our product solves? This question ensures you are discussing the right topic, and if you’re doing SEO, it’s essential for your keyword research process.
- What is the “best practice” advice on solving that pain point, and why isn’t it working for our reader? This will help you develop an interesting angle that stands out from the rest of the “me-too” content.
- What is a better and more effective method to solve that problem, and what evidence/personal experience do we have to support that idea?
With the rise of AI writers flooding social platforms with “me-too” content, thought leadership content with a unique and contrarian viewpoint will continue to stand out, and you’ll actually find it easier to build an audience.
So before you publish any content, ask:
- Does this idea already exist in the market?
- Is this advice truly the best method to solve this problem?
If you can’t authentically say “yes” to both of those questions, don’t publish the content. If you consistently publish content with an authentic brand voice and don’t regurgitate the same ideas that have already been published, you’ll gain trust much more quickly, as people will look to you as an industry leader.
Step 4: Create a Content Calendar and Workflow
Your content marketing strategy will only scale if you publish new content consistently.
In fact, the formula for a great content marketing strategy is pretty simple:
Step 5: Test And Measure Results
The final step is to measure your results.
This is tricky as content marketing is a long-term play, and you probably won’t see any immediate returns on your investment.
However, some early content marketing metrics you can track to make sure your strategy is heading in the right direction include:
- Your sales team is generating higher quality leads that close faster
- Your general brand awareness has increased (more social media mentions, backlinks, brand queries, etc.)
- Your website is driving more traffic
- Your existing customers are staying longer and are generally happier
In addition to tracking these general brand KPIs, be sure to also track specific campaigns so that you can assess what content performed the best and double down on producing more of those content formats and ideas.
Most marketers track the majority of their content marketing efforts in Google Analytics, though you can also use third-party tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to measure these metrics.
Content Marketing Tips
Tip #1: Engage with your customers
Audience research is important, but instead of just observing them from afar, interact with potential customers to learn more about their pain points and build genuine relationships.
You can do this by joining Slack groups, Facebook groups, and other online communities to learn about the pain points these people face. For example, if you sell to Airbnb hosts, this might be a great community to join.
Tip #2: Tastefully pitch your brand
While content marketing should educate potential customers, it also does need to sell them at some point – otherwise it won’t be a profitable marketing strategy.
The good news is that there is a way to tastefully pitch your product or service.
Here’s an excellent example.
This blog post targets the keyword “how to create an online course” and the brand that published this blog post, LearnWorlds, is an online course platform.
Research your competitors’ advertising strategies
We already mentioned that analyzing your competitors’ content marketing strategies is a great way to get a basic understanding of what types of content and topics resonate with your audience.
However, a pro content marketing tip is to analyze your competitors’ ads and use them as inspiration for your organic content marketing strategy.
Specifically, look at your competitors’ longest running ads as those are probably generating the most sales (otherwise, they would have stopped running them).