Looking Ahead: 5 Marketing Trends We’re Excited to Follow in 2025

January 6, 2025

It’s a great time to be a marketer. Every day, it seems some new technology, tactic, or trend comes along to shake things up and make our world more interesting and exciting. This continually changing landscape also means that we can never let ourselves get behind in keeping up with new and emerging stories from the realm of marketing.

We know that 2025 will be no different. We’re looking forward to twelve months full of new marketing trends, from increasing reliance on AI search to a trip back to the bold colors and huge typefaces of the 1970s.

In this article, we’re looking at five trends (well, actually, a few more than that) that we’re excited to keep track of during this trip around the sun!

AI Search Will Continue to Affect SEO Practices

The launch of Google’s AI Overview in May 2024 created one of the most significant shakeups of SEO performance in history. Many sites that featured reliable, consistent, and easily digested information saw their performance soar in the last seven months of 2024.

While some of those astronomical performance increases are beginning to settle back down to Earth, that’s not to say that we won’t see more significant shifts in SEO performance over the next year. By its nature, AI is always somewhat experimental. Algorithms that perform perfectly one day can become unreliable the next, so we anticipate that Google will keep tweaking things on their end, meaning that we’re looking at a volatile twelve months.

Why We’re Excited to Follow AI Search

First and foremost, we’re excited to keep tabs on this because it informs so much of what we do. From writing website copy to managing business listings, our team integrates SEO best practices into a huge part of our content creation. The copywriters and digital marketing experts at M&R routinely engage in professional development and continually mine industry resources and publications for tools and techniques to improve our clients’ visibility on search engines.

Another reason we’re excited to track this is because, well, AI is fun. It’s interesting to see how this technology evolves and watch as it literally develops itself over time. (It can also be hilarious – like when Google’s search algorithm misinterpreted a joking post on X and ended up insisting that Elmer’s glue should be an ingredient in pizza sauce.)

AI’s Immaturity Will Increase the Value of Authenticity

Search isn’t the only place AI is having an impact. For several years now, businesses have begun relying on generative AI for a number of tasks. AI is excellent at some of them: dashing off a quick email to the team or reframing meeting notes into a briefing document, for example. However, it’s still not quite there on other things, such as writing compelling, unique marketing content.

Unfortunately, many companies have elected to outsource all of their marketing to AI, and a quick scan of some companies’ websites will quickly make it apparent that ChatGPT is still not entirely up to competing with a human copywriter. The copy, while technically accurate and even vaguely human-sounding, still rings a little false.

In a world of computer-generated content, “authenticity” is the name of the game for 2025. Audiences react well to authentic content with those undefinable but easily recognized traits that show a real, breathing person wrote it.

Why We’re Excited About Authenticity

As we said above, AI is useful. But we’ve always known that authenticity is key in marketing to today’s audiences, and we pride ourselves on creating hundreds of thousands of words worth of human-first content every year.

That’s not to say we’re not embracing AI. We’ll continue to explore AI as it develops throughout the coming 12 months. We’re already leveraging AI’s power for some of our internal tasks, streamlining our behind-the-scenes work so we can spend more time focusing on our clients’ needs. But, for the time being, if it’s content that represents one of our clients to their audience, it will be authentic, human-generated content.

Brand Consistency and “Brand World” Will Become More Important

Branding has always been important for businesses, but never more so than right now. Now that every YouTube influencer and startup company has a polished, consistent brand, audiences are saturated with branding all day, every day. So, how do you make your brand stand out?

One solution? Brand everything. When a company uses its branding on every single piece of collateral its audience sees, it creates a more powerful impression. After all, when 100% of your content is effectively branded, then 100% of your content can do some of your marketing lifting for you.

The result is what’s being called a “brand world” – a simple, concise visual document that provides an easy-to-understand visual guide to your brand’s style, specific design elements, and more. When combined with a compelling brand style guide, a brand world provides a quick-look reference and inspiration for integrating your brand into everything your company produces.

Why We’re Excited to Follow Brand World Trends

We’ve actually already integrated brand world thinking into many of our design processes – we call them stylescapes – and they’ve already helped a number of our clients achieve a solid and consistent brand.

The brand world/stylescape works on two levels: it helps our team ensure that everything we do for your business stays on brand and in alignment with your style. It also enables you to keep your team’s internal efforts in alignment. A brand world model requires all of your materials – packaging, in-store signage, digital content, traditional marketing, etc. – to be branded, and your stylescape helps define that.

Social Media Attention Spans Will Continue to Decline

We used to criticize a lack of attention span in younger people, but more recent research indicates that all our attention spans are dwindling, especially when it comes to social media. With so much content on major social platforms and algorithms continuing to lean towards sponsored content, making an impression in a sea of branded content is harder today than ever.

In 2025, businesses will need to leverage a wide range of tactics in order to make sure that a disengaged, scroll-happy audience doesn’t ignore their brand’s social presence:

Video will remain an effective scroll-stopper if the content is engaging and can grab the viewer in the first few fractions of a second.
Humor, music, and dramatic visuals will also remain effective in helping businesses’ social content stand out.
Combining organic social content and social ads will be vital for businesses looking to cut through the algorithm and get their message out on social platforms.
As with all other marketing, authenticity will play an essential role in separating the social kings from the overlooked multitudes.

Why We’re Excited to Follow Social Media Trends

In 2024, we revamped our social media services to better promote our clients. We’re leaning even more heavily into video, authentic on-site photography, and regular posts not only about your business’s products and services but also about your team and the people behind your business’s success.

We’ve already begun the new practice of our digital experts visiting our social media clients’ businesses biweekly, monthly, or bimonthly, collecting fresh new content and generating content ideas for social media. As we proceed through 2025, we’re excited to track how these new tactics help us create more buzz.

Design Trends Will Continue to Track Broader Style Trends

Our design team has several trends they’re excited to track, from AI-assisted design to the most recent iteration of retro design:

AI-Assisted Design—Just like with content, AI’s design skills are still under development. Talented designers, however, can use AI to help with brainstorming and finalizing their work.
Texture and Depth – Audiences are beginning to look for a change from the flat, smooth designs of the AI-powered world and wishing for a return to textured designs with depth of color and tone.
Retro Is Back (Again) – Actually, it never left. While there’s usually at least one retro trend active at any given time, the current trends towards a vintage style include the bold typography and color schemes of the 1970s and ‘80s.
Unique Shapes – Part of the design trend looking back to the ‘70s and ‘80s includes the return of custom shapes to marketing, with things like “blob designs” and the floral/asterisk shapes of the era coming back into vogue.
Dynamic and Custom Typography – Watch out, font designers – the rising trend in typography is towards more custom letter shapes and styles that break from existing typefaces. Animations involving moving, active letters that reflect the piece’s messaging are also returning to the spotlight.
Minimalist-Maximalist Design – While this might seem like a contradiction, this new trend combines the level of detail and complexity seen in maximalist design with the simpler shapes and color designs of minimalist style.

Why We’re Excited to Follow Design Trends

Our designers love good design, and new trends open up new spaces for our team to leverage their incredible creativity to provide precisely that. They strive to continually find innovative ways to integrate current design trends without succumbing to passing fads that have no staying power.

Our “stylescape” model of design idea creation means that we’re even better positioned to build a look that effectively uses these design trends while remaining flexible enough to adapt to future changes without breaking anything that’s been done prior.

We’ll Continue to Be Your Partner in Growth

Okay, so this one isn’t a trend. It’s a promise. No matter how the marketing landscape changes, we’ll be right there on top of it, leveraging the newest best practices to deliver your brand to audiences in innovative ways. Throughout 2025 and beyond, we’ll be tracking these and other trends, making sure that your marketing remains appealing and effective in the face of an ever-changing marketing landscape.

Call 478-621-4491 or contact one of our business development managers today, and get ready to embrace the latest in marketing awesomeness in 2025!

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