The Essential Digital Marketing Guide For Small Businesses In 2025

2025 is on the way (or here if you’re reading it in the future!) so it’s probably customary to give a few educated predictions for the year ahead. 

2024 has seen some big changes with search adopting AI more and more, new social media channels launching, and social media influence winning boxing, elections, and attention. 

It’s been a disruptive year but there’s plenty to take from it. What will 2025 hold? Here are some areas to focus on. 

The Essential Digital Marketing Guide For Small Businesses In 2025 

Get AI to automate it, and humans to create it 

ChatGPT arrived late 2022 so it’s hardly a new thing now. With a 2nd full year under its belt and countless competitors it’s now very much mainstream. 

But the rage against the Machines is strong. People are not keen on being fooled by AI. Big celebs have pushed back on deepfake videos, and social platforms like Facebook and Instagram have insisted you’re honest about AI content creation by offering you the chance to label it (for now.) 

Our thoughts though – especially with AI in marketing – is that you should be using it to do the donkey work, not the important parts.  

Getting AI to speed up process, document notes, record meetings, and mock up designs and slides is great. Using it to write tonnes of content, smash out loads of generic social media posts, or – God forbid – be you on video just because you can train a tool to do it, isn’t what people want. 

People buy from people. Make sure you leave some human on your content; preferably at the end finessing part! 

Get on TikTok 

Tiktok continued to grow and the pressure was all too much for LinkedIn as they adopted scrolling, portrait videos into their app. 

TikTok is engagement for the non-engaged. The platform rewards content pieces, not content volume or following and thus gives the opportunity to people with low to zero audience. 

On Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Facebook you’re better off when you have a large audience, on TikTok, it doesn’t matter. Create some great content and you could soon be reaching millions. 

Of course… it does mean you need to create some video but there’s lies the massive opportunity. Most hate it. Get out of your own way and get tiktoking! 

Pay 

On the flip side, on the more traditional social platforms, the free ride is almost over. Reach on social media is getting pretty poor unless you’re really consistent and committed. So, it’s worth considering a small pot of cash to promote and boost your content. 

Build a list 

You don’t own shit unless you build a list! We’ve seen waaaaaaay too many people lose all their audience this year as hackers persist on stealing social media accounts to aid their social engineering goals. 

List building – getting emails, phone numbers, and other personal data onto a CRM and email system is key to your business. 

Lost your social following? At least you can build it up fairly quickly with email. 

Tracking is becoming more of a mysterious art 

Consent Mode 2. Server-side API. Datasets. Yeah…! Digital wtf arrived in 2024. 

Getting to grips with messy configuration is essential though. If you want to be able to follow and track a decent chunk of your marketing efforts in 2025 then it’s time to stop ignoring all those alerts (It’ll be better in the long run!). 

Google Ads Goals. Email authentication. LinkedIn insights tag. Facebook datasets. Server-side API. It’s time to get to grips on conversions as the simple tracking is no longer enough. 

2025 is gonna be a wild ride. Are you ready?  

We are. It’s been a super year all in all and we’re ready to take the learnings (many of which we shared in our final podcast here) into the year. 

Join us (subby to our emails here) and let’s embrace the next 12 months. 

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