13 digital marketing trends you should plan for in 2025

Ready for another transformative year for marketing, with AI, personalization, and evolving technologies taking center stage?

To stay competitive in 2025, marketers need a clear understanding of emerging trends and actionable strategies to adapt. 

This article breaks down the top 13 marketing trends to help you optimize your efforts. 

From buyer journey optimization to AI-powered search, we provide insights from industry leaders and practical steps for implementation.

1. Buyer’s journey 

In 2025, brands should focus on optimizing the buyer journey. 

Channel diversification should align with the buyer journey and all micro-moments. 

Rand Fishkin’s latest study of Google usage found that most consumers:

• Use social media for inspiration.
• Leverage search engines and large language models (LLMs) for qualification.
• Consult reviews, UGC sites and Reddit to validate their choices.
• Go to Amazon and various marketplaces to make purchases.

Key insight 

Map out every channel and every platform your customer uses to make purchase decisions. Stitching this journey for a consistent experience is key to maximizing returns.

2. SERP saturation

AI Overviews and personalized SERPs will dominate.

AI has been a significant disruptor this year, and Apple, Bing, Google, and several others will release more advanced LLMs and insights. 

Search is multimodal. This means that to appear in AI Overviews, you must:

• Focus on customer intent and user satisfaction.
• Carefully curate the customer journey across various channels.

Key insight

Before orchestrating content strategy, know your customer intent, the platform of choice for your target audience, the various formats of content your customer is consuming, and what is saturating AI overviews in your vertical. 

Ensure that the content your brand creates is consistent, discoverable, performs well in traditional organic rankings, and is cited by authoritative sites.

• It is important to ensure that content is visible and engaging across various channels and platforms preferred by your target customers, per Danny Goodwin, Editorial Director of Search Engine Land and SMX. 

Dig deeper: 7 strategies to maximize your AI-powered search market share

3. Schema: Knowledge graph and semantic search

The need for deeply nested schemas has become even more important in an AI-first world. 

Brands need to invest in building solid knowledge graphs that provide accurate information about their business by leveraging schema. 

Having technology that enables full discovery of content makes it easier for content to be crawled, indexed, and rendered.

• The IndexNow initiative by Bing offers near real-time indexing capabilities as content changes, according to Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing. 

Schema helps in ensuring the right information is given about the brand to search engines and LLMs.

Key insight

Brands should carefully measure all referral traffic coming from AI search engines. SEO is evolving into GEO. 

Alternative AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity will continue to grow. 

The more you describe what your page is about and the deeper the nested schema you add, the better you help machines and AI discover the right data, which leads to greater saturation in LLMs.

If your brand is using any tool for content creation, ensure you are investing time in understanding audience insights to create content.

Dig deeper: 7 steps to scale your content creation process in the world of AI

4. Tech stack

Adapt your tech stack by building content discovery and customer acquisition natively into the platform. This is an important step for brands. 

Does your tech stack and infrastructure natively enable content discovery? 

Consider moving from a monolithic CMS architecture to a hybrid, headless, component-based architecture. 

Standard SEO features to integrate into your workflows include:

• Redirect management.
• Keeping content fresh.
• Content creation.
• Page creation.
• A/B testing.
• Securing insights around traffic data.

Visual search, technical SEO, and page speed will be more important than ever in 2025, so ensure they are natively built into your tech stack.

Key insight

Consumers should be able to discover all your assets easily. Your tech stack should enable discovery and acquisition. 

Vision search, technical SEO must-haves, and page speed will be more important than ever. Ensure it is natively built into your tech stack.

Dig deeper: Future-proofing digital experience in AI-first semantic search

5. Digital assets and data

Centralizing your most accurate and valuable data – such as images, content, videos, and PDFs – is key to ensuring they are adaptable and easily accessible.

Referencing consistent images across all channels and using accurate, high-quality information about your brand is essential for ensuring your data remains reliable and adaptable.

Key insight

All your digital assets and data are consumed across various touchpoints and must be easily accessible depending on the channel and the customer journey. 

Consistency and quality of data are key to enabling a solid brand presence.

Use the latest vision search technology to rate your images for quality and create and centralize all data before distributing them across all channels.

Dig deeper: Visual content and SEO: How to use images and videos in 2025 

6. Content: Quality and authority 

There’s been much discussion around helpful content and core updates.

• Google will work harder on content quality issues going forward and continue to refine its algorithms to improve the elimination of poor content, according to Barry Schwartz, CEO of RustyBrick.

With so much content generated by AI, a dedicated focus on content quality is vital. Content should be personalized based on the user journey.

Topical, entity-rich content will perform well as we move toward semantic search from lexical search.

Key insight

Brands should include authority and expertise as part of their content strategy. 

• “Emphasize authorship by highlighting key individuals and their expertise rather than just the brand’s overarching claims. UGC, Reddit, and Quora will play significant roles in any brand’s content marketing strategy,” according to Patrick Reinhart of Conductor.

7. Local: Back to the basics

It’s important to return to the basics.

• “Focus on on-page optimization, Google Business Profile (GBP), personalizing the customer experience, building authoritative links, ensuring content quality, utilizing user-generated content (UGC), and encouraging reviews; all of which truly matter,” according to Greg Gifford, COO of SearchLab.

Instead of viewing local search in isolation, take a unified approach to analyze:

• Local listings.
• Website location pages.
• Local content.
• And schema or entity markup of key business information. 

Linking this information with business offerings helps search engines identify the most relevant details for local businesses.

Key insight 

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Here are four key components for a successful local strategy in 2025, via Krystal Taing of Uberall:

• “Your overall strategy should emphasize visibility, engagement, reputation, and conversion. Adopt a comprehensive journey strategy that extends beyond just local listings.”

Dig deeper: Local search: Key trends and tactics for marketers

8. Paid marketing

The traditional paid funnel has evolved significantly with the introduction of Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, which are driven by AI. 

Paid strategies now extend beyond the bottom of the funnel, requiring brands to optimize destination pages and standard campaigns to succeed with PMax.

Integrating paid and organic search strategies has become essential for reducing customer acquisition costs. 

A seamless customer experience is essential, from the first click to the final conversion.

This can be supported by leveraging user data to identify improvements and drive continuous optimization.

Key insight

PMax campaign performance relies on on-page elements and historical insights from standard paid campaigns.

Paid and organic strategies can no longer operate in silos, making co-optimization a key strategy for 2025.

9. Engagement signals

Google has become every brand’s homepage and will continue to dominate search, per Fishkin’s Google usage study.

Zero-click answers, including AI Overviews, already dominate many of the largest categories of search demand.

Key insight

Overall, Google’s traffic to brand sites will keep declining.

Most deep learning AI models use user engagement signals.

• Brands should “focus on creating targeted content tailored to specific audiences, understanding their needs (e.g., videos, podcasts), rather than just topic or keyword-based content,” according to Jordan Koene of Previsible.

Using CTR, average session duration, and other engagement signals to understand what visitors do with your content will be key to measuring engagement metrics.

This means brands must focus on saturating SERPs by creating long-tail entity-rich content that is truly helpful to the target audience based on their intent.

10. Personalization

Marketers should treat Google as their homepage and saturate the search with as much information as possible.

For the visitors who click through, it will be important to personalize the buyer’s journey and optimize for their intent.

Key insight

Curating the customer journey based on audience data can significantly enhance conversions across all channels.

By leveraging insights into customer behavior and preferences, brands can create tailored experiences that resonate with their target audience.

Dig deeper: How to boost your marketing revenue with personalization, connectivity and data 

11. LLMs

There might be a 25% decline in organic search by 2026, potentially reaching 50% by 2028, Gartner predicts.

So, how can you stay ahead? 

SEO professionals should consider using LLMs as a channel for traffic and brand visibility in 2025 and leveraging them as super-smart assistants. 

We are witnessing steady growth in traffic originating from LLMs. 

The more accurate data you provide to LLMs – along with more links, citations, and information about your business and offerings – the better they will represent your brand.

Key insight

• “Be everywhere that matters,” according to Crystal Carter of Wix. 

LLMs learn from high-authority sites, so ensuring your brand is mentioned in trusted sources is essential. 

Pursue backlinks and partnerships with publishing houses that collaborate with LLMs. 

Additionally, monitor for any incorrect or misleading information about your brand. Backlinks are invaluable: quality links from trusted sources enhance your credibility in the eyes of LLMs. 

• Allow LLMs to crawl your most valuable data.
• Manage your entity by accurately tagging your content with schema markup. Aim to secure links from authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

12. AI agents

AI agents are revolutionizing digital marketing. 

AI agents are highly influencing the future of digital marketing, offering marketers a chance to automate routine tasks and focus on strategic creativity. 

This innovation is crucial for staying competitive in an evolving market landscape.

The agentic framework supports the development of agents and efficient operation.

Key insight

Businesses can leverage AI agents for tasks like content creation, data analysis, building itineraries, and customer interaction. Successful implementation requires substantial data and modern infrastructure.

13. Metrics to measure

Understanding the visual impact of various SERP features and incorporating new metrics alongside traditional ones is essential. 

While traditional organic ranking remains important, DemandSphere’s Ray Grieaselhuber emphasizes focusing on visual metrics to measure impact. These metrics include:

• Visual rank (rank with SERP features factored in).
• Average pixel depth.
• Fold depth and the percentage above or below the first fold.
• First fold opportunities.
• Inner/interior rankings within SERP features (e.g., rank within AI Overviews, product carousels, etc.).
• Cosine similarity scores of inner rankings and ranking pages relative to AI Overview summary text.

Key insight

Co-optimization and SERP saturation will be key strategies for 2025, with a focus on measuring visual and engagement metrics.

Future-forward marketing

Businesses should prioritize delivering a strong and consistent user experience across all search engines, especially as new players enter the market, according to Marcus Tober of Semrush.

Looking ahead to 2025, it may become a pivotal learning year as we explore new performance metrics, adapt to emerging marketing channels, and transition toward an AI-powered agent economy. 

To thrive, businesses must remain agile and open to change.