Five Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2025
The digital marketing landscape never stands still. And it doesn’t have much respect for the formalities of our calendar, either. Innovation is happening all the time, making it essential for businesses to keep their finger on the pulse with the latest trends shaping customer engagement throughout the year.
But that said, as a traditional time of reflection and contemplating what’s to come, the start of a new year is as good a moment as any to take stock of what is happening in the vibrant, dynamic world of marketing. And most importantly of all, consider what is going to make the biggest difference to your business in the year ahead.
If you read as many of these types of articles as we do, you’ll know the same handful of trends get trotted out again and again. AI, AR & VR, video and social media are all being touted almost universally as the hottest digital marketing trends of 2025.
We don’t disagree. These are significant topics in their own right. So, we decided to dig a little deeper and break things down into five more specific trends that we’re excited about for the year ahead and beyond.
Generative Engine Optimisation
What’s the trend?
AI, and generative AI in particular, is guaranteed to have a profound impact on digital marketing going forward. But while a lot of the talk so far has centred around the possibilities of AI content creation and personalisation, don’t be surprised if search is where the hottest AI-driven marketing trends of 2025 emerge.
When ChatGPT was first launched in 2022, all the hype was about its creative potential. However, over time, appreciation of LLMs’ potential as search tools has grown. While traditional search engines simply list indexed pages by relevance to the search query, LLMs, in-depth, contextual answers and summaries, often drawing from several sources at once.
Google acknowledged this by adding AI overviews (AIOs), or results from its Gemini AI large language model (LLM) to the top of standard search results pages in May 2024. It is a defining moment that has possibly changed the face of search marketing forever. The new search format affects up to 84% of searches.
For one, the placement of AIOs at the top of the search results page is significant. Those top organic search rankings, for so long the goal of SEO, are no longer the first thing users see in their search results. Although it’s too soon to be sure, they may soon no longer be the main drivers of traffic, either.
What do you need to know?
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is similar in principle to SEO but focuses on getting your content picked up by LLMs and used in AI responses to queries.
An important thing to note is that AI search is not just limited to traditional search engines like Google. People are using the likes of Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and more as search tools in their own right. ChatGPT has gone as far as to launch a dedicated search-focused interface. Good GEO practice will benefit your web assets in more places than SEO currently does.
What does good GEO practice look like? An emerging and rapidly evolving field exists. However, early experiments indicate that establishing authority and trust in your content as a reliable source is key. One landmark study found that tactics such as citing other sources, quoting relevant authorities directly and using statistics could increase uptake in generative search results by up to 40%.
Zero-Click Marketing
What’s the trend?
The emergence of generative search could also help fuel another game-changing trend in digital marketing – a significant reduction in the number of people clicking on search results even when they do use a search engine.
According to the classical SEO rulebook, this defeats the entire point of search marketing. Businesses spend time, money and effort trying to get their web pages at the top of search results precisely because search is a trusty driver of traffic. You secure a prominent search ranking, you see more clicks through to your website, and you get more opportunities to convert visitors into customers, or so the received wisdom of SEO goes.
Yet according to recent research by influential SEO guru Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEO software giant Moz and now CEO of audience research platform SparkToro, 60% of Google searches result in no click-throughs at all. And that number is rising.
Why? Because search results are getting ‘richer’ – both more detailed and more relevant to the search intention. Snippets, local SEO listings, People Also Searched For questions, and now more in-depth generative search results all mean people are getting more and more of what they need without having to click any further.
What do you need to know?
Zero-click marketing embraces this by aiming to give audiences everything they need on one platform without having to click through anywhere else. In practical search marketing terms, that means focusing more attention on things like business listing optimisation so people can see your opening hours, menus or prices right there in the search results. You might not get traffic to your site, but you do get custom through your door.
Likewise, a zero-click strategy would aim to optimise content for featured snippets or AIOs, for example, by answering questions known to be used in search. Again, rather than simply driving traffic, the broader aim is to increase brand recognition and authority.
Zero-click is also highly relevant to social marketing. Again, social media has long been treated mainly as a lead source for your own channels. But people don’t always want to leave the platform when they’re browsing their socials. And there is value in engagement and brand building beyond measuring traffic.
This is especially relevant given the fact that most social media platforms now either don’t allow external links outright or else (as is suspected in Facebook’s case) penalise the visibility of posts that contain links. Zero-click marketing means giving audiences what they want without worrying about links.
Customer journeys and sales attribution will be harder to track, sure. But modern digital journeys are complex anyway. Not everything must be about direct conversions and measurability if you end up with a bigger, more engaged, higher-spending customer base.
Voice and Visual Search Advertising
What’s the trend?
The growth of voice search has been one of the biggest trends in digital marketing over the past couple of years.
With more than half of all mobile users now saying they rely on voice search on their smartphones, plus the growing numbers of people using no-screen smart assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, marketers have had to adapt to the fact that the language and format of voice searches differ in several important ways to text search. And that has meant optimising online content has had to adapt
But voice isn’t the only disruptive influence on the world of SEO. People are also running internet searches without using any words at all – by capturing images on their smartphone cameras and using them as the search reference, or by using images found online. Google Lens is already used for some 12 billion searches every month.
The rise of voice and visual search has pushed marketers to reconsider SEO in fundamental ways. But it also has significant implications for paid search advertising.
What do you need to know?
PPC ads can be optimised for voice search using much the same approach as voice SEO. It’s all about long-tail keywords, natural language, answering questions, etc. A good tip as far as language goes is to pay attention to the different informal and even slang terms and phrases people might use when they speak and how this might vary from location to location, if that’s relevant.
Another good voice search tip for ads is to add extensions to include your phone number. Via a smart assistant, this will enable the voice equivalent of a click-through – an instant call to your business.
PPC for visual search is starting to take off on social media as well, with Amazon partnering with Snapchat to make product listings searchable via photos and the likes of Pinterest and Instagram launching similar platforms. The first step to taking advantage is to create, index and optimise a complete image catalogue for all your products so they are discoverable via image search. Then, you can build images into ads and match visual searches to clickable images.
Augmented Social Experiences
What’s the trend?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions in the field of extended reality (or XR, the catch-all term for VR and AR) are well documented. Rebranding your company in reference to the metaverse is kind of telegraphing your intentions. The fully immersive virtual social plane he hopes to pioneer might be a way away yet. But Meta has been making plenty of what you might call preparatory manoeuvres. Including investing heavily in AR, VR and AI technologies.
This year, Meta has announced partnerships with Ray-Ban and Oculus to launch AR glasses and VR headsets, as well as unveiling plans for its own Orion range of AR glasses. Again, Meta doesn’t exactly do coy. The future of Facebook and Instagram is writ large – there’s going to be a big shift towards immersive, augmented and mixed reality experiences.
What do you need to know?
There are already lots of examples of businesses using augmented reality as part of mobile marketing campaigns. That’s likely to be how we see the first wave of ‘augmented social’ take off.
Given the huge reach of Facebook and Instagram (and other social platforms should they follow suit), that will make AR content much more common and familiar. What we know from previous digital trends is that familiarity turns into expectation among consumers very quickly. So, businesses would be advised to start thinking about how they might add AR into their marketing plans now to get a running start.
In the long term, should the likes of Meta Ray-Bans and Orion glasses prove popular, we can expect to see AR creep out of marketing and become a more integrated part of the shopping/customer experience. There are already precedents for this, such as fashion boutiques offering AR-powered virtual dressing rooms where you can see how items look on you digitally on a screen, or Ikea’s Place and Kreativ apps that let you visualise how furniture would look in your home.
AR wearables will make these kinds of experiences more immediate and seamless. To capitalise, businesses will have to move from viewing AR as a means of grabbing attention to thinking about how they can use it more strategically as part of their social experience.
Marketing Mix Models Reach the Masses
What’s the trend?
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) is not a new concept. It’s a statistical analysis approach that businesses use to ‘model’ the impact of various marketing tactics, usually in terms of their influence on sales.
You might think of it like a cake recipe. All the different ingredients contribute to how much (or how little) the cake rises. But to get the cake the perfect consistency, you have to get the ratio of ingredients just right. That’s what MMM aims to do with marketing campaigns – to get those revenue goals ‘just right’, you have to have the right mix of marketing approaches.
MMM is well-suited to the complexities of the modern marketing landscape, where the choice of channels and tactics can feel, at times, bewildering and overwhelming. MMM restores order by using data to model which approaches are going to be useful in achieving your goals and which you can leave out.
The only downside is MMM has traditionally been costly and complex in its own right, requiring advanced data analytics capabilities. But, according to Google, that is about to change. In 2025, Google is set to launch Meridian, an open-source MMM platform built on Google and YouTube data, which it claims will make powerful modelling accessible and affordable.
What do you need to know?
At a time when all budgets are under tighter scrutiny than ever, marketers are under pressure to demonstrate impact and focus resources on what really works. But that demand runs almost in the polar opposite direction to the ongoing diversification and fragmentation of media channels.
While the term omnichannel gets bandied around a lot to suggest that modern brands need to be everywhere all at once in order to engage their audiences, in practice that’s neither possible nor smart, even for the biggest brands. What we’re seeing is a return to a more pragmatic approach to marketing where the focus is on what works for you, not simply keeping up with what others are doing. Understanding what works means doubling down on data. In that context, the emergence of a new generation of agile, accessible MMM resources like Meridian is very welcome indeed.
Summary
So, there you have it, the Key Element team’s picks of the hottest digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2025. The trends we’ve picked out cover familiar territory – AI, search, XR technology, social media and data. But what our picks highlight is that it’s not these technologies in isolation that are of most interest to businesses and marketers, but the interactions and intersections between them all – how AI is shaping search, for example, or how AR and VR are evolving to shape social experiences.
Finally, by including Marketing Mix Models in our list, we touch on a broader point that is of crucial importance to modern businesses. All marketing technologies (not just sophisticated data modelling techniques) are a means to an end, tools to help you navigate the astonishingly complex, competitive and convoluted landscape that digitised commerce has become, and drive success for your brand by creating meaningful, engaging, targeted interactions with your audiences.
Trends and technologies aside, that’s the most important message to take into the next year and every year beyond that. To find out more about how you can make that happen for your business, why not kickstart 2025 by talking to our digital marketing experts. We’d love to hear from you!
Dominique Childs
