2024 Marketing Year in Review: What We Saw and What We’re Keeping an Eye on for 2025

We’re at that tipping point in December, where there are only a few days left in the year, so it feels both too late and too early to get started on new projects, new plans, new initiatives. But just sitting around twiddling our thumbs isn’t really our thing at ES, so this felt like a good time to take a look back at the year in the marketing industry and how we can use it to ready ourselves for 2025.

This is a topic we actually covered just last month: leveraging AI to create personalized customer experiences. Tailoring messages, ads, and experiences to the individual consumer has become a necessity, with 80% of consumers saying they want personalization from the companies they interact with. Far from being a passing fad, personalizing your marketing is now an expectation and one of the smartest ways to use your budget, delivering a high ROI.

That centering of user privacy and control was also a growing factor in the social media sector this year, which is seeing a lot of movement as alternatives to Twitter fight for dominance and niche communities thrive on sites like Reddit and apps like Discord. It’s meant brands pivoting to authentic, community-based interactions of these platforms with the aim of building loyalty and encouraging engagement.

Consumers are savvier these days about who’s delivering marketing messages, leaning away from companies themselves and instead looking to influencer and user-generated content. They’re more likely to trust their opinions, reviews, and posts, and brands who recognized this and leaned into UGC – whether it’s a demo on Tiktok, a tutorial on YouTube, an unboxing on a Reel – improved their chances at building authenticity, engagement, and a genuine connection with their target audience.

If you were hoping for a break from hearing the term “artificial intelligence,” bad news is that we don’t think 2025 is going to be your year. The drive toward individualized consumer marketing is going to make the use of AI tools and techniques, from data analysis to predictive insights to content generation even more necessary and central to marketing success

This one may seem really narrow and niche, but it’s one of those areas that can deliver big results for not as much investment. Namely: are you optimized for visual and voice searches? Is your business set up to pull in traffic from people who are asking their Alexa, their Siri, their Google Assistant to grab results for them? Are you positioned well for those who are searching images, logos, and other visual media? Both of these forms of search are going to be key to growth in 2025.

Two things are true at once going into the new year: short-form videos are one of the best areas of social media to invest resources in when it comes to return on your efforts; and also, the U.S. is poised to potentially ban TikTok, which would likely dramatically rewrite the American social media landscape. Thinking creatively and staying nimble in the social media space is going to absolutely vital to maintaining engagement in 2025.

We’ll be honest: this is just the starting point for a brand-new year of change, adaptability, and innovation in the marketing space. Knowing how this industry goes, there are shifts on the horizon that no one has quite seen coming yet, but we’ve been in the game long enough to roll with those kinds of punches. Staying flexible, responsive, and creative has been a foundational part of our company – and it continues to be absolutely essential to building success for our clients in 2025.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 30th, 2024 at 10:16 am and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.