2025 Digital Marketing Trends to Look Out For

2025 will absolutely change digital marketing as we know it. Agile brands have already jumped on the bandwagon of what’s to come whilst some are still adapting to the new way of doing things.

I’m talking AI, Social SEO, shoppable videos among other trends that I will point out in this think-piece.

Times are changing, for real. And it’s only best for businesses to move with the changing times lest they lose out on potential sales, clients or worse case scenario fold and go home.

Over the years we have seen companies that were reluctant to adapt to new technologies and ended up being replaced by those that read the room and moved with the programme. Kodak, Posta and Nokia are just but a few examples of such.

Looking at 2025 digital projection, there’s great potential for companies to bring out their A-game and be ahead of competitors.

So what are some of these trends?

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI has become part of us by now, there’s only need to leverage it to our advantage – in the best way possible. Brands have previously used AI to churn out captions, web articles and even ad copies.

But that might need a shift of gear a little bit. Audiences can now detect an AI generated content. And get irked while at it. Truth is, majority of your audience still value human content – content that has life and human touch.

Ideally, you should combine both your creativity and AI (especially for brainstorming ideas) when creating content for your audiences. Relying fully on AI will cost you numbers both on social media and search engines and authenticity.

User Generated Content (UGC)
The past years we have seen brands opting to use influencers and content creators to advertise their products online.

This is going to even get bigger and better (cliché), both for brands and aspiring content creators. With the current algorithm, the number of views on your TikTok or Instagram Reels is not determined by the number of followers, rather by how people interact with the content.

This calls for content creators and marketers to be creative enough to attract as many eye balls as possible. Your content only needs that one video that will grab attention and the whole ecosystem changes.

Storytelling plays a major role in this. How best, relatable and unique your content is will separate you from the crowd.

There are two tips to have in mind when you choose to bank on UGC
– Avoid being salesy – entertain first, sell later (majority of social media users are there for leisure)
– When selling directly, especially on TikTok, prioritise putting the price and location on your caption, and make the video as short as possible (save people’s time).

Short Form Videos
Of course, people’s attention span is deteriorating day by day. The shorter the video, high chances you’ll get more interactions on it. You’ve possibly come across comments such as, “ongea haraka (speak faster)” or if it’s in long articles like this one, comments will be like “summarise”.

And such is the new way of life.

TikTok, Instagram/Facebook Reel, YouTube shorts need not to be more than a minute. Put across your message faster, clearly and directly to the point.

Omnichannel
Omnichannel calls for diversification of your target audience. You have possibly been missing out on leads, clients, opportunities or even partnerships because you have relied on only one platform.

Most new brands/businesses that are coming up are opting for TikTok and Instagram and leaving out Facebook, X etc.

There are many excuses to this such as target market or their brand’s identity strategy. For instance, if you’re targeting young people (let’s say Gen Z), you’ll most likely go where they are – like TikTok and IG. Same case if your content is primarily videos; some platforms don’t do well with video content.

Whilst that is a good strategy for audience segmentation, it’s a safe bet to cross-share your content all across the platforms. Only thing you might need to do now is content repurposing – of course what you post on LinkedIn isn’t exactly what you’ll post on X, you might need to tweak it to fit the different audiences while still retaining its actual message.

Social Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If your brand is targeting the new generation of social media user, you most likely want to optimise your social media caption just as much as you optimise your web content for search engines.

TikTok, for instance, has become a search engine on itself. And this is going to be more prevalent as more content is being produced day by day. Just like X where you’d easily search for what’s trending and get the content without a sweat, you can easily search for “Fridge for sale in Nairobi” on TikTok and get exactly what you want.

What that means for brand is, there’s now the need to craft your caption to make it easy for anyone looking for your product or service to find you. This was previously made possible with hashtags, but those days are coming to an end.

Partying shot
There are numerous trends that will come along as we journey on. These are some of those that will shift the paradigm and the whole digital marketing ecosystem.

Even so, traditional techniques like using keywords for SEO, hashtags on posts and long-form articles are still applicable for some brands.

However, that is not a cue to remain behind as your competitors change lanes, it’s a wake up call to add these tactics in your arsenal.