13 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2025

Top Industry Voices Share Their 2025 Digital Marketing Trend Predictions

As digital marketers, we know a new year brings new goals, new opportunities for growth, and new challenges.

But a new year also brings plenty of change. Whether it’s advancements in technology or updates to the platforms we use, we expect another year of adjusting strategies and adapting to the changes that emerge over the next 12 months.

When we went to San Diego in November for brightonSEO, our Marketing O’Clock team spoke with some of the best and brightest minds in our industry and asked them to predict what changes and trends we'll see in 2025.

Read on to hear their thoughts and advice.

Crystal Carter | Head of SEO Communications, Wix

Brand Visibility in Large Language Models (LLMs)

“I think that this is something that’s going to be becoming much more to the forefront of these LLMs – tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, you know, Copilot – being a channel. We are starting to see traffic coming from these and you should be tracking that traffic to be able to evidence whether or not this is an actual channel for you already. And I think that these are going to be channels for us and as SEOs and as paid media specialists, we should be managing these channels strategically and be taking steps to make sure that we’re able to influence our brand visibility there.”

Gil Gildner | Co-Founder, Discosloth

Good Economy

“2025 is easy because I think it’ll be just a little more of the same. I think it’ll get a little better, I feel pretty good about the economy for the next few years – I think it will, you know, truck along. After that, all bets are off though. I have no idea.”

Akvile DeFazio | Founder, AKvertise

Meta AI Improvements

“I think that Meta will start to improve its AI. And hopefully, we can get some reporting and analysis and get an AI fact-finder and be able to do our job even more seamlessly and more efficiently and effectively.”

Jyll Saskin Gales | Google Ads Coach

Smart Bidding or Bust

“There are specific use cases where you might want to use manual CPC but especially with the way close variants work with match types now, those are few and far between. So I would say it’s smart bidding or bust. If smart bidding is not working for you, then I encourage you to try to figure out why that’s the case and try to get it to work rather than fighting to hold onto manual CPC.”

Maggie Humphrey | Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Cypress North

Keyword Changes

“I think that there’s going to be some changes with keywords. I think that possibly phrase match might be going away and we’re moving more toward broad or renaming these keyword match types because they make no sense as they are now.”

Mikhail Alfon | Co-Founder, Blue Light Media

A Focus on Creative

“I think that we have to focus more on creative specifically. As budgets expand, as creative kind of dies out really fast – understanding your ways of really streamlining that process (and) creating as many variables of your creative as possible, as many influencers, UGCs, so on and so forth. AI, I don’t think, is going to be in the place where it’s going to replace what you’re doing in-studio or with a creator just yet. So I think that if we can focus more on that, we’ll be a lot more successful.”

Sam Tomlinson | Executive Vice President, Warschawski

How Marketers Will Thrive

“I think we’re going to see a few things. I think you’re going to see Google pushing more and more into automation, which isn’t going to be a surprise to anybody.

But where I think marketers are going to shine, I think we’re going to see more of these roles rise, is thinking about three things in my mind:

One, I think, is personal brands and influencer brands are going to become more and more impactful. I think marketing is becoming more and more of the value creation.

Number two, I think we’re going to see more marketers adopt psychology principles and actually start to think, especially on the performance side, like marketers.

And then on the third, I think you’re going to see kind of a reversion back to some of the older school targeting tactics because data quality has degraded pretty substantially. So things like placement reports and actually thinking about and doing audience research and understanding the right channels and tactics to reach your audience and thinking broader than just the click. All of those things I think are going to come back in a pretty big way and the marketers that are ahead of that are going to be at a a pretty big advantage versus the ones who are not.”

Jeremy Krantz | Director of Paid Search, Compound Growth Marketing

Match Type Changes & More AI

“I think AI, which is the biggest topic we’ve had at HeroConf by far. I think over 60% of sessions have AI as part of their theme. It’s in its infancy right now so I do expect that to keep evolving and I think it will play a much greater role in everything we do.

I suspect also loosening of match types a little bit further (with) potential deprecation in 2025. I hope not, but at this point – and I think you can probably agree to this – but like, exact match is exact-ish. Phrase match is broad-ish. So like why even bother pretending we have match types anymore? Like who are we fooling here, you know?

And if Google, if you’re listening, please don’t get rid of them because I’m a control guy – I’m Type A. I really don’t wanna run broad.”

Andrea Cruz | Head of B2B, Tinuiti

Incrementality

“I’m going to go with incrementality. That’s my word for marketers for 2025. You guys have expanded into all of these platforms because we’ve told you to do so, but now you have to measure it right. So make sure you are doing all of those conversion lifts, brand lift studies, and have fun with it.”

Matt McGee | SEO Savvy Agent

Google Business Profiles in AI Overviews

“It’s a prediction and a fear – which is, what is going to happen with Google Business Profiles in the AI overviews. They’re not really in there at this point, but I have a feeling that kind of thing is going to meld at some point and I don’t know what it looks like. So my prediction is that that’s going to happen and I’m also a little bit afraid of how it’s going to look and how it’s going to impact local search.”

Julia Vyse | Digital Director, dentsu international

More Automation

“For 2025, I would say get ready for even more automation. We think that we’re seeing a lot of automation and a lot of black boxes and a lot of, like, ‘Just go broad, just let the machine do it.’ We ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Collin Slattery | Founder & CEO, Taikun Digital

Media Mix Modeling (MMM) Data

“YouTube is gonna get unlocked for small advertisers because MMM data is going to be more easily available. And they can measure the performance impact of it because it is incredible and the only reason more people don’t use it is it’s hard to measure.”

Kelvin Newman | Founder, brightonSEO & Founder, Rough Agenda

A Bigger, Better brightonSEO USA

“We’re hoping to double in size again which, you know, will be really, really exciting. And obviously, we’re running in September in San Diego so it’s going to be even warmer, even nicer here. And yeah I think that we’ve got a lot more pad on the paid search side – so in terms of increasing the amount of program and the varieties of format as well. I know that paid search… it’s a really interesting area where there’s lots of really, really passionate people who want to get together about it and we just hope we can make that happen, really.”

If you have any questions about these trends or how you can make them work for you this year, contact us so we can get you set up for success.