4 Marketing Strategies to Get Ahead in 2025

It’s a new year. You’ve evaluated the past year and you want to shake it up this year.

Since the emergence of AI, everything is moving ten times faster than previous years so staying ahead of the curve has never been more important.

Planning and staying one step ahead of your competitors is the way to win in 2025.

 In our blog, we discuss the 4 marketing strategies to implement in  2025 that align with our predictions about digital marketing and social media trends (You can catch up on it here) we discussed in our previous blog.

We provide in-depth insights into finding and analyzing data, along with recommendations for useful tools and resources. 

Let’s set you up for success!

Before implementing any strategies, it’s important to evaluate where you are now, not the future. 

Take note of past results, ROI, and whether you hit past objectives and goals before setting new ones. 

This gives you more clarity and direction on where to take your business in 2025. 

Determine your business goals. What’s your biggest goal for 2025? Where do you see yourself in a year’s time? What will you be proud of this time next year? 

Think long-term then work backwards into short-term goals and actionable steps you need to take each month to hit the end goal. 

Best practice to set long and short-term goals is by using the SMART method. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. 

A long-term goal for brand awareness could be to increase market share and attract a younger demographic (millennials aged 25-35 in urban areas) by 20% within the next 12 months.

Long-term goals take time and need to be monitored throughout the year to see whether you are on track. 

Implementing short-term goals can keep employees and teams on track and accountability. 

A short-term goal could be to increase social media engagement on Instagram by 15% within the next 3 months. 

3 months is an average timeline to evaluate whether your strategy is working or needs to be adjusted. 

Once you know your long-term and short-term goals, it’s time to implement the strategies to get there. 

The Power of Data Analytics: Unlocking hidden insights about your audience

Your analytics are your best-kept secret. They let you know what’s working and what’s not. Businesses that fail and get left behind continue to do the same strategies each year because well.. if it’s worked before, it’ll work again, right?

But there’s a reason why they aren’t getting results. They fail to keep up-to-date with trends and prefer to stick to what they know. In business, you need to be agile and always ready to switch directions if needed. Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. 

Your goals for your business this year will determine what you should be focusing on. 

If you want to increase brand awareness, your focus should be on showing your expertise and awareness around your product or service. 

Ask yourself “does our target audience need more information about what we provide? Do they understand how our product or service works?”. What differentiates you from your competitors? 

Increasing brand awareness can be done through content marketing such as writing in-depth articles, blogs, tutorials, and guides about your products or service. 

If your industry is more technical or buyers need more information before investing, in-depth whitepapers or e-books are valuable resources that can move them further down the funnel. 

Tracking your social media insights such as reach and engagement are a direct link to see if your content is resonating with your target audience.

Establish thought leadership in your industry by engaging in industry news and discussions with potential customers. 

If you’re driving traffic to your website, check your insights on your hosting platform and implement Google Analytics. On the platform, you can view bounce rates, dwell time, and page views to see your user behaviour. 

As a general guideline, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good but above could indicate a problem.

Check your page speed insights to see your website’s loading time. If a website takes too long to load, people get frustrated and will choose someone else. 

High page views indicate the type of content that is popular and engaging for your audience. 

The algorithms are constantly changing but by analyzing your analytics and reviewing at the end of each month, you can be ready to adjust your strategy quicker. 

 

Essential Tools for Data-Driven Marketing 

Google Analytics is an important tool to use for making data-driven decisions. It gives you clarity on what’s driving traffic to your website… or not. 

Are they spending time on your website or bouncing straight off? It only takes a few moments for a customer to decide if you are the right fit. 

If you want to see if your website is driving traffic, key metrics to analyze are bounce rates, dwell time, and clicks. 

If you have an e-book or a lead magnet on your website (we highly recommend it!), analyze how many clicks it gets on a daily basis. 

Is your website clear about what you provide? Is the messaging speaking to the right audience? Where do you show up on Google? Is your website optimized for search results? What about voice search optimization? 

Whether you’re a beginner or advanced at analyzing data, knowing where and what to analyze can be confusing. 

Let’s say you want to see whether your messaging is clear on your website. Add Google Analytics G4 onto your website and you can see in real-time about your users behavior. 

Google Analytics G4 replaced Universal Analytics two years ago and offers even deeper insights about your website and its traffic. We wrote a blog on everything you need to know about GA4 here. 

You can track how users are finding your website. Through search engines? Social Media? These insights will help you refine your strategy especially regarding SEO. 

Sites like SemRush, Moz, Ahrefs give a deeper insight into keywords your competitors and target audience are searching for.

Create a document like an excel sheet and download the top keywords to start implementing onto your website. 

Making your website SEO-friendly is important because if Google considers your website to be a reliable source for lets “digital marketing”, you can be ranked in the top 10 and have a higher chance of getting your content seen. 

If you don’t have a huge budget and you’re just starting out, Keywords Everywhere and Google Search Console are beginner-friendly and don’t require any budget. 

Think of what your target audience would search for. Another cost-effective way to find questions for keywords is check out the “People Also Ask” section on Google’s homepage. 

Since Google+ arrived, voice search optimization is one strategy you need to implement this year. 

We wrote a blog about voice search optimization which you catch up on here.

We dive into the different strategies to implement with regards to SEO and optimizing your website to show up in results.

It’s a competitive field but implement the tips and you’ll be ahead of most.

Businesses should have a social media presence to expand their reach and communicate with their customers to get real-time feedback. Listen to your customers.

Always keep them in mind when you are creating a strategy. After all they are the ones that buy. 

Whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Tiktok or another platform you use, each one offers deeper insights into your analytics.

A business account displays impressions, reach, clicks, new followers, and interactions. 

Don’t make the mistake of reviewing the analytics and then doing… nothing. Data is there for a reason.. to inform your strategy and what direction to take. 

If a piece of content gets more reach and engagement compared to others, do more of that. If website clicks are low, are you promoting your products or services enough? Is your audience well-informed about the desired outcome from your business? 

Your audience potentially needs more information before buying especially if you’re in the growth stage of your business. 

Establishing authority on social media takes time. Don’t feel defeated if you don’t get the results you want straight away. 

Consistency is key.

Personalized customer experiences will continue to be important in 2025. Gen-Z and millennials value authenticity, community, and being heard. 

They don’t want to be one of many, they want to have a deeper connection with the brands or businesses they invest time and money in. 

Both Millennials and Gen-Z are willing to spend more money on experiences, in-person and online so it’s important to create a personalization strategy.

We created a blog on the things to avoid in your personalization strategy here. 

Don’t get too personal or you’ll creep your customers out. 

If you’re struggling to get customers to engage and convert, your content or emails probably aren’t personalized enough and are getting lost in their emails. 

Invest time into understanding who your target audience is on a deeper level, know and know what they need to hear before they need to buy. 

Not everyone buys the same. 

Some are analytical and need results while others are more emotional and connect through stories.  

Segmenting your audience based on the insights your CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) gives or email marketing platform like Mailchimp allows you to personalize your content to their interests, needs, and where they are in the buyer’s journey. 

For Mailchimp, segment your audience by demographics (female, 25-35 years old, Ireland), and their activity in the last 30 days. Did they open your email in the last 30 days? Did they click on any links within the email? 

If they never opened your email, this could be a sign that your subject line didn’t intrigue them.

Subject lines should tell your audience what it’s about. Adding a sense of urgency and their name such as “(name) limited offer available inside!” can intrigue your audience to open the email. 

They open the email but don’t click on anything like your call to action or website, it’s possibly unclear to your audience about what action you want them to take. 

In Mailchimp, check audience insights and it gives you a complete overview of the actions your audience is taking (or not taking!). 

If you’re a beginner, start with simple segments and slowly build upon it when your audience grows. 

An example of segmentation could be – Female customers from 30-45 in Ireland who have made a purchase in the last 30 days. 

You can re-engage them with a special offer or limited discount for them because they already have shown interest. 

Segment your audiences based on these deeper insights to create a seamless experience for your customers and reach the right people at just the right time.

While AI is great to implement into your strategy to make your workflow more efficient, never lose the personal touch, the human.  Customers can sense AI from a mile away. 

Content is King. Can you guess who coined this term? Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s not wrong. 

Content is the best way to connect with your audience but most businesses fail because they post product features or information their audience isn’t interested in. 

Well, how do you find out what your audience wants? 

Analyze your data. No content, no data. More content, more data. 

If your business has been around for years, we’re sure you have pages upon pages of data to analyze and start to spot trends. 

If you don’t have pages of data, don’t worry because there’s always a way to gather information. You just need to be a bit more creative. 

Create polls, questionnaires, or forms to get feedback directly from your audience to start collecting data and creating new segments.

Don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to receive or what topics they are most interested in. 

If you’re still unsure, analyze what your competitors are doing and see what’s working. 

This can give you inspiration into what your audience would like to see but remember to always add your own personal experience, results, and expertise. People buy from people. 

Check your competitors’ social media likes, followers, views to see what content is performing well and resonates with an audience similar to yours. 

If you have the budget, tools like BuzzSumo or Backlinko have tools which can help give you a more in depth competitor or brand analysis. 

Research trends, reports, and predictions from sites like Google Trends, Statista, or the Hubspot blog who publish industry trends and reports to help you create a clear content strategy. 

It’s important to remember, what works for one business mightn’t work for yours. 

Use social listening tools like Brandwatch, looking at hashtag trends and using communities and forums like Reddit or Quora to see what people are talking about. 

You would be surprised at the value you can find online if you look in the right places. 

 

The Art of Storytelling: Connecting with Your Audience on an Emotional Level 

Every business has a story. It’s important to get it across in your messaging so you can create emotional resonance with your audience. 

Since the advancements of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it has pushed businesses to create richer,  more personalized narratives.

But what if you don’t know your story? 

 

Get clear on your why 

Use Simon Sineck’s framework, don’t start with the “how” you do it but rather why you do it. 

Why did you start your business? Most start because of a pain point they were experiencing and couldn’t find a solution so they filled the gap. 

Go deep into the pain point, the challenges and successes you’ve achieved in your business journey. 

Customers find it aspirational, inspirational or relatable. 

 

What makes you different 

Now you can look at the “how” you do it. 

What differentiates you from your competition?  Highlight your customers’ experiences, their results, and how you helped them achieve their desired outcome.

 

The Vision 

No one starts a business to have an easy life. We start because we have a vision for our own life but also for our customers. 

A future life where you help thousands of customers improve their productivity, health, expenses, and so forth. 

What is the driver behind your business? 

Now that you have the why, the difference, and the vision, it’s time to create the…

 

Brand Identity 

Without an identity, your brand or business can get lost and blend in. To create one, you need your 

• Mission 
• Vision 
• Values 
• USP/UVP
• Positioning 
• Visual Identity 

By combining your brand’s story with identity, you make it easier for you to stand out. 

Establish your brand origin. How did your brand come to be? What inspired you to start your business? Was it a personal journey or a solution to a problem? 

Next, establish your core values that reflect your business and everything you do. Is your brand courageous? Not afraid to go against the norm? Or is it about making a social impact? 

If your brand was a person, how would you describe them? This plays into the brand’s tone of voice, personality and visual identity (logo, typography, font) online. How do you want to be perceived? 

Every person will have a perception of your brand depending on how they interact with you. Make sure messaging is consistent across all channels or people get confused and are unsure what you stand for. 

Origin story, personality, core values, and visual identity, it’s time to create a brand narrative. How has your product or service improved someone’s life? 

What impact did you have on them? 

Customers love seeing a journey, a transformation, overcoming challenges and persevering regardless. Intertwine your story into your identity and you can stand out. 

 

Tracking the Impact 

How do you know if your story is connecting with your audience? 

By monitoring your website traffic, social media reach and engagement, or brand mentions, you’ll be able to analyze what’s resonating with your audience or not. 

A great example of a brand story is Nike. 

Nike is famously known for its quote “Just Do It” and the tick logo. They collaborate with influential figures like Michael B. Jordan, Lebron, Serena Williams, and tell stories of overcoming adversity and challenges. 

When you watch any of Nike’s campaigns, you are always moved into emotion. Inspiration, aspirational, motivated to take the plunge and “Just Do It”. 

Your brand story makes you unique. 

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is choosing the right platform to spend their budget and resources on. 

You might think being everywhere is the right approach but there’s only so much time, resources, and money before it can all fall apart. 

Have you created a buyer persona? and target audience? 

Because there’s a difference between the two and having both will help you zero in on your audience. 

 

Buyer persona 

A buyer persona is a fictional character you create from studies, feedback, focus groups and surveys from real people about your product or services. 

This requires deep research and listening to your audience about their pain points. From that, create this fictional persona and don’t forget to give them a name! 

They represent one of your key target groups, based on the information you found. 

Meet Martha. She’s a 31 year old and has lived in Ireland her whole life. She works in the healthcare industry and has been there for over 10 years. 

She enjoys her work because it gives her a sense of purpose and passion but the long hours writing reports are taking her away from her children. She values quality time with her family but her job is tiring and requires a lot of mental energy. 

She wishes there was a product that could save her time, improve her productivity, and give her back time with her family.

Now we have a mental image of who our buyer persona is. 

 

Target Audience 

Now it’s time to create our target audience.

This is a much broader concept compared to Martha, it’s grouping similar individuals who share certain characteristics together to target more efficiently. 

If you are a software company, developing a product for the healthcare industry to improve efficiency, save time, and is cost effective, our target audience could be: 

• Industry: Healthcare industry 
• Company Size: 10,000 – 20,000
• Income: 35,000 to 45,000
• Location: EU countries 

As you can see, target audiences are broader but buyer personas enable you to get deeper into your audience’s mind. 

From this, make a decision about where you think your target audience is going to be hanging out.

If you’re targeting the healthcare industry, invest resources into LinkedIn compared to Instagram. A professional industry like healthcare mightn’t be spending time creating videos or stories on Instagram, they are busy enough as it is.

 

Organic Reach vs. Paid Advertising: Finding the Right Balance

There’s always debates about whether to go with organic reach or paid advertising. Which one is better? 

This is why reviewing the past year of results is important because by using the data, you can decide on the direction you want to go. 

 

So what are the Pros and Cons?

If you don’t have a huge budget, organic content is cost-effective as there’s no direct financial investment. It helps build long-term relationships and trust as it feels more genuine and authentic to your audience. 

High-quality,  engaging content with the correct keywords  can also improve your SEO results. 

The cons to organic marketing is limited reach as organic reach on most platforms is declining making it harder to reach a large audience. Rather than investing with money, you’ll be investing more effort and time commitment to create, schedule, and engage with your audience. 

It’s harder to measure ROI because there’s no direct way to analyze the return on investment. 

Let’s move to paid ads marketing. 

The pros are an increased visibility as you can reach a wider audience quicker and more effectively. Unlike organic reach, with paid ads you can target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. 

It’s much easier to track key metrics like clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend and understand what’s driving results.  

However, investing in paid ads requires a big budget to run and maintain paid campaigns. If you are running ads, you need to have in-depth knowledge and skill in ad targeting, bidding, and optimization. 

There’s also a high potential for ad fatigue as overexposure of ads can lead to decreased engagement. 

So when should you consider paid advertising? 

If you’re launching a new product or service, this can generate awareness and drive initial sales.

However, if you’re a new business, focus on organic reach first to build a customer base first to see what content resonates with your audience. 

Offers around Christmas or specific holidays can maximize reach and engagement but it can be competitive so make sure to start early, have a good budget set aside, and constantly monitor it to adjust if necessary. 

Perhaps you have a specific target audience that is quite niche. 

It might be more difficult to reach them organically and ads can get in front of them faster. 

Ads are a great way to drive traffic to landing pages to capture leads for a targeted ad campaign regarding  an event, special deals, or another offer.

It’s important to evaluate resources, funds, and energy and decide whether advertising is the right approach for your strategy. 

 

The Importance of Social Listening: Understanding Customer Sentiment

Let’s take you back to school for a moment. 

Bare with me… in school, gossip was the highest form of currency. 

We’re creatures and if there’s anything people love more than is hearing about other peoples lives. 

Audiences crave authenticity. That’s why businesses are increasingly embracing behind-the-scenes content

They want to see the human element behind the brand and connect with the people who make it happen.

Gossip was a form of currency in school, social listening is the form of currency online. 

Gen-Z has grown up with social media and has no issue about voicing their opinions about topics, products, or services they have invested in. 

Understanding social listening and being able to implement feedback quickly is important for businesses if they want to remain on their customers’ good side.

Use tools like Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Sproutsocial often to listen to what your customers are saying about you.

You can turn on notifications and create filters on the platforms to be notified when someone mentions your brand or business, positive AND negative. 

Responding back to customers quickly and efficiently not only creates amends faster but customers appreciate when they feel seen and heard. 

Deleting negative comments or failing to respond back quickly will result in further negativity. Listen to the gossip because you’ll save yourself a lot of time. 

Start 2025 strong with long-term and short-term goals and set actionable steps to achieve each month. 

Review at the end of each month and adjust your strategy when necessary. You don’t want to get halfway through the year and realise you’re not achieving what you set out to do.

Get clear on the why behind your business, the story, and the vision you want to accomplish. Then implement strategies that will take you closer to your end goal. 

Struggling to achieve your goals every year? Don’t have a clear marketing plan? Content failing to get in front of the right audience? 

Contact us today to enquire about our services and how we can help you achieve your business goals.