Ready for another transformative year for marketing, with AI, personalization, and evolving technologies taking center stage?
To stay competitive in 2025, marketers need a clear understanding of emerging trends and actionable strategies to adapt.
This article breaks down the top 13 marketing trends to help you optimize your efforts.
From buyer journey optimization to AI-powered search, we provide insights from industry leaders and practical steps for implementation.
1. Buyer’s journey
In 2025, brands should focus on optimizing the buyer journey.
Channel diversification should align with the buyer journey and all micro-moments.
Rand Fishkin’s latest study of Google usage found that most consumers:
Use social media for inspiration.
Leverage search engines and large language models (LLMs) for qualification.
Consult reviews, UGC sites and Reddit to validate their choices.
Go to Amazon and various marketplaces to make purchases.
Key insight
Map out every channel and every platform your customer uses to make purchase decisions. Stitching this journey for a consistent experience is key to maximizing returns.
2. SERP saturation
AI Overviews and personalized SERPs will dominate.
AI has been a significant disruptor this year, and Apple, Bing, Google, and several others will release more advanced LLMs and insights.
Search is multimodal. This means that to appear in AI Overviews, you must:
Focus on customer intent and user satisfaction.
Carefully curate the customer journey across various channels.
Key insight
Before orchestrating content strategy, know your customer intent, the platform of choice for your target audience, the various formats of content your customer is consuming, and what is saturating AI overviews in your vertical.
Ensure that the content your brand creates is consistent, discoverable, performs well in traditional organic rankings, and is cited by authoritative sites.
It is important to ensure that content is visible and engaging across various channels and platforms preferred by your target customers, per Danny Goodwin, Editorial Director of Search Engine Land and SMX.
Dig deeper: 7 strategies to maximize your AI-powered search market share
3. Schema: Knowledge graph and semantic search
The need for deeply nested schemas has become even more important in an AI-first world.
Brands need to invest in building solid knowledge graphs that provide accurate information about their business by leveraging schema.
Having technology that enables full discovery of content makes it easier for content to be crawled, indexed, and rendered.
The IndexNow initiative by Bing offers near real-time indexing capabilities as content changes, according to Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing.
Schema helps in ensuring the right information is given about the brand to search engines and LLMs.
Key insight
Brands should carefully measure all referral traffic coming from AI search engines. SEO is evolving into GEO.
Alternative AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity will continue to grow.
The more you describe what your page is about and the deeper the nested schema you add, the better you help machines and AI discover the right data, which leads to greater saturation in LLMs.
If your brand is using any tool for content creation, ensure you are investing time in understanding audience insights to create content.
Dig deeper: 7 steps to scale your content creation process in the world of AI
4. Tech stack
Adapt your tech stack by building content discovery and customer acquisition natively into the platform. This is an important step for brands.
Does your tech stack and infrastructure natively enable content discovery?
Consider moving from a monolithic CMS architecture to a hybrid, headless, component-based architecture.
Standard SEO features to integrate into your workflows include:
Redirect management.
Keeping content fresh.
Content creation.
Page creation.
A/B testing.
Securing insights around traffic data.
Visual search, technical SEO, and page speed will be more important than ever in 2025, so ensure they are natively built into your tech stack.
Key insight
Consumers should be able to discover all your assets easily. Your tech stack should enable discovery and acquisition.
Vision search, technical SEO must-haves, and page speed will be more important than ever. Ensure it is natively built into your tech stack.
Dig deeper: Future-proofing digital experience in AI-first semantic search
5. Digital assets and data
Centralizing your most accurate and valuable data – such as images, content, videos, and PDFs – is key to ensuring they are adaptable and easily accessible.
Referencing consistent images across all channels and using accurate, high-quality information about your brand is essential for ensuring your data remains reliable and adaptable.
Key insight
All your digital assets and data are consumed across various touchpoints and must be easily accessible depending on the channel and the customer journey.
Consistency and quality of data are key to enabling a solid brand presence.
Use the latest vision search technology to rate your images for quality and create and centralize all data before distributing them across all channels.
Dig deeper: Visual content and SEO: How to use images and videos in 2025
6. Content: Quality and authority
There’s been much discussion around helpful content and core updates.
Google will work harder on content quality issues going forward and continue to refine its algorithms to improve the elimination of poor content, according to Barry Schwartz, CEO of RustyBrick.
With so much content generated by AI, a dedicated focus on content quality is vital. Content should be personalized based on the user journey.
Topical, entity-rich content will perform well as we move toward semantic search from lexical search.
Key insight
Brands should include authority and expertise as part of their content strategy.
“Emphasize authorship by highlighting key individuals and their expertise rather than just the brand’s overarching claims. UGC, Reddit, and Quora will play significant roles in any brand’s content marketing strategy,” according to Patrick Reinhart of Conductor.
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7. Local: Back to the basics
It’s important to return to the basics.
“Focus on on-page optimization, Google Business Profile (GBP), personalizing the customer experience, building authoritative links, ensuring content quality, utilizing user-generated content (UGC), and encouraging reviews; all of which truly matter,” according to Greg Gifford, COO of SearchLab.
Instead of viewing local search in isolation, take a unified approach to analyze: