EP 67: From 2024 to 2025: The Biggest Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Acquire podcast. I'm your host Jenny Wright. We are going to do a really cool episode today where we're going to be looking at the trends from 2024 in digital marketing, what was great, what sucked and what's coming in 2025. This is going to help you prepare for what is literally on the horizon and it's Christmas Eve and I love doing something like this at the end of the year, uh,

on this day, actually, because I think it's really fun. And if you're listening to this, I hope that whatever, if anything you celebrate, you're enjoying it. So happy Yule, Christmas, Hanukkah, all the wonderful different holidays. There's so many that are happening at this time of year because it is a special time of year for so many people. So I hope that you're enjoying it in any way that you choose to enjoy it.

I like having my apple cider or hot chocolate and a nice book. Unfortunately it's not going to be or it isn't a white Christmas up here with any snow. Usually in Canada that would be the case but we're just not having it where I am in Toronto and that really sucks. But a couple hours from here they have a couple feet of snow and I wish I was there.

And hopefully we'll be in the next little while to go do some skiing. Anyways, let's really dive into this. I'm excited. Again, we're breaking down the biggest trends in digital marketing from 2024 and then what's ahead in 2025. So get ready to take some notes. This is very cool. I've done some research.

particularly to bring you this episode. And so I can't even start this episode without first mentioning AI. And AI was the biggest thing in 2024. We saw this rise of content creation. There was a ton of fear that it was going to eliminate a bunch of digital marketing jobs. It has not. It has changed the way we work.

But you'll find that even with the level of ChatGPT 4.0 and Jasper and all of the other ones, we still don't have a perfect AI. And I don't think we're going to have it for some time. However, if you are somebody who follows what's going on with AI and updates, you'll know that ChatGPT 5 is on the horizon at the time that we're talking about this, which is the end of 2024.

And ChatTPD 5 is meant to be insane. Like it's just taking all the learning models that it's been using since it came out and 5 is about to be incredible.

Apple just came out with their newest iOS for the iPhone, for Mac, everything. And the iOS on my iPhone now has this really cool Siri, which lights up my screen. But I will tell you right now that the outputs are just not perfect. So you ask it something simple and I'm just not getting great answers. So it looks like it's still figuring things out.

But how cool has 2024 been for AI, right? So we've seen people use it for email marketing, creation, blogs, ads, you know, all of that stuff being created in record time. I'm still writing copy by hand. I'm using it for research and prompts, and that's totally okay. But when it comes to writing email copy, website copy, webinar copy for high conversion, it's

It's still not there and I'm not going to use it as such. Definitely using it for research, but I don't recommend that you use it for all of your content creation. It's just missing that essential human element, human factor. And so something to take in consideration. It definitely helps you save time though. I mean, wow. The things that we've been able to create.

Short form video domination. That's what 2024 was really about. It was 100% platforms like TikTok and Instagram reels, YouTube shorts were driving insane engagement. I saw my own engagement on YouTube shorts go through the roof. And if you weren't creating bite-sized, enjoyable, snackable pieces of content, then you missed out.

that, that opportunity. Now we're switching weirdly for 2025. And I'll talk about that in a bit. We're going more long form, right? So we're seeing YouTube shorts now allowing for three minutes, uh, TikToks. The length of time is insane. You can put it like a 10 minute TikTok, but short form video, I predict is still not going to go anywhere. I still predict that short form video is here to stay. It just that you have to get more creative with it. And so I think that's going to continue to be a trend in 2025.

Another thing that I saw happening in 2024, and I have been saying this for years, it will never change, but I swear it takes people a while to come around. But you'll say you'll hear a lot of people saying that like email marketing is back.

it never freaking left. I don't know where people get this idea that it's back. I think only because people finally sort of woke up that social media is just unpredictable, unreliable in a lot of ways, right? You know, we hear about this upcoming TikTok ban in the States. I'm in Canada. There's no creator fund here in Canada, but a lot of the creators in the States using TikTok as their monitor, like the way that they're making money is they're totally screwed. But you know,

they're seeing the reliance that they have on these social media platforms and they need to get over into email marketing. And it's a constant thing. It's like a, it's like a cycle. You know, we've got, um, blue sky that just came out blue sky looks to me kind of like old Twitter, but I, you know, I, I have my profile on there. I don't really dabble too much. And I will say that I just love that people are like, you know, email marketing is making a comeback guys. It just,

it's never going to leave just get on board with email marketing and stop postulating that anything else is going to take over email marketing is not going anywhere at least not for the next i don't know five years at least and i'll update that in five years we'll see what i say in five years but i'm telling you your email list is where it's at it's the most valuable asset you own and if you haven't spent a considerable amount of time in 2024 building it up

you gotta make plans for 2025, okay? Really, like you really need to make plans for 2025. And then the next thing that was really, really prevalent in 2024 was this sort of like...

it's such an overused word, but authenticity movement. You may have heard this, like the no filter movement of 2024, where audiences were just completely done with overpolished, super salesy content, formulaic content. Even businesses, big, big brands were really going full on authenticity, right? They were going full on for like no filter. You would see Wendy's responding on people's TikToks. You'd see like...

the smithsonian institute and stuff like that like you were seeing some crazy clapbacks on social media from other companies responding you were seeing people really taking off sort of the uh the the sort of gossamer kind of look that overly make that like um filtered looks on a lot of social media and they were just delivering the content as transparently as possible a

A lot of people were starting to talk more about their wins and their losses. A lot of people were getting really real with numbers, ditching the corporate speak for a deeper human connection. I can't even tell you how important that is. I just abhor, abhor corporate speak. Like if I hear anything about silos or running it up the flagpole, my eyes roll in the back of my head and I honestly need a cup of tea because it drives me insane.

And then one of the big things also that you probably saw, I know I definitely saw, was the increase in sustainability. And what I mean by that is like eco-conscious marketing hit a new high in 2024. And it's been around for a while.

But we're seeing an increase of it. And depending on sort of where you're from in the world, there was more of that or less of that. And we definitely saw that from packaging and ad copy, brands that really demonstrated

genuine care about their end client or their end user and the planned usage of their product versus how they may have been actually promoting that in the past, the packaging they may have used, stuff like that. And we were seeing a lot of brownie points being earned for certain brands in that way. And we also saw a couple people, their brands being shown that they actually were not sustainable. And I'm not going to point fingers, but man,

You know, when a certain brand says it's cleaning up the world, picking up all the trash, and then we find out that

that's not really happening. Um, that's, that's pretty sad. And I mean, I don't know the validity a hundred percent, but the claims seem to be pretty clear that that isn't completely happening. So, uh, you know, I think there's still a lot to be done on the eco-conscious space. And one thing that I am going to say that for 2025, and I've been talking about this since like 2021, um,

Is this desire to add a charitable component into the digital marketing space? So for every dollar spent on marketing, you know, like it was 10 cents or it was 25 cents or whatnot, we're now seeing like a percentage. So 10% of all sales from a summit are going to a charitable component.

cause, which I think is great. And that is a great thing. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. We're seeing a lot of people talking about that more. And I think it's important. Where can you add that into your marketing for 2025? If you're so inclined, I think that's something that, you know, people should really, really consider.

And then when we look at 2025, whew, okay, these are my predictions for 2025. This is based on me keeping a really close eye on the trends that are happening, talking to a ton of people in this space, and really just having lived in digital marketing since, you know, mid-2012, right?

and really playing in this space for a very long time. I am, I'm coming up on what my 13th year since I left corporate and decided to become a digital marketer and started working on summits and whatnot. And one of the things that I'm really seeing is a lot of personalization coming for 2025. That is my prediction that generic content,

for your entire audience is just not going to fly, right? So this is what I've been talking about for years, but I really think we're going to see a lot of it. And this is the segmentation and personalization within your niche, within the lists that you currently have.

And it's not just like a nice to have, it's a must have now, right? It's an expectation that if I'm on your list, I'm not going to get the generic content. I'm going to get something that I really, really want to hear about. And so you must have segmentation in your list using tagging. It hasn't got, here's the thing with the advent of AI being integrated into every email marketing service on the planet right now, like active campaign, high

high level kit, you know, and so on.

It's impossible for you not to be able to do this, okay? Because it is so simple. And you can use their AI assistance to help support you in the segmentation and delineation of who your audiences are. And you should be creating content specifically for those segmented audiences and not doing en masse, okay? People want content that feels like it was made just for them, whether it's through email, through ads, through social media, and so on, and you should be making it.

And it's literally never been easier. So make sure you're doing that in 2025. If not, you're going to feel the pain. You're going to feel the pain and the crunch of that. Okay.

And I think one of the things that works a lot and is going to take even more center stage in 2025 than it did in 2024 or any year previous, and I'm seeing it in my own things, my own business is interactive content really taking center stage, right? Polls, quizzes, surveys, calculators. Calculators are huge.

I just went through this with a client where we just had an incredible calculator on their website for how to estimate the total cost of your digital marketing campaigns or the calculator on what it would take to have different services within your business. So this is like a larger agency model, but it was like, how much would it cost to have a

video, like a video editor on retainer, how much would it cost to have that person as an hourly or project based. And this calculator on this website was amazing. I actually used it like, I don't know, half a dozen times just to play around with it. And the reason that this calculator was so fantastic, it was, it was allowing you to kind of budget out your expenses as a digital marketing agency or an agency owner, and also potentially as a client that would hire a digital marketing agency.

And honestly, I think calculators are massive and people should be looking at using them. And they're, again, everything is easier now with AI. It's like you, you can't not do these things because it is at your fingertips in so many different ways. So make sure you're looking into polls, quizzes, surveys, calculators, interactive content in some way, shape or form that you can create it because people are so fricking tired at being talked at.

And you've heard me say this before, talk with, talk like engage, talk with people, don't talk at them, explore conversations with people, make people part of your story and be part of their story. If you can insert and storytell your way into a conversation with people, you're going to have a much better result than if you talk at them and tell them the results they should, could, would make if only they hired you.

That doesn't work anymore, right? Interactive elements on your websites, on your emails, within your social platforms. A good friend of mine, Katie Brinkley, had created in 2024 the four post strategy. And one of the elements in her four post strategy, which was to stop posting all the time on social media, one of those elements was a poll. And every week,

She has a poll and it's up on LinkedIn and it's up on Instagram. And, you know, Katie was doing my socials for years until she got so busy that she had to let me go this year. But don't worry, we're still amazing friends and I still use her four post strategy. But, you know, Katie building out her agency, built it on this four post strategy and it took her to new heights this year. And one of those things was a poll.

And putting polls into your social media is a game changer because it is that interactive element, you know, and it doesn't have to sound like a poll, like answer these three questions below. It can literally be, you know, email marketing or the success of email marketing is in consistency. Agree or disagree. I put that up on my social media. I put that up on Facebook like two months ago. I'm still getting fricking hits on that thing. So that's what a poll is. Use that, right?

And then the other thing that we need to look at, and this is again for 2025, SEO is going to get smarter. That's inevitable. All these, all these, all these, um,

all these ways that we're interacting with people with SEO on our websites and so on, it's been learning through AI. It's been really important in 2024. It's going to be even that much more important in 2025. But it's also going to get harder, right? So where it was, you know, the easiest way to get yourself listed on Google in 2012, say, or 2014, or even 2020, it's going to be so much harder in 2025.

But there's a lot of SEO tools that are going to help you, I think, in that way. Right? So Google's algorithms are going to continue to change. They're leaning into authority. They're leaning into expertise. They're leaning into user experience and how much you've got in there. You can't just stuff keywords everywhere.

Creating cute little keyword titles for your podcasts or your blogs isn't going to work. It's actually a mediocre way to try and get attention and it's just not going to work in the long run because now the AIs know these things, right? The algorithm is that much smarter and so they're going to praise and they're going to prioritize high value content that solves real problems and doesn't sound like it was AI generated. Okay?

So what does that mean for you? You need to invest time, effort into comprehensive, actionable content that positions you as the go-to expert in your niche, right? And this is a lesson that I learned years ago by putting myself out there as the summit queen. Nobody has done as many summits as me. This is still true because nobody has hit 450 summits and I have, and I continue to do summits for my clients, but don't sleep on this SEO, okay?

And don't forget about video SEO. YouTube is an incredibly powerful search engine. And you know this already. I'm sure you do. And it's so underutilized. And I was listening to, I don't know if you guys know who Professor Scott Galloway is, but they call him Prof G and so on and so forth. He's got a really huge podcast called Pivot. And anyways, he does his end of year predictions. One of the predictions that he had, and this was on just a week and a bit ago,

is that for 2025, he predicts that YouTube is probably going to be one of the biggest ways you're going to be able to get exposure as a brand.

anywhere. And so that's his prediction for 2025. I'm jumping on that bandwagon. I don't agree with everything this man says at all, but with the digital marketing space and with branding and I guess just marketing in general, I think he knows kind of what he's talking about. And so I'll jump on that one for sure. I definitely think that YouTube is the way to go. I'm also seeing a massive, massive explosion in subscription and membership-based models. And

2025 is going to be subscription-based. If you don't have that within your marketing wheelhouse or your product lineup, take a look at it. Honestly, if you can fit it in and it works, look at doing it, get it done early in the year because they're about to take over. It is about to be everywhere. I know there was a lot in 2023, maybe less, but in 2024, we were really starting to see quite a bit.

I honestly think it is pedal to the metal for subscriptions and memberships in 2025.

People want the ongoing value for a reoccurring low price or reasonable price or value-driven price. And if you can create a product or service with reoccurring benefits, you're going to tap into a loyal customer base that's going to create a steady revenue stream. And if you as a digital marketer want that very steady revenue machine working for you or stream, I should say, then a membership is going to do that for you. And you can start off with the $7, the $9 premium.

Whatever you want. I have a, um, I have a membership that I ran a couple of years ago. It was really good. And I really enjoyed doing it. I ran a membership before that with somebody else that did not work out, uh, you know, buyer beware, not caveat emptor. I guess it was just working with the wrong person. Beware. That's all I'll say. But, um, I really liked the subscription model and

There is a lot of upkeep that you have to do and get a lot of systems in place. If you're going to do a membership model, make sure you're running it in the right type of software and you have all the automations that you need. I like high level for this. Some people use, you know, circle, some people use whatever they want to use. Um, high level has like its own sort of membership system you can play with. It's got its own community you can build within it. Uh,

I like also a combination of maybe having active campaign and then maybe using Circle and so on. But there's a lot you can do in this place, but you really should be looking at this space. And then finally, I'd really say that we're really doing a pivot back to human centric marketing, permission based marketing, which I've been talking about for a decade. We're really seeing that this is like AI tools are helping us to inform and they create this powerful ability

But 2025 is going to remind us about our humanity. Okay. It's going to remind us that the human touch really, really matters. People want to communicate with people. People want to be able to get tapped into that empathy, that creativity, storytelling, and that human touch is going to outshine anybody who's relying too heavily on AI. Okay. People want to feel like they're connecting with you. Capital letters, Y-O-U, and not a chatbot. Chatbots are useful and they're

And the new AI model, even in like go high level, the chat bot in there is insane. The AI assistant in high level is nuts, like unbelievably nuts. And people are seeing some great results. But again...

Getting in touch with a real human being is super important. At the other side of all my emails are people, not chatbots, right? So I have a team. My team answers all the emails that come in. Anybody who like emails info at manybundles.com for the many bundles that we're doing or in our team at jennywright.com for any of my products, they get a person, not a chatbot.

And I think that's really, really important. And I'm going to keep that going. And I think it's important that everybody does. Now, obviously, depending on your size, you may or may not be able to do that. That's totally fine. And chatbots have their purposes for automated messages. And I have no problem with that. I even think I have one on my website. But...

When it comes to customer queries, concerns, issues, billing, all those types of things, make sure people can get in touch with you. Right. And so that's, that to me is hugely important. So I mean, 2024 is,

We were dominated by AI. We had a lot of stuff happening. You know, this was 2024 was the year that was inflected by an election in the States, a lot of things happening in the world, a lot of things happening up here in Canada.

And AI was definitely in the digital marketing space. That was one of the big things that was really governing the trends. We also saw in digital marketing in 2024, this insane amount of inflation and not even real inflation. And I'm going to literally die on this hill. Okay.

The amount of money that companies were trying to charge us in the third quarter of, well, the third quarter of 2024 and then into this last quarter of 2024 are insane. Like people who were, I mean, Canva for one of them, and I love Canva and I still use it, but they backtracked. Canva saying that they're popping up the pricing by an exorbitant amount. ActiveCampaign saying

also threw their prices up. A couple other companies that I was using their services, they are all popping their prices up. That's what precipitated my move to high level and why I went there. Even though if you look back at any of my episodes, I am not a fan of an all-in-one solution because I think all-in-one is the master of none. And honestly, even though I'm in high level, I will tell you it is the master of none, but it has a lot of good stuff. I just could not afford to

what I was paying in all these different services move and when I moved to high level I actually saved over uh 350 U.S a month okay that's how crazy it was getting and so we saw so many Trends happening in 2024 2025 I think we're going to see some of them continuing obviously but we're going to see a lot more humanity being pulled back into the mix and I've said this before it's like a pendulum swing this happened with um Bitcoin this happened with uh what is it

fungible, whatever they were, right? Where like everything swings really hard one way with the pendulum and then it kind of swings back until it kind of like normalizes in the middle. And we saw this this year with AI and in 2025, we're swinging back. We're going back to that need of connection and humanitarian side. Oh, and 2025, podcasts are still going to be incredibly important. If you don't have a podcast and you need to get one,

Get one. Go check out my friend Katie Brinkley. She's got a whole thing on how you can get a podcast going. Use software like Ecamm Live to record your podcast. You know, use Buzzsprout, Captivate, whatever to get your podcast out. And always make sure that you're creating content on a regular basis. So...

Those are my predictions. That's what I thought happened in 2024. That's what I'm seeing. And if you like this kind of content, stick with me for 2025. I've got one more episode coming here in 2024. And then we're moving right into 2025 with some really great content. I'm looking at

down the marketing trends and how you can get in front of more leads, grow your list, sell more product, connect with more people, you know, network, get on more podcasts. We're really going to break down how you can elevate your business over and over and over doing repeatable and provable marketing techniques that just work.

work. And so stay tuned for that in 2025. I appreciate you so much for listening. Thanks so much for being here. If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you are following us everywhere and leave me a review. It would mean the world to me. And again, thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to y'all soon. Take care.