Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2025

From AI Agents to Zero-Click Experiences, here’s what to watch in 2025.

Last week, I reviewed some of the most important digital marketing trends I observed in 2024. Now, I’m looking ahead to 2025. Here’s what I’m keeping my eye on in the new year and what you should do as a marketer or business owner.

Zero-Click Online Experiences

Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, ChatGPT – all these digital entities are moving more and more toward what digital marketers call “zero-click online experiences.” Zero-click online experiences are interactions where people get the answers or information they need directly on a platform (like Google search results, LinkedIn posts, or a chatbot like ChatGPT) without needing to click through to a business’s website.

This is accelerating thanks to:

• Search engines becoming answer engines
• Apple’s cookie changes
• Anti-tracking and privacy laws
• More use of ad blockers
• Increasing use of apps

Why Will Zero-Click Experiences Become More Prominent in 2025?

• Controlled Environment: Online businesses and app developers believe that delivering immediate answers directly on a platform improves user satisfaction and retention by reducing the need for additional clicks.
• Monetary Benefits: Companies believe they will make more money when you stay on their sites or platforms or apps. That’s because the longer you are engaged, the more opportunities they have to present you with advertisements, cross-sell products, gather valuable data about your preferences, and ultimately, increase the likelihood of making a purchase or taking a desired action within their ecosystem, all while minimizing distractions from competitors

For your business, this means that you may see an erosion in website traffic over time as zero-click experiences become more common. So be aware that you may start to see a slowdown or erosion in traffic growth in 2025.

What Should You Do?

• Keep Doing Basic SEO: Continue with the fundamental SEO practices. Branded searches will continue to be a reliable and important way to drive traffic to websites.
• Embrace AI-Native Platforms: Platforms like ChatGPT or AI-powered discovery engines require businesses to develop new strategies for delivering benefit-focused, concise, and conversational content that will be used by these AI tools.
• Leverage PR: Ensure your company is included in the earned media sources that AI tools are using to answer questions. [Read more about this in my “Is SEO Dead?” blog post from 2024.]
• Optimize Your Website: Make sure the traffic you do get to your website finds what they want immediately because the visitors you get are going to become more precious. If someone does manage to get to your site through Google or ChatGPT, they probably have high intent to do something on your site. That might be contacting your sales department, or booking an appointment, or purchasing one of your products. Make sure you build your website around maximizing conversions.
• Engage in Other Marketing Activities: By focusing on social media, paid digital marketing, podcasts, in-person events and other similar activities, you can ensure that your company’s brand name remains top of mind among potential customers.

More Focus on Measurement and Correlation (And Less on Attribution)

For years, there was a joke that digital marketers liked to tell. Analog advertisers used to say, “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” And digital marketers would smugly say, “We know exactly which half of online advertising works.” That wasn’t ever really true. And it will become less and less true in 2025. 

In other words, traditional attribution methods are becoming increasingly ineffective due to factors such as the decline of third-party cookies, the rise of ad blockers, the proliferation of privacy laws, the popularity of apps, and the complexity of multi-device user journeys.

What Should You Do?

• Track What You Can and Calculate ROI: Be visible and active where your target audiences are. Measure what you can in terms of visibility, impressions, etc. Then correlate that with your most important KPIs.
• Look at Parallel Trend Lines: If you’re getting good earned media coverage in the right publications, and your ads are appearing on websites where your customers are online, and your email open rates are going up, and your social media followers on key channels are increasing, and this is all happening while your sales are going up… you’re probably doing it right.

The growing inability to draw direct links from marketing efforts to sales will frustrate many businesses. But looking at the data in a thoughtful way by focusing on correlation will likely prove sufficient for many businesses. This approach mirrors traditional advertising methods, where success was gauged by general increases in brand awareness and sales, rather than pinpointing the exact source of each conversion.

Potential Breakup of Google

The United States Department of Justice is demanding that Google sell of its Chrome browser after the courts found that the tech giant was a monopoly in the search market. The government argued that the exclusive contracts that Google has spent billions of dollars to form with other tech companies, including Apple, to make it the default search provider on smartphones and web browsers, are anticompetitive.

I view Google Ads an effective tax that many businesses must pay simply to be visible online. And if you’re not visible on Google, you might as well be invisible for most businesses. 

What Should You Do?

Keep an eye on how this develops in 2025. This could be a net positive for digital marketers and businesses who advertise online in the form of increased competition and lower costs for Google Ads.

Sale of TikTok

A potential shutdown of TikTok in the U.S. is also on the horizon. Under a law passed last year, TikTok will be banned unless ByteDance divests it by Jan. 19, 2025. President-elect Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to block the law from going into effect.

What Should You Do?

Don’t panic: Most TikTok users can be reached on a variety of other social networks.

• People use an average of 6.8 different social networks every month. This means that if a business’s customers are active on TikTok, they are also active on other social media apps. 
• Data from Meltwater and reported by DataReportal back this up. A majority of TikTok’s audience also interacts with other major platforms: 80% use Instagram, 82% are on Facebook, and 77% frequent YouTube. 
• In short, only 0.1% of TikTok users exclusively use TikTok. That means that over 99% of the TikTok audience can be reached on other social channels. 
• And content created for TikTok can be easily adapted for other apps. Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, and YouTube Shorts are all rip-offs of TikTok’s video style. 

So if you rely on TikTok, ensure you’ve got your bases covered with other channels, like Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.

Growth of AI Agents

First of all, what is an AI Agent?

In the words of Enver Cetin, an IA expert quoted in the Harvard Business review: “You can define agentic AI with one word: proactiveness. It refers to AI systems and models that can act autonomously to achieve goals without the need for constant human guidance. The agentic AI system understands what the goal or vision of the user is and the context to the problem they are trying to solve.”

Use Cases

• Customer Service: Agentic customer service agents can quickly grasp customer intents and emotions and take independent steps to resolve queries and problems. For example, “an agentic customer service agent could predictively assess whether a customer delivery is going to be late, inform the customer of the delay, and proactively offer a discount to sweeten the disappointment.”
• Sales Support: Agentic AI systems could dramatically liberate sales teams from much of many time-consuming activities, such as emails, paperwork and other administrative tasks. SalesForce recently introduced its Agent Force Service Development Rep that assists human sales teams with interpreting customer messages, recommending follow-up actions, booking meetings and generating responses.
• Marketing Campaigns: Agents can help connect the digital marketing ecosystem by developing, testing, and iterating different campaign ideas. For example, according to a McKinsey report, “a marketer could describe targeted users, initial ideas, intended channels, and other parameters in natural language. Then, an agent system—with assistance from marketing professionals—would help develop, test, and iterate different campaign ideas.”

What Should You Do? 

Look for opportunities to apply AI agents to customer service, sales support and marketing campaigns. 

Conclusion

Digital marketing can change quickly. I hope this rundown, from AI agents to zero-click online experiences, will help you stay focused on some potentially big shifts in 2025.