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It’s that time of year! Time to review marketing trends for 2025 that are relevant and doable for small businesses. This time, I found four.
As usual, every year, I find repeats from the past. Yes, we know videos on social media are supposed to be less than a minute – not a new trend.
And can we PLEASE stop talking about using virtual reality (VR) for marketing? Waste. Of. Time.
Instead, let’s talk about the trends you can easily integrate into your small business’s marketing strategy.
4 marketing trends in 2025 that are relevant for small businesses
Using AI for marketing support
I have already written about why you should not use ChatGPT to write your content for you:
- They don’t have your experiences and therefore cannot share your customer stories, lessons learned, or other pearls of wisdom you have acquired.
- Even if they are trained to sound like you, they still sound “off.” As a result, you’ll have to spend time editing whatever they spit out.
- Generative AI tools remain prone to hallucination, which means you need to verify everything they write (especially if they cite sources that may not exist).
With that said, AI can make your marketing life easier in other ways:
Let AI serve up content ideas
Is it time to write your blog and you have no idea what to write about? Ask ChatGPT what topics are trending around your areas of expertise, which are most popular, or what questions people are asking about it.
Lean into AI automation
Useful AI features are baked into many marketing tools. Look at the email marketing and social media scheduling platform you are using. What repetitive tasks can be automated? How can you use their features to improve performance (like letting Mailchimp choose the send time to improve open rates?).
Use AI-generated insights to customize messages and offers
As we know, AI can analyze large amounts of data quickly, including previous client interactions and purchase histories. It can then segment them and provide you with insights on the type of offers to send.
Let’s say you have a large group of people on your email list who have never converted; you could send them a one-time offer towards your best-selling service. Of maybe you have some highly engaged people on LinkedIn; you could invite them to an in-person event.
Keep focusing on quality content
As you can imagine, this trend was music to my ears.
In March 2024, Google rolled out a spam update. It refined some of their core ranking systems to better understand if webpages are unhelpful, provide a good or poor user experience, or read as though they were created for search engines instead of people.
Terrible, AI-generated content was flooding the Internet (and still is), so Google wanted to cut down on the crap that was being served up in search. The company expected their spam changes would reduce the amount of low-quality content in search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites.
Once the rollout was complete the following month, and Google reported that users would see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results.
Why do you write blog posts and create content in general?
To become a trust source of information – and get found online. You need to create high-quality, helpful content that only you can write.
Taking short cuts won’t cut it.
(You can read the full list of what constitutes quality, helpful content here.)
Boost reach and awareness with nano influencers
Nano influencers are the opposite of celebrity influencers. They have “small” followings on social media (less than 10,000) in specific niches, they are trusted, and they have very high engagement rates. Oh, and they have reasonable fees.
Who could use a nano influencer?
- A bookkeeping business focused on outdoor adventure companies
- A digital marketing agency that specializes in ecommerce for makers without a bricks and mortar location.
- A fractional COO who wants to work with more minority business owners.
I could keep going, but you get the idea.
An established business can certainly use a nano influencer, but I would recommend this marketing strategy for a newer business that wants to quickly increase their awareness.
Build a community
Yeah, this one seems a little daunting but hear me out.
You don’t need to build an online community. It doesn’t need to be a paid membership thing, be exclusive to brand evangelists, or even be large.
Marketing is all about building relationships and trust, right? And a lot of small businesses I know grow via referrals.
So, who do you want to build relationships with right now? And how can you do that in person?
You could create a small community of business owners who are:
- In your industry (finance, marketing, food and beverage, etc.)
- Natural referral sources for each other (a real estate agent, mortgage broker, insurance agent, interior designer, and home remodeler)
- In your town (if you have a small town) or city neighborhood
I belong to a small lunch group of fellow business owners in my town, and it’s wonderful. Everyone is there to build relationships, not sell.
And because I live in a small mountain town, there are tons of micro communities here and new ones are always being formed.
People are looking for communities where they feel welcomed, heard, supported, and importantly, where they belong. Why can’t you be the one to create it?
What marketing trends did I forget?
I don’t pretend to know anything, so if you’ve come across a marketing trend in 2025 that really resonated with you, do let me know!
Related: The Real Cost of Growth: How Much Should You Actually Spend on Marketing?