601. Marketing predictions, 2025 🧙
7 bold-ish predictions to laugh about when looking back a year from now
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
7 bold-ish marketing predictions for 2025
At times, I have been wise enough to avoid predicting the future of marketing, allowing myself to save face and avoid embarrassment. (Yes, I did once predict that Ello would be the next big social network.)
This is not one of those times.
I am throwing caution and common sense to the wind and taking a whirl at predicting what lies ahead for marketing in 2025. Of the following 7 predictions, I would be delighted if two of them came true—batting .300 (getting a hit three times out of every 10 at-bats) is a huge success in modern baseball, as it should be when trying to pin down the future of marketing. When in doubt, hedge.
(Speaking of hedging, here is my version of a predictions list from last year, which I conveniently did not label as “predictions.”)
1. Threads will be the new Twitter (for reals this year)
As Twitter continues its descent into chaos, there’s been a lot of talk about what social network will rise up to replace it. The two leading contenders seem to be Threads (built by Facebook) and Bluesky (built by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey).
Threads launched like a rocketship in 2023 with over 70 million users in its first week alone and has been chugging along just fine since then; its current user count is 275 million. Bluesky, by comparison, has 20 million. Both are text-based social networks, with Threads taking the Meta approach of mass appeal and Bluesky taking a more tech-forward stance of decentralization, whatever that means.
I am one of the 275 million people on Threads because it’s just so easy to do if you’re already on Instagram. And while the rocketship growth hasn’t necessarily translated into the same cultural cachet that you get when you’ve “arrived” as a social network, all the ingredients seem to be there for something special in 2025: interesting content, pretty design, and much less shouting. The brands seem to be having a lot of fun there, too, like one of my personal Threads favorites, Calm:
But don’t just take my word for it! Here is a rosy outlook from Alison Battisby of Avocado Social:
Once Threads hits a billion, they plan to look to monetize it through ads. There has been huge development [on the platform] this year, with almost daily new features coming out; customizable feeds, some list style content, and algorithm trending topics. So they are working very hard on making it a viable competitor to X.
2. TikTok will not be banned in the US
This may not be as bold of a prediction as it seems, considering few TikTok creators are worried about a potential ban just a few days away.
My hot take is this: Capitalism will find a way.
Ironically, I wrote the same thing two years ago in my marketing predictions for 2023!
Word on the street is that US lawmakers want TikTok banned because of TikTok’s China roots. It’s almost unfathomable that TikTok wouldn’t exist in one of the biggest consumer markets in the world, and that’s the conclusion TikTok’s loyal users and savvy business leaders will arrive at, too. The easiest way around it is to sell. Does Elon have any money left?
(The answer to the question about Elon’s money is, yes, he does still have plenty of money somehow.)
3. Employee advocacy will be the #1 new marketing channel
The rise of Employee-Generated Content (EGC) has been rapid this past year, but it’s not like the tactic is brand new: EGC is simply employee advocacy, which has been around forever: Your employees post about your company on social media.
The biggest change in 2025 will be that marketing teams are going to get a whole lot better at orchestrating this.
Case in point:
You ask employees to opt in to an EGC program with incentives for posting
You connect employee social accounts to a social media management platform like Buffer or Sprout Social
Your social media manager creates content and schedules / proposes content for everyone involved
You track the performance all from one dashboard
I’m sure that others will have smarter and better ideas about how to systematize this tactic, so don’t be surprised if you start seeing more of your LinkedIn friends posting about how great their company is!
(Note: This will work beyond the B2B world, too, as B2C embraces EGC and even customer support trends in a more employee-owned direction.)
(Note #2: What does this mean for an employee’s personal right to having their own identity on social media, separate from their employer?)
4. Every marketing job description will ask you to exhibit strong AI literacy
You won’t need to be an expert in AI, but you’ll need to be an expert in how to engineer the right prompts to get the most of out of your AI tools.
Sub-bold prediction: Rather than take-home exercises for marketing job applicants, you will be asked to pair with the hiring manager on a live exercise so they can watch you work, much like how engineers do pair programming!
5. Normal “googling” will decline 10% or more
When you need an answer these days, where do you turn?
Many people go to Reddit.
Many turn to TikTok or Instagram.
Many load up their ChatGPTs and Claudes and ask the AI.
Google, of course, is trying its best to incorporate all these different behavior shifts by sticking AI results at the top of its searches and adding social results to many of its pages. Still, as the new generation of online searchers arrives, they aren’t as ingrained into a Google-first mindset as their predecessors. Expect Google usage to fall, ever so slightly, and for other channels like social search and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to rise in prominence.
6. You will be asked to run a campaign for a Gen Alpha customer / buyer
Gen Alpha are today’s teenagers, which gives them a lot of power over the culture and trends and zeitgeist. They’re also starting to have buying power, whether they’re influencing families in how to spend their money or if they are spending money of their own on B2C apps and DTC purchases. Chances are that B2B marketers won’t have to lean too far into Gen Alpha personas quite yet, but the Gen Alpha influence will be felt in the language and memes, at the very least.
7. The best-performing content will be human-outlined, AI-written, and human-edited
AI can do some amazing things, and we humans are not shy to ask. Content is one of the main marketing areas affected by AI production, which is great for productivity but can lead to an iffy end result for the audience and reader. That’s why a mix of AI and human content will win out in 2025—readers will find this content more engaging, search engines will find it more authentic, and marketers will find that it performs better than the mass-produced, unedited AI-farmed content.
Bonus good reads 🧐
What are the digital marketing trends for 2025? [Digital Marketing Institute]
Marketing trends 2025 [Kantar]
13 digital marketing trends for 2025 [Search Engine Journal]
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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