This past year was a rollercoaster for content marketing. Blogs saw traffic tank with Google algorithm updates, social media platforms are under scrutiny, and AI-generated content is flooding the internet.
I’m hoping 2025 will be a little less exhausting, but who am I kidding? We need to be prepared for whatever comes our way. To put my money where my mouth is, I spent time talking to other content marketers and clients—and sifting through retrospectives and other musings—to figure out what we might expect for content marketing in 2025.
Here’s what I found.
Table of contents:
1. Less reliance on review sites and more on real customer interactions
Over the past few years, my clients have made a big push to get visibility on sites like G2, TrustRadius, or Trustpilot, even giving away gift cards or prizes in exchange for a review.
I think that movement is rooted in the new wave of buyers that are entering the market—Millennials are more likely to do more research on their own before talking to sales. They speak with peers and colleagues, dive deep into comparison landing pages, case studies, and “best of” roundups, and scan review sites for additional perspectives (just like they might if they were trying a new restaurant or looking for a new auto mechanic).
The problem my clients are running into now is that all marketers understand this buyer behavior. What this means is a lot of fluff and a lot of cherrypicking on review sites. And prospects can sniff out BS like that from a mile away.
So one trend I expect to see is a move away from review sites. Some marketers are choosing to avoid them altogether, instead focusing on other forms of testimonials that feel more authentic. Jim Holben, CMO of Defendify, decided to test the weight customers placed on reviews to see if renewing with those sites was worth it.
He found that their audience “placed almost no value on badges and scores. What they DID care about were video testimonials, written testimonials with names and titles, and on-demand product demos,” all things he’s planning to publish in 2025.
In addition to the tactics Jim is after, you could also consider turning actual customer instances into templates, or inviting customers to guest post about their specific use cases on your blog. Showing that folks want to evangelize your product is a concrete way to demonstrate that customers gain value from what you’re selling.
2. More AI—but not necessarily in the ways you think
No one’s surprised to see AI on a list of content marketing trends. By now, we’ve all experimented with it, and hopefully you’re finding helpful ways for it to make content strategy and creation faster and better. Instead of vague “make AI work for you” suggestions, though, I found a lot of really valuable, specific tips.
Optimize for AI overviews
Getting into Google’s AI overviews—and other AI search functionalities, like ChatGPT Search—is still kind of a mystery. But I thought Bani Kaur, a fractional content strategist, had a great suggestion: “Instead of chasing random keywords,” she says, “Think about the full journey someone goes through when researching your product or problem space. Your content needs to anticipate their next three clicks.”
Write for voice search
Smart assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are also providing AI overviews to your customers. Peter O’Callaghan, Head of Marketing at ScrapingBee, is ensuring all of his team’s content is structured to be read aloud by these devices: “In 2025, our SEO strategy will center entirely on voice search optimization. This means focusing on creating conversational, question-and-answer formatted content that aligns with how people speak when using voice search.” It’s a bold strategy, for sure, and I’ll be curious to see how it pans out.
Use AI for sales enablement content
Marketers spend a lot of time spinning up content for sales that sometimes doesn’t even get used—that sales enablement content is a great use case for AI, giving content marketers time back to concentrate on more strategic GTM efforts.
Nathan Thompson, Head of Content Strategy at Copy.ai, puts it this way: “AI should help sales enable themselves, generate and structure more data to inform what campaigns will move the needle, and free up time for marketers to execute against those campaigns at a deeper level than they would’ve previously been able to.”
Create synthetic data and audiences
AI-generated audiences can help you identify and close brand awareness gaps much faster. Steve Lamar, a web analytics consultant, commented on Amanda Natividad’s call for AI use cases, describing how he asked an AI tool what the best marketing calendars were. He immediately noticed his client’s company wasn’t listed, and AI gave him some ideas to fix it:
“While I don’t disagree, the other tools listed were project management tools that have marketing calendar capabilities. So, I am working on reworking my positioning and how it differs from other tools. Even considering a rebrand since the name is too niched down.”
In Fortune’s Term Sheet, Lauri Moore, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, took her prediction on synthetic data a step further, linking it to AI agents: “With agentic applications on the rise, the competition for data will heat up, driven by synthetic data generation, crowdsourced content, and content studio partnerships.”
Write about your use of AI
People are eager to learn about AI, so if you—or anyone at your company—is using it in an interesting way, you should write about it. Another commenter on Amanda’s post, Rebekah May, said she “got a ton of Perplexity traffic to a blog post I wrote about optimizing for Perplexity.” The Zapier content marketing team has seen similar results, engaging their audience with articles about how Zapier employees use AI.
3. Slowing down to scale up
Focusing on the craft of content was a core theme I noticed as I read through people’s 2024 roundups of content marketing. Here’s what that means.
Focus on quality
With AI everywhere, there needs to be more of an emphasis on quality. Does your piece answer (or better yet anticipate) people’s real questions? Does it leave them feeling empowered or inspired afterward? Is it actionable for your readers?
In her first Contentment newsletter of 2025, Tracey Wallace shared a poignant take on this:
“I’m sentimental this time of year, but it reminds me of my all-time favorite quote by Rebecca Solnit, ‘The stars we are given, the constellations we make.’ AI can give us the suggestions, the strategy, the headlines, the angles (if you feed it the right information first!), but it is us who bring it to life. It is us who name the constellations, give them stories, and meaning, and seer them into lore. Less assembly line. More art.”
Tailor content to the platform
You should definitely be promoting your content across channels, but each distribution channel needs its own take. “Social copywriting is something I’ve learned is a special art,” notes Madeline Cruikshank, Marketing Manager at Wilcox Communities. “Copy needs to vary based on platform, purpose, and audience. I’ve had many roles where they cross-post the copy and content for convenience, but it doesn’t bring in the results.”
Spend time exploring new tools
Software exploration can feel like a low-impact task in content marketing, but if you can find the right tools, they can help you create better content, faster. Here are a few things you might take time to do this year:
-
Expand your tech stack. Per Melissa Cooper, Copywriter at Pompa Program, “Learning new tools has been a constant theme, especially in my adoption coordinator role, where I recently dived into the Shelterluv platform. I’m looking into any tools that integrate well with content planning software to make storytelling even more streamlined, meaningful, and effective.”
-
Learn to use AI well. Zac Harris, CEO and founder of Rankd, explains: “If you’re lazy with AI, you’re just going to scale your own laziness. It’s not a substitute for doing the actual work. You need to treat AI like a junior team member who still needs lots of guidance and oversight.”
-
Give video a try. I’ve seen folks call 2025 “the year of video” over and over again. But brainstorming, producing, and editing video content is a lot of work—even with the help of AI. That means you may have to spend more time working on it.
4. In-house content creators
Jack Appleby, founder of Future Social, predicts that in-house content creators will become a standard job: “I saw an ad agency LinkedIn job post for ‘Senior Content Creator’ the other day. Brands are gonna get better results hiring people who specialize in social video than re-training traditional creative directors or social media managers.” Freelancers will always be a great way to scale, but in-house content folks fill a gap that freelancers just can’t.
And it’s not just about dedicated content roles: you should also be working with non-content folks in your company to help you create content. The Zapier team does this a lot, having team members from product marketing, engineering, people ops, and beyond contribute to their blog and social media marketing.
You should even have senior-level managers—including your CEO—join in on the content creation. Dave Gerhardt, Founder of Exit Five, wrote on LinkedIn:
“Having the founder/CEO write on LinkedIn isn’t about the ego and the drive to be famous. It’s about understanding how information spreads today and how people buy. Social media is marketing. And it has become the number one source of information, news, and knowledge for most industries. Use it to share knowledge, to share information.”
Mary Keough, Director of Product and Content Marketing at CoLab Software, still handles all of the company’s organic social content. She says: “Before I was hired, our CMO did it. It’s that important.”
If you have an internal content creator engine going, consider tapping into your customer base next. Start by asking, “Who on our customer advisory board is great at social?” or “How can I make the most of my advisor network?”
5. Communities for idea generation
When I’m writing about something I’m not a super-expert on, Reddit is a great source. I don’t have the lived experience of being an engineer, for example, but the people posting on r/WebDev or r/ExperiencedDevs (presumably) do.
Their posts give me inspiration, particularly for hooks. Real things that happened to real people draw readers in.
I’ve found that “Top 1% commenter,” “Top 1% poster,” and “Super Contributor” Achievements are a good sign of knowledge and experience, and I go look at people’s previous posts to determine whether they’re legit.
Reddit is a great example, but joining Discord or Slack communities is another great way to access subject matter experts. And while you’re there, you can organically build a Rolodex of SMEs that can be used in other types of content. This is especially helpful for startups that don’t have a huge network—not only to put out more journalistic content but eventually to dip their toes into influencer marketing.
6. Rethinking LinkedIn
Since I launched my content business, I’ve felt a lot of pressure to show up on LinkedIn. And for good reason: many of my fellow freelancers do and report that they’ve gotten lots of leads from doing so. I see agencies showing up all over the platform, too, and I can only imagine that they’re getting solid pipeline from it; otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing it.
But, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, LinkedIn is a lot of sameness. All the posts are either boring, ranting, or raving. It gets old. On the final Content, Briefly episode of 2024, Jimmy Daly, Founder of Superpath, said:
“In Twitter’s absence, LinkedIn’s become kind of the only B2B social network. You find cool conversations, but I would say that’s maybe 10 to 15 percent of the time. And the rest of it is just so much bloviating, you know? People are going to fatigue from that. This happens with all social media. You optimize it for the algorithm, and you degrade the product for the reader.”
That’s not to say that you should abandon LinkedIn. But you might think a bit more deeply about what you’re posting there and why. Increase the standards for what you post, and explore other ways to engage with buyers, like at conferences or local meetups.
7. Proprietary research that can be repurposed
Running your own large-scale survey or study can be expensive, but if you use the data well, it can absolutely be worth it. Here are just a few of the benefits:
-
Being the stat everyone wants to include in their hot take social posts, blog intros, and long-form guide callout boxes is pretty great PR.
-
You can chunk it up into bite-sized nuggets that can be used in all sorts of formats: email sequences, onboarding, interactive demos, talk tracks for conferences or podcasts—you name it. This also helps you reach people in all the formats they like.
-
One or two surprising results could act as one entire pillar of content, making it easier (and faster) to flesh out your content strategy.
-
It could help you show up in research-oriented AI search engines.
Last year, I helped one of my clients tailor the same research to each of their top verticals. Each of those playbooks served as inspiration for webinars with experts from each industry (and that was used to create additional content); was featured in LinkedIn ads, drawing in more of their ICP; was linked to from other content; and acted as CTAs on their website and in outbound campaigns.
In a world where unoriginal AI content is everywhere, having proprietary data will absolutely help you stand out.
You can apply this concept (launch one big thing, whip it up into a million content pieces) to events as well. I just saw a post from UserEvidence about how setting up a podcast studio as a sponsor for a cybersecurity conference gave them “6+ months’ worth of content.”
8. Rebrands (or refreshes)
Something I’ve noticed coming up a lot with my client base—which stretches across diverse industries within B2B SaaS—is the idea of a rebrand, or at least a website refresh.
For starters, optimizing for AI search overviews is a real thing, and it’s not just for your blog—it’s for your whole website. If your brand name is too generic, you might get left behind.
But it’s also about how things look. Websites are getting prettier and prettier, and people absolutely judge books by their covers. Having a beautiful and user-friendly website makes a good first impression and gives you an edge over the competition. Ashley Lewin, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Refine Labs, emphasizes in a recent LinkedIn post:
“Your website is your top salesperson and your storefront. We all know this. Yet ownership often gets fuzzy. Too many restrictions and processes stall action, and key pages sit untouched for months (or longer).”
Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Ops at Navattic, agrees, saying: “I think with less marketing budget, one of the cheapest ways to increase marketing return is a website update.”
9. Brands getting “a little weird”
With AI on the scene, marketers are getting more and more fed up with rote, jargon-y content. Freelance content writer and strategist, Jasmine-Jade O., said it best in an Animalz LinkedIn post comment:
“I’d like to see a bit more personality-infused content that doesn’t sacrifice value. I’m tired of the corporate speak that a lot of content marketers (myself included) feel they have to adopt for their brands, products, or services [to] be taken seriously.”
Jess Cook, Head of Content and Comms at Island, who also commented on the same Animalz post, said: “I’d LOVE to see some B2B brands get a little weird. And I think we’ll start to see some very different podcast formats. The whole host + guest expert has been done to death. I think people want something new.”
I came across a bunch of companies finding ways to stand out earlier this year:
-
Omnisend, a marketing automation platform, put a twist on traditional swag, sending T-shirts with a huge can of Spam on them to customers who hate spam emails.
-
Air, a creative ops platform got a little weird with their CEO’s end-of-year recap (among lots of other things). Instead of a dry, bulleted post, their creative team fed an AI actor a script noting the company’s accomplishments with some tasteful swearing, crummy stock photos, and Green Day background music mixed in.
-
Zapier, an all-in-one automation platform (whose content marketing you’re reading right now), did a brand campaign called ZAP: AI in a can, where they “sold” an AI energy drink.
10. Email newsletters
In a world where Google, LinkedIn, and all the algorithms keep evolving, your email list is one thing you have at least a little more control over. That’s why I saw a lot of people suggesting that 2025 is a good year to start a newsletter.
As Lee Densmer, owner and content strategist of Globia Content Marketing, puts it: “If you don’t do a newsletter, start. This is one of the best ways to reach a captive audience.” But, she warns, don’t make it “throwaway marketing.” It has to offer something valuable and interesting.
One way to make sure there’s a human touch in all of your emails is to incorporate user-generated content. Edward White, Head of Growth at beehiiv, for instance, is encouraging readers to submit their own stories, insights, or case studies to their newsletter. “Turning them into active contributors not only boosts engagement but creates a network effect; contributors are naturally inclined to share content they’ve been part of.”
What should your content marketing do in 2025?
Not to get too woo-woo, but my advice is to move in the direction that calls you and your brand. What immediately caught your attention while reading—or, let’s be real, skimming—this article? What catches your attention when you see other content marketers doing it?
For me, it was a podcast episode that made me stop and think: “Whisper” on Jay Acunzo’s How Stories Happen. In it, he points out how much noise there is—on social media, on blogs, everywhere. To cut through it, he argues, you shouldn’t just scream louder. Instead, you should be more contemplative and introspective. You should develop your argument and story more. And you should deliver it more quietly, to make people stop and lean in to hear you.
“Volume and power are very different things. Attention and influence are not actually as closely linked as we like to think. They may be closely correlated, but one doesn’t cause the other. Scrambling for attention does not guarantee trust. I think more than ever, ideas like followers, traffic, and reach are massively different than trust, influence, and fans.”
Plus, his argument is all wrapped up in a story about the iconic movie “The Snowman”—when he played the first few notes of the music, I was catapulted back to my childhood.
Related reading: