Brand building, E-E-A-T & increasing privacy: Our top predictions for 2025

As 2025 gets well underway, we asked our channel specialists what trends they predict will dominate their specialism this year:

Digital PR – Ellie Mack:

“I think we’ll see a significant shift in PR in 2025 as brand building takes centre stage for marketers. There’s more recognition on the importance of clearly defining a brand’s identity and maintaining consistency in messaging to support long-term growth.

“This evolution has been partly driven by Google’s emphasis on elevating true experts and authoritative voices in search results. Short-term tactics no longer suffice; users seek reliable and trustworthy information, aligning with Google’s mission to think like a user.

“As a result, PR efforts will have to increasingly focus on enhancing the reputation of key experts and spokespeople within organisations, with a strong emphasis on specialist and trustworthy content. Thought leadership will play a vital role in this transformation.”

SEO – Tom Corless:

“SEO continues to rely more predominantly on an integrated brand and marketing strategy which seeks to provide a strong, consistent and trustworthy experience for users across all platforms.

“For SEO in 2025, this will mean a stronger focus on E-E-A-T signals as Google looks to elevate expert and authoritative content creators, with the positive being that regardless of your business size – if you’re a true expert and specialist in your area, you can dominate the organic market.

“As a discipline, SEO needs to collaborate much more closely with other facets of marketing to ensure the E-E-A-T signals are being met.”

Paid Media – Matt Robson:

“This year I think we’ll see multi-platform experiences dominating paid media strategies.

“Video is dominating as a format and it provides a chance for brands to engage with their audiences in much more impactful ways, the barrier to creating quality video content has been reduced and there are more platforms than ever before to reach new audiences, opening up the opportunity for challenger brands.

“As paid media marketers, I think our focus will be more on how our ads align with other marketing channels to create a stronger brand experience for users.”

Data & Analytics – Jason Sanderson:

“I think 2025 is the year that marketers have to accept that having 100% accurate data is unachievable. Online marketing datasets will become more separated as privacy increasingly becomes a core focus of platforms, government bodies and ultimately, users.

“Overall, this is positive for us as users, of course! As marketers – sure, we can’t achieve that holy grail of an attribution model where all of our data perfectly aligns and we can separate out individual users – but it doesn’t mean that we can’t make informed decisions.

“Marketing mix modelling should be something brands aspire to, to help inform decisions with this gradually limited data.” 

Social Media – Eve Lowdon:

“As well as seeing brands continue to prioritise video content on their channels as a way to engage users’ ever-decreasing attention span – I think (and hope) we’ll see a bit of a shift towards emphasising and empowering digital wellbeing.

“Sounds a little counterintuitive when putting a social media strategy in place but hear me out. Audiences are increasingly aware of how addictive social media platforms are, and actively being more selective with their time on social to make it more meaningful.

“I think we’ll see brands shifting to align with this sentiment and focus in on content and influencers that promote mental health wellbeing and align with the brand’s core values.”