How a Marketing Review will help grow your business in 2025
Digital Marketing in 2025
In 2025, many SMEs will face a challenging time with the increase in national insurance contributions and many customers tightening their belts and reducing household spending.
As with all challenging times, there are opportunities for businesses if you know where to look.
It will be no shock that a digital marketing company is advising you to increase your marketing spending, and I can almost see your eyes rolling as I write this. However, the simple truth is that marketing is all about who will spend the most money to acquire a new customer. There is no better example of this than Google's Pay Per Click (PPC) service, where whoever is prepared to spend the most money will be at the top of the page.
However, where do you place your marketing bets in 2025 to maximise your returns? That is the question a marketing review will help you answer. This blog will examine why this could be your first and most important step toward success in 2025.
Understanding Your Current Position
Before setting a course for growth, it's important to assess where your business stands in the current market. A marketing review provides a comprehensive snapshot of your existing strategies.
The first step is to evaluate your previous performance: Analyse the effectiveness of your current marketing efforts by examining any key performance indicators (KPIs) or, more likely for small businesses, the return on investment (ROI). This helps identify what is working and what needs improvement.
By reviewing customer feedback and speaking to other staff members and even other companies, you can often spot trends that will impact your business. This insight lets you stay ahead of the curve and adapt your offerings accordingly.
Know Your Customer
As consumer behaviours and preferences evolve, so should your understanding of your target audience. A marketing review should include updating your buyer personas. Buyer Personas or Avatars are detailed representations of your ideal customers based on data, research, and insights into their behaviours, needs, and goals.
If you haven't done this recently, you should understand exactly who your best customers are. Ensure that your buyer personas accurately reflect the customers you want to attract. This may be different from the customers you have previously attracted. Understanding who your ideal customers are is essential to ensure that your content, both on your website and in your Ads and social media profiles, engages your audience's specific needs and preferences.
One effective way to better understand your customers is by using a "before and after" value matrix. This simply means looking at where your customers are now—what problems they're facing—and where they want to be after using your product or service. By thinking through these two stages, you can clearly see how your business helps solve their challenges.
For example, imagine you own a landscaping company. Before working with you, your customers might be struggling with an overgrown, unappealing garden they don't have time to maintain. Their frustrations could include feeling embarrassed about their outdoor space or missing out on hosting friends and family. After hiring you, their garden becomes beautifully landscaped and easy to care for, allowing them to feel proud of their home and enjoy spending time outdoors with loved ones.
This process helps you build a detailed picture of your ideal customer and what they care about most. With these insights, you can create marketing messages that speak directly to their frustrations ("Is your garden out of control and stopping you from enjoying your home?") and highlight the solution you offer ("Transform your garden into a space you'll love with our expert landscaping services"). It's a simple yet powerful way to connect with your audience and make your marketing more effective.
Optimising Your Marketing Channels
In 2025, a comprehensive approach to marketing channel optimisation is crucial for business growth. We will look at three key areas: SEO, PPC, and social media.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO remains a key aspect of any digital marketing efforts. Ensuring that your website is fast, responsive, and technically working well on all types of devices goes without saying. However, SEO also requires that your website has engaging content that is structured in a way that will rank well in search engines, which is also very important.
Fundamentally, there are two key questions you need to answer to ensure your SEO strategy is effective and aligned with your goals:
1. What keywords (search terms) are you trying to rank for, and are these keywords being searched by your customers?
Understanding the keywords you want to rank for is the foundation of any SEO strategy. These terms should directly align with what your target audience is searching for when they need products or services like yours. It’s not enough to guess at these terms—using tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs can reveal search volumes, competition levels, and the intent behind the keywords.
For instance, a keyword like “landscaping services in Bournemouth” targets a specific audience with high intent to hire, whereas a generic term like “gardening” might attract irrelevant traffic. Choosing the wrong keywords wastes resources by driving unqualified leads or failing to attract anyone at all. A clear focus on relevant, customer-centric keywords ensures your SEO efforts directly contribute to lead generation and revenue.
2. Where are you trying to rank? Is it nationally or locally?
Your geographic focus plays a huge role in shaping your SEO strategy. If you’re targeting local customers, optimising for local search terms (e.g., “roofing companies near me” or “electricians in Christchurch”) is essential, and tactics like Google Business Profile optimisation, local citations, and reviews become critical. On the other hand, if you’re aiming to reach a national audience, your approach should focus more on broader keywords, high-authority backlinks, and content that appeals to a wider demographic.
Without clarity on whether your SEO efforts are aimed at a local or national audience, you risk diluting your strategy. For example, trying to rank nationally for highly competitive terms might lead to poor results if your business primarily serves a local market. Conversely, limiting your focus to local terms when you have the capacity to operate nationally could stifle growth opportunities.
Why Knowing the Answers Is Essential
Without clear answers to these questions, you’re essentially throwing time and money at SEO without direction or measurable impact. An undefined keyword strategy leads to poor targeting, attracting the wrong audience or no audience at all. Similarly, failing to specify your geographic focus means your efforts could be scattered, reducing their effectiveness and making it harder to achieve meaningful results.
By taking the time to define your keywords and geographic targets, you can align your SEO efforts with your business goals, maximise ROI, and ensure every action you take contributes to growing your visibility, traffic, and conversions.
Find out more about Search Engine Optimisation
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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC continues to evolve, offering more targeted and efficient advertising options. It is important to remember that PPC is much more than just Google Ads. There are other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, and there are plenty of social media platforms on which you can advertise. Are you advertising on the right platforms?
How effective is your Ad Copy and Creatives? Crafting compelling ad copy and visuals tailored to each platform, ensuring they blend naturally with the user experience.
Are your Ads running in the right areas at the right time to give them the best chance to be seen by your customers?
Find out more about PPC Advertising
Social Media Marketing
Social media continues to be increasingly crucial for companies to engage with customers and prospects. However, most companies will issue curated posts that feel impersonal and do not engage with their audience. Another common mistake is focusing on the wrong platform. For most companies, it is solid wisdom that you have to meet your customers where they are, not where you are. Your customers won't necessarily spend their time where you do. A marketing review will identify where your customers and prospects hang out. This is particularly important if you want to change focus in the new year and attract a different type of customer.
Another truth about Social Media is that it is incredibly crowded with lots of your competitors (direct and indirect) vying for your customer's attention. So, how do you get your customers and prospects to stop scrolling and engage with your posts and band? Again, this is another area that a marketing review will address.
Find out more about Social Media Marketing
Aligning with Business Goals
Aligning marketing strategies with business goals is crucial for sustainable growth because it ensures every marketing effort directly supports your broader objectives. However, business goals are not static; they often shift significantly in response to internal changes or external influences, and this alignment needs to evolve accordingly.
For instance, economic uncertainty might push businesses to prioritise stability and profitability over aggressive growth. Instead of focusing on expanding into new markets, a company might realign its marketing to retain existing customers and maximise lifetime value. Similarly, technological advancements could lead a business to pivot toward digital transformation, making goals like improving online visibility or adopting AI-driven solutions more urgent.
External factors, such as changing consumer behaviours, market disruptions, or new competitors entering the market, can also force businesses to reassess their goals. Similarly, regulatory changes or environmental concerns could lead to new priorities, such as adopting more sustainable practices and communicating these to customers through marketing.
Concussion - Adapting to Market Changes
To stay competitive, it's essential to regularly review and adjust marketing strategies in line with these evolving business goals. This adaptability ensures that marketing remains effective and positions the business to respond proactively to changes in the marketplace, setting the stage for sustainable, long-term growth.
As we look ahead to the challenging year for businesses, we must recognise that significant opportunities lie within these challenges. With many companies tightening their belts and reducing marketing expenditures, the landscape becomes less competitive, presenting a unique advantage for those willing to invest strategically.
This contraction in overall marketing spend across industries means that the cost to reach potential customers is likely to decrease. Digital advertising platforms, media outlets, and other marketing channels may offer more favourable rates or increased reach for the same budget. This creates a prime opportunity for businesses to amplify their voice and expand their market presence at a lower cost than in previous years.
Marketing is essentially a zero-sum game. There is a finite amount of customer attention and spending power in any given market. When competitors reduce their marketing efforts, it leaves a vacuum that proactive companies can fill. By maintaining or increasing marketing activities while others pull back, businesses can capture a larger share of voice and, consequently, a larger market share.
The opportunities in this environment are substantial, and the potential return on investment for marketing spend could be significantly higher than in more competitive periods. However, the key to success is ensuring marketing budgets are allocated to the right activities. This is why conducting a comprehensive marketing review is essential. A thorough analysis of current strategies, market conditions, and potential opportunities will help businesses identify the most effective channels and tactics.
In conclusion, while the year ahead may present challenges, it also offers a landscape ripe with opportunity for those willing to seize it. The more a company invests in smart, strategic marketing during this time, the better positioned it will be to emerge stronger when the market rebounds. By capitalising on the reduced competition and lower costs, businesses can set themselves up for long-term success and market leadership.
Apply for your Marketing Review
If you would like a detailed review of your marketing to help grow your business in 2025, you can apply for one of our detailed, no-cost marketing reviews today.
Due to the time and expertise involved, we can only offer these in-depth reviews to a limited number of companies each month. While there's no charge for this service, it does take a significant amount of our time, so we can only provide these for businesses that meet specific criteria to ensure we can deliver the most value.
If you're serious about growth and want clear, actionable insights into your marketing strategy, apply now to join the waiting list.
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