25 Tips to SUPERCHARGE your Marketing in ’25

The start of a new year means planning your upcoming campaigns and securing (read: fighting for) budget. With funding, time and human resources constantly under pressure, how can you supercharge your marketing quickly and easily?

Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, our 25 top tips will help you plan and deliver a year of successful and measurable marketing activations.

And of course, if you need help to make your ideas fly, get in touch with us today!

You treasure what you measure

Before committing any of your precious marketing budget for 2025, assess what worked – and equally importantly – what didn’t work last year. Dive into your website and social stats. Investigate the outcomes of leads generated at industry events and conferences. Get feedback from customers, sales teams and leadership on engagement generated by your thought leadership. If you haven’t captured results from last year’s activities, make it your top priority for this year. If you don’t know the return on investment (ROI) of every single activity you fund, how can you decide where best to spend money going forward?

Marketing strategy follows business strategy

Of course, marketing should always have a seat at the table to influence and inform business strategy – however all the marketing spend in the world won’t make a positive impact if your objectives are at odds with those of the business. Build good relationships with the leadership team to ensure you’re aligned around target sectors, markets and buyers. Have an eye on the competition so you can put clear blue water between your business and theirs. And use your ROI insights (that, again) to advocate for what works, and steer clear of what doesn’t.

We’re here to sell beer

OK, not literally for many of us (sadly). This is all about having a value proposition: being absolutely clear about what’s on offer, and creating demand that your business can meet. Keep messaging simple and in tune with the voice of your customers. Be honest – never over promise – because when expectation doesn’t meet reality, people get upset. And this links nicely to the next tip, which is to…

Activate around a few clear themes

With a constant clamour for cut-through, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd, especially when budgets are tight. So, take time at the start of the year to identify a few key themes that become the umbrella under which the majority of your marketing sits. Again, don’t over-reach here: it’s critical that everything you put out is rooted firmly in your expertise, solutions and insights, and supports revenue targets (so you can track and show ROI – yes, that again). And remember: when you start to get bored of your chosen topics, this is when they’re starting to resonate with your buyers.

Think of yourself as the customer

As marketers, we’re responsible for being customer advocates. We need to understand our customers’ needs, how they think, how they speak, and when, where and how they buy (bearing in mind that buyer journeys are no longer linear, with so many ways for people to research and connect with you). We need to bring this knowledge to life in everything we do. Take your website, for example. Does the navigation reflect what buyers and partners actually need, and does it use their language to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for? If most visitors view your site on a mobile device, is it optimised to give them the best experience? Can they get to the right content in less than three clicks?

Start with the end in mind

When devising a campaign, planning an event, or writing thought leadership, imagine what success looks like. Visualise the headline in an industry magazine or newspaper – write it out, if it helps! Having a clear intended outcome will help you to keep clarity of intent across all aspects of your campaign, which in turn makes it easier to measure the impact and results. Needless to say, your headline must match your objectives and intended outcomes.

Authentic content is key…

Here’s some good news… Perfection is officially out! Whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, ultimately you’re selling to people – and what people crave is authenticity. What does this mean, in practice? It means that you can share a work-in-progress point of view rather than a fully finessed and massively detailed piece of thought leadership. It means that you can create a greater number of shorter, value-driven videos that feel real and relateable, rather than something longer with lots of unnecessary special effects. Given everyone is pushed for time, shorter and more impactful content is the way to go anyway.

…As is interactive content

In the words of Robbie Williams, ‘Let me entertain you!’. With so much *meh* content out there, why not have some fun? This is your opportunity to develop engaging content that fuels people’s imaginations, and inspires them to get involved. Imagine you’re a local brewery (back to selling beer again…): why not run a campaign inviting people to suggest bold new flavours for a seasonal special via Instagram Stories, and then create a poll to choose the winner? Shoppable videos are another great way to engage and drive sales. Polls and quizzes work equally as well in the world of B2B, too. Get people to share their point of view in a LinkedIn post, then you can follow up with the results… and open the door to a sales conversation.

Use AI, but carefully

Come on, who hasn’t used ChatGPT when pushed for time to help write that overdue product brochure, or draft last-minute social content? AI is the marketer’s friend when it comes to thinking fast and generating ideas. But it must be used with caution; we’ve all come across websites where the content has clearly not been written by a person. Something feels a bit off; the tone isn’t quite human enough. And, as I’ve said before, authenticity is key. So, use AI for inspiration, but don’t use it to cut corners. Trust me, people will know.

Schedule for success

We’ve all been there; we start the year with a commitment to driving out regular, relevant content. Then all of a sudden things get busy, and content goes back to being ad-hoc. Either that, or we develop a detailed plan for the year and bulk-produce materials, only to find in Q2 that the market has changed, and what we’d planned is no longer relevant. I’m a big fan of developing a detailed plan a quarter ahead, with a broader-brush plan-on-a-page through the rest of the year. For your quarterly plan, start with your key themes (see tip 4), then pre-schedule what’s going out under these themes by channel, by week/month. Get your content for the quarter created up-front, fully signed off and ready to go. Punctuate this with the dates of known activities, such as industry events or product launches, and use these to further amplify your content. As you get halfway through a quarter, plan for the next. This way, you keep consistency over your themes and messaging, but have the flexibility to change how you activate against these depending on emerging results, or a change in internal or external factors.

Think digitally

I don’t have to tell you this, right? Still, you’d be amazed how many businesses think of digital as just their website, rather than making it the foundation of their marketing strategy. However your customers choose to buy from you, they will have interacted with your brand digitally before making the decision to buy. They’ll have Googled you at the very least. So, make sure that you look at every idea through a digital-first lens. This means understanding how people want to consume content on different digital platforms, and making sure you serve them up the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. Think video, versus audio, versus visual: what’s going to work best on the various digital channels you have in your toolkit?

And think visually

A picture paints a thousand words… With today’s multitude of digital channels, we marketers are spoiled for choice for ways to bring our ideas to life creatively and impactfully. And linking to the previous tip, visual content is perfect for digital-first marketing. Think imagery, videos, infographics; the world is your oyster! And sometimes, needing to distill something down to a short visual story helps you to get to the heart of the proposition, and means your target audience engages quickly and emotionally with what you’re trying to sell.

Make your website work harder…

First of all, do you know for sure how well your website is currently working to deliver leads or sales? You need to be constantly analysing stats (that AGAIN!), user journeys & etc. to turn your website into a high-powered sales engine. This is an area where you can’t afford to ignore the AI revolution; you need to ensure that your content is optimised to help alternative AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI overviews find you. Go back through old site content – remove anything that’s out of date or no longer relevant, refresh anything that needs a few tweaks, and ensure that any new capabilities have supporting content to bump you up those search results.

…And ensure it supports voice search

Did you know that 58% of consumers use voice search to find local business information? Voice search is a critical way to reach customers, and to consider in 2025. Make sure your online business profiles are up-to-date. FAQs help your business to feature in results, as does having a more human, personable tone of voice in your written content. And when looking at your SEO, go beyond simple keywords and include phrases that your buyers use in real life – which links back to tip #5, thinking of yourself as a customer.

Use social media to test ideas

Wondering if a new strapline will land? Want to know which creative route will resonate before investing in a full-blown campaign? Let social media do the hard work for you! (Remember, perfection is SO last year – see tip 7.) Think of social channels as your testing ground: put out ideas and quickly learn which gains the most traction. Then use your marketing £££ to amplify the top performing posts via paid campaigns. Again, this is an area where AI comes into play. AI-enabled platforms like TikTok prioritise engagement, which is how good campaigns go viral – giving you more bang for less buck. Test and learn has never been so easy, or so immediate.

Check in on your brand

When businesses are going through a growth phase, or when time, headcount and budgets are pressed, it’s easy for their brand to take a back seat. All of sudden, things are out of kilter: you’ve got an old logo on product literature or merchandise; your previous colour palette is still being used on your website; your new content has a different written style compared to old wording. Given that potential customers will visit many different touchpoints before making the decision to buy from you, consistency is key. Make sure your messaging, tone of voice and visual brand elements are completely aligned.

Build your own holy trinity

In the world of B2B particularly, a close collaboration amongst marketing, sales and product (the holy trinity) is critical to success. You need to understand the product inside-out, whilst elevating the narrative beyond technical details, in order to build a value proposition that speaks to potential buyers in their voice. Sales teams are your gateway to the customer. Getting sales teams on-side enables you to speak directly with buyers, hear how they talk about your solutions, understand their needs and concerts, and turn all of this into powerful marketing content. That’s how you become able to think of yourself as the customer (see tip #5).

Partner with your customers…

Once you’ve partnered with Sales to build relationships with your customers, you can gain their trust and turn them into advocates. Some of the most powerful and successful campaigns I’ve ever worked on have had customers at the heart of the content: talking on video about the benefits of a solution, doing a joint keynote speech at a conference, talking to the media about the results they’ve seen, or sharing content on their social channels. What do they get in return? Well, you need to understand them to know the answer to that. For one organisation I worked with – a top 5 Bank here in the UK – they wanted to be seen as innovators in their field. So our product launch put them front and centre, talking about being first to take it to market, and the great results they were seeing. Guess what? Other banks soon signed up, turning a brand-new solution into a multi-million pound revenue stream.

…And engage with micro-influencers

Joining forces with influencers doesn’t require mega bucks. Sure, you can build paid relationships with big-hitters, but when budgets are squeezed you can still get great traction by working with micro-influencers. These are people who are authentic (that word again), whose values chime with yours, and who have credibility. Work with them to plan a collaboration – an online event, a giveaway, a product review – that you can test, learn, measure and scale. Just make sure that you have equal ownership of all contact information and leads generated, so that you can measure resulting sales and revenue (yep, ROI again).

Don’t overcommit yourself – or your team

This links back to tip #4: setting a few key themes that you continually reinforce throughout the year, versus putting out lots of disparate stories that don’t gain traction. And remember: it’s always better to do a few things really well, rather than lots of things badly. Think social media: rather than trying to be across every platform, use the data to understand which one(s) work best for you. Ditch the others, and focus on sharing out regular, impactful and relevant content on the one or two bring in the bucks.A final tip: every business wants a newsletter, and it seems like a great idea… and certainly it can be a great way of keeping warm prospects, or triggering past customers to buy from you again. But don’t commit to it being a weekly or monthly thing. (Honestly, people aren’t watching their inboxes waiting for it to drop.) Make it ad-hoc, when you have something interesting to share.

An event is never just an event

Building on the previous tip, help yourself by making an event – whether B2C or B2C – part of a bigger campaign. Think of it as another channel through which you activate your planned content and themes – in speeches and podcasts, on your stand (if you have one) – rather than pressurising yourself to come up with something completely new to showcase. Ramp up social posts, advertising, customer communications and PR before and during the event, leveraging existing themes and content. Then have a plan to capitalise on the business generated at the event itself – with measurement criteria and controls in place, of course! ROI, need I say more?

Make the most of your CRM tool

Even the smallest business should have a way of capturing, managing, and leveraging their prospect and customer data. My very first tip talked about the importance of using data to help drive strategy and decision-making; your CRM tool should be at the very heart of this. If you’re an SME, it needn’t be over-engineered or costly – some tools give you access to basic features for free. Whatever platform you choose, make sure it’s built to deliver insights that help you meet your goals – whether they are to deepen customer engagement or drive new in-bound sales. And insights are only as good as the data behind them. To be blunt: crap in, crap out! Make sure your data is well organised and up-to-date. And look to find a CRM that makes your life easier – some integrate with other platforms like Xero, others have additional features such as project management and timesheets, meaning you don’t need multiple tools to manage your business – and hopefully reducing overall costs.

Find your tribe

Broaden your horizons beyond your own team and industry. It’s very easy to get caught up in focusing on what your competitors are doing – however some of the best inspiration for ground-breaking marketing campaigns can come from beyond your industry. So, get out there and network. This is especially important if you’re the only marketer in your business, or part of a small team. If you work with agencies, build relationships with them and talk marketing beyond the scope of your projects. What else are they working on? What’s on the minds of their other customers? Sign up for local and online events which have content both in your areas of interest and across topics where you need to build knowledge. Don’t know how to make a CRM work for you? /Sign up for a webinar where you can get some tips. Want to better understand the importance of PR and how it links to marketing? Listen to a podcast. I’m currently obsessed with ‘When it hits the fan’ on Spotify – they have some fab ‘quick wins’ episodes too, on subjects like ‘how to use storytelling’.

Sustainability is not a phase

With people’s need for authenticity (tip #7) comes an increased scrutiny on an organisation’s commitment to sustainability. Greenwashing is not acceptable; people know when you’re faking, and a failure to deliver on pledges you make will damage your brand. That said, you can be honest about being on a journey in this space. Take the opportunity to showcase ways in which you’re making changes, for example designing new product packaging that’s entirely recyclable.

You treasure what you measure

Am I cheating by re-stating this? Perhaps… But honestly, setting targets for every activity and religiously measuring the results is the single most important thing any marketer can do. If you have fact-based insights (see tip #22 about CRM) you’ll know which activities are delivering against your objectives, and which should be shelved. Insights enable you to totally own your budget and focus on investing in activations that deliver measurable results. They also help you to de-risk test and learn activities, because you’ll be able to know in real-time whether they’re working or not – see tip #15 above about using social media as a quick and low cost way of doing test and learn. Plus, it gives you more power to veto people’s pet projects, or much-loved but outdated activities that really should be retired. Knowledge is power!