John Bohan covers six marketing trends for 2025: the TikTokification of social platforms, building brand-viral content like Chipotle and Duolingo do, creating your own creator pages instead of paying influencers, using improv-style UGC instead of polished ads, adopting specific AI tools like OpenAI's O1 and Sora, and live social shopping platforms like Petco and Nordstrom are using.
There's 6 major trends in 2025 that you can jump on now to scale your business. The first one is the TikTokification of social media, where most all the social platforms are focused on one thing: watch time. The videos get the longer watch time, get more reach because they make the most money for the platforms. It's simple. More time on the platform equals more ads. The marketers that will win are the ones that can make on-brand content that caters to the algorithm. Here's marketing trend number 2 that you're going to want to jump on in 2025 to scale your business. Well, first I'm going to tell you what not to do. Don't try and just go viral for viral's sake. It's not go viral, it's go brand viral. Create content that balances the algo with your brand. Going viral by itself can be very dangerous to your business if it's not done correctly. So the 2025 advice is know your brand really, really well so you can be playful and create social content that goes viral, supports your brand, and scales your business. Some brands that are absolutely crushing it because they know themselves so well are Chipotle, Duolingo, Liquid Death, Chamberlain Coffee, and even Judy's Cafe, which is a small pancake house that is blowing up in social and with revenue. If you want to learn how to copy the success of these brands and others, message me from the link in this bio and I'd be happy to set up an exploratory call. We have a proprietary 5-point method to help you to succeed. Trend number 3 for 2025 that you should jump on is the creator economy. The companies that embrace creators and develop relatable on-brand content will win. But it's not about the influencer marketing that you've seen over the last several years where posts have been spread across many different influencer pages. It's more about building social pages that become a bigger asset to your brand and a driver of business. Shortly, I'll provide you with a playbook on how to avoid the expensive costs of talented influencers but still have the opportunity to work with them in a win-win. The creators or influencers have certain needs that aren't being met that you can solve while scaling your business, and it doesn't come with the large ticket price of a single post. If you're in marketing, the fourth trend that you're going to want to focus on in 2025 to get ahead is your customer has stopped paying attention to 15- to 30-second commercials that are highly produced and scripted. These ads are really old school and they don't work. It's amazing that there's so much money still poured into this— $60 billion into TV last year. People don't want to be sold to anymore. They want to be entertained. They gravitate towards brands that can really produce content that feels like they're doing it on the fly. It's like elevated UGC. So how do you do this? How are these brands creating this amazing content that's connecting on social media? Well, the way to think about it is instead of scripting, stage your content. What I mean by that, and this is key, is put the right talent in the right setting with the right strategy and start rolling the cameras. Rely upon improv a lot more. That way you'll develop relatable content that tells stories, stops people in the newsfeed, and gets them to lean in. Trend number 5 for 2025 is AI. The key is how do you get the most out of it in the quickest amount of time? There's thousands of AI companies out there, so how do you keep track of all of them? Here's a secret, and the hack is I don't think you need to. It will boil down to just a handful where we as marketers, in my opinion, will only use a small amount of companies for strategy, copywriting, videos, images, etc. I mean, think about Apple. It's kind of like that where they own our MacBook, our phone, our iPad, music. OpenAI is clearly in the lead with 4 billion monthly visitors and 10 million paid subscribers. So if you want to geek out on all the different tools out there, you know, be my guest, go for it. But if you want to save time and access a hack, my advice would be to sign up for the Pro or Plus version of OpenAI. And this is not an ad, this is completely unbiased advice. Plus version is only $20 a month and will give you access to a number of tools, including the O1 model, which will provide you with better creative strategy and copywriting. The O1 model also imitates human thinking much better than the free version. It can also handle more complex instructions instructions than the, the free version. It has fewer errors and is actually a lot faster. So you gain access to other things such as Sora, which is text-to-video, DALL-E 3, which is text-to-images, as you may know, multi-model capabilities, which allows you to share images, files, and even your camera access, which is pretty cool. Our last trend for 2025 is possibly the biggest opportunity that you can jump on in the next 12 months as well as the next 5 years, and I'm super excited to tell you about it. It's a major shift in how commerce has been happening in China in the last 10 years, and it's about to blow up in the Chinese creator Zheng Shuang used it to generate $14 million in sales in just a week. So what is it? The trend is live social shopping, and it is blowing up. Think QVC in the '80s, but much bigger because it can be customized for your interests via the algorithm. Live social shopping is happening across all major social platforms, including TikTok, Instagram Live, Facebook Live, and others. And it's an ideal opportunity for the mom-and-pop businesses to shift to live social shopping when things are slow in their store. In addition, major brands that have dove into live shopping shopping include Petco, Nordstrom, Samsung, Tommy Hilfiger, and others. Most live shopping content is simply product descriptions and prices, but other brands are using it to partner with celebs and make a more dynamic, fun event, like the opportunity to win prizes and be completely entertained. So it's basically shopping with entertainment, which is similar to what happens in the store, but now it's happening in social media, and brands are 10x-ing the results versus straight paid ads. If you want to jump all over this opportunity, comment shop and I'll send you a how-to guide that dives deeper into this opportunity and provides 20 best practice tips to help you to start selling products online right away and succeed. That's it. 6 trends in 2025 to help you thrive. And if you do it right, marketing can be the sole difference between you and the rest of the competition. We've seen this across a number of brands such as Liquid Death, Duolingo, Chipotle, and a bunch of others. If you'd like to explore how to jump on any one of these 6 trends to accelerate your growth and your career, send me a quick note below and I'd be happy to schedule a call and learn what's possible for you in 2025. Thanks very much. See ya.
