The New Year Starts Now: 2025 Digital Marketing Strategy

This year has flown by, at least for us here at Media Rebel. We are nearly out of the month of August and quickly approaching the fourth and final quarter of 2024. With the new year on the horizon, now is the time to start planning your strategy. Effective digital marketing takes a great deal of research, planning, and evaluation.

Being proactive in your digital strategy for the new year will only help set you up for success in 2025. If you want to make informed decisions based on accurate data, resource allocation and measurable goals, your 2025 digital strategy starts now.

Quick adaptation and following trends is still essential to maximizing your digital potential, but there’s still a lot you can do to lay the groundwork. Here, we’ll outline the reasons why you should start planning now for 2025 and what that will look like for you.

Fast-paced Digital Landscape

The digital world moves fast, leaving little room for delay. Like the common saying: If you’re on-time, you’re late. With so many moving parts in enacting digital strategy, the planning stage tends to be more significant than you anticipate. You don’t want to head into the new year with no foundation for a strong digital strategy, forcing you to scramble through the planning stages.

This fast-paced nature can be a double edged sword. Technology, consumer expectations and industry trends can change by the week, making it difficult to anticipate what your business will need in the upcoming year. 

AI, for example, has been a persistent concern recently for how rapidly the technology is evolving. There’s no saying whether your strategy will change in light of new developments.

This is why adaptability is always key. We aren’t suggesting that you start preparing any creative or blog content for release in 2025. Rather, the preparations for your business goals, budgetary considerations and data gathering can begin now.

Competitive Advantage

Keeping up with the saturated and evolving digital world is not simply a matter of timing. Starting your 2025 digital strategy now provides you with a valuable advantage over your market competition. Heading into the new year with data-driven and tested insights on your goals, budget and plan is invaluable to your success.

This is where a digital agency makes all the difference. Too often, we meet with clients who are reaching out because their strategy has been unsuccessful. We are happy to help turn things around, using our expertise to realign their strategy to be more effective, but they’ve already lost valuable time playing catch-up.

We talk a lot about how difficult it can be to have your voice heard above the digital noise in a highly competitive market. How can you expect to stand out if your strategy is a disorganized mess?

The best advantage you can give your business in the digital marketing jungle is an informed strategy you’ve established alongside a reputable agency. With everything aligned, you can approach the new year with an organized focus.

Aligning Business Goals

As we’ve stated in the past, aligning your business goals with your strategy is the first and most important step in digital marketing. 

Starting on your 2025 digital strategy allows you to give this step the time and consideration it needs. You can use the time to evaluate your current strategy, collect data and form business goals that are realistic and measurable.

This is especially important to start early because it’s what connects your 2024 to your 2025. You want to be able to measure growth between this year and next, demonstrating successful progress. 

The goals that you set will inform everything you do, from budget allocation to data gathering.

Evaluating Your Team

Whether you’re working with an internal or external team, carefully aligning your goals is essential to evaluating your success. If the goals you’ve aligned aren’t measurable and clearly communicated, how can you tell whether a project was successful or not?

Evaluating your team is an essential step in preparing for your 2025 digital strategy. Starting early is vital to maximize your effectiveness in the new year. Take note of what your team needs to successfully accomplish your digital goals. Whether it’s new hires or certifications, this is the time to get started.

This is the key to an organized strategy. You can’t gather data and measure your results with specificity and clarity if you haven’t organized your team.

Gathering Data and Insights

Reviewing analytics from Google, social media platforms, and data from any A/B testing conducted over the year will be helpful in planning for the upcoming year. This information is imperative for understanding your audience and what they perceive as relevant and useful.

Testing out videos, posts, carousels, etc. gives you the opportunity to evaluate what posts kept your audience on your page. Engagement is a valuable metric of success, so testing out different content to review what led to the highest engagement is important.

In Google analytics, scroll tracking displays in-depth how users are scrolling through. If you don’t have scroll tracking enabled we recommend you read this article on how to implement it.

Bounce rate and time on page will also inform you of how useful users find your site. To learn more about bounce rate go here. The ideal bounce rate for your site depends on your industry and website type, as seen in the infographic below. File downloads and clicks will help identify any documents or links on your site that are both useful or not.

CXL. (n.d.). Bounce rate benchmarks chart. Bounce Rate Benchmarks: What's a Good Bounce Rate, Anyway? https://cxl.com/guides/bounce-rate/benchmarks/

This data is always useful to collect and update real-time, but starting early with the explicit purpose of planning your 2025 strategy will lead to the greatest success.

Optimizing

We constantly stress the importance of optimization in digital strategy. You can spend a large budget on content, ad placements, and a website, but if you aren’t optimizing based on analytics, it’s a complete waste. The earlier you start, the more effective your optimization will be.

Many see planning early as being less flexible to changes in market trends or consumer preferences, but it’s actually the opposite. Having an organized digital strategy to test gives you more data to adapt your plan.

By starting early, you can ensure that your proposals have proven data to back them up. This pays off when you’re allocating a budget for digital strategy. Instead of vaguely anticipating how much you might need to spend on digital marketing efforts, you can have a clearer expectation of how much it will cost and exactly what that money will be used on.

Budget Considerations

Knowing what you should spend on digital marketing seems isn't always obvious. Too often we meet businesses who aren’t certain. Whether it’s from a lack of planning or communication, this is a major area of collapse for business’ digital marketing. While traditional marketing still holds value, it’s evident that digital marketing should dominate a marketing budget.

A smart business begins planning its budget for the upcoming year by reviewing current year spending against measurable outcomes. This evaluation forms the basis for future strategies. Each year, you should include an increase in your digital marketing budget.

If you meet with an agency, as we suggest, you want to be able to communicate how much you are able to allocate to your projects. You never want to be left without the budget to execute your digital strategy as planned because you hadn’t properly communicated what you have*. 

When you meet with agencies, contractors, or especially internal team members, you need to be able to clearly communicate what your budget is for a given project. The worst case scenario — but by no means an uncommon one — is misunderstanding your own budget and having to cut back on an established plan.

Conclusion

With only a few months until the new year, there’s a lot of ground to cover in planning your digital strategy. Setting goals, evaluating your team, gathering data, optimizing your strategy, and budgeting can make the difference between success and struggle.

Planning for the new year can feel overwhelming, so check out our other blogs on digital strategy. For more information on digital advertising and agencies, click here to read our blog. Social media is increasingly becoming the central framework for digital marketing strategy, so building your brand presence on the right platforms is a must. Read our blog on social media strategy here.