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Strategy

2025 Q1 marketing cheat sheet: 5 key insights for your strategy

Amongst digital marketers, it’s a well-worn cliché that the industry never stands still. Staying on top of all of the latest trends, changes, events and key dates is a bit of an uphill battle.

Well, to make things a little easier in Q1, we’ve done some of the leg work for you!

These five insights from our team are sure to help you get off to a great start in 2025.

1. Awareness is not just for Christmas

Something worth remembering every year as we push into January is that the New Year is not the time to slow down. While consumers may be seeking to cut back or reduce unnecessary spends in the few weeks that follow, it’s important not to lose momentum, and any additional opportunity to secure their attention, trust and loyalty should be seized.

We talk a lot about retaining loyalty through useful, cost-friendly means in our blog on marketing during a downturn, but in short, there are lots of ways to keep awareness flowing without bruising the bottom line.

Keep paying attention to your customers — what are they saying on social media? What are their concerns and challenges right now? How are they engaging with your posts? You know that the cost of living crisis will be acutely felt post-festive season, so let them know you’re on their side.

This could be discounts and deals, but it could also be reliable, trustworthy insights and information. Keep the great content coming, because this keeps you front and centre, engages them and means that when they are ready to spend, they’ll remember you.

Be sure to react and respond to comments on your social feeds, for example — it’s a great way to humanise your brand, something that’s key in 2025.

2. Keep on top of 2025’s key dates and awareness days (but don’t overdo it)

Being caught short by these sorts of events is any marketer’s worst nightmare. In your industry, there’s likely to be a number of niche awareness days!

Whilst you won’t want to jump on irrelevant awareness days, cherry picking a few to join in with is just a simple way of humanising your brand and growing amongst consumers interested in what your brand does. We all need a little more funny, non-salesy content in our lives.

There are a number of key dates coming up in Q1 2025 that you might want to keep on your radar.

January

  • Dry January (#DryJanuary)

  • Veganuary (#Veganuary)

  • 20th Blue Monday / Brew Monday

  • 20th: Cervical Cancer Prevention Week (#CervicalCancerPrevent)

  • 25th: Burns Night

  • 27th: Holocaust Memorial Day (#HolocaustMemorialDay, #LightTheDarkness)

  • 29th - 12th Feb Chinese/Lunar New Year

February

  • L.B.G.T.+ History Month (#LGBTPlusHM)

  • 2nd: Yorkshire Pudding Day (sorry, we couldn’t resist)

  • 10-16th: National Apprenticeship Week (#NAW2024)

  • 14th: Valentine’s Day

  • 16th: BAFTA Film Awards

  • 28th - Start of Ramadan

March

  • Women’s History Month (#WomensHistoryMonth)

  • 1st: St David’s Day

  • 6th World Book Day

  • 8th: International Women’s Day (#IWD24)

  • 10th: Mother’s Day in the UK (#MothersDay)

  • 17th: St Patrick’s Day

  • 20th: First day of spring

  • 22nd: World Water Day (#WorldWaterDay)

  • 30th: British Summer Time starts (clocks go forward at 1am)

3. Plant meaningful sustainability in your strategy

According to Kantar data, sustainability contributes over $193 billion to the world's top 100 brands. While many of us, as consumers and marketers are aware of the surge in consciousness around more sustainable shopping and living, knowing that it can be a key driver when making purchasing decisions is vital.

When brands are ethical and sustainable, it boosts consumer trust and confidence. Kantar goes on to say that consumers are seeking more than brand level, shallow sustainability, they want meaningful change and company-wide values and evidence. Expect ESG (environmental, social and governance) to play a key role in your strategies in the coming year. Go beyond immediate purchase and look into how your brand can make lasting change and impact in its own sector and beyond; consumers are seeking those products and businesses showing a real commitment.

4. Use the Q1 slowdown to steal a long-term march

The quietest months for retail and e-commerce are January and February, and with cost-of-living pressures showing no sign of abating, this is likely to be truer than ever.

But consumers aren’t stopping their spending altogether, even if brands are reigning in their digital activity. Doesn’t this present the perfect time to shout the loudest and reclaim your share of industry voice? The slow-down won’t last, so use this time wisely.

Social media advertising, PPC and email will be your go-to digital channels for ramping up short-term visibility. However, there are other ways to leverage these fallow months to get to know your audience even more, benefitting you in the longer term.

For example, SEO-led changes to your website — both technical and content-focused — aren’t usually ‘quick-win’ and can take a few months to deliver their fruits, but you’ll be in a great place for Q3 and Q4.

After all, you don’t have to pay for those organic search results spots, and by working in tandem with your always-on paid campaigns, you’ll be increasing your slice of the search engine visibility pie, covering off this incredibly important consumer touchpoint.

5. Getting to grips with generative AI

Now, AI continues to be a controversial topic in the world of marketing; while it can have a place, the combination of poor quality AI output, met with consumer mistrust, means we're likely to spend a lot of 2025 debating its place.

Kantar has told us that many marketers are excited about its potential, but that 44% of those asked can still tell when AI has been used. So, what does this mean? It means that in the coming year, it will be upto agencies and professionals to assess investment in this tech, scrutinise its output, and ensure that applications are fit for purpose. Brands seeking to cut costs by utilising AI may well get burned as quality and nuance is still lacking in many cases. Consider what it is you have to do to reassure the 43% of consumers that don't trust AI centred ads.

Does this all sound a little like hard work?

Then maybe we can do some of the heavy lifting for you in 2025.

Our award-winning team covers all digital marketing specialisms — social media, branding, PPC, SEO, content, PR, email, e-commerce and web development.

If you could do with a helping hand staying ahead of the curve this year, drop us a line today!

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