B2B Tech Energy Agency Partnership

2025 Communications Trends to Watch

By Kersa Haughey

The world of communications is evolving rapidly, and 2025 is set to bring its own unique challenges and opportunities. From shifting employer branding strategies influenced by political landscapes to the rise of B2B micro-influencers and the changing role of AI in creative design, staying ahead requires foresight and adaptability.

So, what trends should you prepare for in 2025? Here’s what our leaders across planning, communications, digital, brand strategy and content, and creative services are watching — and how you should respond.

Generative AI will continue to shape how we connect with audiences

Kersa Haughey, Director, Marketing + Business Development

This year, generative AI proved to be both a powerful tool for comms teams and a force disrupting how people discover, consume, and engage with content and information. But AI isn’t static — it’s advancing rapidly, reshaping the digital ecosystem and audience behavior online. In the months ahead, its influence will only grow, making it critical for communicators to stay tapped in and adaptable.

This means closely monitoring AI’s evolution, assessing its impact across channels, and fine-tuning programs to respond to new opportunities while tackling emerging challenges. The teams who embrace the technology and invest in an ongoing understanding of its strengths and limits will drive visibility, engagement, and authority in 2025.

Employer branding strategies will evolve with the changing political landscape

Caitlin New, VP, Communications

Next year will be yet another season of change for U.S. companies. Any time a new presidential administration takes office, it introduces uncertainty among both employees and employers.

It’s not reasonable to assume employer branding strategies that worked in the past will remain effective now. Employers should evaluate the following and adapt their strategies accordingly:

  • How will a new administration, a noisy political landscape, and policy changes affect your workforce physically, financially, socially, and emotionally?
  • What industry changes could impact your ability to attract or retain talent in the coming years?
  • Could external issues like national and cultural crises cause ripple effects throughout your company?

All of these could impact employee productivity, which could have an adverse effect on the bottom line. That’s why proactive employer branding strategies, including internal and external brand communications, employee engagement, talent recruitment, and crisis management tactics, are paramount to success in 2025 and beyond.

B2B micro-influencers and independent media influencers grow as newsrooms shrink

Helen Murphy, VP, Communications

B2B reporting is evolving as two distinct groups of influencers and micro-influencers gain greater followings, filling the hole left by shrinking newsrooms. The first is a wave of B2B experts who are growing their voices as trusted sources for industry insights. The second consists of former journalists from traditional news outlets who have gone on to launch independent or alternative media ventures. Both groups are building audiences across newsletters (like Substack and Ghost), podcasts, social platforms, and industry forums — a shift underscored by a 21% rise in Substack subscriptions between August 2023 and January 2024.

At INK, we’re closely tracking both movements. Below is a sample of journalists-turned-independent creators whose platforms are already driving meaningful conversations and industry influence:

Companies shouldn’t ignore these influencers and micro-influencers just because they aren’t traditional media or have a smaller following. The readers or listeners who engage with these influencers are highly engaged and very targeted. Think quality over quantity.

Marketing and sales will forge deeper and more collaborative relationships

Kim Mackley, VP, Brand Strategy + Content

We’ve seen this trend unfold over time and accelerate due to some interesting convergence. Around 2018 to 2019, we started hearing about the modern CMO and their strengthening position in the C-Suite. These deeper relationships with CFOs and CSOs combined with two things: 1) marketing departments armed with newly available tools and metrics and 2) an unwanted, but probably necessary, tightening of budget that occurred across industries post-pandemic. These forces led marketers straight down and across our funnel, and now we’ve increasingly found ourselves playing an active role in things like business development, customer retention, and even sales-holy-grail activities like pricing.

To be good partners here in the coming years, I’d spend time prioritizing metrics that matter the most to both sales and marketing, increasing allocations for sales enablement materials that are an extension of your brand strategy, and doubling down on quality thought leadership efforts that can not only help with customer lifetime value (a beloved sales metric), but also new customer acquisition. Best brew a fresh pot for that next cross-functional meeting with sales!

Energy companies will need to focus on the impacts that matter to their audiences

Candice Eng, VP, Energy Communications

In the past couple of years, energy companies were asked to show progress and action. Hence a lot of focus on “what are you doing?” Entering a new presidential administration, growing energy demands, and unknown headwinds, energy companies will need to show their impact. And the kind of impact matters.

Key audiences such as policymakers, investors, and customers are going to prioritize economic impact — supply chain, workforce, affordability, and reliability.

We will likely also see an increased focus on community impact, and these storylines will gain traction with media. Journalists are facing their own uncertainties with shrinking newsrooms, pressure from executives, and a noisy political environment. They need to focus on the stories their readers will click and read, need to have industry, economic, or consumer-impact perspective, and will need to be less and less about your brand. Social issues will also come back to the forefront of media interest and storylines as consumers and employees will become more conscious of what aligns with their values again.

Keeping a human in the AI design loop and going back to brand basics

Emily Grossman, VP, Creative Services

With more clients and teams looking to AI for inspiration (and often execution), designers will serve as a check and balance to uphold brand integrity and ensure AI is being used in a way that makes us and our work smarter, but doesn’t lose touch with reality, maintains a human element that is imperative for reaching the REAL humans at the other end of our designs.

On the branding and positioning front, we will also begin to see brands return to connection and purpose — getting back to the core of what makes people connect with a brand and gives it a driving purpose. AI tools have been feeding the need for fast iteration and keeping up with trends, but 2025 will bring back a focus on quality, timelessness, and brand equity.

B2B brands look beyond LinkedIn for lead gen and X alternatives accelerate

Traci Mazurek, VP, Digital

While LinkedIn has been the B2B marketer’s go-to platform for lead generation advertising, we’ve seen a decrease in its lead gen across industries and content types, including historically significant conversion-drivers, like webinars and reports. However, PPC has emerged as an even stronger contributor to B2B leads than in the past, particularly Google’s dynamic ads format. Our advice? Google Ads should be your bare minimum, always-on, baseline advertising tactic to reach users already searching for your expertise. Running a mix of responsive and dynamic ads allows you to own specific keywords while also covering other relevant searches that might bring prospects to your website.

Elsewhere in the social media landscape, newer X-competitive platforms are worth exploring, even though X may not fully disappear any time soon. Threads and Bluesky have had steady user growth and adoption throughout the past couple of years. However, both platforms have seen a surge of signups and engagement since November 6 and have added features over time, including video posting, pinned posts, hashtags, and block features. While neither app has advertising opportunities yet, Threads ads could be in the works as soon as early 2025.

Marketers who aren’t already on these platforms should park their brand handles and invest time in exploring the landscape. Monitor your media targets, influencers, and friendlies across X, Bluesky, and Threads to evaluate where they engage most and experiment with posting content across channels to test engagement.

Marketing communications teams will need to measure less, more often

Caroline Harvey, VP, Planning

Traditionally, marketing communications teams build out annual reports and then track progress quarterly. But as we see an increase in efforts, like paid digital and owned content, that can be heavily targeted, allow for more message control, and generate real-time data, waiting a full quarter to assess and apply learnings is not productive.

Think about a paid awareness campaign on LinkedIn with a few different versions of the same ad running. If people are coming to the website through the ad but bouncing, there’s opportunity to rethink the site’s content or structure. Or, if there’s significant engagement with one ad version but almost none with another, pull the messaging that’s resonating across other assets.

These quick observations give us insight that can help refine and optimize our efforts, but if we wait too long to analyze the data we’re getting, the insight becomes obsolete. In 2025, focus on setting KPIs that help inform strategy and build in more frequent checkpoints to assess and apply what they’re telling you.

Start your year on the right foot

At INK, we firmly believe companies hire agencies to see what’s coming and to proactively bring ideas and strategies that improve their business results. Keeping a pulse on the forces and trends that may impact our clients is just one part of how we do that — one piece of our Be There Before™ methodology. For over 20 years, we’ve blended enduring and emerging communications strategies to keep our clients ahead of the curve.

Ready to get ahead? Let’s talk about what we can accomplish together in 2025.