This article explores the top inbound marketing trends for 2025, from the use of video marketing across multiple channels to the implementation of artificial intelligence and chatbots, to help you create a more effective strategy aligned with today’s market expectations.
1. Using video marketing across multiple channels
Video is essential in every aspect of digital marketing, and this isn’t going to change anytime soon. If you’re not already using video for your clients, social media, and website, are you really making a presence felt?
No matter what survey or report you read, video boosts metrics, whether it’s attracting visitors to your website, engaging them in your email campaigns, or delighting them with good after-sales service – video draws users into your sales funnel for the conversions you need.
Combine these two winning strategies and you double your chances of success.
- Create a YouTube channel.
- Post videos on Facebook.
- Add it to Instagram IGTV.
- Support all your channels by posting links on LinkedIn.
- Add a snippet and link on Twitter.
- Is your market suitable for TikTok or Snapchat? Do it too.
- Add your videos to your social media feeds, web blogs, and stories.
- Add links in your email newsletters.
- Promote your most popular platforms with paid advertising and targeted outreach.
2. Betting on unrestricted content
For those unsure of what is restricted and unrestricted content, a ‘gate’ is typically a form that a user must fill out to access protected information. It’s a traditional tactic used by sales teams to collect contact information and generate leads.
Gated content often has a higher value to the reader, something that would justify giving their email address to receive more information from that website or expert.
- Webinars
- Online events
- Newsletters
- eBooks and white papers
Ungated content offers free access to blog posts, web pages, and information designed to attract readers to the early stages of a sales funnel.
- Blogs
- Educational and informative articles
- Podcasts
Remember the ‘attract, engage, delight’ methodology. Inbound marketing is all about creating relationships and making them last. Hopefully, your product is good enough to persuade customers to get involved, and your sales team can use other tools to get the contact information they need.
3. Build content as sales tools
Remember the ‘attract, engage, delight’ strategy. Once potential customers are engaged, there’s nothing wrong with delivering well-crafted content to educate and engage them further – you can even delight them with the right tools, gently nudging them to the finish line.
So how do you do that? First, you need accessible, deliverable digital content that answers all the questions your leads might ask.
- Create content that explores and offers solutions to the recurring pain points your sales department is tired of answering.
- Create content specific to different case problems. Your content should range from case studies, sales presentations, knock-out sheets, to one-pagers, white papers, and demo videos.
- Build a library of content for your sales team, so it’s easily accessible to deliver immediately (better yet, automate it through your CRM).
- Create case study content with customer testimonials. Social proof (buyers trusting other buyers) is a valuable tool for closing conversions.
- Collect data from your content and salespeople, analyze it, review it, and update the content. Continually improving it will make it more efficient and fit for purpose.
Sales content is designed to drive customers further down the sales funnel, using the information they need to get there.
4. Add tutorials or step-by-step content
Interactive tutorials are the easiest way to get new users up to speed on using software or updates.
User interfaces have become increasingly intuitive, meaning many of us can find what we need with just a few clicks. But for those apps and packages that aren’t so easy to understand, you could spend days trying to master them.
Taking a walkthrough uncovers all the areas that the developer thinks you might not find quickly without some direction. And that’s great for delivering satisfaction.
You can carry this mindset over to your offline products or those without a digital interface.
Creating interactive, step-by-step content to guide users through processes at their own pace is the perfect solution in those cases. You can even include videos that cover the details that your words and illustrations can’t.
5. Greater use of artificial intelligence and chatbots
For the last item of our inbound marketing trends for 2025, let’s go back to the ‘attract, engage, delight’ methodology.
You’ve attracted a potential customer to your website via search engines or an inbound link from content you’ve published on other sites. You’ve engaged them with your beautifully presented and curated information (you can see they’ve already visited several pages). So how do you tick the final box and ‘delight’ them? Give them even more of what they want.
Here’s the interesting thing about chatbots. When chatbots first appeared on websites, they were usually handled by humans because the technology wasn’t advanced enough.
Some users were delighted to instantly connect with someone who could deliver exactly what they wanted without having to scroll through the entire website.
Others, less extroverted and much less impatient, found it a bit intrusive.
As artificial intelligence developed and chatbots were introduced, they became increasingly convincing, innovative and effective.
Today, chatbots are more human than ever. Natural language processing, understanding, and generation (NLP, NLU, and NLG) through textual or auditory requests and responses are so compelling that it feels like we’re dealing with humans, only more efficient.
Here we explain how to use them in inbound:
- Provides direct access to the information they need.
- Schedule calls and meetings.
- Book services.
- Provides pre-sale information, price guides, rates, and even time-sensitive offers.
- Manage direct customer support across all departments.
- Pay for products and services directly through most chatbots.
When the conversation reaches the point where only a human operator can provide what the user needs, that is when the human operator steps in to save the day.
As chatbots continue to improve, they will offer you and your users more help than ever before.
By making them conversationally smarter, they are much more fun than before and easier to interact with, providing all those ‘feels’ your UX team tells you about. And they are the absolute future for saving time and resources in digital inbound.
