A Small Business Guide to Local Marketing Success in 2025: 5 Trends to Follow

Creating a successful local marketing strategy is hard. But maintaining that success can be even harder. Just when you figure out the best practices for optimizing your marketing ROI, new rules, technologies, and trends can seem to pop up overnight, throwing a wrench into your well-oiled marketing machine. As you start to think through your annual ad planning, consider local marketing tips for 2025.

From the rise of AI to the ongoing uncertainty over the fate of third-party cookies, it’s easy for local business leaders to fall behind in tracking these trends—especially when so many other parts of the company require their attention.

Fortunately, Cox Media keeps tabs on these marketing trends for you. Read on to learn about five key trends likely to shape your marketing strategy in 2025—and how your business can adapt to these changing circumstances.

1. Inflation is Slowing, and Small Business Sentiment is Rising

According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, U.S. small business confidence reached its highest level in almost 2.5 years over the summer, underscoring growing optimism that fears of uncontrolled inflation and a possible recession have been easing among small business owners.

The study found that small businesses are confident that inflation is cooling and that wage growth is slowing down, both of which are stabilizing expenses for those companies. More certainty around operating costs is likely to inspire businesses to invest available funds into growth efforts, including through their marketing efforts.

In 2025, this economic stability could drive increased demand and competition for certain marketing inventories as businesses vie with one another to acquire customers and grow their local customer base. Forward-thinking businesses may want to get an early jump on this trend to get the inside track on local rivals.

2. Evolving SERPs Will Require Changes to Your SEO Strategy

Google’s search engine results pages continue to transform, forcing businesses to rethink their SEO best practices. While Google’s AI Overview feature is the most prominent new addition to SERPs, other changes are bringing new complexity and opportunity for forward-thinking SEO strategies.

The search engine increasingly prioritizes image and video content in local search queries, for example, while incorporating other Google properties such as its “People Also Ask” product.

To keep pace with these changes, local businesses should embrace a number of tactical SEO strategies recommended by Google and other SEO experts. These include:

• Incorporating original, high-quality videos and images into your business website;
• Making sure those images meet Google safe search standards;
• Enhancing landing pages to offer key local search information such as your business address, hours of operation, FAQs, important videos, and photos of your business and/or products;
• Tailoring web content to People Also Ask and other Google products used in SERPs;
• Recalibrating your SEO KPIs to prioritize impressions volume for your visual content.

3. Marketers Say Short-Form Video Offers the Best ROI

According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing report, marketers now consider short-form video to offer the best ROI of any other digital marketing channel. Those marketers are finding success creating branded short-form video content for platforms and products including TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

For local businesses, short-form video represents a high-performing content channel that can also be cost-effective to fit your marketing budget. Short-form videos require less production overhead and can be repurposed across multiple platforms to maximize engagement and ROI for that content.

They can also give your target audience a new way of experiencing your business, employees, and overall brand—especially if you have yet to take advantage of this digital engagement channel.

4. Adoption of Social Selling Will Continue to Grow at the Local Level

While social selling has been around for a few years, its embrace by consumers and local businesses has been a slow-but-steady process. As younger consumers grow up and enjoy increased purchasing power, though, they’re demonstrated an increased comfort with social selling experiences.

According to consumer research, 71 percent of Gen Z consumers prefer using social media to discover new products. Among Millennial consumers, that figure is still a strong 51 percent.

Instagram and Facebook already have well-established social selling products, but platforms like TikTok are hard at work developing and launching new e-commerce features to make social selling easier for local businesses. Retailers should be prepared to experiment with these products and find out what kind of opportunities are awaiting early adopters.

5. User-Generated Content Will Aid Local Brands in Their Bid for Authenticity

Branded campaigns are up against a challenging trend among consumers: As many as 96 percent of consumers say they generally don’t trust advertisements.

That doesn’t mean businesses should pull back spending on advertising and marketing campaigns, especially when they’re widely regarded as a critical driver of revenue growth. But this consumer trend does underscore the importance of planning out creative content with authenticity in mind.

Your existing customers may be your best asset in this crusade. According to a 2021 report, 93 percent of marketers found that consumers inherently trust content created by actual people, rather than advertising and marketing professionals. User-generated content (UGC) can help cultivate a sense of authenticity that builds brand trust among your target audience.

Local businesses can use an active social presence, social sharing contests, and other UGC strategies to incentivize consumer content creation that can be leveraged in your digital campaigns.

As marketing best practices evolve, a digital advertising partner can help your local business keep current on emerging trends and opportunities to build your brand and grow your customer base, including the local marketing tips for 2025 mentioned in this article. Cox Media’s experts can help you develop a marketing strategy that is responsive to the current marketing landscape, positioning your business for better campaign ROI in 2025 and beyond.

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