Advertising auctions are overheated, performance campaigns are on the verge of collapse, and large companies are cutting marketing budgets. Should we expect a catastrophic market decline in 2025? Absolutely not. Let’s find out why.
Market situation
If you look at the forecasts of marketers and other industry experts, they all say that in 2025, digital marketing will face a crisis. But let’s be honest: the problems began in 2022.
The list of main challenges looks like this:
- Reducing the budgets of large companies.
Some big brands have already announced that they will reduce marketing spending next year. This is a trend that stretches back to 2022, when budgets fell sharply. This situation was repeated in 2023 and 2024. But smaller companies are replacing the large ones. Their number compensates for and even exceeds the previous budget. This may even reduce the overheating of auctions. - Is this the end of the performance campaign era?
Yes, the price for a lead has increased significantly, but your services are not standing still either. For example, in 2021, the average cost per click in Yandex Direct was 47 rubles, and in late 2023 – early 2024 it was already 156 rubles. In some companies, prices for services rose 4 times in six months! Yes, perhaps small players will leave the market. But for large brands with competent optimization and analytics, the performance is still working. Let’s see what will happen with rates in 2025. - Salaries are rising, and it’s becoming unprofitable to keep marketers.
If you are a small company, it may not be economically feasible to hire a marketer. In this case, it is better to figure it out on your own or order an audit of problematic tools. By the way, this can be done through my Telegram channel. There is a cool guide that will help you quickly launch an effective campaign.
Jobs for “universal soldiers”.
Many companies are looking for specialists who can do everything at once: social media, websites, analytics. But this is an illusion. Working with social media and websites are different areas that require separate skills. This approach will only worsen the results. Instead, the right strategy and expert advice can greatly simplify the task. - Overheated auction.
Yes, this is a problem. The main instruments are almost monopolized by large players. There are also arbitrageurs who drain the budget of the Kyiv region in a month. The situation will remain difficult until FB Ads and Google Ads return. There are few options: to play by the residual principle or to look for other approaches, for example, to enter the burgeoning markets. In 2025, this will become even more important.
Tools in marketing – subjective experience
- Advertising on Telegram. You know the story from the category “for those who have a tight wallet”. According to colleagues, there is no point in trying it without a test budget of at least 30 thousand hryvnias. Plus, according to them, the statistics there are lame, and the audience setup is so-so. If the price per subscriber is less than 2 euros, consider yourself lucky.
- SEO optimization. As long as I have been working in this field, it is constantly criticized. But what’s interesting is that everyone eventually comes to the conclusion that it’s indispensable, especially when a contextual search costs more than two thousand hryvnias. It is one of the most effective tools in terms of price/result ratio. What has changed in 2024? There are few significant changes: processes have begun to require more attention, and the volume of work has increased due to neural networks. In 2025, I think the workload will be even higher.
- Content marketing. At the end of 2024, the demand for talented authors and editors increased dramatically. We are convinced that in 2025, the field will expand even more. Content generates the warmest applications even in difficult niches. It’s a long-term game, but the stability it provides is worth its weight in gold.
