It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to Carrie Webb, head of communications at The Bigger Boat.
Audience-driven communications will be key in 2025.
Trust building and truthtelling. Informing decision making. Meeting heightened expectations for digital and physical experiences… There’s a lot riding on your brand’s content, yet it needn’t be a tall ask of your content marketers. When it comes to understanding and delivering on your customers’ needs, your content strategy is the driving force in communicating crucial messaging. And it cannot be empty words.
In 2025, your content must be perfectly attuned to your audience segments and their customer journey, i.e. it must go so much further than simply meeting them at each brand interaction. It should be steeped in solid research that’s gotten under the skin of who your customers are, and what drives their decisions and frustrates them.
You should glean insight from your stakeholders, and extract data from pivotal moments of the customer journey to understand the why behind their behaviour. Only then, armed with a thorough view of the customer experience, will meaningful content truly engage audiences and ‘perform’ (a word that’s bandied around often but suffers from very different perceptions attached to it).
