Stop Doing This: 2024 Content Marketing Habits I’m Urging Clients to Ditch in 2025

Happy New Year! Here’s to avoiding those stock “content calendar ideas” and improving on that resolution to “spend less time on my phone.” (You can do it!) While you’re feeling pumped for the new year and inspired to expand and grow your business, I’ve got some tips for your content marketing strategy.

Want to know what I’ll be advising and putting into action for my clients in 2025? Here’s a sneak peek:

Posting AI Blog Content Nobody Wants to Read

Imagine that, a writing agency owner telling you not to use AI for your content writing. What a shock, right? You might assume we’ve got a biased opinion of AI and will rue the day we’re set out to pasture in favor of a bot scribe. But that actually has nothing to do with this appearing on my list. In fact, I think most businesses should be consistently looking for ways to leverage AI, particularly when it comes to marketing and advertising.

However, I’ve started and stopped reading waaayyy too many blogs in 2024 because of the AI content that’s been simply slapped on there in order to count as words on a page. No I don’t want to embark on a journey into the vast realm of creativity and transform with the undulating rhythms of life. Ask yourself, are you sucked in by writing like that?

At the end of the day if you don’t care about your content, why should I as the reader? You don’t even want to take the time to write it, so let’s you and I agree that the topic isn’t worth talking about and we can both get offline and head to our respective snack drawers and actually do something we want to do.

Just because you can churn out 50 articles in a day doesn’t mean anyone will want to read them. In fact, in 2025 it’s my guess that the brands that stand out will be the ones with the unique content that don’t fall into the laziness trap of AI content. Yes, AI writing has gotten better and will continue to, but what it will always (hopefully) lack is the ability to connect on real world human levels the way we can person-to-person.

My advice? Don’t give AI a lame basic prompt and copy and paste the piece into your blog.

Instead, use AI to generate more topic ideas, ask AI for inspiration, alternative headlines, stronger CTAs. AI can offer a great jumping off point and will indeed make content more efficient, but if you want to stand out with content your audience wants to read, take the extra step to humanize and personalize your content so it’s not just something they can get on ChatGPT as well.

AI Imagery Run Amok

By now most of us are aware of the Christmas Coca-Cola scandal that saw the brand lampooned all over the interwebs for its “soulless” AI holiday ad. That comes on the heels of the zombie-like reincarnation AI disaster that ushered in a new era for Toys R Us. But while these big corps fumble around with new ways to replace their creative departments, there’s no shortage of small to mid-sized businesses also getting in on the cringe fest that is AI art.

I recently went on a dentist’s blog to read about some of the services they offered. I was stunned, shocked, and speechless to see they had littered these posts with AI-generated illustrations. At first glance the pictures looked cool, but if you stared for more than half a second you started to see the kindly dentist had two needles stuck in a patient’s arm, the patient had three limbs and the clock was backwards on the wall. Needless to say, it didn’t give a good impression. In fact, it made me want to email them and ask if they knew what chaos was going on in their blog page (but I didn’t).

Yes, today, you can probably create an image of anything, without being limited by your own (or someone else’s talent) or even by your own imagination. But just because you can create unhinged images doesn’t mean your business needs to be posting them. The AI gen-art genie is probably never going back into the bottle and it’s going to be way too tempting for brands to churn out imagery in lightning speed that used to require models, artists, photographers, and a dozen other staffers along the way. And while debating the ethics of this industry is beyond my bandwidth here, it is important not to get sucked too deep down the AI art vortex.

Operating Like the HCU Never Happened

There was a time, not that many years ago when sweat equity really paid off in SEO blog writing. You put enough articles up about a given topic, eventually Google would show you some love. It was a beautiful system that while not entirely fair or perfect, did get many newcomers to quickly rise in the ranks to pull in big traffic numbers. But what would be the fun in such predictability, right? Google decided to mix things up in the last couple of years and move away from the old rules of SEO (see the Helpful Content Update). If you build it and blog enough, the traffic will come, used to be a fairly reliable promise. Not so now. Today, you simply can’t rely on organic search alone.

Fine, I’ll ditch the blog. Sure it seems like a logical response, but I’ve got two good reason to not throw the blog baby out with the Google bathwater:

1. SEO still works, it just needs to be a lot more laser focused. Low competition keywords are still worth writing about. Localized content for site-specific businesses still makes sense. In 2025 you’ll need to be a lot more strategic about your content and focus on quality rather than massive amounts of generic content.
2. A blog isn’t just for organic search, it can act as the centerpiece of your content marketing, fueling videos, social media posts, ads, funnels, emails, and newsletters.

Avoiding Video Content

Video is scary, until it isn’t. Please take this as your sign that you don’t need a five figure video editing budget and high-end cameras. This isn’t a wedding we’re trying to capture for posterity. Although every Gen Z’er on TIkTok already gets this lesson, I still run into a disproportionate number of business owners missing out on content gold. They worry that if they shoot something with their phone it’ll be too amateur. Or they think that they’ll need to break their budget to get some videos edited. But TikTok ushered in an embrace of the authentic, the raw and unscripted video. So let that liberate you into showing your flubs, the human nature of your business. You don’t need to do it alone, but you do need to set your bar a little lower, have some fun and not worry so much about the online critics.

Leaving Free Marketing Opportunities on the Table

Are you on Threads? Do you do Pinterest? Not every platform is right for every business, but too often a brand will ignore a perfectly good platform for no legit reason. Content creation takes energy, good content requires time, imagination, creativity and execution. If you’ve done the heavy lifting of making the content, why not share it on more platforms. That’s what resize buttons are for!

Thinking People Will Subscribe to Your Newsletter Because You Made One

Back in the late 90s, I can’t explain the excitement of opening a clunky email from my @netreach.com account. But it’s been many, MANY years since most of us took any pleasure in opening and reading their emails. Email used to be the only game in town, but now we all message each other across many different platforms and email is fast becoming the least fun of all of them. What reason would someone have to follow your newsletter if it’s just a bunch of promotional content and pats on the back to yourself? Would you voluntarily open your newsletter if it was from another company? If the answer is no, there is hope. Just like solid blog content, most any brand can make their newsletter fun, sexy and dare I say worth opening with the right mix of helpful content, entertainment and inspiration.

Not Trusting the Process

Okay this one’s more just a crappy human nature issue than a marketing trend. You gotta stick with your plan and stick with it for the long haul. That doesn’t mean to feel trapped in the same strategies even when they aren’t working, but one of the biggest challenges for anyone with a smartphone is to avoid the new shiny thing and go chasing it. In digital marketing there will always be gurus and influencers urging you to jump on this or go big on that. But the brands that succeed are the ones that are committed to giving their approach the time and space to grow. You won’t see results in a few months of blogging or posting, but when you trust your process and don’t expend energy on second guessing your tactics, you can have the focus to be more creative and evolve naturally.

Entering 2025, there are new challenges but also plenty of new opportunities. With a little guidance, your brand can effortlessly adjust to the increased competition and carve out a loyal and profitable niche for your brand. Want some help? Hit me up!