Author Archives: i4lead

If you’ve watched the news recently, the possibility of a recession has captured everyone’s attention.

Most reputable sources say it’s too soon to say whether or not a recession will happen, but, regardless, savvy businesses are thinking ahead and considering how their potential customers might react. 

To give insight into how consumer behaviors are or could be shifting, I surveyed more than 200 U.S. consumers to ask them if their spending behaviors have already changed amidst the possibility of a recession, and how they would change if we were to enter one. 

Table of Contents

• What is a recession?
• Are we in a recession?
• How Consumer Spending Habits Could Be Changing Today [2025 Data]
• How Spending Could Change in a Recession
• How an Upcoming Recession Could Differ from 2008

Recessions can be induced by global economic shocks, changes in consumer confidence, and other large-scale economic changes.

But this year, in particular, there are a select few factors that have spurred concern about a potential recession, including tariffs and federal job cuts.

For more on the cause of recessions and why some are concerned about them happening in the near future, check out this helpful post from our partners at The Hustle.

Are we in a recession?

I’m not an economist, so I looked to trained professionals for this answer. 

JP Morgan Chase placed 2025 recession expectations at 60%, and in early March of 2025, the former Treasury Secretary said there is close to a 50/50 chance of a recession in 2025. While the stock market dropped in April (The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the month with a 3.2% loss), the market returned a few weeks ago. 

This being said, we (and by we I mean financial experts, not me, a HubSpot Blog writer) can’t declare a recession until there are two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and that hasn’t happened.

How Consumer Spending Habits Could be Changing Today [Data]

1. How has the news of a potential US recession impacted your spending habits?

In winter 2023, we asked consumers how the news of a potential US recession would impact their spending habits. The most significant reaction was to purchase less (30%) and spend money more conservatively than they did in previous months (28%). 

I asked this same question in May of 2025, and there was a small change: consumers are reacting to a potential recession by spending more conscientiously than in previous months (28%), rather than slowing purchases overall (22%). 

I interpret this as consumers being less panicked and more pragmatic about potential downturns because of what they learned about handling their financial situations from the economic effects of COVID-19 and post-pandemic inflation. 

The number of respondents who say that the news of a potential recession hasn’t impacted their spending dropped from 13% in 2023 to 9% in 2025. 

My Takeaways for Marketers

Rising costs of goods (see those egg prices recently?) and services often cause consumers to become more cautious in “frivolous” spending. I recommend focusing on strategies to help your business continue to draw in revenue while customers tighten their wallets. Discounts, sales, and deals are a great place to start, but the most impactful marketing play is highlighting your value proposition in all content you release. 

Consumers are making strategic adjustments, so make sure all of your messaging and content make your value proposition and benefits explicitly clear so thoughtful spenders know exactly what they’ll get from going through with a sale.

How Spending Could Change In a Recession

Consumer spending behavior is often contingent on outside factors, and news of immense economic change is certainly one of those factors. 

Below, I’ll go over what consumers told me about how they’d respond to financial uncertainty. 

2. If a recession is declared, how will your home budget change in the first three months of this new financial era?

59% of consumers I polled this May (2025) say that, if a recession is declared, their home budgets will decrease. 

As of April 2025, inflation hit 2.3%, but wages aren’t moving to match these changes. Naturally, the public is already looking for ways to avoid breaking the bank by reducing their budgets.

My Takeaways for Marketers

Lowered budgets mean consumers are going to be more thoughtful about how they spend their money. 

This is important to keep in mind if financial uncertainty continues, but it’s not something to panic about or change your entire marketing strategy over. Instead, focus on championing the value your offer will bring to consumers. Hammer in on the benefits they’ll get and prove that they will genuinely be getting value for their money if they decide to spend it with you. Testimonials and user-generated content can go a long way in terms of supporting the benefits of what you’re selling.

3. During uncertain financial times, what did you spend the most money on?

I also asked consumers to reflect on their purchasing behaviors in previous uncertain economic times (like past recessions or the COVID-19 pandemic), and they reported spending the most money on necessities, most commonly essential groceries and food (58%). 

That’s followed by fixed expenses like rent, mortgage, housing bills (like utilities), essential personal care and hygiene products, and medication and healthcare. 

Since consumers also told me that they plan to maintain the same spending habits as they did in past recessions, you can learn from what they previously spent money on to recession-proof your strategies. 

The biggest difference between how consumers spent most of their money in 2023 and 2025 is that clothing, shoes, and other essentials were the top 3 spending categories, higher than medication and healthcare. What this shows me is a shift to self-preservation. By reducing or eliminating spending on leisure or entertainment, people can ensure that families are taken care of before taking risks on “non-essential” purchases. 

My Takeaways for Marketers

Consumers essentially don’t want to feel like they’re “wasting” money during a time when every dollar counts. Since they’re more conscientious about their spending, the best way for marketers in all industries to beat the skepticism is to lock in on proving the value customers will get from your product or service. If they know they’ll get genuine value, they’re more likely to spend money.

How an Upcoming Recession Could Differ from 2008

There are key differences between the potential recession in 2025, what happened during and after the pandemic, and the Great Recession of 2008, mainly the factors that will have caused it and its potential duration. 

The recession in 2008 was due to debt-related excess built up in housing infrastructure, which took the economy nearly a decade to absorb. COVID-related fiscal and monetary stimulus contributed to inflation and drove speculation in financial assets. 

According to Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, 2025 would be largely tariff-induced, as well as federal job cuts, DOGE changes, declining consumer confidence, and slowed spending. 

There’s no way to predict how long it would last before it even happens, but Political Economist and Brown University Professor Mark Blyth says, “This is a once-in-a-generation shift in how we run the global economy.”

Whatever happens, the economy has already shifted in the past few months, and survey respondents told me that they have already started to spend money more conscientiously. And, if we enter a recession, they’ll have the same spending habits as they did during other uncertain financial times, which tells me that it’s important for businesses to be prepared for potential consumer shifts.

Key Takeaways for Businesses in 2025

As a marketer, I’m not an expert in financial markets or a source for investment, HR, or legal advice. The data above can help you understand consumer spending behavior during recessions, but it’s important to keep in mind that results are just a brief look into the eyes of consumers. 

If there’s one thing I do know, though, it’s marketing. The survey results I discussed above tell me that marketers should be aware of how efforts might need to pivot with changing consumer needs or trends. Here are a few takeaways I suggest keeping in mind to adapt our marketing strategies for financial instability: 

• Value-first marketing: As consumers and businesses tighten their budgets, making sales, retaining customers, and persuading people to buy non-essential products will be more difficult. I recommend focusing heavily on the value you’ll be able to provide, rather than your product or service being flashy, trendy, or cool. Consumers are more likely to spend money during these periods if they know it won’t be a “waste.” 
• Partner with influencers and creators: Influencers and creators have loyal followings that relate to them and trust what they offer. If you already have an influencer budget, partner with people who have strong relationships with their communities and can demonstrate that they get value from what you offer. 
• Champion testimonials, reviews, and UGC: Relatability will be a significant selling point during a recession, as people want to see proof that the money they spend will help them. Testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content show interested shoppers that people like them, who share their same pain points and needs, are getting value from what you offer. 
• Create education-focused content: Consumers who do purchase from you want to make sure they get the most value, and education-focused marketing content will help them do exactly that. 
• Revisit your customer journey maps: Revisiting your customer journey maps will help you add additional touchpoints for nurturing if consumers have longer consideration phases during a recession or general economic instability. 
• Cost-effective marketing: You might want to explore more cost-effective strategies for marketing, like reducing excess ad spend and focusing on organic social, SEO, or email marketing instead.

Remember, financial uncertainties — and even recessions — are common. And while it might become more challenging to win customers in the coming months, business and consumers will still keep moving (and making purchases) even as we wait for the cycle to run its course.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Video is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s now an absolute must and should be at the forefront of any marketing strategy. With almost half of Gen Z and millennials watching short-form video to discover new products, video is essential to increasing visibility and getting brand recognition.

But now the question is, where is the best place to post videos?

I’m here to help. Here’s a list of the best vlog promotion channels for your short-form, long-form, and live videos based on ROI, engagement, and lead generation.

Table of Contents

• What are vlog promotion channels?
• Best Channels for Short-Form Video
• Best Channel for Long-Form Video
• Best Channels for Live Video

With TikTok’s future uncertain, platforms like LinkedIn, X, and even Substack are taking this opportunity to woo TikTok’s audience (or “liberate them,” if you ask Substack’s CEO) and introduce features like dedicated video feeds, algorithm changes that prioritize videos, and new video advertising avenues for marketers.

And marketers, too, continue to see the value of video content. According to our 2024 State of Video Marketing Report, 37% of marketers found video to be very effective in helping them achieve their business goals.

Our 2025 State of Marketing Report also shows that in 2025, marketers will continue to invest more in video — particularly short-form video as it delivers the highest ROI (21.02%).

The data from consumers shows that investing more in video is a wise choice.

According to a Wyzowl survey, 78% say that they would rather watch a short video to learn more about a product than read articles or manuals, and a whopping 91% of consumers say that video quality impacts their trust in a brand.

To help you get started on creating high-quality videos, HubSpot has created a nifty AI-powered Clip Creator tool to help you create and edit videos. With a few clicks, you can create watermark-free videos for your social media channels. And for people who are already used to a certain workflow, we got you, too. We have a list of the top AI video editing tools that can help you with your next video.

Now, let’s get on to the best vlog promotion channels.

Best Channels for Short-Form Video

TikTok

Since launching in 2016, TikTok has upended social media, so much so that many platforms (including Instagram and LinkedIn) have been heavily investing in hosting and elevating vertical videos to capture more of TikTok’s audience.

It’s no surprise that many social media networks want to become more like TikTok, as TikTok users spend almost 44 hours on average per month on the app, according to Statista.

This is significantly more time than all the other apps on the list. Trailing behind in second place was the YouTube app, where users spent almost 25 hours a month on average, just a little over half of TikTokers time.

TikTok has grown beyond being *the platform* for viral dances (although there is still plenty of that), and has become a viable marketing option for those willing to get creative — and these stats prove it.

Pro tip: To learn more about TikTok marketing, I recommend checking out our free marketer’s guide to TikTok.

Source

Instagram

Instagram is the top platform for sharing videos, topping the charts in ROI, engagement, and lead generation over competitors like TikTok and YouTube. A Sprout Social survey also found that 61% of social media users turn to Instagram to find new products.

It offers a great deal of options, too, as marketers can play with multiple content formats on top of videos (think carousels, Lives, and Stories) while capturing the attention of an already engaged audience.

Source

LinkedIn

Marketers, don’t sleep on LinkedIn. In 2025, Wyzowl reported that for the first time, LinkedIn was the most widely used platform by marketers, after accidentally leaving out YouTube, the channel that usually claims the top spot, in their survey.

Caveats aside, LinkedIn is quickly becoming an emerging platform to post marketing vlogs, especially B2B marketing. They’ve introduced a new algorithm that prioritizes video over text or images, and rebranded their Wire Program to BrandLink which allows advertisers to pair up with content creators and publishers and place pre-roll ads before a trusted creator’s video.

Best Channel for Long-Form Video

YouTube

Hands-down, YouTube is the best channel for long-form videos. There’s no other platform like it.

YouTube has kept a competitive edge against other vlog promotion channels like TikTok and Instagram. Not only are people watching YouTube on their phones, but it has also captured a substantial share of people’s watch time on television, sometimes surpassing legacy networks like FOX, Disney, and NBC.

With its media dominance and reach, it’s no wonder that YouTube has emerged as a powerful marketing tool. In fact, almost 30% of marketers plan to increase their investment in YouTube in 2025, according to HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing and Trends report.

Participants also ranked YouTube as the third-best platform for ROI. While many marketers find success on YouTube for different reasons, its large user base (2.6 billion active users, to be exact) and advanced ad targeting certainly help.

If you’re looking for the best place to host your long-form videos — like product demos, Q&As, behind-the-scenes content, and more – YouTube is the home for it all.

Pro tip: If you’re just getting started with YouTube as a vlog promotion channel, check out our complete guide on creating, promoting, and optimizing your video content.

TikTok

While TikTok is best known for bite-sized videos, creators can actually upload videos up to 60 minutes long. Over the years, the maximum video length has been slowly, well, ticking up. When it was first launched, TikTok started with a 15-second limit. Then, they upped it to 60 seconds, and then three minutes. You get the picture.

Data trends show that longer videos deliver more views and higher engagement.

An interesting study by Buffer shows that videos between one and 10 minutes in length get the highest number of views, have the highest reach, and the longest watch time on TikTok compared to videos under a minute. Creators with more followers also tend to have longer videos, according to Statista.

While people don’t generally think of videos under five minutes long as long-form, the data seems to show that audiences on TikTok — as well as the channel’s algorithm — seem to favor longer content.

Best Channels for Live Video

YouTube Live

With its massive user base, reach, and diverse audience, YouTube Live is an appealing option for your livestreaming needs. Data from Statista says that it was the most used live streaming channel in the United States in 2023.

Features like Super Chats, Super Stickers and membership gifting enable greater engagement with your audience and monetization avenues.

YouTube also provides powerful analytics on live videos. Check real-time analytics like concurrent viewers, likes, and chat rates, as well as post-stream stats like the number of new subscribers, total watch time, and more.

Instagram Live

With Instagram Live, you can stream from anywhere and invite guests to join your stream. There’s plenty of opportunity for engagement: viewers can send emojis, write comments, and send donation badges.

Additionally, when you go live on Instagram, your followers receive a notification to tune in so your stream won’t get lost in the crowd, which is more likely to happen on YouTube or Twitch.

Facebook Live

Like YouTube, Facebook boasts a massive audience spanning multiple age groups, although millennials take up the largest share.

Facebook Live is an excellent option if you‘re already active on the platform and have a healthy following. But if you’re still growing an audience, fear not — you can go live from a personal profile, page, or even a group.

With Facebook Live, you can edit previously recorded streams, chat with users using the live chat feature, and schedule your streams in advance. However, keep in mind that Facebook limits your stream length, and your monetization options aren’t as robust as other platforms.

Want more? Check out this article on tips for Facebook Live.

But what about Twitch?

It feels odd to exclude Twitch from a conversation about live streaming, since it is the most popular streaming-specific platform in the world. That said, marketers report low engagement and ROI on the platform, and the content is heavily geared towards gamers and e-sports.

In 2024, non-gaming content constituted only 15% of Twitch streams, but there are some non-gaming marketers who have found success using Twitch. Billboard reported that in 2025, music marketers have found success promoting artists by partnering with established Twitch streamers, clipping moments from streams, and putting the shorts on places like TikTok or Instagram.

Back to You

It can be difficult to figure out how to approach video marketing. It takes time, money, and energy to create videos — making it imperative to find the best home for your content.

If you need some inspiration, first check out what’s already out there and see what you like. After you’ve done some research, think about your target audience and define some goals, such as lead generation, engagement, or brand awareness. Once you nail those down, it’s easier to pick the platform to achieve them.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Millions of businesses worldwide invest billions in paid ads each year to put themselves in front of as many people as possible. And they’re doing it because online advertising, when done right, delivers outstanding results.

On the other hand, if you’re not careful, it can feel like flushing your $$ down the digital drain.

To help you out, we’ve put together this comprehensive online advertising guide for business.

Table of Contents

• What is online advertising?
• How Online Advertising Works
• Benefits of Online Advertising
• Types of Online Advertising

What is online advertising?

Online advertising is promoting your brand, product, or service through various digital channels. It’s an umbrella term that covers social media, display ads, paid and organic search, and native advertising. And it should definitely be part of your marketing strategy.

How Online Advertising Works

Whether you‘re on the lookout for the best Indian restaurant in your neighborhood or looking for a specific SaaS tool, you’re likely going to turn to a search engine to find what you need.

The same goes for your audience.

With search engines like Google, Perplexity, and many others being a core part of daily routines, running paid ads can catch your audience’s attention on these platforms.

And let’s not overlook how much time people spend on social media — an average of two hours and 23 minutes each day, according to Statista (though some of us — cough — may be pushing those averages ever higher). In most cases, social media advertising should be part of your overall marketing plan.

There are plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. First think about who you’re trying to reach.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What target demographic am I advertising to?
• How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?

The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most frequented social media channels and the keywords they look up the most.

If you want to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media, it’s important to note that most social media platforms offer business pages the ability to pay a fee to promote posts/ads within the interface.

Or, if you are looking to advertise on a search engine for targeted keywords, Google Ads or Sixads can guide you through the process of payment and execution.

To learn more about boosting social media posts, read How to Boost a Post on Social Media [Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter].

If you’re curious about SEO versus PPC, try our article on when to optimize and when to pay for traffic.

Benefits of Online Advertising

There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

1. An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
2. A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
3. The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn’t.

The goal of any advertising strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you‘re getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you’re putting in.

To get help on quickly creating high-quality marketing campaigns, try HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant — it can help you generate copy for landing pages, ads, and emails, so you can spend more time on strategy.

Types of Online Advertising

Let’s dive right into the different types of online advertising.

Social Media Advertising

Every month, there are over 3 billion active users on Facebook, 2 billion on Instagram, and 586 million on X worldwide.

Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spending invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. The global digital advertising spend is projected to exceed $344 billion by 2027.

When HubSpot asked marketers which social media platforms were best for engagement, we found that Instagram and Facebook take the top slots — but YouTube wasn’t too far behind.

Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:

• Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
• Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
• Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.

Let‘s look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.

In HubSpot original research from 2025, we asked marketers which social media platforms their companies used. YouTube and Instagram were by far the most popular, with Facebook, X, TikTok, and LinkedIn also making the list.

That doesn’t mean you should only focus on one or more of the top six. Depending on your business and your target audience, you may find other platforms just as — or even more — useful.

For instance, digital marketer Jenna Kutcher is a big proponent of Pinterest, which she told HubSpot was the number one organic traffic driver for her business and her most lucrative channel: “The average entrepreneur is spending 20 hours a week on marketing and eight hours on social media,” Kutcher said.

“By comparison, Pinterest takes me under an hour a week, and gives my content a longer shelf life. The average lifespan of a post on Instagram is 24 hours at best. The average lifespan of one pin on Pinterest is four months.”

To learn more about paid social media marketing, read Paid Social Media: Worth the investment?

1. Facebook

According to HubSpot’s 2025 Social Media Trends report, nearly 60% of marketers say their companies are leveraging Facebook.

One of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook is audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network. Facebook‘s advanced targeting can target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.

Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads simultaneously. Facebook lead ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.

With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.

Here’s an example that Facebook provides in its lead ads overview:

Source

Facebook suggests using three or fewer questions, like in this example, which it says results in a 26% lower cost per lead than ads that ask more than three questions.

2. Instagram

You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 2 billion monthly users globally, the vast majority of whom are between the ages of 18 and 34.

There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:

• Create and promote posts, Stories, and Reels directly from your Instagram professional account.
• Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.

I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.

Ads that appear while scrolling your feed are called in-feed ads. The ads that you see in the “Explore” section while exploring your interests and discovering new content creators are explore ads.

In this example provided by Meta, you can see that the explore ad is a 1×1 tile with a “Sponsored” label:

Source

Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of people looking for new creators or content.

To learn more, read The Pros and Cons of Instagram Marketing.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn has over 900 million monthly active users worldwide.

Users on the platform are largely working professionals, which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising.

The advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that are unavailable on other platforms.

Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.

Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to reach a very specific audience and drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.

In this PDF on best practices, LinkedIn provides the example below of JP Morgan using LinkedIn’s conversation ads:

Source

4. X (formerly Twitter)

Digital advertising is less common on X because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on X.

This is very unique to X — but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on your goals. X has over 586 million monthly users globally.

If you’re curious about advertising on X, read our post, How to Market on X: Tips and Data from a Marketer.

5. Pinterest

Some say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.

Pinterest has 537 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female.

Here’s how to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:

• Pick a pin. Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
• Decide who sees it. Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
• Pay for results. Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
• Track what’s working. Once your campaign starts, see how it’s doing and make adjustments as necessary.

Among Pinterest’s case studies is this success story from Kroger:

Source

Pinterest says in the case study, “Kroger’s efforts paid off in a big way. Premiere Spotlight in search achieved a remarkable 11.6% lift in awareness.1 They also saw a 5.4-point lift in brand association, positioning Kroger as a trusted partner in meal planning.”

6. YouTube

Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.

Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific, relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

Learn more about YouTube advertising with our article YouTube Ads for Beginners: How to Launch & Optimize a YouTube Video Advertising Campaign.

7. Snapchat

Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, and augmented reality (AR) lenses — pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram.

What makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends.

For more, read our article Should You Advertise on Snapchat?

8. TikTok

Promoting TikTok videos allows brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most posts you’ll see on TikTok aim to get laughs.

From a brand perspective, you’ll want to create funny videos that align with other content on the platform and take advantage of fast-moving trends — think dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

HubSpotter Caroline Forsey talked to TikTok’s global head of product partnerships, and they have the scoop on how to use TikTok for lead gen.

Paid Search Advertising

People searching online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe will be the most helpful to them.

You might be thinking: “I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?”

Well, there are three key reasons:

• Google estimates that for every $1 a company spends on Google Ads, it gets $8 in profit. (You can read about Google’s methodology starting on page 56 of this PDF report.)
• Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
• Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.

Paid search advertising allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.

Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual.

Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.

But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That’s where keywords come into play.

Keywords

Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search.

That’s because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected.

Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords, and Google will display your ad based on those selections.

Let’s say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types “who are the best movers.”

By searching “best movers,” she’s going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like “moving companies” and “top-rated movers.”

Search engines also consider your intent when choosing the types of ads to display.

So, how do you select your keywords?

Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.

A brand keyword is a word or phrase that includes a brand‘s name or variations of a brand’s name. For example, some of HubSpot’s brand keywords include HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

These are all variations of the HubSpot brand and the tools that we offer.

Non-brand keywords are all other relevant keywords that don‘t include a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name.

Some of HubSpot’s non-brand keywords include “inbound marketing,“ ”sales software,“ and ”customer relationship management.”

While these keywords are not part of HubSpot’s brand name, they are relevant terms that allow HubSpot to reach audiences interested in eventually making a purchase.

Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor’s ads.

If you don‘t run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you’ll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords.

Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

Match Type

When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don’t just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.

This is where match type comes in. Since there’s an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you three match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

You can even use a broad match modifier and exclude negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.

Let’s take a look at each match type:

• Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].
• Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by “quotes.”
• Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don’t include any symbols.
• Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.
• Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there.

Google processes some 15 million search queries each month. With Google leading the search engine market and accounting for 70% of the global search engine market share — 75% in the US — it makes sense for businesses to run Google Ads campaigns.

But this doesn’t mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms.

In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.

My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics.

This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.

Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

Native Advertising

Native advertising, or sponsored content, blends in with the publisher’s content, whether written copy or a video (though there should always be some sort of tag that identifies it as paid content).

Here’s an example from Adweek, which regularly publishes pieces in partnership with brands (note the “sponsored content” tag at the very top left of the piece).

Source

When you pay for a publisher‘s native advertising services, you’ll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won‘t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience. They‘ll enjoy reading your post and won’t feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them — exposing your work to an engaged viewership.

And as with the example above, native advertising gives you the opportunity to show up authentically to your audience and give them information that’s genuinely useful to them.

To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

Display Advertising

Display ads are a controversial topic among digital marketers.

Some advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads, and malicious display ads have even spread computer viruses.

It’s easy to see why people use ad blockers: Display ads have a reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.

Ad networks like Google Display Network and Meta’s Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance.

They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time.

And if you want more control of your advertising, they‘ll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we’ll cover each ad network’s features and targeting capabilities.

1. Google Display Network

When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over 2 million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and re-market website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.

If you don’t want to manually build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.

2. Meta’s Audience Network

With Meta’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.

Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.

If you want to continue leveling up your ads training, check out HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Digital Advertising Training Course.

Getting Started

In today’s digital work, having the right online advertising strategy is essential for every business.

Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.

Start building a strategy today, so you can increase your revenue tomorrow.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

I know I’m in the minority, but the second September hits, I want to break out the Christmas tree, play “Jingle Bells,” and cover everything in baubles and tinsel. But one of the more accepted signs that the festive season is officially upon us is when holiday marketing campaigns start jingling, ringing and ho-ho-ho-ing into our homes, streets, and devices. After all, is it even Christmastime if I’m not hearing sleigh bells every five minutes?

It’s never too early to start making a list and planning this year’s holiday marketing campaign (unless you’re reading this in December, in which case, you can get a head start on next year’s ads). So, in this post, I’ve rounded up ten of the best holiday marketing campaigns from the past couple of years to inspire your plans.

And when you’re ready to deck your own marketing plans, check out HubSpot’s guide to creating seasonal marketing campaigns. I also love Campaign Assistant, a free AI-powered tool that helps you create copy for your next ad, landing page, or marketing email.

1. Etsy: Where’s Waldo/Wally

Etsy tugs on all the strings with this ad. It’s cozy, gives me hits of nostalgia, and somehow captures a bit of that anxiety that I felt looking for Waldo in the books. Hearing his inner monologue made me feel like I’m finally getting to know the silly guy that I’ve been looking for all these years, and he’s more soft-spoken than I thought!

Waldo, or Wally, as he is known in certain countries, with his trademark red-striped sweater and beanie, weaves in and out through throngs of people who are staring, whispering, and rejoicing that they have found him. At the end, he reunites with his partner, Wenda, in a coffee shop and says what is perhaps my favorite tagline in recent years: “Sometimes, it takes someone who really knows you to make you feel seen.” I mean, come on. It’s just perfection.

What I like: I like how watching this ad made me feel as much joy as finally finding Waldo in the books. It’s also a bit of marketing genius on behalf of Etsy; they’re using this commercial to remind us how it feels when you get a gift from someone who just gets you. And hmm, maybe Etsy is a good place to find those kinds of gifts?

2. Chewy: Coal, the holiday surprise

This may be the only time that I’m sad about not getting Coal for the holidays. The ad starts out simple enough. We see two girls opening their presents on Christmas. They’re confused that all they’re getting is coal… coal-themed presents, that is.

Then, their mom carries in a black puppy, a rescue, as Chewy points out in the video description, aptly named Coal. Just seeing Coal’s little puppy eyes made me as excited as the girls in the video.

What I like: I like that on top of this ad being so cute, Chewy is responding to both the ad’s fans — and detractors — in the comment section on YouTube. Chewy’s engagement really shows that they care about their customers.

3. Chick-fil-A: Legends of Evergreen Hills

Chick-fil-A has been slowly building its own cinematic universe, all taking place in a magical wonderland called Evergreen Hills. In 2019, they introduced Sam, a little girl who just wanted to build a snowman with her family. The heartwarming two-minute ad titled The Time Shop encouraged viewers to give the gift of time. Since then, Sam, her family, and her friends return over the holidays with a new story that expands on the world of Evergreen Hills.

In 2024, Sam is back, now a bit more grown-up. This time her new adventure unfolds in five, 22-minute episodes available in the newly launched Chick-fil-A Play app.

The app, which marks Chick-fil-A’s expansion into entertainment, contains exclusive animated series, podcasts, and games. As part of the app’s launch, Chick-fil-A released the first episode on social media as well as clips and stills to promote the show and the app.

So not only is this series part of a holiday marketing campaign that promotes Chick-fil-A the restaurant, but it also is a part of a years-long marketing storyline taking place in multiple platforms and ultimately culminating with the launch of the app.

What I like: I have to give them props for their commitment in building this cinematic universe and for seamlessly weaving this story thread through multiple platforms.

4. Kroger: Share your food, share your heart

This ad packs a lot of story in a minute. Set to America’s song Lonely People, it tells the story of a boy who notices that his seemingly grouchy elderly neighbor is pretty lonely during the holidays. He then gets the idea to sneak some food from his family’s holiday meal, and leaves a small plate of snacks and festive treats at her doorstep.

Seeing his kindness, his family then offers to share their whole meal with the neighbor who invites them inside her home. The tagline “Share food. Share love,” then appears as we see the family chatting with their neighbor.

What I like: If this doesn’t make you want to stop scrolling and step outside to talk to some humans, I don’t know what will.

5. Disney: The Boy and the Octopus

Hot take: This short is way more magical than any movie Disney has put out in recent years. Directed by Taika Waititi, this story is centered on a little boy who, after swimming in the ocean, comes home with a spunky and stubborn octopus stuck to his head.

They become fast friends, and the boy introduces the octopus to the world on dry land, all while a gentle, acoustic version of The Little Mermaid’s Part of Your World plays in the background. The octopus is captivated by what dry land has to offer.

One night, after watching a Christmas classic on TV, the octopus wishes to hitch a ride with Santa and see more of the world, so the two hatch a plan for the octopus to meet Santa.

This short subtly weaves beloved Disney properties throughout the story, from a Buzz Lightyear action figure to a Star Wars lightsaber to the Mickey beanie that the boy uses to conceal the octopus as they sightsee around town.

What I like: I think this short just hits all the spots. It’s fun, it’s endearing, and just serves up the magic that Disney is known for.

6. Hershey’s Kisses

I have to put in a plug for this classic. First debuting in 1989, this simple ad stars red and green Hershey’s Kisses doubling as bells and playing the carol, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, while being conducted by a silver Kiss.

While there have been some small changes throughout the years, this ad remains largely the same year after year, and is much beloved by merrymakers all around the country. Even the grinches at r/CommercialsIHate subreddit like this ad.

What I like: I like that this ad has staying power. It hasn’t lost its charm at all and has become an American holiday tradition.

7. Outback: Koala on the Walla

Speaking of traditions, I love Outback Steakhouse’s vaguely threatening alternative to Elf on the Shelf: Koala on the Walla. The jingle about this cute marsupial-a says, “He knows all of your secrets. Every rule that you’ve defied.” This koala is always watching, and denies you steak if you’ve been bad.

I’m personally rooting for Koala on the Walla to finally kick out those mischievous Elves that seem to adorn every shelf.

What I like: Despite his threatening nature, Koala on the Walla is just too cute, and I definitely wouldn’t mind having him around the house, despite the risk that his beady eyes might be spying on me from inside the washing machine.

8. GAP: Holiday ‘24

This ad isn’t flashy, but its simplicity is what makes it so effective. For this campaign, GAP assembled a diverse choir of talented musicians and social media stars, their beautiful voices blending together as they sing Janet Jackson’s Together Again a cappella.

It’s a great reminder that sometimes you don’t need fancy animation or an elaborate storyline. A simple ad can resonate just as well.

What I like: I like how they brought together different voices and styles and how beautifully the song was arranged to make each singer shine.

9. LEGO: Herding home for the holidays

Lego has not made a holiday movie this time around, but if they did, they think that it would be the G.O.A.T. That is, it would have literal (Lego) goats.

While some brands have made beautiful cinematic masterpieces for their holiday marketing campaigns, including some on this list, Lego has made a trailer for a movie that doesn’t actually exist. Called Herding for the Holidays, the fake movie tells the story of a city go-getter who heads back to the farm to become a goat-getter, and it’s got strong Hallmark Christmas movie vibes. Lego, it’s not too late to make this happen!

What I like: Tons and tons of goats and lego. What’s not to love?

10. Coca-Cola: Secret Santa

A list about the best holiday marketing campaigns wouldn’t be complete without talking about the AI-generated ad that Coca-Cola released in 2024. While I wouldn’t say that this ad is tops when it comes to technicality or frankly, aesthetics, it was one of the best at eliciting engagement, albeit mostly negative.

The ad was inspired by a 1995 ad that used real trucks and real people. This newest ad was a collaboration between three AI studios and used four AI models, according to Forbes. And yet, the result is a series of clips that teeter ever so closely on the cliff over the uncanny valley.

The backlash to the ads was swift. Article after article talked about the pushback the company faced after the ad was released. Critics called the ad “soulless.”

What I like: I like that it’s a real-time test of the old saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” After all, when was the last time the news cycle was taken by a Coca-Cola ad? While all the negative publicity probably won’t make a real dent on the sales of Coke, I’m looking forward to seeing if they’re going to hire a human Santa for the next holiday campaign.

What I don’t like: You could argue that AI is just a step above using CGI, but the technology really isn’t there yet. Zoom in, and you can see that the trunks look so wonky, some of the wheels weren’t even spinning. Even the Coca-Cola logo itself is off in some places. I think it’s unfortunate that the three companies and the four AI models couldn’t perfect the logo in every shot.

Go Forth and Be Merry

As these examples show, there are many ways to incorporate holiday cheer into your marketing campaigns. Holiday ads no longer fit into one mold, but as cheesy as it sounds, what the most effective ones have in common is heart.

Think about what makes the holidays so special to you, and tell that story. I’m pretty basic, so what usually gets me are ads that show a hint of ‘90s nostalgia or a sumptuous family spread. You know I’m taking notes from Kroger’s ad, and making beef wellington this year.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

It’s 2025, and the highest-ROI marketing channel is still good ol’ social media. I’ve created social media content for just about everyone: government offices, nonprofits, small businesses, solopreneurs, and more.

Sharing content on social media is a no-brainer for brands. But orienting yourself on the basics of social media, types of content, trends, etc. is a heavy lift.

Whether you’re looking for a strategy refresh or trying out a new channel for the first time, this is your guide to the different types of social media content, what works best, and how it can empower your business. I’ll dive into the data and trends so you can clearly see where to invest in 2025.

Different Types of Social Media Content

We used to talk about content formats in conjunction with social media platforms: photos equal Instagram, videos equal YouTube, text equals Twitter. Now, most social media platforms are a mosaic of content types. Here are the most popular formats today.

1. Short-Form Video

As a consumer, who hasn’t felt the gravitational pull of short-form videos? They’re fun to watch, (too) easy to binge, and relatively fast for businesses to create. These quick, stimulating videos are the most engaging social media content there is.

According to our 2025 Marketing Trends Report, short-form videos are more important than ever for businesses:

• 21% of social media marketers said that short-form video content has the highest ROI.
• Short-form video content is the #1 priority among social media marketers.
• 17% said that they plan to increase their investment in short-form video in 2025.

Short-form videos can be published on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and X (previously Twitter). Take a look at our latest Social Media Video Trends Report to see where these platforms stack up against each other.

The TikTok video below is a great example from Brooki Bakehouse, sharing a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like running a bakery. This content format is highly relatable and markets the business without the video content feeling like marketing. It’s also a low-budget way to create short-form videos.

Great for: Brand awareness, lead generation, and showcasing customer success.

2. Long-Form Video

Video content is now so diverse that it’s been split into several different social media content categories. Despite having lower ROI than short-form videos, long-form video content is still relevant and in demand on social media. A few quick differences from short-form video content:

• Longer = more costly to produce.
• Consumers expect higher production quality.
• Content needs to be highly engaging, as the average viewer lacks the attention span to finish long-form content.

I only watch longer video content when I’m emotionally invested in a brand’s voice, mission, or product. Short-form videos are great top-of-funnel content, while long-form content nurtures existing leads.

Below is a long-form video example from the coffee accessory company AeroPress. This company knows that its target audience is interested in the lifestyle that accompanies its product, and they create videos that cater to that lifestyle:

Great for: Relationship building, customer retention, and customer education.

3. Live Video

Don’t forget live video! This format has the third-highest ROI of all social media content types, but is one of the least-used content types according to surveyed marketers. This digital marketing medium packs a punch, and brands that ignore it are missing out on an incredible connection opportunity.

Live video gained popularity during the pandemic, allowing remote participation in events. Twitch and other popular live-streaming platforms let people interact with their favorite creators in real time. I like seeing brands use live video because it can’t be faked: There’s no AI or repurposed content. It feels like a genuine investment in engaging with viewers.

You can choose a virtual-only live video, or live stream an in-life event to offer physical audience members and virtual viewers the same real-time experience. Here’s an example of a live-streamed event from Sephora:

Great for: Customer engagement, solution education, and building trust/credibility.

4. Images

When asked about the type of content that they use most, marketers reported that images were used almost as frequently as short-form video. Images are convenient because they can be shared on all social media channels. The image umbrella primarily includes photography, not designed graphics (that’s the next point).

Some easy image post ideas include:

• Product announcements.
• Before and after photos.
• Product photography.
• Behind-the-scenes.
• Office life.

Here’s an example of a simple image post from The Woobles showcasing new products:

Source

Great for: Product awareness, storytelling, and staying top of mind.

5. Infographics/Carousels

Infographics are a content type with the share-ability and visual appeal of photos but are filled with helpful data and information. It’s an impactful form of social media content and educational content. Infographics are effective, too, with 51% of marketers who regularly use them saying they yield high ROI.

I’m also lumping carousels in here with infographics — I think carousels are even more valuable in 2025 than raw infographics. I say this based on both user behavior and preferential treatment in the algorithm. Did you know that if your Instagram followers see the first page of your carousel but didn’t engage, Instagram will show it again, but swiped to a different slide to catch the viewer’s attention?

Carousels have become extremely popular on certain social media platforms (like Instagram, LinkedIn, and even TikTok). Both infographics and carousels serve the same purpose: Use this content format to educate and share industry news. Here’s an example from apparel brand Gnara that educates viewers on the history of women’s pants:

Great for: Industry authority, shareability, and customer education.

6. Text Posts

We see text-based content on social media every day, from X “threads” to Meta’s Threads app to thought leadership posts on LinkedIn. The primary goal is to share insight through words — you can pair it with an eye-catching image, but the focal point is the writing itself.

Blogs are popular text-based content where people read longer posts and discover helpful information. But a common mistake is sharing blog links directly on social media. Social platform algorithms don’t favor linking out; they want viewers to stay!

Marketers reported that their blog or website is the #2 area seeing an increased investment this year, and sharing snippets as text-only posts on social media is a great way to repurpose. Break a blog post down into snackable takeaways that are more suitable for social users’ habits.

Here’s an example of a highly engaging text post from copywriter Jasmin Alić on LinkedIn:

Source

Great for: Engagement, problem awareness, and product awareness.

7. User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is content your audience creates that features your business/brand that is not paid for by your business. For example, someone shares a non-sponsored Instagram Reel about how much they like your product or posts a picture wearing your clothing and tags your business.

UGC is seeing an increase in investment in 2025. Marketers reported that it was their third-highest focus area, behind short-form video and images.

UGC pays off, as customers trust reviews from friends and family more than they trust branded ads. Nearly 80% of people say UGC highly impacts their purchase decisions, considerably more so than branded content and influencer content.

This type of content is powerful because it helps your audiences see that people use and like your products, vouching for you in a real-life way. Why toot your own horn if you can get someone else to do it, right? It naturally funnels in new social media followers.

Here’s an example of user-generated content posted by India @ourwanderlust_life featuring the Stasher Bag. Stasher Bag commented on this post, which is a free way to boost user-generated content in the algorithm and get more exposure.

I already own several Stasher Bag products, and seeing people using their product reminds me of its value. UGC brings in new leads while reinforcing the buying decision of past customers.

Great for: Lead generation, brand awareness, and conversions.

8. Audio Chat and Live Rooms

Remember when Clubhouse was all everyone could talk about?! That frenzy has passed, but audio chats and live rooms are here to stay. Many platforms have native audio features, like X Spaces, LinkedIn Live, and Facebook Live Audio.

Audio content is particularly trendy among Gen Z, the biggest social media demographic. A 2024 Spotify study found that Gen Z enjoys audio content because it creates a feeling of genuine connection (more so than other online content).

Audio chat rooms let brands directly communicate with audiences and develop closer relationships than seeing a billboard or watching a YouTube video. And, during a time when customers value connections with brands more than ever, audio chat rooms are a valuable tool.

This type of content isn’t my style as a consumer, but this shows the value of a diverse content strategy: The same content won’t speak to every consumer. Having multiple social media accounts and sharing different types of content will help you create a wide funnel. Here’s an example from a chat hosted by The SAS Collective on X:

Source

Great for: Conversions, industry authority, and community building.

9. Forums and Private Groups

There’s more to a social media strategy than just gaining followers and making sales. Some brands are facilitating a genuine community around their product. One of the most effective ways to do this is through forums and private groups.

When asked about the biggest benefits of building social media communities, marketers cited increased brand sentiment/loyalty as the top benefit.

I’m a part of several company groups. As a consumer, I’m much more likely to remember and recommend a product when I’m a part of a tangible group with other customers. It makes me feel like the brand cares about my success with their product, not just the sale.

Here’s an example from the pressure cooker company Instant Pot®. This group keeps its audience engaged by creating a place to share recipes, troubleshoot together, and celebrate wins:

Source

Great for: Referrals, audience engagement, and social proof.

10. Content That Represents Brand Values

Almost half of marketers say that content reflecting brand values is part of their existing social media strategy. This type of content is anything that highlights what your company stands for, such as commitments to sustainable production practices, fair treatment of employees, social justice, and more.

Consumers care more than ever about what the brands they buy from stand for and the values they have. They want to know the causes that businesses support and the commitments made to bettering the world.

If you need an example of doing brand value content right, look no further than Patagonia. It’s not just about loyalty: Marketers also say that it has the 5th biggest ROI of any trend. Marketers also report that creating content that reflects brand values is a top priority in 2025.

Great for: Building trust and credibility.

11. Shoppable Content

Shoppable social media content allows consumers to browse through products on your accounts, discover things they like, and even make a purchase without leaving the app.

The image below is an Instagram shop for Ink Meets Paper, where someone can browse its products, find what interests them, and make a purchase. This is a valuable content type as social shopping is currently on the rise, and consumers are discovering new products and buying products on social media apps more than ever before.

In fact, social media is the most popular way for Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X to discover new products — over one in five have made an in-app purchase in the past three months. No wonder 87% of marketers said they would increase their investment in social selling enablement tools in 2025.

Source

Great for: Conversions and product awareness.

12. Ephemeral/Disappearing Content

Ephemeral/disappearing content is content that only stays up for a certain amount of time, like Instagram Stories that disappear after 24 hours. Leveraging people’s FOMO (fear of missing out) is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing playbook. The feeling is amplified even more on social media.

Users only have a set period to engage with disappearing content, so they might be more eager to keep track of your profiles and keep returning to experience it.

Creating quizzes and polls in your Stories is a great way to leverage this type of content. People only have a certain amount of time to respond, generating excitement and immediate action and inspiring respondents to come back and see results.

See the Instagram story example below from Harvard Business Review, or browse more ideas from LEGO, NASA, Outback Steakhouse, and more.

Source

Great for: Customer engagement, lead nurturing, and education.

13. Educational Content

This is less of a content format and more of a content type. Educational content shares helpful information with audiences that helps them reach their goals and meet their needs. Any of the content types we’ve discussed can deliver educational content: infographics, videos, text-based posts, images, etc.

Educational content is perfect for all social media channels. HubSpot often shares educational content through YouTube videos, where viewers can learn more about concepts of interest, like this example below:

Great for: Problem awareness, brand awareness, and industry authority.

14. Funny, Trendy, and Relatable Content

Social media marketers know the value of a viral post too well. Creating buzzy content requires a high level of awareness of what’s happening online, cultural moments, and current events.

Over 40% of marketers already share funny, trendy, and relatable content on social media, and 59% say they will double down on funny content in 2025, it being the most effective of the three. Consumers love it, too — they’re starved for quality humor from brands.

Our very own social media team is savvy at this kind of content, like this funny and relatable X post:

Source

Great for: Audience engagement and staying top of mind.

Repurposing content is still a valuable strategy.

It’s challenging to create individual pieces of content for every single platform, so many marketers share similar content across platforms but repurpose it to fit the tone and requirements of each one. Repurposing content is important to maximizing ROI and ensuring your content reaches your audience.

The key to success, however, is repurposing content, not simply resharing it. Viewers don’t appreciate seeing a brand share the exact same thing on each platform.

It’s a new era for social media. Let this tutorial help you create a plan that will help you reach potential customers and turn them into fans:

Want more social media insights?

Have these social media content ideas inspired you to get creating? As a longtime marketer, I’ve seen the impact of a strong social media presence. I’ve also seen how much investment it takes to see results.

Creating endless social media posts is demanding. Social media users want to be entertained, educated, and informed. It’s a heavy lift for marketers, but the opportunity makes it worthwhile.

Learn more about the state of social media with more of this data, videos, and exclusive industry tips on our Social Media Trends report.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

One of the most powerful — but least used — aspects of social media is its ability to turn customers into community.

Today’s master has a lot to say about how social, community, and customer marketing all work together as one. And as our 15-minute interview stretched into a 90-minute coffee chat, folks, it got really hard to distill it down into only three lessons.

But if your role touches on any of those areas, you’re going to want to see what Katie Parkes has to say.

Katie Parkes

Director of Social, Community, and Customer Marketing for Apollo.io

• Fun Fact: Katie competed nationally for Canada in figure skating and plays a dwarven fighter named Barbara Wild in D&D.
• Claim to Fame: Founding member of Shopify’s enterprise marketing team. She’s told the stories of some of the fastest-growing ecommerce brands (like Allbirds, Knix, and Chubbies), grew Shopify’s social media audience by 270% in one year, and tripled listenership for Shopify’s enterprise podcast. 

  (She also moonlights as a toddler brand strategist, rebranding broccoli as “dinosaur trees” and spinach as “Hulk leaves.”)

Lesson 1: Make YouTube your hero.

Since Katie Parkes heads up social and community, you probably expect her gaze to be locked on TikTok or Reddit, right?

But when I ask her which marketing channel she’d pick if she were only allowed just one… she doesn’t even take a breath before blurting out, “YouTube.”

“YouTube is poised to have its biggest year yet,” she says, pointing out that the video giant has now eclipsed even Netflix as the most-watched streaming service on TV.

And, fun fact: YT’s audience is just a teeeeeny tiny hair smaller than TikTok and Instagram… combined.

“Use YouTube as your hero channel, and build a content engine around it,” Parkes advises. “Every video becomes the source material for dozens of repurposed assets — carousels, threads, memes, Reels, Shorts, and more.

“I think of it like this: Validate a topic with audience demand. Create a video script about that topic. Turn that video script into a blog, then take pieces and consider how it could become a carousel or short video.”

And as for the community aspect? Though YT lacks the direct message feature of most social platforms, Parkes says you should engage your audience right there in the comments.

“Priority one is keeping them on channel.”

And what do you put on that shiny new channel? Well… turn to your users.

Lesson 2: Turn power users into creators. (And vice versa.)

One of the most valuable marketing resources you have is your own user base, according to Parkes.

“The first thing you need to do is find your power users. Then turn those power users into creators. Have them create YouTube videos for your channels. Have them jump into your webinars.”

And it can work just as well in the opposite direction: Turning content creators into power users.

“Reach out to creators that your [ideal customers] already know and give them access to your product and research. Influencer marketing is not just an awareness play, but also an incredible growth engine.”

Either way, the results will land harder than content that comes directly from your own company. (In nerdspeak, you’ll roll persuasion with advantage.) Your audience already knows you believe in your product. Show them that people just like them believe, too.

Lesson 3: Listen up.

Once you give your power users a voice, your audience shouldn’t be the only ones listening. In addition to being great collaborators for content, your users are also the best source of info about… y’know… your users.

“Take the people who love your product and build an advisory board. Give them exclusive access to betas, and tap them for product feedback.”

And while that will improve your product, it’s not just a product play. When your audience knows they’re being heard, it creates a more engaged and loyal community.

But it’s not just a feedback play, either. Your existing users also understand what potential new users think — after all, they were noobs once, too. You can turn to them to A/B test marketing collateral, gather quotes from subject matter experts for new content, or even source vegetarian recipes for the Instant Pot you were just gifted. (Okay, that one’s just for me. But seriously, cdelprincipe [at] hubspot [dot] com.)

Parkes says to start with the question, “How do you make them feel empowered?” Then make it happen.

Lingering Questions

Today’s Question

“Besides AI, what marketing trends or technologies are you keeping your eye on or planning to try this year?” — Shelagh Dolan, Content marketing lead, Quora for Business

Today’s Answer

Parkes says: “I’m paying close attention to how data storytelling is evolving, especially as trust in marketing continues to erode.

The brands standing out right now aren’t just publishing content — they’re showing receipts. Customer stories. Product usage. Community influence. As social algorithms continue to reward who is getting the most attention, credibility is the new currency.

But isn’t just about numbers. It needs to be earned in creative, human ways, so you need to rely on real voices.

That’s why I’m excited about creator-led and community-first B2B marketing — tapping into your power users, internal experts, and community members to share the story in their own words. We’re moving away from polished brand narratives and toward trusted individuals who bring both expertise and authenticity.

In a sea of regurgitated AI garbage and fake content, the most important thing your brand can focus on is being believed.“

Next Week’s Question

Parkes asks: What’s one “boring” marketing channel or tactic that’s working way better than expected for you right now, and why do you think that is?

When Threads launched in July 2023, it made headlines for breaking records — 100 million sign-ups in less than five days — and was quickly dubbed the “Twitter killer.” But within weeks, usage dropped sharply. Headlines followed, warning that Threads was already losing steam.

Fast forward to 2025, and the picture looks very different. Despite early skepticism, Threads has quietly grown into an active conversation platform online, yet it is still murky waters for brands.

So, is Threads really losing steam? Not quite. The platform may have cooled from its explosive debut, but recent data and the marketers I spoke with suggest it’s gaining traction in a more sustainable, long-term way.

Is Threads losing steam?

Short answer: No — at least, not anymore.

After the initial burst of downloads and attention in July 2023, Threads experienced a steep drop in engagement. According to SimilarWeb, usage fell by 79% just one month after launch, and average time spent on the app dropped from 21 minutes to just 3 minutes per day in the U.S.

But those early numbers told only part of the story.

In January 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Threads had surpassed 320 million monthly active users. Data from Backlinko supports that growth:

• Threads now has 100 million daily active users globally.
• In the U.S. alone, there are 30 million monthly active users.
• The app has maintained steady growth every month since its rocky post-launch period.

“Threads now has more than 320 million monthly actives, and has been adding more than 1 million sign-ups per day. I expect Threads to continue on its trajectory to become the leading discussion platform and eventually reach 1 billion people over the next several years,” he wrote in an earnings statement.

When I log on to Threads, I’m impressed at how lovely my feed feels. Essentially, it’s the text version of Instagram. My experience seems to match many of the users and brands who’ve adopted the program, especially the ones who have fled Twitter in the past few years.

While app downloads have slowed compared to launch week, retention and engagement have quietly climbed.

Threads hasn’t replaced X (formerly Twitter) across the board, but it has found a strong foothold — especially among creators, lifestyle brands, and those looking for an alternative to heavily algorithm-driven feeds.

My feed, for example, is a mix of memes, aesthetic photos, and political news stories. It nostalgically feels like 2015-era Twitter again… nature is healing.

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How Marketers and Creators Are Using Threads

While users have embraced Threads, the reactions from marketers have been more muddled. Here’s what I found in HubSpot’s Marketing Trends report:

• Only 9% of marketers are using Threads in their overall strategy.
• The ROI is much less tangible than other social platforms — only 3% of respondents saw a return.
• For those using Threads, however, they are seeing positive results. 39% of marketers will continue their investment on the platform in 2025, while 24% will increase their investment.

To understand how marketers were incorporating Threads into their strategy, I spoke with several creators and strategists who’ve embraced the platform.

Many early users credit Threads’ integration with Instagram as a key driver of growth. Gigi Robinson, a managed Meta creator and founder of Hosts of Influence, said the crossover made it easy to bring over existing audiences:

“A bunch of followers just came on over from Insta to Threads or Facebook to Threads, which I think was really cool.” To date, she’s gained more than 10K followers on the platform.

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She told me that the decline of X, particularly its shift to paid verification, was a major turning point for her. “When X rolled out that they were getting rid of verification — even for credible media sources — it felt like a slap in the face,” Robinson said. “It made Threads a much more appealing alternative.”

Robinson’s content strategy on Threads blends humor, relatability, and a dose of realism. “Sh*tposting, affirmations, crazy headlines — that’s what gets attention,” she said. “I’ve had about 2 million impressions from Threads and gained 1,500 followers just by consistently engaging and showing up.”

As a creator, speaker, and advocate who’s been building an online presence for nearly a decade, Robinson sees Threads as an extension of her broader ecosystem — one that includes Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and now her new education platform for creators. She often repurposes content across channels and uses Threads to test ideas, share behind-the-scenes moments, and land brand partnerships.

“It feels like a shared Notes app with my community,” she said. “There’s no pressure to be perfect — and that’s why people engage.”

Though the platform doesn’t yet have the depth of conversation in certain industries (such as crypto or B2B tech), its steady user growth and positive sentiment suggest it’s far from fading.

As creative director Mike Vannelli put it, “Threads is less volatile, more intimate — kind of like early Instagram but for ideas. We’re seeing more meaningful engagement, especially from creative audiences who are tired of the noise.”

Vanelli says he and his team are experimenting with “softer storytelling” on Threads.

Marketers are still figuring out where Threads fits into their larger strategy — but one thing is clear: The platform rewards experimentation, authenticity, and low-pressure content.

But it’s still not right for every brand.

“We’re highly regulated in financial services, so Threads doesn’t fit our compliance needs yet,” said Kelley Muhsemann, a marketing manager at wealth management firm R.W. Rogé & Company, Inc. “But if your audience is Gen Z or Millennial, it could be a goldmine.”

Lia Savillo, a social media lead in the crypto space, echoed that Threads hasn’t yet captured her target audience. “The platform hasn’t gained traction within the crypto space, and there’s very limited industry-relevant conversation happening there.”

For now, I recommend brands to assess where their communities already live, and many are keeping Threads in the mix for future opportunities.

My Key Takeaways on Threads for Marketers

Threads may not be making the same splash it did at launch. But after speaking with creators and marketers who are still actively using it, I’m convinced it’s quietly becoming a valuable space, especially for brands willing to experiment.

Here’s what stood out to me:

• Threads is still growing. With over 320M MAUs and climbing, it’s far from a dead platform.
• Engagement thrives on authenticity. Funny, real, imperfect content performs well, especially when paired with consistent interaction.
• It’s ideal for testing different types of content. With no set “best practices,” Threads gives brands space to play, listen, and learn.
• Know your niche. The platform isn’t yet a fit for every industry. If your audience isn’t there, you might hold off — but if they are, it could be a smart early investment.

Personally, I don’t see Threads as the next Twitter (RIP) — and maybe that’s the point. It’s carving out something different: a lighter, more human space for conversation and creativity.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Customer communication preferences vary widely in today‘s digital landscape. Some may want to go to a company’s landing page, initiate a conversation with a chatbot, or even pick up the phone to learn more about a service or product.

In my experience leading marketing teams, understanding how your customers prefer to interact with your brand is essential for creating exceptional customer experiences that drive loyalty and retention.

Read on to discover HubSpot Blog insights and research about customer communication preferences with their favorite businesses.

Table of Contents

• Customer Communication Preference Statistics
• How Customers Prefer to Learn About Products
• How Customers Prefer to Communicate with a Company
• How I Think Companies Can Better Meet Customer Expectations This Year

Customer Communication Preference Statistics

To begin, I recognize it’s a marketer’s tendency to focus on campaigns and metrics. However, some of the most valuable intelligence for your marketing strategy comes directly from your customer service teams. So let’s begin with some insights from our State of Customer Service report.

According to our research, consumers are more demanding than ever when it comes to customer experience. Leaders report that the number of tickets their company receives is higher than ever before (75%), and customers expect issues to be resolved immediately (82%).

Additionally, customers expect a higher level of personalization than ever before (78%). So we ran a HubSpot blog survey asking respondents how they prefer to interact with companies when looking for information about a product or service. Let’s dive into it.

How Customers Prefer to Learn About Products

According to customer responses, 46% said they prefer to review its content (videos, commercials, blog posts, images, etc.), 15% follow or visit its social media accounts, and 9% go to the company’s physical store and read reviews on review sites or social media pages.

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1. Reviewing Content

When customers want to learn more about a product, they overwhelmingly turn directly to your content. Research consistently shows that potential buyers actively seek out videos, blog posts, social media content, and other materials published by companies before making purchase decisions. This natural customer behavior should be the cornerstone of your marketing strategy.

To maximize this opportunity, create content that meets your audience where they already spend their time. For example, Gen Z spends most of their time on YouTube, followed by Instagram, Snapchat, and then TikTok. By understanding these platform preferences, you can ensure your content reaches potential customers on their terms.

Your content must also align with customer search intent. The AI Insights for Marketers report reveals that 55% of marketers now use AI for text-based content creation (blogs, ebooks, marketing emails, press releases, product descriptions, and social posts) — a direct response to the growing customer demand for informative, helpful content.

This strategic focus on AI-enhanced content creation delivers dual benefits: marketers can spend more time on creative work (66% agree) while reducing time spent on repetitive tasks (78%). The result? Businesses can consistently produce the high-quality, personalized content that today’s research-oriented customers actively seek out.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s Email Marketing tools help you leverage AI-assisted content creation while maintaining the authentic personal touch that customers expect during their research process.

2. Social Media

When it comes to social media, 56% of consumers are influenced by posts shared by friends and family for sourcing ideas. In addition, 54% of Gen Z shoppers and 58% of millennials agree that social platforms are better than online searches for finding new products.

In addition to this survey data, the 2025 Social Media Trends report also indicates that social media continues to be a crucial channel for customer communication. 69% of marketers agree that more shopping will happen on social media than on brand websites or third-party marketplaces this year. This signals a significant shift in consumer behavior that businesses need to prepare for, and social media management is getting more important to reach customers.

Pro tip: Leverage HubSpot’s SMS Marketing tools to complement your social media strategy with direct, personalized messaging that meets customers on their preferred channels.

3. Reading Reviews

When it comes to reading reviews, National Leave a Review Day data shows that 54% of consumers are putting their trust in online reviews first, outweighing the opinions of friends and family (24%), company claims (18%), social media influencers (2%), and media reviews (2%).

Review management isn’t just a reputational concern but a necessary business function that directly impacts your bottom line. I believe forward-thinking companies integrate review generation into their core customer experience strategy rather than treating it as an afterthought.

How Customers Prefer to Communicate with a Company

When reaching out to a company online, survey respondents preferred to message a human representative from your business (45%).

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This is a crucial statistic to be aware of considering the rise of chatbots. While the AI-powered tool is undoubtedly helpful, customers are letting us know that they don’t want you to shift your entire messaging strategy to revolve around an automated tool.

However, the second-highest preference is for a mix of chatbots and human representatives. So, even though customers want to talk to a person, you can combine both tools in your strategy. When you leverage a mix of the two, aim to have bots complement the human experience. For example, a bot can initiate a conversation and collect information to transfer the customer to an agent most equipped to provide a solution.

Customers are also okay with simply using chatbots for routine and simple tasks, like order tracking, checking status or balance, or changing an order.

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How I Think Companies Can Better Meet Customer Expectations This Year

As we move through the year, the businesses that thrive will align their communication strategies with evolving customer preferences. The data is clear: customers expect immediate, personalized service across all channels, with both self-service options and human support available when needed.

I think we‘re at an inflection point in customer communications. Throughout my marketing career, I’ve observed many technological shifts, but few as transformative as what we’re experiencing now with AI-enhanced communications. Companies that resist this evolution risk being left behind, while those who thoughtfully embrace it will forge deeper connections with their customers.

By leveraging the insights from HubSpot’s research and implementing the right tools, you can create a customer communication strategy that not only meets these expectations but exceeds them, driving loyalty and growth in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in July 2017 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.

Ethan Mollick, professor of management at Wharton Business School, has a simple benchmark for tracking the progress of AI’s image generation capabilities: “Otter on a plane using wifi.”

Mollick uses that prompt to create images of … an otter using Wi-Fi on an airplane. Here are his results from a generative AI image tool around November 2022.

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And here is his result in August 2024.

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AI image and video creation have come a long way in a short time. With access to the right tools and resources, you can manufacture a video in hours (or even minutes) that would’ve otherwise taken days with a creative team. AI can help almost anybody create polished visual content that feels real — even if it isn’t.

Of course, AI is only a tool. And like any tool, it reflects the intent of the person wielding it.

For every aerial otter enthusiast, there’s someone else creating deepfakes of presidential candidates. And it’s not only visuals: Models can generate persuasive articles in bulk, clone human voices, and create entire fake social media accounts. Misinformation at scale used to take serious operations, time, and expenses. Now, anyone with a decent internet connection can manufacture the truth.

In a world where AI can quickly generate polished content at scale, social media becomes the perfect delivery system. And AI’s impact on social media can’t be ignored.

Misinformation is no longer just about low-effort memes lost in the dark corners of the web. Slick, personalized, emotionally charged AI content is misinformation’s future. To understand the implications, let’s dive deeper into social media misinformation and AI’s role on both sides of the misinformation fence.

Social Media Misinformation Today

What is misinformation?

Before I begin, I should note how I’ll discuss the term “misinformation.” Technically speaking, this issue has a few different flavors:

• Misinformation is false information shared without the intent to deceive. It’s usually spread accidentally because people believe it’s true. When your uncle shares a fake news story on Facebook, that’s misinformation.
• Disinformation is false information shared deliberately to mislead, manipulate, or harm a person or persons. Its purpose is often to create political, social, or financial gain. Think bad state actors or troll farms meant to deceive intentionally.
• Malinformation is when someone shares true information intending to cause harm, often by taking it out of context. It’s a real story used maliciously. For example, someone leaking private emails to smear a public figure is malinformation.

For our purposes, I’ll focus on misinformation as much as possible and will note differences otherwise.

Social Media Misinformation: A Brief History

The fact that we need distinctions hints at the scope and scale of social media misinformation today. False or inaccurate printed content has existed since the Gutenberg printing press.

The advent of newspapers also brought “fake news” and hoaxes — one of my favorites being The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a series of fake articles in the New York Sun covering the “discovery” of life on the Moon.

Misinformation has followed every medium — newsprint, radio, television. But the internet? Two-way communication on the World Wide Web has helped misinformation like “fake news” proliferate.

Once users could create content online — not just consume it — the door opened to an almost limitless supply of misinformation. And as social media platforms became dominant, that supply didn’t just grow; it became incentivized.

News on Social Media

Today, 86% of Americans get their news from digital devices; information sits in their palms, awaiting engagement. Ironically, the more accessible information becomes, the less we seem to trust it — especially our news.

Social media has only exacerbated these challenges. Firstly, social media platforms have become primary news sources. The 2024 Digital News Report from Reuters & Oxford found:

• News use has fragmented, with six networks reaching significant global populations.
• YouTube is still the most popular, followed by WhatsApp, TikTok, and X/Twitter.
• Short news videos are increasingly popular, with 66% of respondents watching them each week — and 72% of consumption happens on-platform.
• More people worry about what is real or fake online: 59% of global respondents are worried, including 72% of Americans.
• TikTok and X/Twitter are cited for the highest levels of distrust, with misinformation and conspiracy theories proliferating more often on these platforms.

The more we rely on social media platforms for news, the more their algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy in the challenge to keep us scrolling. Platform creators are then encouraged to provide relevant content to capture attention, engagement — and dollars.

And if the goal is engagement, not accuracy, why limit yourself to real news? When “outrage is the key to virality,” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, and virality leads to rewards, you do whatever it takes to go viral.

And it works, as the data shows. MIT research shows fake news can spread up to ten times faster than true news on platforms like X/Twitter. A story need not be true to be interesting, and in an attention economy, interesting wins.

Mind you, misinformation is often unintentional. And the reward systems these platforms offer to users encourage sharing interesting content regardless of veracity. Your uncle may not know if an article is true, but if sharing it gets him twice as much engagement on Facebook, there’s a good chance he pushes that button.

But now, it’s not just humans spreading falsehoods. Generative AI’s ascendence is fueling the fire — revving up a powerful misinformation engine and making it harder than ever to tell what’s real or not.

AI Can Create Misinformation, Too

Generative AI tools, with broad access and easily manipulated prompts, expand creative powers to nearly anybody with a fast enough internet connection.

So far, the ability to manufacture fake images and videos is AI’s greatest contribution to misinformation proliferation. Common offenders include “deepfakes,” AI-generated multimedia used to impersonate someone or represent a fictitious event. These can be funny; others, damaging.

For example:

• The “swagged-out Pope,” with images of Pope Francis in a puffy jacket.
• Russian state-sponsored fake news sites mimicking The Washington Post and Fox News to disseminate AI-generated misinformation.
• Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which used deepfakes of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. Drake removed the song from his social media after the Shakur estate sent a cease-and-desist letter.
• A campaign robocall to New Hampshire residents using a deepfake of President Biden. The consultant behind the robocall was assessed a $6 million fine by the FCC and was indicted on criminal charges.

Organizations can also use AI copywriters to mass produce thousands of fake articles. AI bots can share those articles and simulate engagement at scale. This includes auto-liking posts, generating fake comments, and amplifying the content to trick algorithms into prioritizing it.

One often-cited prediction suggests that by 2026, up to 90% of online content could be “synthetically generated” — meaning created or heavily shaped by AI. I feel that the number is inflated, but the trend line is real: content creation is becoming faster, cheaper, and less human-driven.

That said, I’ve also found that some fears over AI misinformation’s effect on real life could be overblown. Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, four out of five Americans had some level of concern with AI spreading misinformation before Election Day.

Yet, amid efforts from foreign actors or deepfakes like the New Hampshire robocall, AI’s impact ended up muted. While technological advances could lead to more effects in future elections, this result shows the limitations of AI-driven misinformation in the current technological climate.

And from a brand safety perspective, marketers aren’t panicking either — at least not when using established social media platforms. Our own research found that marketers felt most comfortable with Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram as safe environments for their brands. While AI-generated misinformation makes noise in political and academic circles, many marketing teams remain somewhat confident.

So if AI-driven misinformation isn’t swaying elections or bothering marketers (yet), where does that leave us? These AI tools are evolving, as are the tactics. Which begs the question: Can AI fight the fire it helped light?

But … AI Can Also Be the Solution

For years, search engines like Google have tried to fend off the spread of misinformation. Many news sources also put misinformation management front and center. For example, Google News has a “Fact Check” section highlighting erroneous information. And, while automation and bots are helping, it faces an uphill battle in the Age of AI.

What AI unlocks is scale. While generative AI can create misinformation, it can detect, flag, and remove that content just as effectively. AI-generated content is becoming more realistic and harder for humans to spot, which means scalable AI countermeasures become essential. That’s true for protecting public trust and brand reputation.

Marketers are caught between an AI arms race. They’re trying to use AI in their business branding to help them do their jobs faster and better. But AI-powered misinformation can negatively affect brand credibility, platform visibility, and consumer loyalty. In short, marketers need help.

Here are some organizations on the front lines of that fight, using AI to rein in misinformation.

Cyabra

Cyabra focuses on detecting fake accounts, deepfakes, and coordinated disinformation campaigns. Cyabra’s AI analyzes details like content authenticity and network patterns and behaviors across platforms to flag false narratives early.

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Fake profiles can pop up and push misleading online narratives with breathtaking speed. If your brand is monitoring online risk and sentiment, a tool like Cyabra can keep pace with the spread of misinformation.

Logically

Logically pairs AI with human fact-checkers to monitor, analyze, and debunk misinformation. Its Logically Intelligent (LI) platform helps governments, nonprofits, and media outlets track misinformation’s origins and spread across social media.

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For marketers and communicators, Logically can offer an early warning detection system for false narratives around their brand, industry, or audience.

Reality Defender

Reality Defender uses machine learning to scan digital media for signs of manipulation, like synthetic voice or video content or AI-generated faces. I haven’t found many tools offering proactive detection — you can catch deepfakes before they go viral.

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This kind of early detection can help brands protect their campaigns, spokespeople, or public-facing content from synthetic manipulation.

Debunk.org

Debunk.org blends AI-driven web monitoring with human analysis to detect disinformation across over 2,500 online domains in over 25 languages. It tracks trending narratives and misleading headlines, then publishes reports countering emerging falsehoods.

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Global brands will find Debunk.org especially helpful, given its tool’s multilingual nature. You can navigate international markets and regional misinformation spikes more intelligently.

Consumers are also getting AI-powered support. For example, TikTok now automatically labels AI-generated content thanks to a partnership with The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) and its metadata tools.

And with Google investing heavily in its Generative Search Experience, the company includes an “About this result” panel in Search to help users assess the credibility of its responses.

As AI advances, so too will the tactics used to deceive, and the tools designed to stop it. What’s around the AI river bend? Let’s look at where misinformation could head in the Age of AI — and what experts are already seeing.

What We Can Expect: Misinformation in the Age of AI

Emotional Manipulation and “Fake Influencers”

According to Paul DeMott, CTO of Helium SEO, the most dangerous misinformation tactics may be the ones that don’t feel like misinformation.

“As AI gets better, some subtle ways misinformation spreads are slipping under the radar. It’s not always about fake news articles; AI can create believable fake profiles on social media that slowly push biased info,” he said. “Researchers might not be paying enough attention to how these fake accounts work to influence people over time.”

DeMott sees the issue extending beyond fake people into the message’s emotional design.

“One thing that could make it harder to spot misinformation is how AI can target specific emotions. AI can create messages that prey on people’s fears or desires, making them less likely to question what they are seeing,” he said.

He believes the next wave of misinformation solutions must match AI’s budding emotional awareness with detection systems ready for subtext.

“To counter this, we might need to look at AI solutions that can detect these subtle emotional cues in misinformation. We can use AI to analyze patterns in how misinformation spreads and identify accounts that are likely to be involved,” said DeMott.

“It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game, but by staying ahead of these evolving tactics, we have a shot at keeping the information landscape a bit cleaner.”

Hyper-Personalization and Psychological Biases

Kristie Tse, a licensed psychotherapist and founder of Uncover Mental Health Counseling, sees the danger not only in the tech but also in the psychology behind why misinformation works.

“One emerging misinformation tactic that’s being underestimated is leveraging highly personalized, AI-generated content to manipulate beliefs or opinions,” she said.

“With AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, these tailored messages can feel authentic and resonate deeply with individuals, making them more effective at spreading falsehoods.”

Tse explains how misinformation hijacks humans’ emotional wiring, leading to challenges like the speed of spread.

“The speed at which misinformation spreads is often faster than our ability to fact-check and correct it, partly because it taps into strong emotional responses — like fear or outrage — that bypass critical thinking,” she said. “Psychological factors, such as confirmation bias, play a significant role. People are more likely to believe and share misinformation that aligns with their existing beliefs, making it harder to counteract.”

But AI could help us if we build the right tools.

“On the solution side, we might be overlooking the potential for AI to create tools that proactively detect and counter misinformation in real-time before it goes viral,” said Tse.

“For example, AI could flag manipulated content, suggest reliable sources, or even simulate a debate to highlight contradictory evidence. However, these solutions need to be user-friendly and widely accessible to truly make an impact.”

AI Ecosystems That Reinforce Biases

James Francis, CEO of Artificial Integrity, warns we’re focusing too much on content moderation and not enough on context manipulation.

“We‘re not just dealing with fake articles or deepfakes anymore. We’re dealing with entire ecosystems of influence built on machine-generated content that feels real, speaks directly to our emotions, and reinforces what we already believe,” he said.

Francis notes that people usually fall for lies because the content feels emotionally right.

“What worries me most isn‘t the technology — it’s the psychology behind it. People don‘t fall for lies because they’re gullible. They fall for them because the content feels familiar, comfortable, and emotionally satisfying,” he said. “AI can now mimic that familiarity with incredible precision.”

With such an ecosystem in play, he believes the real challenge isn’t removing falsehoods but empowering people to stop and think.

“If we want to push back, we need more than just filters and fact-checkers. We need to build systems that encourage digital self-awareness,” he said. “Tools that don‘t just say ‘this is false,’ but that nudge users to pause, to question, to think. I believe AI can help there, too — if we design it with intention. The truth doesn’t need to shout. It just needs a fair shot at being heard.”

Synthetic Echo Chambers

Rob Gold, VP of marketing communications at Intermedia, raises the alarm on one of AI’s more insidious abilities: creating networks of fake credibility.

“It’s not just a fake or misinformed article, but the potential for AI to manufacture the illusion of academic or expert consensus by building large networks of interconnected fake sources,” he said.

Gold shares that AI could mimic credibility by creating articles, studies, posts — even Reddit threads — fooling users and search engines.

“It wouldn’t be hard at all to build a strong, fake echo chamber supporting a false story. It tricks us because we tend to trust information that seems backed up by many sources, and AI makes scaling that creation simple,” he said.

“Imagine trying to disprove a fake claim about, say, security flaws in cloud communications when there are half a dozen fake ‘studies’ that all agree and cite one another.”

To fight this, he says we need smarter tools able to detect citation loops and sudden explosions of information.

“These tools should flag strange patterns, like lots of new sources appearing quickly, sources that heavily cite each other but have no history, or sources that don’t link back to any established, trusted information,” Gold said.

“Ironically, seeing too many of these tightly linked, brand-new sources pointing only to each other might become the warning sign itself.”

Confusion Attacks Against the Fact-Checkers

Will Yang, head of growth and marketing at Instrumentl, sees an even deeper problem simmering: AI content design not only to trick humans but also to confuse other AIs.

“Neural Network Confusion Attacks are a sneaky new tactic emerging as AI technology advances. These attacks involve creating AI-generated content designed to confuse AI fact-checkers, tricking them into misidentifying genuine news as false,” he said.

These attacks fool AI systems, of course. But they also erode public trust in all moderation efforts.

“Researchers might underestimate the psychological impact this has, as users begin to question the reliability of trusted sources,” he said. “This erosion of trust can have real-world consequences, influencing public opinion and behavior.”

Yang suggests the solution is for AI systems to get smarter at both detection and identifying manipulative intent.

“Training these systems not only on typical data patterns but also on detecting subtle manipulation within AI-generated text can help,” he said.

“This means enhancing AI models to recognize inconsistencies often overlooked by conventional systems and focusing on anomaly detection. Expanding datasets used for AI training to include diverse scenarios could also reduce the success of these confusion attacks.”

Social Media Misinformation Is Getting Smarter. So Must We.

Ethan Mollick posted another otter video in January 2025. Watch it, and you might mistake it for cinema.

Otters on planes are fun and games. But this same technology can whip up fake videos or audio of celebrities and politicians. It can tailor emotionally precise content that slips easily into a family member’s Facebook feed. And it can create an ocean of fake articles or fictional studies to manufacture expertise overnight, leaving users none the wiser.

I work with AI in marketing regularly, but writing this piece reminded me how fast this space is moving. The truth may not need to shout, but amid louder AI-generated noise, it needs help to be heard.

Whether you’re scrolling social media feeds as a marketer or an everyday user:

• Stay aware.
• Ask questions.
• Understand how AI systems work.

Thankfully, AI isn’t only amplifying misinformation; it’s also helping us detect and manage it. We can’t outsource the truth to machines. But we can make them part of our solution.

I first tested AI tools in 2019 to automate repetitive parts of my workflow. It seemed like the perfect solution: Let the code execute the manual stuff I was too bored to do.

However, I quickly discovered hidden costs to everything I did. My automation script needed a server to live on. The server needed maintenance and monitoring. And if the backend APIs changed, my script would no longer work.

AI today has similar overhead costs, but at a far greater scale. For instance, Sam Altman recently tweeted that saying “yes” and “please” to ChatGPT cost tens of millions of dollars in computing resources.

This got me thinking: How much does AI cost businesses, and when does it make sense to integrate AI?

In this article, I’ll walk you through different kinds of AI models and how much AI solutions cost based on the model type. Whether you’re a startup founder, an SMB, or an enterprise business, you’ll learn how to budget for AI in your company.

Table of Contents

• How much does AI cost?
• How is pricing determined for AI?
• How much should you spend on AI in your business?

How much does AI cost?

AI costs vary widely depending on the type of solution, business model, data quality, model variant, usage patterns, and more.

Let’s break down the cost of AI based on four commonly used AI model types.

The Cost of Large Language Models (LLMs)

LLMs are trained on massive amounts of data (think billions of tokens) to understand and generate human-like language. I use LLMs extensively in my workflow — whether it is to prompt ChatGPT to draft an email, analyze photos through Gemini, or get content ideas from Claude.

Businesses can use LLMs across multiple departments to do things like:

• Answer user complaints through chatbots.
• Screen resumes, create SOPs, or help decide business pricing models.
• AI-assisted code development or debugging.

LLMs are powerful — but that’s also what makes them expensive. User queries get computed across resource-hungry GPUs that cost millions of dollars to train and maintain.

Here’s a rough breakup of the costs to integrate an LLM in your business.

Model as a Service

LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude fall into this category. You essentially “rent” their computing power via a natural language interface (chatbots) or API calls. Chatbots charge a monthly flat fee, while API pricing is more complex.

LLMs break down your prompt (what you send) and the output (the generated answer) into tokens. Each token is a unit of text — a complete word, part of a word, a space, or even punctuation marks like “/”.

For API calls, you get billed based on the total token usage. Here are the costs for OpenAPI, as of May 2025:

• Individual tier: $20-$200/month for restricted access to their chatbot interface.
• GPT o3 (per 1M tokens): $10.00 input; $40.00 output.
• GPT 4.1 (per 1M tokens): $2.00 input; $8.00 output
• GPT 4.1 nano (per 1M tokens): $0.100 input; $0.400 output.

Not sure how many tokens you’ll use? You can run your prompt through OpenAI’s handy tokenizer tool and get an estimate. Also, remember, any documents or past conversation history you include as context count toward your token usage!

Open-Source LLMs

Open-source models like Llama or Mistral are a cost-effective alternative to commercial LLMs like OpenAI. Accessing open-source model weights is free, so you don’t have to pay any API costs.

The main cost for open-source LLMs comes from compute + hardware requirements. Businesses can expect to pay around $200-$500/month for smaller models, but it can also range upwards of $5k-$10k/month for large-scale enterprise usage.

Of course, open-source models require a fair bit of technical expertise to implement, deploy, and update across your systems. However, fine-tuning an open-source model can cut down your overall costs significantly.

Training Your Own LLM

If your business deals with very complex or sensitive data, you can opt to develop your own AI infrastructure. LLMs require computing resources (high-end GPUs), memory (databases), and specialized engineering talent.

Training your own LLM can easily cost you between $100k – $1m for initial development. And then comes maintenance, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, fall-back logic, and model monitoring.

The Cost of Predictive Analytics Platforms

Want to know which products might become holiday bestsellers? Or if a new feature will get enough market demand? Instead of relying on your gut for answers, consider using predictive analytics platforms.

These platforms identify patterns in massive datasets like customer behaviour, historical market data, etc., to help make data-driven decisions. For instance, they can estimate potential customer churn by analyzing usage frequency and support ticket history.

Predictive analytics platforms tend to be more affordable than other AI models since they don’t need heavy computing power. Costs depend more on data quality and the number of users.

SaaS-Based Platforms

Pricing is based on users, monthly prediction volume, or on-demand usage.

Solutions like Tableau or PowerBI premium cost $15-$100/user/month. Enterprise SaaS solutions like Alteryx start at $4,950 per year for a single user. More comprehensive plans, including the Alteryx AI Platform, can range from $10,000 to $50,000 or more per year, especially for larger teams.

Custom Solutions

Basic predictive systems cost between $20k-$30k, while advanced ones start around $40k+. You can reduce development costs by using open-source libraries like scikit-learn or Tensorflow. However, expect to pay a 20-30% premium for maintaining the model and associated infrastructure.

The Cost of Recommendation Engines

Recommendation engines are an excellent way to customize user experience. They analyze user data and activity to suggest products, services, and content your customers might like next. For instance, at the end of this article, you’ll find a “related articles” list — that’s a recommendation engine in action.

These recommenders are a win-win: Customers find what they want, and companies get to boost user retention on their platform.

But what’s the actual cost for companies to understand my preferences (and yours!) so accurately? The answer depends on the kind of recommendation engine they use.

• Platform-integrated: Typically free. Many ecommerce, marketing, or CMS platforms include basic recommendation capabilities free of charge or at a minimal cost. Examples include Shopify’s product recommendation API and Hubspot’s smart content recommendations.
• Off-the-shelf: $2000 – $12,000. These are typically SaaS-based solutions, with a pay-as-you-go model. For instance, Amazon Personalize computes its pricing based on data sent to the model, training, and real-time or batch recommendations.
• Custom: $10,000 – $200,000. A custom recommendation engine might be the right fit if your business model depends on curating good content or products. These can be expensive, but you can use open-source libraries like LightFM and FAISS to build quick prototypes. Examples include Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.

The Cost of Process Automation Solutions

As I mentioned earlier, my AI journey began with process automation tools. I built a dashboard for managing access to internal company tools.

Instead of manually reviewing and approving each user request, my script would verify eligibility, grant permissions, and notify users automatically. It would also flag unusual access requests or suggest likely permissions based on data from similar teammates.

While working on this project, I discovered that process automation can handle any repetitive task. These tools can open new browser tabs, click buttons, send customized emails, log activities, and more. When you add AI to the mix, these systems can even handle decision-making and analysis based on previous data.

Intelligent process automation solutions like these have two components:

• Automation tool. You can choose a SaaS no-code solution like Make.com or a robust enterprise solution like UiPath. Make.com has a subscription-based pricing ($9-$29 per month for 10,000 ops) while UiPath operates on a per-bot pricing ($1000 – $10,000 annually per bot).
• AI models for specialized tasks: Automation tools can call on AI components to process specialized tasks such as document parsing, intent classification, etc. This is similar to having a custom LLM, priced per unit processed (i.e, per document or API call).

How is pricing determined for AI?

AI cost isn’t just about the model you choose. It’s about how often it runs, how much data it needs, and how well it scales.

Let’s look into specific factors that affect costs across AI models.

1. Data Costs

AI runs on data. The quality of your data determines how accurate your model will be. If you’re not careful with the data you supply, AI can spit out nonsense into customer communications or include its own biases.

I’ve seen internal company data get messy. Valuable data gets stored across multiple CRMs, cloud solutions, and internal tools. The result? Inconsistent, redundant, and often unreliable data.

So, while raw data is cheap to acquire, getting clean, labeled data can become expensive. Data processing involves multiple steps: collection, cleaning, labeling, and structuring into AI-friendly formats. Each step is typically charged based on data volume or hours spent. For instance, CVAT, a data cleaning platform, estimates the cost of annotating 100k images at $300k.

If your internal data isn’t sufficient, you can supplement it with external datasets from providers like Bloomberg or data marketplaces like Kaggle.

Once your data is ready, the next step is to store it. Depending on data volume, cloud data storage instances can cost anywhere between $1k-$10k a month. Your cloud storage should be able to scale with you as you collect and process new data.

Data governance is another factor to consider. I recommend budgeting around 10-20% of your costs to go towards data security and compliance with laws like GDPR.

2. Infrastructure Costs

Infrastructure costs come into play if you opt for custom AI solutions or use open-source models. SaaS platforms include these expenses in their monthly pricing, but building your own infrastructure needs a substantial budget.

For instance, high-performance Nvidia GPUs like H100 can cost between $15k and $40k per unit. Most production environments will require multiple GPUs to optimize for performance. A modest AI cluster could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You must also consider energy and power costs to manage this cluster, which can bump up the total cost by 30-40%.

Cloud solutions like Google Cloud AI or AWS are cost-effective, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Costs typically range from $2 to $80/hour, depending on the specifications of the GPU instance. A single H100 80GB GPU within the a3-highgpu-1g instance costs approximately $11.06 per hour, while an instance with 8 H100 80GB GPUs, the a3-highgpu-8g, is priced at around $88.49 per hour.

3. Training and Development Costs

Most businesses underestimate the development costs for successfully running an AI model. You’ll need to build custom integrations to make the model work with your existing systems, train the model, and then fine-tune the responses for your use case.

“The real cost isn’t the token [API calls to an LLM]. It’s everything you wrap around the model to make it usable — retries, caching, orchestration, fallbacks, evals. Anyone quoting ‘fractions of a cent’ per token is leaving out half the bill,” explains Joe Cainey, the CEO of Sunbeam.

Acquiring the right developer talent has also become competitive. Salaries for AI developers can range from $200k-$1m+. Project-based freelancers charge somewhere between $50 and $100/hour, depending on their experience and geographical location.

4. Maintenance Costs

AI tools must be updated every 3-6 months to account for newer models, data contexts, and changing business needs. Maintenance activities can include, but are not limited to:

• Performance monitoring.
• Retraining based on user interactions.
• Adjusting prompts or data for better output.
• Security and compliance updates.

Unless your business environment is highly controlled, I’d say you should expect a 15-20% maintenance overhead to keep your AI systems running accurately.

How much should you spend on AI in your business?

There is no straight answer to this question. Setting the right AI budget for your business is not about following industry averages, but about tailoring it to your needs.

Let’s break down the key factors you should consider before deciding on an AI solution.

Business Size and Budget

Budget predictions can vary depending on the scale of your business.

An IBM study indicates that larger companies plan to allocate roughly ~3% of their revenue to AI, about $33.2 million annually for a $1 billion company. In contrast, small and medium business owners I’ve interviewed budget around 5-20% of their total revenue to AI.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMB)

If you’re an SMB, consider starting with AI-integrated SaaS platforms that can target multiple departments. For example, Hubspot’s Breeze bundles AI automation for marketing analytics, customer support, and sales into one tool. This integrated approach to AI delivers better ROI than maintaining your own infrastructure, especially for teams with limited technical resources.

Source

Of course, this decision also depends on the nature of your business. If your business deals with sensitive data or has AI-dependent operations, you’ll likely need a custom model. Depending on your budget and business priorities, you can choose an open-source solution or build a proprietary one.

Roman Georgio, the CEO of Coral Protocol and ex-Camel AI founding member, shared his thoughts on this: “I would pay a bit more to use Claude if I were building a SaaS tool like Cursor since my product depends on the best possible LLM output.

“But if I’m just performing text summarization for an AI-powered CRM, I’d optimize costs and use [an open-source solution like] Mistral or Qwen.”

Enterprises

Enterprise budgets can range in billions. Oracle spent $3B in Q125 for the cloud infrastructure that supports AI training. At this scale, enterprises typically adopt a hybrid strategy — using custom infrastructure with third-party or in-house APIs for sensitive data and SaaS platforms like Breeze for specific departments.

Many enterprises use their collective bargaining power to negotiate agreements with AI vendors. These agreements typically have a minimum lock-in period where you get volume-based discounts and early access to new platform features. For instance, a senior AI leader shared with me that they spend $100k/month on GitHub Copilot licenses for ~7000+ team members.

Integration Complexity

Here’s something you probably didn’t expect me to say: Getting your systems ready for AI might cost as much as (or sometimes more than) the AI solution itself.

Implementing AI requires you to address any inefficiencies in your systems.

Bad data? You’ll first need to standardize it to reduce costs and the risk of hallucinations. Disconnected systems? You’ll need to build custom integrations with your AI tool.

Standardizing your systems is not just an AI expense, though. It improves your overall operations with efficient reporting, easier training cycles, and smoother integrations in the future.

So, budget for integration costs, but also look at the overall business value.

Risk Tolerance

Another thing to consider is your business’s risk tolerance. Souvik Roy, senior AI development manager at Standard Chartered, highlights this as a significant concern since they deal with financial data.

“Before automating any processes, the first thing we consider is whether potential damage is reversible. We don’t want to run into compliance issues or potential fines because we tried to automate something,” he told me.

For instance, if a model generates “You have to…” instead of “You must…”, the difference is usually negligible. However, this can lead to critical misunderstandings in industries like law or finance.

Companies with low risk tolerance should allocate additional budget to safety guardrails, testing, and human oversight.

When (and When Not) to Invest in AI Solutions

While researching AI costs, I saw a clear pattern: AI is slowly moving from small department-specific experiments to enabling organization-wide shifts.

Companies aren’t asking if they should adopt AI, but rather how to integrate it.

Whether it is a managed solution like Hubspot Breeze or a custom implementation with API calls, there are AI solutions for each business level. Hubspot’s State of AI Marketing Report reveals 75% of companies implementing AI have gotten a positive ROI.

When I spoke to Cainey, I liked his three-step decision tree for integrating AI solutions:

1. Does it scale linearly with headcount?

2. Is it predictable enough for a model to handle?

3. Is it safe to be wrong 5% of the time?

If yes to all three, it’s on the roadmap. If not, it’s either human-led or skipped entirely.

My advice? Resist the temptation to automate or include AI in every business process. Start small, measure usage, and then scale your AI investment as you validate the ROI.