To do marketing well in 2025, you need to do four things well:

In 2025, the marketing field faces many challenges: traffic dividends have peaked, consumer demand has changed, and brand growth pressure has increased. In such an environment, how can brands achieve sustainable growth within a limited budget? This article explores how brands can achieve the marketing goal of integrating brand and effect through precise insights, innovative content and intelligent technology from the four dimensions of "wide effect, long-term effect, effectiveness and efficiency", combined with Kuaishou's marketing cases, and provides ideas and inspiration for the marketing layout in 2025.

The marketing battlefield in 2025 is full of challenges. On the one hand, the Internet traffic dividend has peaked, the cost of acquiring customers continues to rise, and the pressure of ROI is like a mountain that stands in front of every brand. How to attract users and achieve conversions to the maximum extent within a limited budget has become a difficult problem that all marketers must face.

On the other hand, consumers’ demands are also undergoing profound changes. Their consumption behavior has become more rational, and they hope that every expenditure is worthwhile. At the same time, they also expect to gain more emotional resonance and life value experience from brands.

In such a market environment, brands need to find certainty amidst many uncertainties and drive sustainable growth. However, this is not an easy task.

01 Brands face challenges in growth and efficiency improvement

Recently, when I was communicating with some brands about their plans for 2025, I found that they generally faced some common problems, which also constitute the challenges that marketing needs to focus on in 2025.

One is that short-term growth and brand building need to be balanced.

In the era of stock competition, the competition between brands is more intense. If a brand fails to achieve performance growth in the short term, it will face huge external market and internal assessment pressure. Therefore, short-term growth is the basic guarantee for the survival and development of a brand and cannot be ignored.

However, if a brand only relies on short-term traffic to drive growth without paying attention to brand building, it is like a castle in the air with an unstable foundation. The growth brought by short-term traffic is often difficult to sustain. Once the traffic investment is reduced or competitors adopt more aggressive strategies, the brand will fall into a growth bottleneck.

Only through long-term brand building can we establish solid brand awareness in the minds of consumers, form brand potential and achieve sustainable growth.

Therefore, brands must both keep their feet on the ground and look up to the stars.

The second is that there is an urgent need to improve efficiency.

In 2025, as the uncertainty of the external environment increases, the operating risks faced by brands are also increasing. In this context, it is particularly important to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and optimize resource allocation.

The rapid development of AI technology has provided new possibilities for brand efficiency improvement: AI can help brands accurately locate target users, create and distribute content more efficiently, and provide a scientific basis for marketing decisions through data analysis and prediction.

However, this also poses new challenges to brands, namely how to quickly learn and apply AI, integrate it into the entire marketing chain, and truly achieve efficiency improvements.

In general, in 2025, brands must not only achieve good short-term advertising results, but also take into account long-term brand value and improve operational efficiency. Ultimately, all of these depend on the word "effectiveness".

02 In 2025, brand marketing must achieve four "effects"

Recently, Kuaishou made a year-end summary titled "Effective, Effective, Winning 2025". Through the four dimensions of "wide effect, long-term effect, effectiveness, and high efficiency", it directly hit the pain points of brands in the short-term and long-term, in terms of investment and operation, and provided solutions. This summary also cooperated with intangible cultural heritage to create a series of creative cases, providing brands with inspiring practical paths.

Next, based on the case of Kuaishou, let’s take a look at how brands will solve the problem of “efficiency” in 2025.

1. Broad effect: amplify the volume and seize the mind

Over the past year or so, "long-termism" has become a high-frequency word in the marketing field. Its core is to get rid of the path dependence of short-term traffic and turn to long-term brand building to seize the minds of users. And Guangxiao is the key to building long-term potential through brand building and driving sustainable growth.

Specifically, brands need to take advantage of key nodes and major events to break down circle barriers, reach a wider audience, and create greater brand influence.

During the 2024 Paris Olympics, Kuaishou teamed up with China Unicom to launch the "Champions Are Coming" interview program, creating highlights of the event through the highlights of athletes winning championships, and achieved a total exposure of 1.4 billion times.

At the same time, China Unicom used the interactive functions of the Kuaishou platform, such as the torch venue and guessing venue, to issue brand coupons, completing the excess coupon issuance task by 41%, and driving the brand word search volume to surge 105 times.

The program not only expanded the brand's voice, but also deeply integrated the brand concept of "having dreams and direction" with the spirit of champions, successfully occupying the minds of users and achieving product and effect integration.

Another brand, Yili, took advantage of the Olympic content ecosystem on the Kuaishou platform and created a "cloud home" for its loyal users through innovative interactive gameplay. The program eventually received more than 14.4 billion views, and related topics topped the Kuaishou Index Food and Beverage List, becoming the double crown of event marketing influence.

2. Long-term effect: user sedimentation and promotion of conversion

In the current social marketing environment, whether it is short video promotion or live streaming, the success of a brand depends not only on whether the content can bring high exposure, but also on how to efficiently convert traffic into actual sales.

Long-term effectiveness means that while brands pursue short-term exposure on the platform, they must also focus on continuously driving sales conversions through content ecology and user connections.

Beijing Tong Ren Tang combined Wu Zi Yan Zong Wan with sports events through cooperation with Kuaishou Village BA to create the innovative concept of "energy management". The brand was deeply integrated into the event scene through content forms such as challenge competitions, theme songs and on-site material displays. The number of related topics played exceeded 100 million times, which increased the brand exposure.

At the same time, through content co-creation and user interaction, Tong Ren Tang has established a deep emotional connection with its target users, successfully transforming its brand image from a traditional "drug" to a more dynamic "healthy lifestyle partner." It also laid a solid foundation for subsequent user accumulation and e-commerce conversion.

Another case is that through cooperation with Kuaishou Village Olympics, Jiaduobao demonstrated how to achieve a win-win situation in brand voice and sales through three-dimensional scene marketing.

Online, Jiaduobao launched the #村奥宝你出彩 topic challenge, which was played over 1.23 billion times, strengthening brand awareness; offline, the brand deeply connected with users through puppet interactions, product placements and on-site event displays.

In addition, Jiaduobao embedded product purchase links in the live broadcast room, allowing users to complete purchases while watching the game, shortening the conversion path. The online and offline marketing approach has brought significant sales growth to the brand and accumulated long-term user assets.

3. Effective: Build a traffic pool to achieve brand-effect integration

Marketing must be effective, which is what every marketer often says, but it is not easy to be effective. The core of an effective marketing model is that the brand can guide high-quality traffic within the platform to the outside of the site through refined operation of the user traffic pool, thus realizing a full-link closed loop from interest triggering to consumption conversion.

The case of FAW Bestune Xiaoma operating on Kuaishou is a good example of how to do "effective" marketing.

In terms of content operation, Pentium Xiaoma has built a multi-dimensional content matrix through the Kuaishou platform, including "celebrity factory visits", "vertical KOL store visits live broadcasts", "brand self-broadcasts" and "dealer linkage".

During the live broadcast, Kuaishou anchors significantly increased user participation through professional car model interpretations, interactive raffles and welfare distribution. The number of viewers in the live broadcast room reached 36.47 million, and the total exposure was as high as 272 million, effectively accumulating a traffic pool.

At the same time, Kuaishou's powerful platform resource integration promoted the efficient conversion of traffic. From the widgets in the live broadcast room to the hot list resource position of the platform, to the special return live broadcast of "520 Confession Day", Kuaishou continued the popularity of the event through hard advertising resources + super operation positions, and continued to release car purchase policies, achieving a total order volume of more than 14,000 for the Pentium Pony.

The model of content operation + platform resource integration + full-link closed loop has helped Pentium Pony build a long-term operating traffic pool and also provided possibilities for in-depth operations for subsequent users.

4. Efficiency: Intelligent drive, cost reduction and efficiency improvement

AI technology has penetrated the marketing field to a great extent and has become the core driving force for brands to achieve efficient growth. By using AI, companies can efficiently create content, more accurately match people and goods, significantly reduce operating costs, and improve delivery efficiency.

The transformation of AI from an "auxiliary tool" to a "core engine" makes it an indispensable tool for future brand marketing. This is the value brought by efficiency.

Over the past year, Kuaishou has made impressive progress in intelligent business applications, building a full-link AI solution from material production and distribution to acceptance.

For example, Kuaishou's AIGC technology has achieved an average of 100,000 commercial short videos per day, and the AIGC video customer penetration rate has reached 24%. At the same time, the application of digital human live broadcast and marketing large language model has greatly improved content production efficiency and conversion rate, helping brands to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In Meituan Waimai's "18 God Coupon Festival" project, Kuaishou used intelligent resource optimization to help Meituan Waimai achieve accurate reach of innovative gameplay such as search recommendations and interactive magic watches, and facilitated the efficient conversion of more than 14,000 orders.

In addition, Kuaishou launched the "Live Again Reborn ID" public welfare project during the Qingming Festival in 2024. The project restored the voice of the deceased anchor Xiaohui through AI technology, carried out an 8-hour live broadcast, and popularized high-reaction emergency knowledge.

This technological innovation not only continues the experience passed on by the deceased with his life, but also calls on the society to pay attention to the truck driver group. It has successfully covered 9.57 million online users and had a total exposure of 1.21 billion, demonstrating the potential of Kuaishou's AI ecosystem in content creation and marketing.

The above Kuaishou cases reflect the significance of "wide-reaching, long-term, effective and efficient" in brand marketing. By accurately understanding consumer needs, innovating content formats, optimizing resource allocation and driving intelligent technology, Kuaishou has helped brands achieve the marketing goal of integrating brand and effect, while also promoting the vigorous development of its own ecosystem.

In the third quarter of 2024, Kuaishou's daily active users exceeded 400 million, a record high, and the total user usage time increased by 7.3% year-on-year. At the same time, online marketing service revenue increased by 20.0% year-on-year to 17.6 billion yuan. These achievements show the strong resilience of Kuaishou's user and content ecology, and also reflect the vitality and growth potential of Kuaishou's business ecology.

Conclusion

To make a good marketing layout for 2025, the key is to grasp the essence of "effectiveness" and make concerted efforts in the four directions of "wide effect, long-term effect, effectiveness and high efficiency".

To sum up, "wide effect" means expanding the coverage and influence of marketing through big ideas or big events, reaching a wider target audience, and seizing the minds of users;

"Long-term" means converting brand awareness into sustained commercial value based on content ecology and user connections;

"Effective" means building a traffic pool, operating users in a refined manner, and opening up the entire chain from interest triggering to consumption conversion;

"Efficiency" means using AI technology to drive people-goods matching and content production, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and achieve precise delivery.

By grasping the "four effects", brands are not only building sustainable growth momentum for the future, but also responding to market challenges through systematic innovation paths and seeking growth certainty in an uncertain environment.