What smart business will be choosing next year
As we enter the last quarter of 2024, we can see that the pace of technological change continues to grow, reshaping the way businesses work and interact with their customers. From the rise of AI in the content field, to the need for digital sustainability and better web accessibility, 2025 is set to herald a wave of change across multiple sectors.
In an increasingly competitive digital economy, the businesses that embrace innovation will be the best placed to meet the growing and increasingly niche demands of customers, deliver improved experiences and stay ahead of the competition into 2025 and beyond. Let’s take a look at the innovations set to define 2025 and see what they mean for businesses.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Content
As the digital landscape evolves, the need for content grows both in terms of volume and specificity. The content supply chain – an umbrella term for the process of creating, distributing and management of content – is ever more important for businesses who want to grow. Demand for content has doubled over the past two years, but in the next two is expected to grow twentyfold. The need to deliver content at scale is only going to increase and it is going to be necessary for businesses to think about how they meet this need.
AI is revolutionising the way content is delivered by effortlessly automating tasks that previously required significant time investment. AI tools such as Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini are allowing businesses to produce and distribute content 80% faster while reducing the cost by approximately 75%. Brands are therefore able to create personalised content and meet the growing demands from the market with speed and efficiency. A cost reduction of 70% for translation means that businesses seeking to expand globally are better served than ever as we head towards 2025.
Carbon Saver: Sustainability Meets UX
Increasing numbers of website creators are using Dark Mode wherever it is possible, in most cases for its aesthetic appeal and – for many users – greater readability and accessibility. Not everybody realises that it is also beneficial for sustainability, using less energy to deliver…. So you could certainly call this a “win-win”.
By reducing eye-strain and offering greater readability in low-light environments, Dark Mode is already considered a benefit for user comfort. More people should know, however, that it also delivers a 63% reduction in battery usage. Statistics are pointing to a continuing growth in uptake, with Dark Mode/Carbon Saver being the preferred viewing mode of 67% of TikTok users, 79% of Mac users and a massive 85% of people who use e-readers.
As we look towards the new year, it is as good as certain that demand for Dark Mode will increase, or at least a button that gives the user a choice as can be found on www.underscore.co.uk. We certainly see this as a must-have for businesses that wish to meet growing user expectations whilst contributing to an energy-conscious future.
Accessibility in the Digital Age
User accessibility, or visibility of content, has grown in importance for businesses in recent years, with a growing number of people only willing to do business with companies that behave in an ethical fashion. More than one billion people globally live with disabilities, making accessibility a non-negotiable priority. Recent studies have shown as many as 98% of homepages are failing accessibility tests, so there is clearly a need for brands to refocus their standards in this area. Even if the numbers make it feel like you’re in good company, the inverse is also true: improving on accessibility will quickly set your business apart in a positive way.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s accessibility guidelines are built around four key principles: sites and pages should be:
- Perceivable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust
To meet these principles, content should meet certain standards. For perceivability, all content should be accessible to all users, meaning alternatives such as alt text for images, and captions for videos are provided. Operability requires that all functionality on a site is easy to navigate and that this can be done without a mouse; keyboard navigability matters. Understandability is fairly self-explanatory but means that the site needs to be easy to follow and have an intuitive layout, while robustness demands that clean, uncluttered code is used to make the process easy for screen readers and other assistive technology.
A good example of accessibility in action is the recent digital re-brand for Academia, a leading sustainable multi-service IT solutions provider. The visual identity refresh included a vibrant new colour palette and fonts that passed the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) highest standards of compliance for legibility and contrast.
Meeting these standards can take time, but it is worth bearing all of the above in mind. Adding alt-text to images and captions to videos will become second nature, and producing content that is friendly to assistive technology is a skill worth learning now. As we move into 2025, businesses that reach out to and value a wider range of users are the ones that will have greater success.
The Power of Schema Markup in SEO
Google has recently pushed live its latest update, which is intended to correct what many creators considered to be an overly-harsh downranking of sites in the September 2023 update. As of this moment, and it is early days, many site owners feel like the issues haven’t fully been overcome, so it is all the more important that brands are using the full gamut of tools available to them. This has to include schema markup, a tool that is often left unused and which can make a real difference to your performance on search engines.
Schema markup is a form of microdata which helps search engines better understand your website content and makes it easier for those search engines to display relevant information to their users. Websites that use schema markup see consistent improvement in their results on search pages; research has shown that those sites that use it rank, on average, four places higher than the same site would without. That’s not a boost any business should be content to do without.
The main four types of markup all have their part to play in generating more meaningful search results. Logo Markup ensures that when you are displayed in Google’s knowledge panel, it will be with your correct branded logo; Local Business Markup ensures that potential customers will find your contact details and other salient information more easily; and Review and Product Markup both improve visibility by making sure ratings and information about your products or services are prominently displayed. As we approach the turn of the year, using every tool available to you – including schema markup – will be more and more important.
Localisation: The Key to Global Engagement
Adapting content to fit specific local and cultural contexts – also known as localisation – is an increasingly essential consideration for businesses looking to engage with a global audience. This can be as simple as Americanising content by changing spellings to their American versions, or as extensive as translating your website into another language. Other ways you can localise your content include making references to national holidays and even running promotions connected to them. You may also consider how jokes and pop cultural references may fail to translate across borders, and seek to rework them for a different audience.
It is certainly worth localising your content if you wish to capture an audience in another country. Studies have consistently shown that it increases website traffic by as much as 70% and allows brands to rank higher in new markets. Using accurate translations and culturally relevant content will permit you to rank in regional search engines such as Baidu in China or Naver in South Korea, rather than relying on users in those regions using non-native search engines. Building trust with customers in new regions will pay off in the long-term and is certainly something worth considering with 2025 on the horizon.
Those who invest will have a better chance
To fully capitalise on the opportunities offered by such innovations, businesses must nonetheless also focus on the current challenges in the content supply chain. These include, but are not limited to, outdated technology, staffing shortages and inefficiency in processes. Integration of the innovations we’ve mentioned, along with a review of approaches to take account of the aforementioned challenges, will equip a business to deal with the explosion in demand.
Some regions will fare better than others it appears in this evolution. Meta is not releasing its multimodal Llama 3 AI model for video, audio, images in the EU, and has suspended its AI assistant, saying restrictions on the training of large language models make it unworkable.
Apple Intelligence has also suspended the European roll-out of its generative AI tools, saying the EU’s Digital Markets Act compromises privacy by forcing them to let third parties into their systems.
The UK, Japan, India and the Middle East are all going for light-touch regimes, judging the technology as it evolves and hoping to capture the economic prize. The US is fully on board and China has made AI the central pillar of its bid for global technology supremacy.
To summarise, we believe that tools and strategies from AI to schema markup, with an eye on localisation, will be crucial for ambitious businesses seeking to meet the needs of an increasingly hungry content market in 2025, and going forward successfully from there.