LOCALiQ’s Digital Marketing Insights: What Worked in 2025

Whether you’re a sole trader, running a small business or working as part of a marketing team, now is the time to plan your marketing strategy for 2026. Reflecting on the wins and lessons from your recent marketing campaigns is a great place to start and can set you up for future success. Asking the question “what worked well” is an insightful way to pinpoint what to focus on in the new year.

At LOCALiQ, a digital marketing agency for local businesses, we specialise in running digital marketing campaigns for businesses like yours. This means we have a wealth of data and insights from thousands of digital marketing campaigns to pass on to you. Let’s unpack what worked most for our customers in 2025.

1.  Using both social media advertising and display advertising campaigns will allow you to reach a broader audience

Potential customers travel through stages before deciding to purchase. We call this the buying journey. It is often depicted as a model called the Sales Funnel. Meeting customer needs at each stage of the sales funnel (or buying journey) is crucial because it helps build trust, improves engagement, and most importantly, increases the chances of them purchasing your products or services.

Using a combination of social media ads and display ads is a powerful marketing strategy to reach your potential customers at various stages of the buying journey. Display ads are shown across websites and apps, while social media ads target audiences on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. When used together they can reach a broader range of potential customers in places where they spend time online. In fact, campaigns using both social and display ads saw up to 38% higher return on investment compared to single-channel campaigns.

Success Stories: The Basildon Academies

A multi-channel campaign led to success for our client The Basildon Academies, when advertising their Year 6 and Sixth Form Open Evenings. LOCALiQ’s awareness solution drove 1700+ website clicks and 2400+ social engagements. The campaigns also boosted brand awareness for the client by delivering 147k+ impressions.

Read the full case study here: The Basildon Academies | Success Story by LOCALiQ UK

2.The ‘Viewable Time’ metric allows businesses to measure their brand awareness

Brand awareness is an important marketing metric. It refers to how familiar existing and future customers are with your business and how well they recognise your brand. Having good brand awareness is crucial for building trust and driving sales, however, it can be tricky to measure.

This is where the Viewable Time metric can be particularly helpful. Unlike impressions which is a count of how many times an ad is shown, viewable time measures the length of time an ad is actively seen.

As part of one of the largest publishers of local news in the UK, Newsquest Media Group, we’re backed by trusted newsbrands. LOCALiQ digital marketing campaigns land in places where people are engaged and receptive. That means our advertisers messages don’t just get seen, they get remembered. We don’t just count impressions; we measure the time ads are actively seen. This proves that our environments hold attention and build familiarity in a way others can’t.

Success Stories: Owen Hearing

Our client Owen Hearing were able to achieve 195 hours of Viewable Time using a LOCALiQ Awareness Solution as part a digital marketing campaign. They totalled over 130K + impressions and 200+ potential customers clicked through to their website.

3. Ads placed on trusted platforms consistently generate measurable marketing results

If you had to pick one word that makes or breaks a brand today, it would be trust. Building trust helps create long-term relationships with your customers; When people trust your business they are more likely to buy from you, stay loyal over time, and recommend you to others.

When a brand advertises in an already trusted environment, people transfer some of that trust to them. News brands are seen as both credible and competent, and the numbers speak for themselves:

• Advertisers see a 68% uplift in brand trust when advertising with news brands compared to other environments (IPA Databank 2012-2022, UK for-profit cases).
• News brands are seen as 2.4x more reliable and 1.9x more factual when compared to social media (Differentology 2023, Tapestry 2023).
• 81% of Brits say they trust the news and information they see in their local newspapers and websites. (Source: Trust Local Homepage – News Media Association)

LOCALiQ are proud to provide trusted, community-rooted journalism through more than 200 local titles in print and online. Our advertisers’ ads and campaigns appear alongside professional, trustworthy journalism, not next to questionable or low-quality content. This boosts the perception of your brand.

With over 70% of purchase decisions starting with an online search. [syngrid.com], digital marketing will be even more important for businesses looking to grow and reach new customers in 2026.

Contact us today to discover how you can attract more customers through trusted local news partnerships as part of your marketing strategy. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to boost your engagement.

Meet the Author

Leah Davies

Leah is a marketing manager with over 10 years of experience in advertising and marketing. She holds a Diploma in Digital Marketing and a specialist certification in Social Media, both awarded by the DMI. Leah helps businesses build stronger connections with their audiences through smart and effective digital strategies.

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