Chad Hetherington

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Happy 2026!

As we settle into a new year, let’s take a moment to look back at our most popular Brafton Blog posts from 2025. Further than that, I’ll be grouping posts into top themes and topics to gain a deeper understanding of what marketers thought about and worked through throughout 2025 — mostly for fun, but also to help identify what might pique readers’ interests as we kick off 2026 (and what topics you might need to catch up on as you prepare for a fresh Q1).

Here are the top themes our readers were most interested in in 2025, with links to some of their favorite posts.

Theme #1: Understanding AI in Marketing & Compliance

This theme doesn’t come as much of a surprise. We’re three (almost four) years into the AI boom, and the topic is as contentious as ever. While the adoption waters have begun to calm slightly, there is still tons of pressure butting from various angles. At the same time, we see fairly regular accounts of big brands blundering initiatives by not properly reviewing AI content before publishing, or failing to disclose AI use altogether, resulting in viral scandals that never fail to spark heated debates.

Those pressures and public mistakes culminate over time, and really get people thinking about their own approaches to AI, considering how others are employing tools, deciding what’s best for them and learning how to deploy and use those tools responsibly.

It’s fitting, then, that a post all about the ethics of AI and AI disclaimers topped out our 2025 list as our most popular blog entry of the year. Other AI-related posts that readers kept coming back to dealt with Google’s AI Overviews, how they work, and how to optimize for them, as well as our hub article for our inaugural AI in Marketing survey:

Theme #2: Reviewing Core Marketing Strategy & Fundamentals

Essentials never falter, including in marketing. In 2025, marketers were re-grounding themselves in the fundamentals of the work itself — perhaps because of continued AI adoption, or simply because they needed a refresher on the core cogs that move marketing needles.

Readers found lots of value across these five posts, all about various content marketing fundamentals — from the basic marketing functions to anti-fluff writing and more:

Theme #3: Making PPC Work Smarter, Not Harder

I was pleased to see a blog about cross-departmental synergy enter our top 10 list at position seven — not just because I think it’s a valuable topic, but because we also wrote a whole white paper about it! In fact, “From Friction to Flow: Building Synergy Between PPC, CRM, and Sales Operations (8 Common Challenges + Solutions)” is based on that white paper, offering a taste of the valuable takeaways available in the full version before readers commit to the free download.

This post’s popularity signals that marketers spent time last year navigating real-world friction between tools and teams. Beyond simply asking “How do I get leads?”, more and more folks want to know why their in-place systems — or lack thereof — break after those leads come through.

Focusing on just PPC for a moment, readers were also interested in discovering new pay-per-click tools to add to their martech stacks — and more tools = more reason for that cross-departmental synergy.

If you’ve been wondering those same things, check out the full blog posts:

Theme #4: Refining Strategy on a Popular Channel: Email Marketing & Outreach

Email has stuck around as a core marketing tool because it still works — if you know how to execute. But setting a successful strategy in motion takes some know-how (and, evidently, some humor). 

Email as a marketing channel is more complex and crowded than it’s ever been. Without the right approach, it’s easy to feel like you’re clawing at the void each time you click send on a new campaign. Marketers embracing a cold outreach strategy were interested in levelling up their emails to get more engagement, which almost always starts with the subject line.

To pad their intimidating cold email outreach tactics and take some of that unnerving edge off, marketers also wanted to know how to soften their sends with humor. These two email-related articles were our #2 and #8 most popular in 2025, respectively:

Theme #5: Social Media, Digital Advertising & Audio

Social media is a steadfast marketing channel where strategies can vary widely between platforms, which may explain why marketers were keen to read up on best practices for different channels.

Being able to justify spend and with clear results is more important than ever. Top posts in this category helped marketers not just generate ideas on how to do social media well, but also what objectively ‘good’ social media habits and metrics look like, so they can use that information to inform their own strategies.

Explore strategies for gaining Facebook followers, curating your LinkedIn presence and posts, podcasting and the social media metrics you should be tracking:

Theme #6: Learning From Leaders

This sixth and final theme is all about learning from the world around us. What are other brands doing well? What can they teach us about modern marketing? And, how can we apply their successful strategies to our own campaigns?

These three popular posts offer snapshots into the likes of Nike, Häagen-Dazs, Barbie and more, distilling the most essential information and exploring dependable marketing formulas that you can build into your next initiative:

Brafton’s Top 20 Posts

OK, now to bring it all together into a complete and clean list of Brafton’s top 20 most popular posts from 2025 (including how many views each received across Brafton’s domains):

  1. 5 AI Disclaimer Examples To Keep Your Content Compliant – 46,399
  2. What Is LinkedIn Optimization? – 32,965
  3. 20 Cold Email Subject Line Examples — That Actually Get Responses (Infographic) – 32,885
  4. 30 Funny Email Sign Offs – 32,379
  5. Social Advertising Benchmarks for 2026 – 31,623
  6. From Friction to Flow: Building Synergy Between PPC, CRM and Sales Operations (8 Common Challenges + Solutions) – 30,997
  7. AI in Marketing: What Marketers Really Think – 29,525
  8. Infographic: The 7 Functions of Marketing – 27,596
  9. Fundamentals of Marketing | Marketing Basics 101 – 25,892
  10. 8 Types of Podcasts: The Complete Guide to Audio Content Marketing (Infographic) – 22,302
  11. Nike Marketing Strategy: Secrets to Success – 22,133
  12. The 10 Best PPC Tools in 2026: Free and Paid – 18,172
  13. What Makes Google’s AI Overviews Tick? – 18,134
  14. How To Get Followers on Facebook in 2026 – 17,555
  15. 6 Marketing One Sheet Examples to Model Yours After – 16,533
  16. 3 Anti-Fluff Approaches to Content Writing – 16,350
  17. 6 Real-Life Target Audience Examples to Help You Define Your Own (B2B and B2C) – 16,205
  18. 5 of the Best Types of LinkedIn Content to Post (Infographic) – 15,065
  19. Different Types of Search Engines – 14,437
  20. 6 Companies With Good Marketing Strategies – 13,520

What’s the Tone for 2026?

It’s funny: When you’re in the thick of marketing — especially lately — it really does feel like things change far too quickly to keep up with. And to some extent, they do, but you’ve heard the cliche “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Looking back at our most popular posts of 2025, these themes signal that most readers are simply interested in nailing down the basics and executing them well. Maybe that’s always been the case, or maybe more folks are finding their way back to the fundamentals in the wake of AI everything.

Whatever the case, the tone for this year might just be all about digging up our roots to check in on them, see if they’re healthy and repair where needed before we bury ourselves back into the work for an even more authentic and empowering 2026.