Future of Digital Marketing: Trends and Insights for 2024
For modern day businesses, digital marketing is the new norm. The key to business marketing, growth and establishing an impactful brand presence are AI tools, personalisation and other marketing trends that businesses use to make their product stand on social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.
In this article, we’ll explore the digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2024.
Social Media Trends
Social media platforms gain new users every day, and all such platforms battle for their users’ attention. Businesses need to examine which particular platform is gaining popularity overtime and create effective marketing strategies accordingly. For example, with the recent and continuous drama with X (formerly Twitter), users are now directing their attention and time to platforms like Threads and Bluesky. Businesses with up-to-date digital marketing strategies can follow suit and make sure that they reach the maximum amount of people on various social media apps.
Retention of Audiences
In recent years, marketers have seen the engagement rate on organic social media activity decline. While there are many reasons for this – content quality, time of day, device – people may shift away from engagement to focus on retention in 2024.
To combat this, brands have been creating fantastic social media campaigns built around entertaining, educating, and informing audiences. The key is to drive engagement by being playful and creative.
Social media platforms are looking to enable this by testing longer-form videos – for example, TikTok will introduce 15-minute-long uploads – and focusing more on how brands not only engage their audiences but retain viewers. Marketers can even stay updated through Tiktok’s new analytics options for Reels, where you can look at your audience retention rates, watch time, and content replay.
Personalisation
Among the digital marketing trends expected to accelerate in 2024 is the movement toward not just personalisation, but hyper-personalization, thanks in part to new AI tools.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney help marketers come up with campaign concept ideas and social post ideas, and help with copy generation and text-to-image generation.
In parallel to this, social media platforms are integrating AI into their platforms. For example:
- TikTok enables you to customize your feed based on AI.
- Instagram is experimenting with AI-generated stickers.
- LinkedIn is offering premium users AI features such as AI-powered profile writing assistance and ‘Top Choice Jobs’ signals.
- YouTube is experimenting with Dream Track for Shorts and Music AI tools.
AI & Business Growth
Marketing departments are closest to the consumer, they can be proactive and push forward with an AI strategy. They can use the knowledge gained over the customer journey to identify the opportunities AI can bring to enhance what a business already has.
When choosing an AI project, marketers need to decide whether they want to optimize processes, accelerate production, or transform the business model:
- Optimize: Make your internal processes more efficient (e.g. using ChatGPT to write marketing briefs).
- Accelerate: How could you use AI to make your existing products or services better? Look at the metrics that you could use and ask if AI would add enough customer value to increase the price of the product.
- Transform: Could you use AI to create a new product, service, or business model? This is a great opportunity to go around the organization and have a conversation about the problems that people in the organization face and how AI could solve these problems.
SEO Trends
SEO is changing, and its future looks to be more user-centric and technology-driven. In 2024, those changes could be drastic as AI and machine learning help search engines deliver results based on user intent.
PPC Trends
With such fierce competition for customers, paid advertising offers a way for companies to target their core audience with relevant messages. What makes the pay-per-click (PPC) model so enticing is that marketers can control their spending and stick to a budget.
By understanding these 2024 digital marketing trends and predictions, your business can stay ahead of the curve and look for ways to better connect with your audience across channels, messaging, and more. The one thing that is clear in this digital era is that marketers must embrace AI to be effective in their jobs. Even if your role is not impacted by AI, it will be in the future. So, start learning about the technology and start using some of the platforms.