Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends for 2024
Written by Erin Cranney, Paid Media Executive
It can be hard to keep up to date with the latest innovations and technology trends in the ever changing world of digital marketing.
In this blog, we are sharing our top 10 trend predictions for 2024 and how you can utilise them to maximise your digital marketing this year!
1. Use AI and Automation To Boost Your Digital Strategy
AI has been buzzing around the digital marketing world in the last few years, taking over the conversation online both in the events industry and in the wider marketing community.
AI is not just a buzzword, it is a key tool that will revolutionise your digital marketing, and has opened up a huge range of opportunities for marketers.
By using AI automation, you can free up time throughout the day to focus on higher priority tasks as well as a variety of other important jobs.
AI and automation tools can streamline your day to day and reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
With the introduction of text based generative AI, the new AI powerhouse ChatGPT, you can create copy for paid ads or organic content, conduct customer research, revamp your existing content, and so much more.
Embracing AI and automation is a strategic necessity for a future where innovation, efficiency, and personalised experience is crucial to your marketing strategy.
2. The Uprising of First Party Data
With third party cookies phased out, first-party data provides an unmatched advantage for marketers.
First party data provides complete transparency and allows for ad delivery to be direct between customer and brand.
While third party cookies make assumptions about what customers/ audiences want, first-party cookies can provide true personalisation between audience and advertisers.
First party data allows you to personalise the consumer experience and improve targeting – you can provide them with ads that are related to their previous interests and pull lists of previous visitors and offer them highly relevant ads to an audience you know they will be interested in.
First party data allows you insight to your audience – you can analyse customer activity within your website and learn what works and what doesn’t to harness consistent consumers.
Maximise your targeting with first party data – utilise lead forms in your marketing that request primary data from your customers.
3. Invest in Short Form Video Content
Short form video content is crucial for engaging and converting your audiences through your ads, providing them with information compiled into short, snappy videos will generate traffic across platforms.
For example; Tik Tok has pioneered short-form video and has generated 1.7 bilion users across 7 years, with 1.1 billion of these being active monthly users.
TikTok is one of the most prolific social media platforms of this time and you should be utilising in your marketing mix.
Video content across this platform can acquire millions of viewers in a short space of time, with potentially hundreds of thousands of convertors within days.
96% of users prefer short-form video content compared to ads that take longer than 60 seconds, as they believe their interest in the ad falls short. (Wyzowl)
Short form video also has the highest ROI, sometimes peaking as high as 30% across TikTok..
Video content is more likely to go viral compared to its competitors, and is also more likely to be watched the whole way through.
4. Advertising Through the Live Streaming Lens
Live streaming across social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook has shown to drive engagement and increase brand awareness among millennials and Gen Z.
Offering potential customers to engage with the product, talk about the product, and make purchases all while watching the livestream.
Live streaming can increase audience engagement, creates connections with your audience through personalisation, boosts reach and visibility, increases your brand authenticity and trust, improved analytics and insights into your audiences behaviour.
5. The Guide to Mobile Optimisation
Investing in responsive design makes for a seamless and engaging mobile experience, ensuring that content is accessible, quick, and user-friendly to drive more traffic and conversions..
Mobile optimisation will improve the user experience, increase engagement and time spent on the site and help gain a competitive edge.
In the past year 33% of global marketers have chosen to invest in mobile web design for their customers, with 64% of these marketers claiming that mobile optimisation is ‘effective investment’.
As consumers have become increasingly more reliant on mobile formats, this means purchasing power has multiplied.
For many advertisers using email marketing – the only way to efficiently market is through mobile optimisation.
6. The Power of Podcasting
Podcasting has really only truly taken off in the past 10 years, but has been around for nearly 20 years.
Podcasts can be a great way to grow your audience beyond your niche while also entertaining and educating.
2022 showed that over 100 million across the US were listeners of podcasts – and reaching huge audiences authentically (Forbes).
In a very saturated market it is important that you have considered and researched your audience, created and tailored your content to your audience, offering insight and expertise on the key topics and personalising your interaction with your audience.
7. Join the Demand Gen Takeover
In the wake of Discovery Ads leaving us, we have been placed in the very capable hands of Demand Gen.
Demand Gen is an ad designed to help you expand your digital strategy and drive demand across Google and Youtube.
With Demand Gen, your best-performing video and image assets are used across the most visual and entertaining platforms — YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover and Gmail.
Demand Gen aims to build brand awareness, generate interest and capture leads more than it does to generate conversions.
With its display focus, early adopters of Demand Gen have seen a 3x higher click through rate compared to social display ads, with some finding that CPA is over 60% lower.
Demand Gen can integrate your best performing video and image assets in a visual and entertainment focused way.
The five ad placements available for Demand Gen are – YouTube Shorts, YouTube In-Stream Ads, YouTube In-Feed Ads, Google Discover and Gmail Ads.
8. Get Engaged with Interactive Ads
Interactive ads demand active participation from the audience, meaning that there is no room for losing interest. This is a great new way to make passive viewers active participants in your ads.
Interactive ads come in all shapes and sizes: scannable codes, clickable hotspots, playable ads, swipeable carousels, interactive sliders, countdown timers.
TikTok have different interactive add on’s to make your ads more exciting and spark your audiences interest, including countdown stickers – a great tool to increase awareness for your event.
Image Source: TikTok for Business
A top tip for creating interactive ads: formats should be capable of cross platform compatibility in order to make the user journey more appealing for targeted audiences. Make your customers, attendees and users more likely to want to pursue your ads.
Interactive ads can increase engagement, provide measurable results and create a memorable audience experience.
Interactive ads can also generate valuable customer data based on user behaviours and preferences.
Social sharing is also a benefit of interactive ads, allowing users to send ads to friends and colleagues, leading to organic reach and increased visibility.
9. The Boundless World of Augmented Reality Ads
Augmented reality (AR) places computer-generated elements into a real environment using a digital overlay, often referred to as a lens or a filter.
AR can help to create a richer customer experience and help to provide more of an understanding of a product, service or brand in a more creative way than simply using image creatives.
Using AR in campaigns can also help separate you from your competitors, giving you an edge that can put you ahead.
Examples of how you could use AR in your marketing…
Virtual Try-Ons – often used by cosmetic brands, clothing brands and accessory brands for people to know what they’re really purchasing.
Location Based AR – an AR that doesn’t use markers and is based on where you are.
Virtual Tours – walk your audience through your event space step by step using only a screen.
According to industry research, AR experiences result in 70% more memory encoding than traditional search, video or display campaigns.
10. Expanding Your Reach with the Power of Voice Search
In the evolving landscape of search ads, there is a definite need to explore beyond regular search strategies in the coming year.
We can expand our approach to emerging formats.making sure we stay ahead, reaching audiences in new and engaging ways to stay at the forefront of digital marketing innovation.
Voice search is one example that is set to take off in 2024. Voice search is designed to provide a more convenient and hands-free way for users to search.
It’s predicted that in the next year, there will be 8.4 billion voice assistants worldwide.
Marketers will need to adjust their SEOs for voice search: as voice assistants like Siri and Alexa gain prominence, marketers will need to change SEO approaches to accommodate voice-initiated searches.
This means prioritising long-tail keywords and using natural language processes to optimise content for voice search compatibility.