With the end of each year, the patterns or trends that can mark the sector for the next begin to emerge, and digital marketing is no exception.
2023 was a year of many changes and innovations that forever modified our way of understanding the area, clients, work processes, and mainly, how the tools we use speed up our tasks in order to be more productive.
With this, what will be those new digital marketing and sales trends that will impact our lives by 2024? We made a list that will help you anticipate possible changes for the following year, so that you can prepare and get ahead of your competition, but first, it is important that we ask ourselves…
How do marketing trends emerge?
From time to time we talk about new marketing trends and the way in which they will impact our work in the short, medium or long term. Although repetitive, it is a relevant topic.
The reason? Companies, brands and work teams recapitulate everything they did during the year while, at the same time, they begin to think about the future and the possible opportunities and threats it brings in order to prepare accordingly and get the best out of it.
Part of this analysis has to do with understanding what factors encourage the emergence of new trends, what they are like, who they act on, and how they relate to each other. Among these factors, there are 3 that are very important:
Technological advances
We live in a technological world. In one way or another, many of our day-to-day activities have to do with technology in some of its forms. We schedule meetings with Calendly or Doodle; we use Google to research; We shop online via Amazon, we entertain ourselves with Netflix, and much more.
Thus, the fact that technology influences the development of new trends should not surprise us, especially when we live in a time of mass adoption of mobile devices, the growth and massification of generative artificial intelligence, and the arrival of the Internet of Things. Things to more and more places.
Changes in search engine and social network algorithms
Social media algorithms are constantly evolving, and the same applies to search engines (Google). The ways of indexing, positioning and presenting content change so that the user always receives quality and relevant results.
This is of interest to digital marketing and sales professionals, as these changes generate positive and negative effects on the content and campaigns that are already online, but will also impact the content that will be created in the future, so that studying them in depth is very important.
Evolution of consumer behavior
Over time, consumers of brands change their preferences and also the expectations they have about their products and/or services. It is something perfectly normal, people change over time and become aware of things that perhaps we were not so aware of before, such as fake news, the filter bubble, and more.
Today, in very general terms, people are more attentive to our digital security and privacy than in other years. We also demand greater transparency in the collection and use of our data, as well as a more seamless and personalized user experience.
What are the marketing trends for this year?
Going deeper into the matter, what new digital marketing trends can we expect for 2024?
Broadly speaking, 2023 has been characterized by the emergence of artificial intelligence in our work processes, but also in the integration or sophistication of new technologies that we used previously, only arranged in a different way. This being the scenario, we list some examples of marketing trends for 2024 to start preparing for the future.
Mass adoption of generative AI
2023 was the year where generative artificial intelligence reached various work sectors, each one integrating it with its respective facilities and obstacles. According to data from McKinsey in August of this year, 55% of organizations that responded stated that they had adopted generative AI in one way or another.
On a general level, the result has been good, since tools such as ChatGPT, Bard and Bing have helped professionals streamline work processes and invest the time saved in other activities.
By 2024, generative artificial intelligence, in its various forms, is expected to be widely adopted across all sectors, including digital marketing.
In the coming months, it will be strange (and highly unrecommended) if AI is not integrated into the activities of a company, brand or freelancer, since it has been proven that it can be an excellent tool for segmenting customers, analyzing keywords, personalize customer experiences, build buyer personas, design, research, and more.
Storydoing
It is the next step of what we know as storytelling. Unlike it, storydoing does not focus on telling, but on doing, bringing customers closer to the brand’s products and services through experiences, not speeches.
It is a dynamic approach that offers good opportunities for brand loyalty through action and the real impact of products and services on customers’ lives, so that they are the first witness of its benefits. To do this, storydoing focuses on three elements:
- Have a purpose
- Generate an experience
- Place customers as protagonists.
- A perfect example of this is Apple, which in September of this year shared several stories about how its Apple Watch Series 9 changed the lives of several people, presenting how the watch’s features helped each one get out of life-threatening situations.
Video marketing
In recent months, brands have confirmed that audiences are very receptive to the audiovisual format, either to receive more information about a brand’s products or services, or to strengthen their emotional connection with it so that it is more lasting.
The growth of video marketing has been happening for years. According to data from Smart Insights, the video marketing market grew from 18.7% in 2020 to 22.5% in 2022, and this growth is expected to continue through 2024, thanks in part to the continued expansion of TikTok. Inter alia.
An example of video marketing is this Hubspot video from 2016, where the CTO and CEO of the organization talk about its birth and how it emerged to respond to a key situation for marketing in recent years: the change in the way we buy.
User Generated Content (UGC)
This may not be the best time for announcements. According to the Association of Advertising Agencies, 96% of users do not trust traditional advertisements because, among other reasons, they feel that the media lies to them. That being so, what ways do brands make themselves known on the Internet? Perhaps user-generated content is the answer.
This is all types of content created by users, consumers or clients of a brand and that revolves around its products or services. It is content that people generate completely voluntarily and that may consist of their stories, comments, opinions or situations.
The value of user-generated content (UGC) is that it expresses the real opinion of consumers about your brand, and allows you to see the impact it has had on people’s lives. This has several benefits, such as:
- Generation of trust towards your brand from testimonials
- Greater loyalty
- More engagement
- You know the public better
- You spread content with a low economic investment
The Legion of Doritos Creators is a good example of UGC. This initiative was born in 2006, initially, so that consumers themselves would prepare the Doritos commercial for that year’s Super Bowl. The result was so good that the brand chose to maintain it, offering different challenges to people so that the winners of each one can choose to receive money.
Visual recognition for searches
Maybe you’ve already done it and don’t know it, but many of the searches we do may be based on images and not text. This is a trend that will continue in the coming years and that began with the development of Google Lens, the Google application based on machine learning.
With this technology, users would no longer have to do searches like “skullcandy black wireless headphones.” Just by uploading an image to the search engine, we could have the exact results we are looking for, or at least very similar ones.
This has interesting implications, since the greater use of visual recognition will lead us to increasingly optimize our images with alternative text so that they can match people’s searches.
influencer marketing
In recent times it has been shown that influencers attract people and have power in the purchasing decisions of several people. Social networks like TikTok and Instagram were the places where people saw the takeoff of influencers and their arrival in digital marketing, and 2024 aims to be a year where their strength is consolidated.
One of the sectors that projects the most growth for next year is that of micro-influencers. Depending on the source you consult, they can be people who have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. Although they are people with a small sector, said area is well defined, and there is a greater probability that people will interact frequently with their content.
This is where brands will find very valuable opportunities, as they can form collaborations with micro-influencers and expand their reach to a sector of people potentially interested in their products or services.
An example of influencer marketing is what Cúsica, a Venezuelan music producer, does to promote its own festival, the Cúsica Fest. In recent months, the organization has uploaded stories on its social networks about the gifts it sends to different micro-influencers close to the organization, directly and indirectly inviting people to buy their tickets for the festival.
What are the trends that will have the most impact?
On the one hand, 2024 is shaping up to be a year where automation in digital marketing will go to a new level, thanks to AI tools that will move to a new level of adoption not only in digital marketing, but in many other sectors of the industry. the economy, since this year has served to verify its benefits and real effects on production processes.
