5 Digital Marketing Trends to Keep On Your Radar in 2024

Marketing strategies are constantly evolving to adapt to changes in technology and consumer behaviour, so being stagnant isn’t an option. What is working now may backfire in the near future, and small business owners need to pay attention to the new digital marketing trends to pick what suits their business niche the best and tweak or replace their existing marketing strategy.

We know your to-do list is long, and you probably don’t have time to dig into the vast marketing information online. That’s why we did it for you and selected the five trends you need to keep your eye on in 2024.

The Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends to Look Up to in 2024

Voice Search Optimization

We’re sure you’ve asked Alexa, Siri or Google’s Assistant to look for something online, for example, the weather forecast, at least a couple of times. The massive improvements in voice search accuracy we’ve experienced the past few years, as well as the increasing adoption of smart home devices, are making more of us rely on voice search commands to find what we need online, leading to the surge of voice search optimization (VSO), and the need of optimizing content to appear in voice search results.

To optimize content for voice search, being conversational is more important than ever. Unlike typing, the hands-free convenience voice search allows users to make more specific queries like: “Which is the best Italian restaurant near me?” This means that businesses need to craft natural-sounding content descriptions so it feels like an answer a real person would give.

By this point, you’re probably wondering how you can start optimizing your content for voice, and the good news is that it is pretty easy:

As 70% of voice search results are pulled from featured snippets, when working on a blog, focus on writing descriptions that offer a summarized answer to the main question your blog approaches. According to Semrush, 23 words is the sweet spot to rank for voice searches.

Keep the information in business listings, such as Google Business Profile and Yelp, optimized and updated. This is especially important if your business is local and serves a specific area, as up to 58% of consumers use voice search to find a local business.

Short-Form Video and Live Streaming

The popularity of platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram with its Reels feature, has established short-form video as a powerful way to interact and engage audiences, and this trend will continue in 2024. If you are still hesitant to include video in your marketing strategy, the facts will convince you:

3.1 billion people consume videos on the internet daily, which makes it the most popular form of content online.
64% of customers globally make purchases after watching brand’s social videos.
86% of marketers affirm that video is an effective lead-generation tool.

There are compelling marketing videos that don’t require dancing or pointing out things in the air, or you appear at all. We have a blog where our founder, Bridget, goes deep into 20 types of videos you can try.

Live streaming is another video format that will dominate the marketing space in 2024, as it is expected to reach over $247 billion in revenue by 2027. Thanks to its versatility and flexibility, businesses can leverage live streaming in many ways, including:

Brand awareness and loyalty: make new connections and keep the name of your business on top of your audience’s mind by doing live streams to let them know who you are and what you offer.
Increase conversion: brands that host live stream events have reported conversion rates up to 10x higher than the average e-commerce rate for industries like apparel and fashion, beauty, food, electronics, gaming or education.
Increase your events’ reach: even though we’re back to in-person events, the virtual option is still a popular way to attend events beyond our borders, allowing brands to reach a global audience while keeping the costs in check.

AI-Powered Marketing

From chatbots and ChatGPT to data-driven decisions, personalization, and automation, AI plays a significant role in marketing, and the trend will continue in 2024. Let’s take a look at how AI can enhance your marketing efforts:

Content creation: AI-powered tools can help you create content like blogs, website copy, product descriptions, and social media posts. While these tools won’t replace human creativity any time soon, they save time and take you out of a creative block.

PPC advertising: PPC platforms like Google Ads now rely heavily on an AI-powered algorithm to maximize campaigns’ performance by optimizing bidding strategies, targeting parameters, and ad creatives in real time to maximize ROI within the set budget.

Video will keep its place as the preferred format to advertise, and it’s expected that the spending will also increase in all main online advertising channels, especially in social media ad platforms, as projections aim for $79.28 billion invested in social video ads in 2024.

Email marketing: the main email marketing platforms like Mailchimp already have AI algorithms that analyze email engagement data to determine the best times to send emails, subject lines that perform well, and content that resonates with subscribers.

In 2024, the accuracy and speed of these machine learning algorithms will keep improving, which will definitely save us more time while improving campaigns’ performance.

Chatbots and customer support: In 2024, many businesses that aren’t benefiting from these tools for better customer service will take the step, as the chatbot market is forecasted to reach $9.4 billion in 2024.

Chatbots have improved exponentially since 2019 and will continue to do so in 2024, with advancements in natural language and interaction understanding. Following the voice search trend, the adoption of the next generation of bots, SpeakGPT, will increase, thanks to voice and speech recognition technology innovations.

Micro and Nano Influencer Marketing

The costs and controversies related to major influencers have caused more brands of all sizes to prefer to work with smaller influencers (with less than 100,000 followers), and this tendency will continue in 2024, as marketers have reported that these influencers provide higher engagement, more audience trust and ROI at a lower cost.

Influencer marketing will be one of the main strategies used in 2024, with TikTokers and YouTubers taking the lead. We discuss this tactic in-depth here if you want to know more about it.

Social Shopping

We are not fans of social media marketing for small business, but if you like it and want to keep it as part of your strategy, you should focus on shoppable posts in 2024. Social media platforms are becoming marketplaces that are making the purchase of all kinds of products a seamless experience, as Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and Facebook continue to develop their e-commerce features to take advantage of the time users spend on social platforms, about 2.5 hours according to a global study conducted by GWI.

Given that social shopping offers a seamless transition from discovery to purchase, marketers have to focus on creating visually appealing content to stand out from the crowd with a focus on video and providing as much product information as possible in their posts.

Marketing Never Stops Evolving

In marketing, there are always new, exciting things to try, but not every trend suits all cases. Embrace the trends that best align with your goals and keep an open mind to face the new challenges 2024 will bring to your small business.