October 25 2023

Marketing Trends 2024

Are you looking to try some new strategies within your marketing in 2024?

Below we have put together 5 marketing trends that we think will become much more popular in the next year. In this article, we will cover:

Artificial Intelligence
Voice Search Optimisation
Social Listening
Social Media Used as a Search Engine
Micro-influencers

1. Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

What is Artificial Intelligence? AI is a form of software that can think like a human being. That means that it learns, it has reason and it can predict. As AI gets more advanced, we should see it being used more and more within businesses to automate tasks and predict outcomes.

In marketing, artificial intelligence can be used to analyse large amounts of data and give really important insights into what that data represents. This is something a human can do, but AI can analyse data on a very large scale, deliver results quickly, and has less chance of making mistakes.

In marketing, AI can be used for:

Optimising marketing strategies
Seek out a higher rate of engagement
Create personalised customer experiences
Increase your conversion rate

Imagine, leveraging your customer data and using an AI concept like machine learning to anticipate your customer’s next move and improve the customer journey to help them transact with you quicker, have a better experience and refer more customers – this is happening in larger corporations already and will eventually filter down to smaller businesses but it is not likely to be the case anytime soon.

A couple of ways you can use it for your marketing activities:

Creating blog outlines
Suggesting copy for LinkedIn posts.
Finding inspiration for blog article introductions.
Transcribing video content and webinars.
Writing keyword-focused meta-descriptions.

Don’t forget, AI still needs human help to create content and answers that will work effectively.

2. Voice Search Optimisation

Voice Search Optimisation (VSO) is like Search Engine Optimisation, but instead of optimising for written words, you are optimising for spoken words.

As more people start to use voice commands with their technology, like Siri and Alexa, to search for information, products, or services, VSO will be needed more and more. The way we speak is different from the way we write. The spoken word is a much more natural language pattern than how we write.

When searching for a cake recipe on Google Search, most people will search “cheesecake recipe”. Whereas if we were to ask Siri or Alexa, we may word our search like this: “How do I make a cheesecake?”

3. Social Listening

When marketers look at the performance of their campaigns or content, they would usually first look at the data that it is providing, like views, engagement, conversions, etc. Analytics can be very useful to see what is working and what isn’t. But statistics isn’t the only form of data that can be useful.

Social listening is when you listen to your customers and clients and make changes to your strategies based on their feedback. People have such a broad range of choices across the web, but you can encourage them to choose your business by listening to them and showing that they have been heard.

For example, your business may receive an email from a potential customer asking for specific information about your services and have stated that they cannot find it on your website. In response, you can provide them with the information they need and also make amendments to your website to make that information easier to find.

Other ways you can use social listening for your small business is by monitoring your company’s social-media channels for customer feedback, brand mentions, and conversations revolving around keywords, topics, or industries.

4. Social Media Used as a Search Engine

As time goes on, different social media platforms will be used for different functions. Video-based social media platforms, like YouTube and TikTok, are being used for general search more now than ever.

It may be a good time to start thinking about how your business can utilise this phenomenon for your marketing. Think about what questions your clients usually have and find ways to put these into video form for platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

Using keywords and content that answers the search queries of your customers could help you to increase your reach on social media platforms as more and more people start to use them for searching.

5. Micro-Influencers

In recent years marketers have been utilising the amount of reach that can be achieved when working with social media influencers. Most well-known influencers have 1 million or more followers on various platforms. Although this can do wonders for your business, sometimes it can feel like a less genuine endorsement.

More recently, businesses have been working with micro-influencers, who have 1,000 to 100,000 followers on social media. Micro-influencers usually have a less bloated and more condensed audience. So, although the amount of reach and engagement achieved will be much less, actual conversions may be just as fruitful as they would be when working with more popular influencers. It can be a more authentic experience for your audience to see ‘real’ users using your products or services.

This is great if you are a smaller business as it can be expensive to work with well-known influencers and so this will help to save your marketing budget for other activities.

Where to find your influencers? Social media platforms are usually a great place to start, and if you know where your audience is ‘hanging out’ then you’ll know where you can find your influencers… That’s where we want them, where they are already going to find out information and enjoy spending their time.