Digital Marketing Trends – Complete Guide

Digital Marketing Trends: Since marketing is a field that is always evolving, a strategy that worked in 2023 and helped your firm grow could not work in 2024. Therefore, it is essential that as a marketing professional you are always up to date with the latest trends in digital marketing so that you can include them in your strategy and achieve better results.

Rise Of AI-Powered Marketing

If 2023 was the year of the birth of marketing driven by artificial intelligence thanks to the emergence of tools like ChatGPT, among others, 2024 will be the year in which companies begin to use AI on a massive scale and definitively integrate it into their strategies of digital marketing. In short, it will be rare (and not advisable) to see an agency or marketing team in 2024 that does not rely on Artificial Intelligence tools.

Data analysis, targeted advertising, personalized customer experience, customer segmentation, automation of repetitive tasks, design, search for inspiration and useful information… All these tasks and many more will be supported by Artificial Intelligence tools, a technology that, as we have seen, it will not only serve to enhance and streamline the work of professionals, but it will also improve the customer experience.

TikTok Will Begin To Be Relevant For Companies (it will be mandatory to have a profile)

This digital marketing trend of 2024 should not surprise anyone. And the social network TikTok has been a trend for some years and there are several brands that have already joined it and have begun to create their strategy (although most of them are still very timid). However, 2024 will be the year in which the Asian platform definitely takes off and begins to be truly important. And, despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the name, as of today TikTok is one of the least used social networks , with only 4% of marketing specialists in the United States using it. Many consider it a platform very oriented towards generation Z and others do not really know how to navigate it.

In 2024 that will take a 180º turn, since there are many active users on the platform who are currently not taking advantage .Furthermore, the social media platform has demonstrated its readiness for this trend by introducing TikTok for Business in 2020, which serves as a platform for businesses and brands to advertise themselves.

Expansion Of Social Commerce

Social commerce is a practice that consists of using social networks as another direct channel for selling products and services, integrating functionalities typical of electronic commerce in social media platforms such as, for example, payment. That is, with social commerce the boundaries between ecommerce and social networks are blurred, creating a situation of symbiosis from which the user benefits, since the purchasing process becomes much faster and easier.

In 2022, social commerce also promised to be a trend, but in the end it did not have the expected success. This time, the forecast is more moderate and although social networks are not yet going to become ecommerce 2.0, it will be very important for brands to upload their catalog and link directly to each product on the web to that the user can easily jump from one platform to another and quickly buy something they have seen on social networks.

Digital Messaging: Email Marketing Remains The Most Persuasive Form Of Digital Communication

Did you believe that email marketing was going out of style? Well not at all. In 2024 it will continue to be a very effective way to attract and persuade consumers, just like mobile chats and notifications. In fact, the number of emails between companies and consumers is expected to reach 361 billion in 2024, 55 billion more than in 2020.

And this strategy is extremely powerful, since it allows brands to interact directly and more personally with users.

This trend in digital marketing for 2024 reminds us of the importance of getting down to business when collecting information about the customer journey, since very valuable data can be extracted from there to create more relevant messages.

The 3 Channels With The Best ROI: SEO, Content Marketing And Google Ads (SEM)

ROI (Return on Investment) is a metric that is used to know what the profits of a company have been taking into account the investment cost. According to the data, SEO (organic search engine positioning), content marketing and Google Ads ads promise a better ROI for 2024, so these three actions cannot be missing from your marketing strategy for next year.

Privacy-Centric Marketing

Have you heard of Privacy-Centric Marketing or privacy-focused marketing? This type of marketing is based on putting user privacy at the center, prioritizing transparent data collection, secure data handling and consumer consent to, in addition to complying with privacy regulations, generate trust. On users, something that is usually a challenge for brands that communicate mainly in the digital environment.

This is going to be one of the most interesting digital marketing trends of 2024, taking into account that 83% of consumers want to have greater control over their personal data.

In this context, we must not forget that the “cookieless future” is getting closer , that is, that third-party cookies and, therefore, the tracking of individual users in order to show relevant advertising is close to disappearing. Apparently, 2024 is the year in which Google Chrome intends to gradually eliminate them, although it would not be unusual for it to delay this date, as it has done other times. However, it is imminent and brands must promote the use of “first-party cookies “, that is, first-party cookies, which are safer than the previous ones.

Visual Recognition Technology In Searches

Surely you know Google Lens, the tool created by Google that works with Machine Learning and with which users can search with images instead of text. But this company has not been the only one to make this functionality available to the public, Pinterest or Amazon have also done so and it seems that one of the trends in digital marketing for 2024 will be that many more companies launch it.

Visual recognition technology in searches allows users to no longer have to enter “neckless floral print dress” in the search engine, for example, but uploading a photo of the dress that inspired them will be enough to find it or identify one.

Therefore, this is a sign that product images will increasingly have to be more optimized and will be more important than ever. So much so, that Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said that “the future of searches will be with images instead of keywords.”

Mastery Of Video Marketing And Video Ads

Video marketing is an increasingly powerful strategy, as the audience has proven to be very receptive to the audiovisual format. This trend is expected to grow in 2024 and more and more marketers will use it, both to showcase products and services and to create deeper, longer-lasting connections with the public. And the video marketing market has gone from 18.7% in 2020 to 22.5% in 2022, and it is expected to continue rising in 2024.

In addition, live broadcasts will also be a trend in digital marketing in 2024 and it will be more common for the audience to interact in real time with brands.

Micro Influencers Will Gain Positions

Micro-influencers are considered to be those people with a social media account who have a community of between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, although depending on the sources consulted this range may vary. Typically (although not necessarily), these influencers tend to direct their content towards a specific niche. In short, they are less well-known influencers, with a smaller audience, but where brands can find great potential because their community is usually more committed and interacts more frequently. It is expected that in 2024 these content creators will increase their collaborations with brands, since in addition to the above, they usually offer more authentic content.

Product Placement Gains Strength In Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Product placement is an advertising technique in which the product or service, the brand or a slogan is “sneaked” organically (directly or indirectly) into generally audiovisual content. A typical example is when in a series we see how the characters use a product from X brand, introducing it naturally in their actions. But it doesn’t only happen on television, this technique has also been used in influencer marketing and, it seems that in 2024, we are going to see it even more.

Therefore, it will be common for these creators to integrate the products or services they want to promote in their regular content, while content that talks only about a brand will lose strength. That is to say, 2024 seems to be the year of more subtle and less direct advertising on social networks, since the audience likes being sold things less and less. For example, if you want to promote the latest Sony camera, it will be more powerful for the creator to integrate it into a travel vlog than to promote it only by talking about it from his house.

Prioritization Of User Generated Content (UGC)

User Generated Content is going to be a trend in digital marketing in 2024, very, very powerful. And, according to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, no more and no less than 96% of consumers do not trust advertisements. However, according to another study, 93% of marketers say that consumers do trust content created by real people. Therefore, white and in bottle. Furthermore, if we add to this data the fact that the interest of search engines in this type of content has increased by 335% in 10 years, the trend writes itself.

In short, influencer marketing or ads starring well-known faces are by no means going to disappear, but what will be clear in 2024 is that UGC is going to make a big impact.

The Growth Of Voice Searches

We finish this list of digital marketing trends for 2024 with one closely related to the success of devices such as the Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. And experts estimate that the market for digital voice assistants will reach 26.8 billion in 2025, since currently 1 in 4 people use this type of search on their mobile devices.

Therefore, it seems that text-based SEO is going to take a backseat. This will cause marketing specialists to change their way of thinking and use more conversational language in their strategy, since we do not speak the same as we write. While before the keyword could be “cafeteria in Madrid with breakfast”, now it would become “Where can I find a café in Madrid that is closest to me that serves breakfast at this time?”