Digital Marketing Trends 2024

AI Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming the landscape of digital marketing, bringing in a new era marked by automation, personalised interactions, and predictive analytics. The integration of AI-driven chatbots is elevating customer service and engagement, while ML algorithms are fine-tuning targeting strategies and ad campaigns. Products such as ChatGPT, a powerful language model developed by OpenAI, is capable of generating human-like responses making some professions redundant. As we look at 2024, the synergy of AI and ML is set to continue enhancing marketing processes, delivering hyper-personalised experiences, and providing deeper insights into customer behaviour. 

Optimizely, leaders in the digital experience platform market, have grasped on to this trend and significantly expanded the Optimizely AI capabilities, integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence across its complete product lineup. The launch of Optimizely One, the world’s first marketing operating system, shows the growing significance of AI in the marketing domain. The introduction of the Generative Opal AI assistant represents a noteworthy leap forward, empowering automation across every part of the marketing lifecycle, encompassing tasks such as image creation, tagging, content translations, and more. This automation in customer data management, experimentation, content generation, and workflows is fostering a more efficient marketing process. Image creation, auto tagging, content generation and publishing are just a few of the vast amount of things Opal can assist with. 

It is evident, AI technology will continue to speed up every element of the marketing lifecycle making it vital to stay up to date with this technology.

Personalisation

80% of consumers won’t continue to buy from organisations that have poor personalised experiences. Tailored end-to-end experiences are no longer a ‘nice to have’ feature, but a necessity for brands to participate at all against their competitors. Personalised customer journeys should be seamless across each touchpoint. Customers expect it and guess what – it’s profitable for businesses. Monetate identified that conversion rates increase in conjunction with how many personalised pages a customer views. Organisations that implement personalisation can see an average increase to sales of 20%. 

Learn more about how to personalise your offering and how to get more from your personalisation tool investment.

Conversational Marketing

This is about more than just dialogue or chatbots. Audiences are smart and busy, and they live in a hyperconnected world where they’ve become sensitive to knowing when they’re being sold to. Conversational marketing creates meaningful conversations when it’s convenient to the customer, at scale and is consistent and accessible.

We’re currently operating in an age that is obsessed with authenticity and human connection to cut through the noise of adverts. It’s important to note here that this shift comes with generational changes. People born between 1981 – 1996 are now the largest generation and those who are starting to dominate in positions of decision making and buying power. They’re also the first digital natives – and they’re not quick to trust. Understanding this audience demographic is critical in conversational marketing, for building genuine relationships, creating meaningful content experiences and in a way that earns trust in the people and brand that they interact with.

SEO evolution

Google dominates the search engine space, with a 91.94% market share. So, when it comes to talking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), we’re predominantly (but not exclusively) looking at how our websites can get the best rankings in Google’s results pages. Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day and the average click through rate on the top results is 32%. With traffic volume at this scale, SEO should be featuring on any savvy digital marketer’s plan for 2024.

The digital marketing trends we’re expecting to see within SEO are the evolution and growth through:

• Voice search: 27% of the world population uses voice search on their mobile devices. As voice assistants grow more popular in houses, in cars and on mobile, organisations need to ensure their websites are optimised for voice search queries.
• User Experience (UX): Google has been very vocal about moving towards a UX first model. For brands running audits on their websites to ensure optimum performance in everything from loading speed, mobile, accessibility as well as content optimisation is going to become more important for better results.
• Visual search: 62% of Millennials prefer visual search over any other new tech. With Image searches responsible for 26% of all Google searches, it’s certainly a trend that shouldn’t be overlooked for 2024.

How effective is your current SEO strategy? Get in touch to book an audit.

VR and AR Experiences

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality) have featured in digital marketing trend lists for a few years, however like with a lot of digital trends for 2023 and 2024, the pandemic has accelerated its progress. With real life stores completely off limits for the best part of two years, organisations had to be quick to adapt and sectors like home improvement retail and real estate took the opportunity to create tools to immerse their customers in their brand from home.

Whether it’s using VR and AR to reimagine your new lounge from Ikea or taking a virtual tour around a potential new home, this digital marketing trend is set to stick around for 2024 as we see organisations continue to create immersive experiences on a global scale that are convenient and profitable.

Omnichannel digital marketing

This digital marketing trend encapsulates the roadmap that all sectors are on (whether you like it or not). Digital transformation isn’t slowing down and whilst it’s obviously important to make sure your organisation’s marketing strategy is hitting all of the digital touchpoints from PPC to social media, email marketing, content or video, it is absolutely essential that these carefully consider offline marketing activities too.

Bridging the gap between offline and online marketing is going to be key in 2024 for organisations to create truly seamless customer experiences that are relevant and that convert into valuable results. This might be ensuring social media handles are included on in store materials, creating location/store finder tools on your websites or using QR codes to track campaign interactions between offline and online engagement. Restaurants and pubs started to do this particularly well during the pandemic to place orders at tables and follow up with email marketing campaigns for their customers’ next visits.

Video marketing

Video has become an important part of content marketing and has been consistently featured in digital marketing trends lists over the years, and it’s not going anywhere soon. 68% of consumers prefer to watch short videos to learn about new products over anything else. Consumers want to be able to learn about products and service at their convenience – for brands to meet this demand they should be considering explainer video content that is optimised for social media, YouTube and search engines.

94% of consumers’ buying decisions are influenced specifically by ‘explainer videos’, whilst 84% go on to buy a product after watching a product video. Live video content also lends itself to the consumer thirst for authenticity and human interaction across their favourite digital hangouts (i.e. Insta live). 

Video results are 50 times more likely to rank in Google’s organic search results than text based content and blog posts that include videos are 53 times more likely to rank on page one of Google than those without.

Investing in a top-tier content marketing software like Optimizely Content Cloud, that can handle sophisticated content experiences is a great place to elevate your content strategy.

Your Organisation’s 2024 Digital Roadmap

How many of these digital marketing trends have you considered for your digital strategy? Reviewing your existing marketing activity and digital investments is a great place to start before making any big strategic changes for the year ahead. Working with an accredited digital partner can help to make this a painless process and ensure you’re not missing out on high value opportunities.

We offer a series of digital audits that can be tailored to your organisation’s needs and goals and strategic services to make sure you have what you need for a profitable year ahead. We are Ultimedia, a team of digital specialists in the design, development and optimisation of enterprise-level websites. Our technical and digital marketing experts have been helping global organisations to achieve their digital ambitions for over 25 years. Contact us today to find out how we can work together.