Marketing evolves every year – sometimes even more than we expect it to. With a new disruption, you can expect new marketing trends to shape up (such as using trust badges on the home page). After finding your first profitable product, you need to follow marketing strategies to raise awareness about the brand.
It has become imperative to ensure that you constantly stay on top of the marketing by updating your strategy based on the latest trends. This way, you’ll be able to compete well with the competition and give them a run for their money.
In this article, we’ll discuss the different promising marketing trends that are shaping up well for businesses in 2024. This article will also help you improve your brand’s overall market presence and contribute to higher revenue.
Users access the world of digital marketing differently than we were used to. In 2024, mobile phones are the preferred way to access social media platforms.
Ultimately, you need to look at things from a different angle to strategize something that your competitors are not doing yet. Here are the marketing trends that you need to try in 2024:
Personalized Marketing
Marketers are embracing personalized marketing like never before. No matter how big or small their operations are, it has been utilized by companies in a variety of industries. Because of its effectiveness and usefulness, this marketing trend is still used today despite being around for many years.
For example, if you’re selling Valentine’s day lingerie, how would you market it to the best of your ability? You can do this by following the number one trend of personalized marketing. By using analytics, advertisers and companies can tailor advertising messages and product experiences to each customer’s needs.
Customer-specific marketing involves so much more than inserting the customer’s name into the B2B email lists that you send to everyone. Getting the right message to the right person at the right time with the right suggestions is the key.
When companies collect data on user behaviors, their likes, and dislikes and use that data to show them tailored ads, it’s personalized marketing. Except for customer preferences, the data can include information about interests and purchase history as well.
A personalized marketing strategy utilizes this data to tailor the content your contacts receive via email, ads, and other channels. Many forms of communication with customers have been affected by personalization as companies have become more familiar with this strategy. Here are some recent trends that fall under personalized marketing:
Targeted Discounts
Customers who communicate with the brand’s website often get targeted. Giving attractive discounts to customers within an hour of the interaction can help improve customer loyalty and increase overall company revenue. Similarly, exit intent popups can be used to give targeted discounts to customers that are about to leave your website.
Discounts offer a way for customers to choose faster. Most companies create a sense of urgency in their discount offers by claiming the offer to be available exclusively for them or available for a limited time only. Using this strategy, companies are able to exploit users’ fear of missing out mindset. Lastly, trust badges can also be used to further gain the trust of customers by offering them discounts and a money-back guarantee or something of this sort.
Custom Emails
To improve the open rate of emails, specialists often try different email marketing strategies. Using custom emails for the contact list is better than sending generic emails which can sound pretty boring and robotic. Custom emails are tailor-made to the recipient’s needs and can result in a higher open rate.
If you’re wondering how that’s possible, it’s simple, recipients want to know that you did your research before approaching them. Even a slightly personalized message can go a long way. Custom emails are 6 times more likely to end up with a positive response and 29% more likely to get opened by recipients.
Personalized Ads
Gone are the days when generic ads worked for companies. Now, users want ads that are specially tailored to their experience. This presents huge opportunities for companies to perform well by investing more in developing personalized ads and helping people find what they need. 70% of users interact with the marketing ads if they are personalized.
Visual Content
Visual content is getting better results than ever. Visual content is every online content that is image-based. For instance, it can be
- Videos
- Pictures
- Screenshots
- Infographics
- Graphs
- Charts
- Slide decks
- Diagrams
Visual content should never be underestimated since we have examples in our midst of platforms that are purely based on visual content and how big they are.
We’re talking about platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Both of these platforms have exploded in the past couple of years. Now, for images and branding, Instagram is the way to go. And for watching quality videos, you’d think of nothing else but YouTube. Many marketers (37%) also think that visual content is the most important content as far as being interesting and interactive is concerned. You can use lightroom presets to improve your visual content’s appeal.
In the earlier days, the content was mostly text-based and that was considered okay. But now, with many changes coming in, the type of content people want to consume has changed as well. It makes sense to add some visual content to your text to give readers the maximum value.
Also, having graphs, infographics, or charts help readers digest information much better. It provides a visual representation of the words they’re reading and it will make your content more engaging and fun to read. Further, if we consider an explainer video content as an example, it is not enough to speak and explain the process. Rather, showing how to do something is better than just talking about it – giving no visual content for readers.
The following trends have been seen in terms of visual content:
Infographics
Infographics are long-form visual content as they make up different images to explain the story or help readers visualize the written content. Infographics have been used more recently and bloggers are using them to provide their viewers with a new way of consuming the content.
Viewers can get all the information they would get in a traditional 2000-word blog, however, with infographics, the same can be achieved while they have to commit less time to go through your content. It is the perfect replacement for traditional text-based content.
Visual Graphics
The worst thing you can do to your blogs is to add plain tables of relevant information. No one is going to make the effort of reading into the data. If you want to drive engagements, you’ll need visual graphics to depict what your simple tables represent – in a better way.
Conversational Marketing
Hard selling used to be effective, however, it has been replaced with conversational marketing. Now customers want brands to work harder to communicate with them and provide their solutions in interactive ways. You can only see decent traction when you have conversational marketing in your strategy.
Just like when you want to take care of your loved ones, the brand should be taking care of users. Instead of focusing too much on selling your product, try showing the users how your product can help solve their problems. Show them you care by communicating about the work your brand is doing to tackle those problems.
Instead of talking like a business, try being casual and friendly to your potential users. It will help your company gain customers’ trust and loyalty – authenticity is very important.
Some of the trends in conversational marketing are:
Chatbots
Chatbots are useful in accelerating your sales further. By communicating with visitors on your website, chatbots ensure that your customers have no problem navigating the website and provide help whenever they need it. Further, they can also suggest suitable products based on visitors’ preferences.
Integrating WhatsApp Business
Companies are increasingly using WhatsApp Business to improve their sales. By integrating this software into their conversational marketing strategy, businesses can reach a large number of potential users without any hassle. Customers are more likely to do business with companies they can directly contact. Alternatively, you can also have custom software developed to address these needs.
Interactive Content
As the name suggests, interactive content is the type of content that easily interacts with the visitor or readers. Using interactive content is an effective strategy for improving engagements. It is still not the most used trend, however, it is gaining momentum and it’s worthy of being mentioned here.
Your content will become interactive if you use short questionnaires for readers and know more about them. Further, you can put videos in your content that can be placed when the reader reaches a certain point in the content. Movable elements are also useful in building interactive content. Lastly, you can add an audio element to your content for different effects (funny or suspense) using content creation software.
The trends of interactive content include:
Storytelling
To make your readers enjoy the content you publish, it is important to make it fun and easily understandable. Storytelling is an art and can be used to improve engagement on your website significantly. Divide your content into headings and subheadings to improve readability as well.
Social Media Content
Always keep your followers engaged with the help of smart QA sessions, live chats, and interesting polls that make people comment, like, or share your content.
Tapping Online Personalities
Social media stars are all the rage these days. Brands are more inclined toward using social media personalities to target their desired audience. These celebrities include YouTube stars, Instagram celebrities, vloggers, podcast personalities as well as affiliate marketers.
Using online personalities helps brands reach millions of users easily and it also ensures that your content gets seen. Since the followers are fans of the personality, your content has a higher chance of getting viewed by the followers compared with traditional methods.
This method is best since it targets a specific niche which is extremely difficult in the case of radio and TV. Even though you have the chance to get your content out in front of a larger audience, targeting it to a specific medium and audience can help increase engagement and the effectiveness of brand marketing.
Live Videos
Live videos are a chance for your brand to shine and for you to use creativity. Brands often use live videos on Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube. You can showcase anything on your Live videos to all your followers. For example, to improve engagement, you can show viewers your office or production site. The idea is to show viewers things that would be interesting for them to know. Lastly, having a live QA session might help as well.
Live videos also help drive revenue and increase awareness since the brand is directly connecting with the customers in real-time. Furthermore, behind-the-scenes live videos are exclusive and can improve your customers’ impression of your brand. This allows you to be more transparent and provide a way for customers to make a valuable connection around your brand.
With the use of a video content management system, you can improve the overall quality of the content you publish. Additionally, there are things you can include in short video content:
Broadcasting Physical Events
Broadcasting physical events such as press conferences, debates, speeches, or conferences through a live stream or video conference. Whatever the event is, if you provide your customers with the chance to virtually attend, it will help grow your loyal customers and improve your brand’s global reach.
Live Announcements
Another great way to use live videos is to keep your customers updated with valuable announcements delivered live. This will help you to get real-time reactions from customers.
Short Video Contents
Short video content is becoming more and more common since people have shorter attention spans. It’s easier for people to watch a short clip (a few seconds) than sit through a 2-minute commercial. A video collage, which artfully combines multiple images or video clips, captures attention quickly and effectively.
TikTok, Facebook stories, Instagram Stories, and YouTube shorts are the famous platforms where short video content is consumed every day.
Given that the short videos are usually less than 60 seconds, brands might have a tough time fitting in valuable content in such a small time frame. However, you can use the following ways to incorporate your brand message in short video content:
Provide Valuable Content
Try to fit in only the content that adds value for your customers. This means you can’t put fluff content that has no value.
Short Campaigns
You can invite users to share their experience of using your products or services. It will get good engagement and it will give you the desired level of brand awareness.
Audio Marketing
Audio marketing is real and it is here to stay. In 2024, you can find many platforms dedicated solely to audio content. This includes podcasts and audiobooks etc. You can market your brand using this and reach new audiences, potentially those who are dedicated, audio-only users. Here are a few ways to use audio marketing:
Podcasts
People started to learn how to create podcasts to jump on this trend. There are different types of podcasts available, especially with the increased interest in audio-only content. You can use your brand and contact the influencer to market your brand. One way of using this is to pay the influencer to use your product as an ad break for the podcast. Another way would be to just talk about the brand for a couple of seconds (in the case of a sponsored podcast).
Twitter Spaces provides you with the ability to market your product on Twitter’s audio-only space. You’ll need an influencer to market your brand in live conversations.
Virtual Try-Ons
Using virtual reality (VR) technology, companies can help users shop from the comfort of their homes. After the pandemic struck and people were confined to their homes, online shopping got a huge boost. Now, customers are aware that it is quite easy and convenient to shop from home so why not give them the chance to do it?
Virtual try-on from brands will help users determine whether the product is right for them or not.
Apparel & Footwear
The best application for VR technology is with apparel. Customers can use virtual try-on to make sure the clothes they want fit them perfectly. Similarly, If you’re shopping for KURU Footwear, you can try the shoes on to see whether they look good on you or not.
Conclusion
Following the latest trends will benefit your company’s bottom line (i.e. sales). As such, you and your marketing team need to be ready when it’s time to buckle up and come up with something new and fresh that would improve traction and drive sales further. So far, 2024 has been the year for creativity in terms of marketing and the rest of the year will be no exception.
We’ve discussed 9 different marketing trends for you to try and all of them are already proven effective. However, depending on your business some trends might be more beneficial to follow while others might not give you the results you need.
Personalized marketing is a good place to start since it is the top trend and for all the right reasons. What to learn more about digital marketing and its intricacies? Check out our blogs.
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- Customer Analysis: Good Customer Insights for Better Marketing
- 7 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2024