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A drastic change has been observed in the last few years. While digital marketing strategies evolved. As 2024 is approaching, the digital marketers started picking up the right place to get ready for new strategic updates. You can no longer ignore these digital marketing trends.
This high-tech digital marketing era considers artificial intelligence, machine learning, social media automation, marketing automation, programmatic advertising, and a lot more.
So, let’s discuss 10 key digital marketing trends you should watch out for going into 2024:
Search Engine Optimization Trends to Focus on
SEO is the foremost part of digital marketing and yet remains a mystery for digital marketers as one can’t get enough of it. Just when you think you’ve made the right strategy for your SEO, Google updates the algorithm. Such situations demand that you consider a few ground rules to prepare yourself for the upcoming trends.
Google shopping, which was a free service earlier, is now a paid feature since Google began commercializing its searches and results. The top search engine spots were organic. Now again, it’s paid. Unaware of this transition, Google’s audience continues to stick to the top results.
You have to be extremely agile in picking up the plan to stay ahead of the competition.
Do you know what’s coming up?
Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day. That’s the average figure of how many people use Google a day, which translates to at least 2 trillion searches per year, 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day.
Google updates its algorithm almost every day without any prior announcement or notice. This makes it very difficult for digital marketers to cope up with the fluctuating (can consider using dynamic in place of fluctuating) SEO updates. Google enhances its search results every now and then. ML-based pattern analysis probes the search queries to answer in a particular manner.
Have you noticed that if you look something up on Google in the form of a question, it throws up a featured snippet? In the same manner, it gives a precise list of tools if you look for a list. It uses featured snippets to enhance its results if you try to pull up specific names or stats.
Those days are long gone when you would optimize the sites for keywords and make necessary arrangements to tailor the page according to those keywords. The smart, AI-powered search engine now analyses the website with respect to the nature of particular search terms and organizes the search results to provide the most relevant information on SERP.
Some major digital marketing trends you should be ready for in 2024
#1 Blockchain in Search Engine Advertising
#2 Artificial Intelligence in Customer Engagement
#3 Machine Learning in Digital Marketing Strategy
#4 Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR) Advertising
#5 Visual Search or QR Code Technology
#6 Security Compliance to Protect Customer Data
#7 Predictive Analytics & Multi-channel Attribution
#8 Omni-channel Marketing
#9 Mobile-first Indexing
#10 Video optimization for SERP
So, Let’s discuss each of the trends in detail.
#1 Blockchain in Search Engine Advertising
Isn’t it amazing that advertisers can directly connect with publishers to advertise the brand and pay them fairly? Yes, it could happen with blockchain technology. Blockchain evolving the way people were doing advertisements lately.
In programmatic advertising, blockchain going to play a major role in the next quarter. Big firms are already working, making it happen. A lot of blockchain developers are implementing applications and blocks to increase the efficiency of payment systems in advertising and Book Publishing Services.
Source: singlegrain.com
Blockchain brings transparency, reduces the extra cost or commission to the platform, and increases profits through search engine marketing or advertising.
Source: economictimes
#2 Artificial Intelligence in Customer Engagement
AI-powered tools will be supporting customer engagement with the help of virtual assistants, automated calls, customer feedback analysis, and audience behavior analysis, helping customers provide the required information for a better customer experience.
AI tools are automating campaigns based on past trends and helping digital marketers make the right decisions. Generating helpful customer insights and giving the right support is the value AI tools bring to an organization.
AI bots – Chatbots going to take place instead of human interaction with the customer for each and every query.
AI Analytics – Analyzing the customer data and making the insights to help marketers in campaign planning and strategy.
#3 Machine Learning in Digital Marketing Strategy
The days are gone when digital marketers were sitting and analyzing a huge collection of data and reports to develop the right marketing strategy. Now, machine learning brings a change in analysis and reporting. ML-powered tools will help with generating the right insights based on the customer’s data and testing new strategies to define the failure or success of any campaign. Some major areas where ML playing a big role:
- Better search engine results – Question answers, featured snippets, lists, videos, etc.
- Lead scoring – Analyzing the consumer touch-points and assessing the lead quality
- Data analysis and reporting – Campaign recommendation based on the data
- Trends analysis – Analysis of the past data and generating insights for decision-making.
- Natural language processing – Sentiment analysis
- Content personalization & recommendation – Syndicating the right content to the right audience for better engagement.
- Customer servicing – Studies indicate that 57% of major executives believe this is the area where machine learning can be most beneficial.
Source: digimarcon
Even different marketing & advertising platforms already started exploring the opportunities to implement machine learning on their channels. Like Google searches are now smarter and more accurate; the search engine now understands the nature of the query and gives the desired results for better engagement. ML-powered engines are now working on their algorithms to provide better data and insights.
#4 Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR) Advertising
If you have recently noticing 3d advertisements are going viral on the internet, and advertisers are enjoying the attention to these new advertising strategies.
Recently Coca-Cola came up with the augmented reality campaign. In this campaign, they used animated AR stories for branding
#5 Visual Search or QR Code Technology
By using visual recognition technology and smart image processing market players like Google Lens, Pinterest, Snapchat Filters, and Samsung’s Bixby Vision, brought a huge transformation in the traditional way of digital marketing.
Visual searches are very common these days, but now the bigger challenge is how you will leverage this technology to build your brand and drive traffic to your website. Now even your camera could work as a search bar for your search queries.
Now companies using this technology to leverage their paid campaigns and website traffic. Like Google image search, Bing visual searches are driving huge traffic to the sites by using image recognition technology.
#6 Security Compliance to Protect Customer Data
GDPR, CCPA, and other security compliance are making online data safe and secure to use. Now marketers can’t misuse the audience data for black hat digital marketing techniques. They can’t capture the behavioral data without consent.
The regulatory authorities are now taking more precautionary actions and initiatives to secure the data available online. Now you can’t just buy and sell the customer data without their concern. A lot of compliance is coming the way of digital marketers.
#7 Predictive Analytics & Multi-channel Attribution
Predictive analytics and multi-channel attribution platforms are gaining popularity and will continue to do so in 2024 too. These concepts are based on data mining and machine learning to help marketers make decisions, and predict future events based on the data.
Source: Revuze
The predictive analytics platform helps you prove ROI and improve results. Tools like TrackMaven, Adobe marketing cloud, and TapClicks help you track the conversion from various channels, and help you understand cross-channel attribution. These tools can increase customer retention rates by 10-15%.
Marketing attribution software that shows the impact of every customer interaction that the business participates in.
#8 Omni-channel Marketing
Omni-channel marketing is not new, but it’s still an area where digital marketers are figuring out ways to utilize Omni-channel marketing. A customer wants to connect with a brand on various channels, everyone is not everywhere, but every potential consumer is available on some digital platforms.
Omni-channel marketing allows you to explore those platforms where you can engage your audience, and give them a delightful brand experience, and you can retain the customers by being in touch with them.
According to the ClickZ survey –
Source: clickz.com
Customer retention rates: 90% higher for omnichannel vs single-channel
#9 Mobile-first Indexing:
Even before checking the desktop version of your website, Google first inspects the mobile version of your website even before checking its desktop version. By doing so, it gives preference to the sites that have a higher mobile speed test score. You can test your website here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
How frequently do you run the mobile-friendly test or mobile page speed test on your website?
Google does not penalize your site if it’s not mobile-friendly, but if you check your website’s analytics, you will find that more than 50% of visitors land on your website through a mobile device. If your site is not mobile-friendly, your ranking will be lower than your competitors.
Making a light version of your website, which loads in a fraction of a second, could bring a lot more traffic to your website. It enhances the customers’ experience when on the site.
Who does it impact the most?
People make searches for local businesses using their mobile devices most of the time. For eg.,- if you are offering home-décor or plumbing services or are running a café in the area, you are most likely to get impacted by not having a mobile-friendly business website. But it’s a good idea for all business owners to make their sites mobile-friendly.
Make sure you follow these guidelines while making your website mobile friendly:
- The buttons should be bigger and clean – It will help users to click on the right call-to-action
- The image should be compressed. You can use tiny png or jpg files, which reduce the image size by 80-85%. It reduces the load time too. Squoosh is a tool you can use for this.
#10 Video optimization for SERP
Google’s smart AI pattern analysis and natural language processing system analyses the videos to find the right fit for video searches. Adding the right structured markup when uploading a video on your webpage helps Google understand the most relevant video content to display in the search results.
The title must be descriptive and relevant to what exactly the video contains. Adding a transcript with the video, providing major highlights covered in the video, etc., helps viewers understand the nature and relevance of the video. However, Google’s text-matching algorithm is capable of extracting insights from the video itself, so it’s better to provide well-prepared information to Google.
Conclusion: Are you prepared for digital marketing in 2024?
Your strategy should be continuously updated in accordance with the changing market trends. You can’t win without having the right digital marketing strategy on your plate. Search engine optimization is a major player that gets you more business through digital marketing in the long run.
AI, ML, and Blockchain technologies are transforming the traditional way of digital marketing. Being updated with the latest tools and platforms to leverage your digital marketing strategy would be the right choice. Exploring the different aspects of digital marketing by experimenting with each platform will help you stay ahead of the competition.
