The only constant thing about digital marketing is that it keeps evolving. With the advent of AI, Google updates, and new spam policies, the changes in key areas of marketing in 2024 have been dramatic. These recent developments have also impacted consumer behaviour, which in itself is a factor that influences digital marketing, leading to the advent of new trends. Here are some of the top digital marketing trends that you must watch out for:
- In social media, we will discuss the emergence of Instagram Threads, LinkedIn’s growing significance, and AI’s expanding role across social platforms.
- Hyper Targeting with AI
- SEO trends focus more on optimizing content for users
- Google Ads is recommending using AI as an assistant in PPC campaigns
Social media Trends
Social media dynamics are unpredictable. Who knew Twitter changing its name to X would lead to a stark shift in dominance, giving other platforms a chance to thrive? These changes also drive how marketers form their strategies to get attention from their audience.
How Instagram took the chance, and Thread started to rule
The first thing that deserves your attention the most is, for sure, Instagram threads. Launched in July 2023, Meta has reached 100 million users & ever since, the number has continuously increased.
Threads is a competitor to X. It’s used for sharing textual updates and participating in public discussions.
Many marketers have observed a resurgence in Threads engagement. They say a lot of people are coming to grab a username as the user number is expected to rise. Along with this, many brands like TedTalks and Canva are using it for discussions and asking questions.
The retention rate now replaces the engagement rate
Recently, there has been a decline in engagement activity on organic social media posts. There are numerous reasons behind this, such as quality of content, time of day, device, etc.
Nowadays, social media platforms are overcrowded, and people have more options than ever for content consumption. Due to this, the focus has shifted from engagement to retention. Many social media platforms have enabled longer-form videos. This change is prompting brands to create entertaining and informational content.
LinkedIn, which was initially a place to upload your resume, has also developed to become much more than that. In 2024, it witnessed enormous organic engagement, which is a rare sight to witness on other social channels in the current scenario. This is happening because people are not just updating their LinkedIn profiles anymore. They discuss their skills, have interview sessions, give work and life-related advice and build a community. The user-generated content on these platforms is naturally driving a lot of engagement.
AI is being integrated into social platforms.
AI has become a key player in shaping how we experience social media. But there are more things now that can help marketers with campaign ideas, copy generation and text-to-image generation. Here are some recent examples that showcase how platforms are enabling AI features for marketers:
- LinkedIn Premium offers AI-powered profile writing assistance and ‘Top Choice Jobs’ Signals.
- YouTube has been experimenting with the Dream Track for Music AI tools and Shorts.
- TikTok lets you manage your feed with AI.
- Instagram is expected to bring AI-generated stickers.
However, you also need to consider the privacy and ethical concerns associated with using AI. You should also be aware of your audience’s perception of AI, such as whether they like it.
Expert tip: Keep an eye on how popular brands use the latest AI features and take inspiration.
AI Allows You to Targeting And Personalization
The success of many businesses lies in how they can personalize the experience for their users or customers. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, they can come up with many ways or ideas to show their customers the same social media advertisements. Let’s understand how AI enables you to tailor each ad to an individual’s unique emotion.
Laser-Sharp Audience Targeting
Artificial Intelligence processes huge amounts of user data (demographics, interests, online behaviour) and selects the finest audiences with unmatched precision. Forget broad categories! AI dips in on specific micro-niches, considering the detailed evidentiary preference and buying probability. So, why choose an expensive paid social media advertising agency when you have AI by your side?
Facebook and Instagram use AI to analyze user data and provide highly targeted ads based on demographics, interests, and behavioural patterns. Better relevant advertisements mean higher click-through rates, leading to more page views and possible conversions, making the whole process much more efficient.
Dynamic Creative Optimization
AI optimizes different ad variations (images, text, offers) in real time, determining the optimal combination for each unique user. It guarantees that your ad visuals, messaging, and offers are deeply relevant, thus driving more engagement and conversions.
Netflix and Amazon use AI to provide users with different versions of content and product recommendations based on their viewing or purchasing history, ratings and preferences.
Predictive Bidding & Budgeting
Machine learning determines the optimal bidding strategies that get the highest ad impressions and conversions in the context of your budgeting limitations. This eliminates the human factor in campaign management, resulting in increased ROI and, thus, efficient spending.
AI-powered advertising platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising select the highest bid that offers the most ad impressions and conversions.
Conversational Ads & Chatbots
Artificial intelligence-driven chatbots offer 24/7 customer service in ads, responding to questions and issues promptly. This increases user experience, builds trust, and, hence, results in conversions.
Sephora and H&M employ AI-powered chatbots to provide 24/7 customer service in ads, answering queries and complaints quickly. They do the same in which they employ chatbots for personalized product recommend, style tips and feedback according to user’s preferences and needs. It results in more conversions because of convenient user experience, gained trust and so on.
Content Creation & Influencer Marketing
AI tools support generating content ideas, optimizing titles and identifying suitable influencers, easing marketing activities. This makes time and space for the more important tasks, and this is while focusing on your intended audience and what they like to read about.
Grammarly and BuzzSumo are some of the AI tools that help generate content ideas, optimize titles, and identify influencers, eventually easing marketing efforts. These tools utilize AI to evaluate content and influencer campaign performance and provide insights and recommendations for improvement.
SEO Trends
Google’s constant tinkering brings rapid algorithmic changes, eventually changing how SEO is approached. Here are some of those major changes:
Links are still important but less than before
Our Digital Agency has been in the marketing field for a long time. With our experience we have observed links were generally considered one of the most important Google ranking factors.
Recently Google’s search team member’s statement in a recent Bulgarian search conference has created a lot of buzz. He said, “ Over the years, we’ve made links less important.”
So, does that mean links are less important and marketers don’t have to focus on this aspect. Wait, let’s see what the data says before drawing any conclusion.
Ahrefs is a link-building tool. This data from Ahrefs shows people are still searching for link-building, and the forecasting trend suggests this is going to be stable.
Video SEO
So many people consume content online in video format, mostly on YouTube, making video SEO an important aspect to consider. Studies show that people spend significantly more time on webpages with videos compared to those without. This increases dwell time, which is a positive signal for search engines. In simpler terms, videos can keep visitors on your site longer, making search engines view your content as more valuable. It’s an absolutely effective way to draw more attention to a website and business.
Here are some tips that can help you go ahead with Youtube SEO:
- Keyword Research: Identify relevant keywords that people are searching for and optimize your videos around those terms.
- Strong Titles & Descriptions: Include your target keywords in your video titles and descriptions. This helps search engines understand what your video is about.
- Captions & Transcripts: Add captions and transcripts to your videos. This improves accessibility and allows search engines to better understand the content.
- Promote Your Videos: Share your videos on social media and other platforms to get more views and engagement.
Optimizing Content for Search-Generative Engine
SGE stands for Search Generative Experience. It’s a new approach to search results introduced by Google in May 2024. This technology leverages generative AI to provide users with summaries and overviews of search topics directly on the search results page, without them needing to click on individual websites.
Optimizing content for SGE comes with some benefits, such as:
- A well-structured content that is written to satisfy the user query efficiently is likely to be used by Google to generate SGE summaries. This increases the chances of improving your website’s visibility.
- Optimizing SGE content means making it user-centric, more informative and engaging. Google nowadays favours sites that produce such content.
- By understanding how SGEs work and what kind of content is likely to be featured as an AI overview, you can attract more qualified traffic.
Pro tip: Keep up with the latest developments in SGEs and SEO best practices. As this field is new, staying informed will allow you to adapt your strategies effectively.
Are there any potential drawbacks or risks associated with optimizing content for SGEs?
Websites that merely focus on optimizing for SGE summaries might need to pay more attention to creating high-quality content in general. Creating content for SGE could make them vulnerable if Google’s algorithms or SGE technology changes significantly in the future. Don’t try to exploit the loopholes, as it will only get you short-term success.
EEAT Content
Google rewards content that reflects experience, expertise, and authoritativeness and aims to establish trustworthiness. If your content has it all, you will sail through all the tides of Google updates and spam policies.
Here is our piece of content actively meeting the E-E-A-T standards and ranking in the top position:
Helpful Content
Google’s Core update was all about favouring the websites that produce user-centric content rather than search engine-centric centric. There’s been a shift in how Google evaluates websites. Now, they look at the overall helpfulness of your entire site, not just individual pages. This means low-quality content can bring down the ranking of your good content. So, make sure your website offers something unique and valuable to users. Ensure that your content is informative, trustworthy, and addresses the user’s intent behind their search query. Building expertise and trust on a broad topic is one of the key factors that majorly influence the ranking of a website. You can do so by including expert insights and original data from credible sources or authors to strengthen your content.
Here is what experts say about helpful content:
- Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand, Wix, says that the best content comes from real people who have experience and know what they’re talking about. Search engines like Google are getting better at understanding what people are looking for, and they prefer content that is helpful and addresses real-world situations.
- According to Dan Taylor, Partner & Head of Technical SEO, SALT. Agency, Google’s focus on “helpful, high-quality content” is expanding to include websites with different versions. This means if you have international websites in English for the US, Canada, and the UK, but the content is mostly the same with just currency and spelling tweaks, Google might ignore your hreflang and canonical tags.
Traditionally, websites were structured to reflect company divisions or route leads to specific sales teams. This approach often creates a clunky experience for users and is difficult to manage.
To rank well in search results, you need to convince Google that your alternate versions are worth showing to users. You need to do a couple of things, like:
- Highlight the unique value proposition of each version because why would someone from the US choose your US site over the Canadian or UK version? What makes them different?
- Improve each site’s unique value. This could involve content specific to each region or features tailored to local audiences.
- Rethink your website structure to check if it prioritizes user experience or internal team organization.
PPC Trends
With much competition to draw customers, companies use paid ads to reach their target audience. The pay-per-click (PPC) model is popular because it lets marketers control their spending and stay within budget.
Google is a major player in this area as in Q3 2023, Google made $76.7 billion, with $59.6 billion coming from ads, showing a 9.5% increase from the previous year. Even in 2024, this growth is expected to continuously rise, especially with developments in AI.
How is AI helping with Google Ads?
Google is adding more AI tools to Google Ads. Ai-driven search campaigns let you fine-tune your bidding strategies, broaden match types, and master ad relevance. Broad match keywords feature with Smart bidding and responsive search ads can help you capture leads effectively and boost your ROI. Then, you’ve got Performance Max-AI features to explore a range of Google’s advertising channels. It can also help you understand user behaviour, preferences, and trends across the web. Using AI, you can craft headlines and descriptions for ads and landing pages.
While AI can be helpful, it’s important to be cautious because Google Ads is designed to make money. AI might create biases in ad designs and algorithms.
Cathal Melinn, a digital marketing expert, says that Google is giving more control to AI, limiting human control over ad performance. AI can also over-optimize ads without understanding context like a human.
So, in 2024, use AI as a helper in your strategy, not the only solution.
Google Ads has an optimization score where you can make changes. But remember, Google Ads is designed to make you do certain things. Ensure any changes benefit you. Don’t blindly trust Google. Use your own data and judgment for Google Ad campaigns.
Google reps might call and suggest changes, but they can be pushy. Melinn advises not to make immediate changes.
Conclusion
Google will always update its algorithms; with that, the SEO trends will keep evolving. The only way to survive the battle with these dynamics is to create user-centric content. It’s the only fundamental that is meant to sustain forever. Take AI as your assistance, get help from it, but never rely solely on it.