2024 Digital Marketing Trends From 20+ Marketing Experts
The digital landscape has changed after the increasing adoption of different artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.
Talking about ChatGPT, here are some interesting statistics about its incredible growth since they launched the service in November 2022:
- It reached 1 million users in just 5 days
- It now has more than 180 million users
- It has 1.6 billion monthly visitors
- 92% of their website traffic is direct traffic and only 6% is organic traffic
- Almost 50% of their social media traffic is from YouTube
Although it’s incredible to acquire 1 million users in 5 days, Threads, the new social network alternative for Twitter made by Meta (the parent company of Facebook) succeeded in having 1 million users in just… 1 hour.
Suggestion: Follow our Hot in Social Media account on Threads … and we will follow you back.
Here is the approximate time taken for the most known social media networks to reach 1 million users/downloads:
- Threads — 1 hour
- ChatGPT — 5 days
- Instagram — 2.5 months
- Facebook — 10 months
- LinkedIn — 20 months
- Twitter — 24 months
I believe AI prompting will be a required skill if you want to be a digital marketing pro in 2024 and will help you a lot to optimize your digital marketing plan for your customers.
2024 is also the year when most browsers will kill data-gathering cookies. Google announced they will stop the use of third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2024, joining other browsers like Safari and Brave that have been blocking them for years.
From visual communications skills, data-driven decisions, and storytelling to SEO optimizations of your (already published) content, there are a lot of things you need to know and prioritize to have the best KPI for your customers.
Here are 20+ top marketers who told our Hot in Social Media community their predictions for this year’s digital marketing trends for 2024. A big “Thank You!” to all our marketing friends who share their suggestions for this year, too!
If you found some useful digital marketing trends in this article, remember to share them on your social media channels and mention our social accounts because we are eager to engage with you right away 🙂
What are the most important digital marketing trends for 2024?
Keri Jaehnig
Donna Moritz
Miruna Dragomir
Rob Durant
Andy Crestodina
Stephanie Nelson
Jacob Shipley
Virginia Zuloaga
Adelina Noge
Timothy Hughes
Julia Campbell
Christina Garnett
Marji J. Sherman
Laura Trif
Lilach Bullock
Gus Pelogia
Gini Dietrich
Jeff Korhan
Ravi Shukle
Adina Jipa
Ted Rubin
Ingrid Kibler
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Keri Jaehnig
Founder & CEO — Idea Girl Media
The digital landscape is changing quickly. In large part due to AI. Your top priority is your customer … your end user. In turn, all of your decisions should be data-driven, and you should do all you can to create a frictionless customer journey. Update your social customer service processes and ensure your chatbots are performing flawlessly.
If your business has been online for a few years without regularly refreshing your digital pages and profiles, it is time to take inventory and update your text and imagery so your online visitors see what is most correct and relevant about your brand. If you’ve been online for more than a few years, it’s time for an online presence audit and a new marketing strategy. Investing in this process will help your organization achieve optimal search rankings and outshine your competition on social media platforms.
It’s also time to look at SEO differently. Content strategies should consider the importance of being found via voice search and ChatGPT. Advertising is more expensive. That means maximizing your organic search opportunities in addition to any SEO and advertising budget you assign.
You now must consider Google’s EEAT framework — Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It’s part of their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. They recently added the ‘E’ for the experience. AI cannot create experiences as humans would. So, this speaks to the importance of human experts involved in creating content and informing the public. So, smart marketers will create content with those “ingredients.”
Donna Moritz
Visual Content Strategist, Canva Verified Expert & Canva Creator
So much is changing but the digital marketing trends I will be looking out for, focusing on, or following with interest for 2024 are:
- AI becoming more integrated with the systems we already use — For example, I use Canva daily as a Canva Verified Expert (trainer) and as such I regularly use and teach teams to use AI as part of their visual content creation workflow. This includes using AI for copywriting (Magic Write), creation of visual content (Magic Design), and specific features like animation (Magic Animate). AI has been part of the eco-system in which I work in Canva for a few years now, and I think we will see more software companies start to build the tools we need into our workflow, rather than expecting us to go outside of our dashboards to find it. The best AI happens when you don’t even think about it.
- Teams will need to develop essential visual communication skills — As a trainer of non-designers and teams using visual software, I am seeing it become more and more necessary for business owners and marketers to become “literate” in their ability to create visual content. It’s no longer enough for the designers and the marketing team to drive the visual strategy and create all of the visual content. Employees and team members are now expected to possess basic visual content creation and video skills. This can include design skills and knowledge, but with the software (and templates) available, it’s possible for all team members to work together to create amazing on-brand visuals. By using software that has brand functionality (ie brand kits, brand guidelines, approved brand assets/templates, approvals, and permissions) visuals can be created on brand, at speed, and at scale by the entire team… even those who don’t have any technical design skills.
- Community First — in a world of AI, people ultimately are still drawn to people and for this reason, community will continue to be a key part of marketing and integral to sales. Building community and engagement with your people has never been more important (or craved!). Double down on community wherever you can. From private spaces to groups and conversations in the DMs, focus on the human connection vs churning out content. Of course, use AI to be more productive and assist in your daily work, but remember that humans matter most.
Miruna Dragomir
CMO — Planable
The need for uniqueness and originality in content is on the rise. With AI, the impulse is to focus on creating more content. AI is your creative sidekick, that can detangle marketing processes and remove manual work. But considering the amount of content generated or empowered by AI, the race for truly unique, stand-out material is on. Originality is the new golden ticked in the AI age.
So the trends I see are:
Expert-infused content
The integration of expert insights and professional expertise into content creation is becoming increasingly significant. Most marketing teams can find untapped unique expertise in-house. From peers, and the leadership team, to specialists involved in production. Learning to infuse their expertise into the created content on a regular basis, will help enhance the depth and authority of content. This approach not only boosts the content’s reliability but also its appeal to a more discerning audience seeking authentic, expert-backed information.
Unique, lived, stories and experiences
Authenticity in digital marketing is taking center stage through storytelling and sharing lived experiences. Personal narratives, customer success stories, and behind-the-scenes insights are real-life, handy sources of original content that resonates.
More experimentation with formats of content
AI doesn’t only open the path to more content production, it opens the possibility of creating different types of content. All production is becoming simpler and faster. From podcast editing, to video scripting, to image generation. Marketers will use it more to empower the creativity of their content types to engage different segments of the audience. “
Rob Durant
Founder
As we move forward in 2024 and beyond, social media marketing will not center around what I call “capital ‘I’ Influencers”. You know who I mean — those with hundreds of thousands, maybe even MILLIONS of followersw. It won’t even be about lower-case “i” micro-influencers (tens of thousands of followers). 2024 will be the year where relationships will matter more than ever.
2024 will be the year of the Relator
In the DISC personality assessment tool a “Relator” typically refers to someone who values personal interaction and close relationships. They are often seen as warm, caring, and good at listening and maintaining deep, long-term relationships. Relators place a high value on personal connections and are often very supportive and nurturing in their interactions. They are typically empathetic and can understand and relate to the emotions of others. They tend to be excellent listeners, showing genuine interest in others’ thoughts and feelings. And they generally prefer a collaborative approach — both internally and externally.
2024 will be the year of the Connector
In his book “The Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell describes a similar personality type — Connectors. Connectors engage deeply with their network, forming close, personal bonds. Their interactions are often meaningful and impactful. Due to the depth of their relationships, Connectors are highly trusted and influential within their circle. Their recommendations and opinions are often valued and taken seriously. They prioritize maintaining a few strong relationships over having numerous acquaintances. They tend to invest a lot of time and effort in nurturing and maintaining their relationships.
People relate to people. People want to buy from people. But first, people want to connect with people.
What does this mean for you?
As a professor of Marketing, I tell my students –
– Success in life is not simply about what you know.
– But success in life is not just about who you know, either.
– Success in life is about who knows you for what you know.
– Your job, then, is to make sure more and more people know you for what you know.
The most effective use of social media marketing will be to Be Approachable, Be Sociable, and Be Generous.
Andy Crestodina
Co-founder, CMO — Orbit Media Studios
Clickthrough rates from search engines and social media platforms will continue to decline. We can all expect a bit less traffic in 2024, which means less marketing data. But don’t despair. Keep building your brand. Do memorable things. Embrace offline marketing.
And build your audience on the platforms (LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) with lower expectations about getting clicks.
