Top Digital and Performance Marketing Trends for 2024

• Discover what the experts are predicting as the leading digital and performance marketing trends in 2024.
• Learn what areas of marketing you may want to focus on for a more successful year ahead.
• Interest Media partners with publishers and advertisers providing O&O web properties, exclusive first-party data, and unique, audience-centric, omnichannel and interest-based marketing solutions.

Digital and Performance Marketing Trends to Watch in 2024

Consumer demands and the strategies for meeting them in digital and performance marketing rarely remain the same. As such, expectations and innovations are developing at warp speed as we move into 2024.

With the purchasing power of Generation Z gaining momentum, we’ve already seen a rise in social commerce, influencer marketing, and demand for ethics and sustainability, to name but a few trends. All these areas are expected to grow over the coming year.

Personalization has been an area of focus and is now exploding into a demand for hyper-personalization. AI is rising to the call to assist in this arena. The question remains whether AI tools can be developed as quickly as needed to meet the demand, as well as their affordability versus profitability.

Data and privacy regulations will only increase with new policies going into effect in 2024, as well as Google ensuring that cookies crumble.

Let’s take a look at what appears to be the preeminent trends coming to the forefront in 2024 and what these mean for marketers.

Conversational Marketing

“90% of respondents said an immediate response is important or very important,” – HubSpot

In 2024, brands will put more of a focus on building meaningful conversations with their customers. Expect conversational marketing to be a key trend in 2024.

In short, conversational marketing is a customer-centric and dialogue-driven approach to marketing. It’s based on one-to-one interactions in real-time across multiple channels.

The most important thing to focus on before beginning a conversational marketing strategy is to understand your customers. This means you need to be aware of your customers’ preferred channels, needs and wants, and tone of voice they are most likely to respond to (formal, casual, humorous, etc.).

You need to assess all of these things so that you can deliver a consumer-centric response. You need to provide your customers the power of how and where they can communicate with your business and when.

Why should you consider conversational marketing?

Here are a few reasons why you should consider adopting a consumer-centric, conversational marketing strategy in 2024:

• Create a better customer experience.
• Improve your lead generation.
• Buyers through your sales funnel faster.

How to deliver a conversational marketing solution

“Salesforce predicts that by 2025, 95% of customer interaction will happen through AI,” –Martech

There are a variety of ways to deliver conversational marketing solutions. Any form of two-way communication can be a part of a conversational marketing strategy. Live chat, AI chatbots, and messaging apps are the most common ways of enabling these personalized conversations. However, email and messaging apps are all applicable.

Live Chat Exposes a Fatal Flaw in Your Go-to-Market – Hubspot

Interest Media excels at helping advertisers and publishers deliver conversational marketing solutions

Interest Media specializes in providing audience-centric, omnichannel and interest-based marketing solutions. Contact one of our business development superheroes to assist you with taking your digital marketing strategies to the next level and beyond.

Influencer marketing will continue to evolve

“80% of influencer marketers work with small creators and [micro] influencers,” –HubSpot’s 2023 Social Media Marketing Report

Influencer marketing has been increasing for several years. However, what’s new about influencer marketing in 2024 is that it will continue to evolve, changing from what it is now.

#1: The rise of micro-influencers

The “micro” prefix means a social media influencer with a smaller audience. Somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. However, what micro doesn’t mean is less influence. Their audiences are likely to be highly engaged. Further, these influencers are often more niche-specific. All these factors are a good thing because the audiences often align with these micro-influencers because they are considered more relatable and trustworthy.

Before now, micro-influencers on social media for promoting products, services, or brands were an underutilized tool. However, they can help brands differentiate themselves from their competitors and connect with influencers the audience views as genuine, a viewpoint that can transfer to a company’s brand

#2: Influencer authenticity and transparency

Audience expectations will demand even more authenticity and transparency. This is what is contributing to the rise of micro- and nano-influencers, as the audience begins to question some of the mega-influencers and whether or not they are selling out to big brands.

No matter what type of influencer your company works with – from micro to the largest – what’s most important is choosing influencers who fit your brand well.

Secondly, look for influencers who are willing and able to create authentic content that will resonate with their audience.

Personalized Content Experiences & Hyper-personalization

“80% of customers say they are more inclined to do business with an organization that delivers tailored experiences and 90% say personalization is desirable,” –Epsilon

Personalized content experiences mean that two customers may see distinctly different marketing messages. These not only might be different product suggestions and offers, but also different individualized content recommendations.

Audiences are more likely to accept and interact with marketing messages that offer personalization. However, in 2024 and beyond, audiences are evolving with technology and, thus, their expectations for what personalization should be are speeding into hyperdrive.

The power of me: The impact of personalization on marketing performance – Epsilon Marketing

Hyper-personalization

“61% of people expect brands to tailor experiences based on their preferences,” – Google

While hyper-personalization cannot be defined as a single thing. One definition would be: Delivering personalization in the most advanced way possible with the aim of tailoring your marketing messages to unique customer segments or individual customers.

Hyper-personalization is achieved through custom and targeted experiences through a combination of data, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and other automation.

In 2024, Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and advanced analytics are providing the tools for businesses to deliver individualized content, as well as product suggestions and offers across all touchpoints. And that leads us to…

Omnichannel marketing is a form of hyper-personalization

“89% of customers are retained on average by businesses with omnichannel marketing capabilities,” – Softtek

Omnichannel marketing is a process that delivers marketing messages to consumers throughout various physical and digital spaces or touchpoints. Marketing messages reach customers as they move across different screens such as mobile, tablet, desktop, and television.

The best omnichannel marketing strategies and delivery systems make the experience seamless. They tailor the customer experience based on the individual buyer’s needs and preferences while being aware of where “the customer left off.” In this way, they deliver the right message, at the right time, no matter the device or how the customer interacts with the brand.

Interest Media partners with advertisers and publishers to deliver a consumer-centric, omnichannel marketing solution

“Omnichannel marketing can increase purchase rate by 287%,” – Omnisend

Interest Media offers a complete Omni channel solution. Deliver your marketing messages across email, display, push, SMS, and more.

With specialized tools that are built for performance, Interest Media delivers thousands of exclusive offers, derived from the internet’s most valuable consumer verticals, to publishers seeking increased earnings.

Interest Media offers a consumer-centric advertising solution that utilizes first-party data combined with real-time optimization that maintains a positive user experience while driving higher earnings.

Contact one of our business development superheroes to assist you with taking your digital marketing strategies to the next level and beyond.

Social Commerce

“67% of consumers have already bought through social media platforms and 53% of global consumers say they intend to shop more through social platforms in the future,” –Wunderman Thompson, 2023

Social commerce will continue to expand in 2024 as it moves toward becoming the norm.

In addition to increasing integrated features such as in-app purchases, brands will need to create more “shoppable posts” that make it easier for consumers to purchase products directly from the brand’s social media feed.

Overall, brands need to utilize compelling content that both attracts customers and encourages purchases. Brands need to create a seamless experience that makes the buying process as easy as possible.

More social media platforms are expected to assist in this process by building out features to accomplish this. For example, TikTok’s e-commerce product – TikTok Shop – launched in the US in early September 2023. It allows brands to create product portfolios that are accessible from their profile pages. The shop has a dedicated tab where users can search for different products, discover products through recommendations, browse items in different categories, and manage their orders.

Social media for search

“40% of consumers use TikTok to search for things they need or are interested in learning about,” – Adobe

Related to the rise of social media commerce is a recent study that found some social media platforms are also replacing popular search engines as the preferred search tool of choice.

Younger people are driving this trend with 64% of Gen Z (those born after 1996) and 49% of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) using TikTok as a search tool. Nearly 10% of Gen Z choose TikTok as their preferred search tool over Google and other established search engines.

Sustainability and Ethical Marketing

“78% of consumers feel that sustainability is important and 84% of customers say that poor environmental practices will alienate them from a brand or company,” –TheRoundup.org

Brands that transparently showcase how they integrate sustainability into their products and marketing practices will have a competitive edge in 2024 and beyond.

Consumers are making more conscious decisions about what products they purchase based on the social responsibility and ethics of the companies they do business with. More and more consumers are leaning toward brands that prioritize sustainable practices in how they source, produce, package, deliver, and promote their products with the least negative environmental impacts.

Environmentally Conscious Consumer Statistics – The RoundUp

Statistics also indicate that companies that focus on being environmentally conscious and promoting sustainable products will be more profitable. Consider the following:

• 75% of sustainable goods sell better online than in-store.
• Products marketed as sustainable grew 2.7x faster than those that were not.
• 62% of people say they “always or often” seek products to purchase because they are sustainable
• Sustainable Products have an overall 17% market share and a 32% share of growth.
• 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for eco-friendly brands.

Data and Privacy Compliance

“83% of consumers want more control over their personal information,” – PwC

A deluge of stricter data and privacy regulations are on the horizon and all signs indicate such laws will continue to increase moving forward. Marketers will need to prioritize both compliance and data security.

Google is also taking several steps. Gmail will begin enforcing new, stricter rules on bulk email senders in February 2024. While Google Chrome began phasing out third-party cookies last fall, the company recently announced it will allow some companies to request additional time to transition away from them until December 27, 2024.

Stricter state data privacy laws to go into effect in 2024-2025

Five states already have stricter data privacy laws that have gone into effect including California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and Utah. Four more states have laws that are expected later in the year including Florida, Oregon, and Texas. In 2025, stricter laws are also expected to go into effect in Delaware, Iowa, and Tennessee.

These regulations will force marketers to be transparent about how they collect, use, and protect data.

Top 3 privacy-centric marketing practices for 2024

• Obtain explicit consent from consumers before collecting their data
• Anonymizing or pseudonymizing customer data
• Allow customers to have more control over how their data is used

Adopting such practices and being transparent with users will also be paramount in building trust with the audience and maintaining a long-term relationship.

AI in Marketing

“98% of marketers used AI in some way for their marketing purposes in 2023,” – Marketing AI Institute

This topic is dominating marketing article headlines and is something a lot of people are probably already tired of hearing about, but it cannot go without mentioning.

In addition to the above statistic, 45 percent of respondents also said they were experimenting with AI, while 29 percent said AI was already infused into their daily workflows.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the marketing world in many ways and will undoubtedly bring more benefits than detrimental effects even as it encroaches on some jobs.

For example, there is no way that the hyper-personalization that’s becoming a necessity in today’s competitive market would even be possible without AI. Machine learning is a valuable tool that is crucial for delivering individualized content, offers, and product suggestions to consumers. The demands of reaching consumers at every touchpoint seamlessly through omnichannel marketing can only be fully realized with AI assistance. Advanced targeting will also rely on AI for leveraging advanced analytics.

Where AI will be leveraged

A few of the areas of focus where AI will be employed are:

• Advanced and predictive analytics to help marketers identify patterns, actionable insights, and audience segments, and target potential customers
• Audience segmentation
• Automation of repetitive tasks
• Campaign management
• Optimizing marketing strategies to increase engagements and conversion
• Chatbots to engage in personalized conversations with consumers
• Creation of high-quality content and advertisements at scale, as well as individualized for on-demand responses.

Propel your Digital Marketing with Interest Media

Powered by an internally owned and operated network of web properties, leveraging exclusive first-party data, Interest Media puts the biggest brands in front of their ideal consumers with a unique, audience-centric, omnichannel solution.

Advertisers:

Interest Media allows advertisers to create meaningful interactions with actively engaged audiences that have confirmed their intent and fit your precise consumer profile. These authenticated customers have been pre-qualified and are ready to engage with your brand.

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