As 2023 ends, if you're a marketer, you’re already looking to the future.
Your organization has likely already begun planning and preparing how to best reach customers in the new year. How will you connect with new customers, stand out and generate revenue in a tight market?
To get ahead, understanding future marketing trends is essential. Artificial intelligence, digital marketing and more represent both opportunity and risk.
Here are some 2024 trends in marketing to watch for.
Voice Search Optimization
The rise in popularity of digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant has made it easier for people to get information, complete tasks and make purchases like never before. As of 2023, there are 4.2 billion voice assistants in use, and it’s expected to reach 8.4 billion by 2024. Since 71% of people prefer voice assistants instead of physically typing a search query, improving your online presence to appear for voice search queries is more important than ever.
In 2024, businesses that optimize their content for voice assistants will improve their visibility, reach a wider audience and increase traffic. Additionally, optimizing your content for voice search will enhance the shopping experience for your existing customers.
However, voice commerce has limitations, such as the limited screen real estate available. This makes it more difficult for businesses to display their products and services. You will need to design your display strategy around voice. Rather than providing all the relevant information immediately, look at providing easy options for customers to find what they need. Furthermore, voice technology is still in its early stages of development, and many consumers are hesitant to use voice-activated devices to make purchases. Easing the transition from voice to purchase can pay quick dividends for smart businesses.
Competitor and Social Monitoring
One specific AI use case that will grow in popularity is competitor monitoring. According to recent data, this will be important for 92% of business leaders in 2024.
Competitor monitoring or competitor analysis collects information about other companies, their products, their sales and their marketing strategies. There are benefits to competitor monitoring. Your company will better understand your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. With this information, you can improve your product and marketing strategy by comparing it to the competition.
Social monitoring, a type of competitor monitoring, will improve brand positioning by outsmarting the competition, benchmarking performance and staying current with competitors’ social strategies.
Tools that offer social monitoring, like HubSpot and Sprout, are already popular. By adding the URLs of your competitors to HubSpot’s social media tool, you will automatically find their social profiles. After adding your competitors, you will get a list of all your competitors’ social posts. Marketers can view which posts get engagement in two metrics: engagement total and rate.
ChatGPT and Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence
This AI-powered chatbot is predicted to generate $1 billion in revenue in 2024. ChatGPT is a free language processing tool directed by AI technology that allows users to have human-like conversations, write instructions, answer questions, assist with tasks, and compose emails, essays and code.
While ChatGPT has its limitations, it’s an excellent tool for getting inspiration for content. In addition, its ability to fine-tune content to match the content marketing or copywriting approach can generate a quality first draft or outline to help marketers start creating content.
This chatbot is also a great asset for keyword research. For example, if you’re writing an article for your garage door company by using the prompt "What keywords should I use in an article about garage doors?", you’ll get a list of keywords such as "garage door types," "steel garage doors," "modern garage doors" and "insulated garage doors".
While ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it’s foolish to think it can replace marketers, copywriters and coders. There are risks to relying solely on AI for your marketing. It can’t replace the innovation, originality and opportunistic experience that an employee can. Instead, look at it as another tool in your marketing arsenal. Use it in conjunction with existing marketing efforts to enhance and create efficiencies.
Chatbots in Marketing and Customer Service
Like ChatGPT, the market for chatbots in general will grow in 2024. 58% of companies in the B2B sector actively use chatbots. Those that do have seen a 67% increase in sales.
Chatbots are highly beneficial in marketing and customer service. They allow customers to quickly get answers to their questions, and for businesses to provide answers before that customer turns to a competitor. Marketers can set automated responses on their website to welcome customers and encourage them to ask questions. In addition, chatbots can collect information, qualify leads, book meetings, handle support tickets and streamline sales.
With HubSpot’s free chat feature, you can easily set up a chatbot that serves your customers. Consider using it today, with the goal of continuing to refine and improve it over time.
Data and Predictive Analytics
Data analytics involves examining, cleaning, transforming and interpreting data to gain valuable insights. As a business, you are continually generating data. How you use that data to drive decision-making and strategy may determine your success. In 2024, data analytics will become increasingly essential for businesses to forecast trends and customer insight. The company that uses their data better will see improved decision-making, less waste and more confident operations.
Predictive analytics is the process of using data to forecast future situations. This process uses a combination of data analysis, machine learning, AI and statistical models to detect patterns that predict future behavior. Over time, it will aid digital marketers in assessing when a customer will be ready to purchase again, the potential lifetime value of a customer, and future customer needs or cross sales opportunities. With access to this data, marketers can create customer segments based on predictive metrics to enhance marketing success, generate additional sales and increase revenue.
Hyper-Personalization and Customer Experience
Hyper-personalization uses real-time data, AI, machine learning and predictive analytics to gather and use information from your customer. With it, you can create feedback loops that enhance the customer experience. Think of it like the “other items of interest” on an ecommerce site. What if the system could use the information that the customer gives and the actions they take to provide real value in the “other items of interest.”
Rather than looking for everything else they need, the customer can pick and choose from curated content on a single screen. That’s an exceptional customer experience that will entice a customer to return. With hyper-personalization, you can tailor your marketing efforts to people’s needs, jobs, backgrounds and preferences. Rather than guessing with your marketing, you’re curating a personalized experience with every interaction.
With this tool, marketers can send contextualized emails based on when and where the email is opened. For example, ecommerce companies can send emails highlighting the product the user previously looked at but didn’t purchase. In addition, they can display real-time pricing and dynamically change SKUs when a product goes out of stock.
Take Action Now to Find Success in the New Year
While your company may already have an outstanding in-house marketing team, the easiest path to improvement is often bringing in an outside resource. Even the most stable and successful businesses have benefited from the results of outsourcing marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency, especially when undertaking a new marketing channel or leveraging a new tool or strategy.
With GO2 Partners, you have access to an experienced marketing team with resources you may not currently have on staff. Our goal is to understand your goals and make them our own, provide the support and expertise where you need it, and act as another staff member. We can help your company thrive by reducing risk in marketing investment and enhancing the resources you already have in place. Contact us today to discuss how we can help.
