A new year brings new opportunities to reframe your approach and try alternative directions that can help you get the most out of your marketing and promotional efforts.
Interactive behavior is constantly changing, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends to meet people where they are and deliver messaging that resonates with those changes.
To help with this, here is a quick overview of five key trends to watch as you plan for 2024. These will help you refine your approach.
1. Experiment with short videos
As you’ve probably heard or read countless times before, you need to try out short-form video in your 2024 marketing plans.
Short videos are the fastest growing content type on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, and continue to be a primary form of engagement on TikTok. X is also looking to put more video content in users' feeds, and many businesses that have invested in short video content have seen a significant increase in brand awareness.
The challenge is creating compelling short-form content, which isn't always easy, but there are a growing number of resources to guide you, such as TikTok's top ads list, which highlights the best-performing brand content at any given time.
Additionally, the platform itself is developing new tools to make it easier for brands to create short-form videos, including a generative AI tool that can build video clips based on text prompts.
It’s worth exploring your options and finding out what resonates with you to inspire your own ideas for potential short video clips.
To maximize your ROI, you can repost your video clips on different platforms (as long as you don't repost watermarked content). The more you experiment, the better your results will be.
The popularity of short videos doesn't seem like it's going to wane anytime soon, so it's definitely something to at least keep an eye on.
2. Explore messaging possibilities
A key trend over the past three years has been a shift from posting primarily on public social platform feeds to more private sharing in DM groups.
The reasons are varied: past posts haunting famous users raise concerns about the content you share, political divisions and controversies make people less interested in sharing personal views, and many users have grown tired of random, trivial updates and treat your various profiles as a vague showcase of daily highlights.
So digital interactions are changing, with more people sharing privately, making it much harder for brands to track and equally difficult to penetrate.
But trusted brands that respect direct mail can leverage it as a valuable connection channel: if granted access to potential customers’ inboxes, it can become a key promotional option, leading to more messages being read and increased brand awareness and engagement.
Key considerations here are exclusive offers, offers to friends to enable sharing of private deals, hyper-segmentation to stay relevant, and messaging frequency without being intrusive.
You can benefit from this shift if you encourage people to sign up for these deals and find ways to align your audience with your messaging offers.
3. Consider alternative platforms
Any way you look at it, X is declining as an advertising option. Maybe not for some niche brands, but as larger companies reduce their presence in X there are opportunities to consider it in the context of less competition. But for the vast majority of brands, 2024 will see them rethink their X strategy.
So it might be worth trying out some smaller, niche social platforms to see what results you get.
Reddit continues to improve its advertising options, Pinterest has over 400 million active users with high purchase intent using the app, and Snapchat remains a key touchpoint for young people.
If you haven't tried these apps yet, moving away from X might give you a new opportunity to try them out and see what results you get.
There may also be an opportunity with Threads – they don't have any ads yet, but it could be valuable as an organic brand awareness vehicle. LinkedIn has also seen an increase in activity, and if the changes in X give you flexibility in your plans, it may be time to consider different alternatives.
4. Try generative AI tools
I've tested a variety of the latest generative AI apps and while I don't see them as a substitute for actually doing the work yourself, they can be useful for various elements of the process.
And they aren't going away: generative AI is here to stay, will continue to improve, and will become a bigger part of many workplaces and business processes.
So, you need to understand it and consider the benefits of how different apps can help you optimize your daily processes. Generative AI is expanding into more areas such as audio and video creation, and we expect to see major advancements in both areas this year.
But the underlying core of these projects remains creativity, and coming up with a compelling concept is not something a machine can consistently replicate. Indeed, generative AI is derivative in nature, an approximation based on examples built into the training data, and can only deliver outputs similar to those created before.
Coming up with concepts is still the domain of humans, but for almost everything else we could see some benefit from generative AI tools.
You will learn how AI systems work, the different tools available and how they are evolving, and consider how you can apply them to your process.
A good place to start is LinkedIn Learning's range of AI courses, some of which are available for free.
5. Gain a deeper understanding of AR and 3D object creation
The next step in digital interactions will be increasingly immersive environments, whether that entails AR, VR, the metaverse, or whatever.
Sure, Meta may have been premature in betting its future on its vision of the metaverse, but it's right that this is the direction we're heading.
Kids these days spend all their time in immersive gaming worlds like Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, etc., where they interact, socialize, and engage. This points to a future of broader engagement trends that will eventually include professional interactions as well.
Not convinced? Consider that Facebook Workplace now has over 7 million paid subscribers, and that nearly every business has its own collaboration tools based on the social network's UI. These tools were born out of youth engagement trends, and as users grew, they became a logical development framework for business options.
These trends are indicative, and with the next generation of AR wearables due to hit the market soon, a revolution will unfold that will give all users a better sense of place and presence.
With this in mind, it’s also worth taking the time to understand the latest AR tools on offer and how you can create 3D digital versions of your products, for example, to enhance your presence and expression in your new space.
Generative AI-based tools help simplify the creation process, while evolving AR builder platforms also make it easier to create your own immersive experiences.
Eventually you will be building within a 3D environment, so it may be time to start learning how these processes work.
There are many new trends emerging in the digital marketing space, and it's important to know where they're headed to stay ahead of the competition. These tips will help you make the most of 2024.
