Of course, marketing on the internet is big business. An estimated $5.8 trillion in sales were made online last year, up from $1.2 trillion just a decade ago. So it's no surprise that brands across sectors are rushing to carve out a niche online. But while traditional marketing remains largely unchanged, the world of online commerce is changing rapidly.
A variety of factors influence the latest trends in digital marketing. Recent years have seen the rise (and fall) of NFTs as a highly promising field, growing interest in virtual reality, and the immense impact of new AI models.
It's not just technology that's changing things: new social media platforms are constantly emerging, and established brands risk being left behind. For example, many businesses have been slow to embrace the disruptive impact of TikTok and its now-ubiquitous short-form vertical video.
This means that if you want to ensure your success in today's online market, it's essential that your brand stays current and ensures it takes into account two key trends that will be making waves in 2024:
Tailor-made offers
One of the big differences between online commerce and brick-and-mortar stores is the issue of scale: The largest department stores typically stock more than 200,000 products, while sites like Amazon allow users to cash out on purchases of more than 13 million items.
Similarly, special offers and promotions in physical stores need to appeal to the widest possible demographic of people who might visit the store, whereas the internet, without spatial limitations, allows smart businesses to take a more granular approach.
When dealing with the truly global market offered online, a one-size-fits-all approach is rarely the most effective. Rather, the best approach is to offer dozens, or even hundreds, of unique, specific offers designed to meet specific users and their requirements. One of the pioneering sectors for this approach is the iGaming market. Today, there are a total of over 20,000 online casinos operating online, which have become dependent on dedicated affiliate platforms to sort and direct traffic. This is achieved by these providers offering a huge number of welcome offers and sign-up deals to potential customers, ranging from no-deposit bonus promotions to free spins on slots.
In doing so, the industry is banking on the fact that not all casino gamers want the same thing, so creating the opportunity for users to choose the deal that brings them the best value exclusively keeps the conversation and organic growth pleasantly sustained.
This approach is also common in traditional e-commerce, where coupon extensions like Honey drive transactions through promotions and discounts targeted to end users.
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In-app transactions
The internet today is very different than it was 20 years ago, with the rise of Web 2.0 and social media. Currently, over 60% of internet traffic occurs solely within apps on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This has made these platforms extremely successful in promoting and marketing products. The viability of this model is best demonstrated by the fact that almost all social media platforms generate over 95% of their revenue by selling advertising space and marketing data to third-party brands. However, more recently, that has started to change.
While traditionally the goal of social media marketing has been two-fold: to increase onsite engagement and drive traffic to an offsite shop or service, more and more brands are choosing to run their entire business within these social media platforms.
Of course, this is only possible because the platforms themselves have a vested and competitive interest in keeping users within their ecosystems, hence the rise of services like Instagram Shopping and TikTok Shop, which use their feeds to promote the latest hot products, trends, and deals.
This allows for near-perfect integration, allowing influencers to post a selfie of the promoted product with a link to check it out within the app with just a tap of the screen. Plus, with the rise of generative AI, the relative cost of creating compelling, visually appealing marketing materials on these platforms is only falling, further improving performance in this space.
