Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends in 2024

If you want to improve your competitive position in 2024, pay attention to trends of digital marketing. Today's technologies are only the bare minimum. To achieve real success, you need to look to the future. Here's what you should consider in your marketing strategy. 

5 Trends in Digital Marketing

Not all trends are fast-moving. Some digital trends in marketing have existed for years and are gradually becoming part of our daily lives. We'll start with them and move on to the new ones just emerging. 

1. AI tools for marketers

This state-of-the-art technology is now at the top of the digital marketing trends. According to Forbes statistics, in 2023, the growth of the AI market reached its expected peak of 33.28%. Experts predict its value will increase by 20-30% annually until 2030. At the same time, they believe that AI will increase the GDP of the largest countries by 15-33% during this period due to its flexibility, versatility, and ability to perform many tasks. Among them are:

• Personalization of web pages - artificial intelligence rebuilds them for each user individually, changing the content and sometimes the structure.
• Automation of communications - chatbots lower the workload on call centers by answering simple questions and providing consultations. They can also communicate with a customer until a specialist is connected.
• Predicting visitor behavior - modern predictive AI models can determine the next user action with an accuracy of 90%. This helps to better create personalized offers and optimize the sales funnel.
• Content generation - artificial intelligence reduces the time spent on writing long-read articles by 30-50%, allowing you to fill websites and build link networks faster. In addition, it creates high-quality images that are not protected by copyright. 

At Claspo, we are always interested in trends, especially AI, which greatly simplifies life and improves results. Therefore, researching various AI tools and their capabilities has become a part of our everyday life. Here is a fresh finding:

A go-to platform that creates a "before and after" image based on our suggested prompt. Just look at the result it offered in less than a minute!

If your business involves selling vacuum cleaners, you are lucky to come across this article because you already have a visual (or an idea for inspiration, at least). But if not, don't worry. We are working hard on an article that will include an extensive list of AI tools for various marketing purposes (including the one that created the image above) and ready-made prompts for them. You will definitely find some great solutions for yourself.

Sign up for the Claspo newsletter and find this article in your inbox as soon as it's available.

2. Voice search

This is a recent trend in digital marketing that is just beginning to reach its peak. According to SynUp, 40% of US adults use voice search at least once a week. Among smart speaker owners, the share reaches an incredible 76%. At the same time, voice queries are much more accurate than text queries, consisting of an average of 29 words versus 5–8 words in the browser search bar. This makes them perfect for finding local businesses, such as the nearest coffee shop, a clothing store in a particular area of a city, a local food manufacturer, etc. 

A typical search engine response to a voice query is a text that describes a particular object or phenomenon as briefly and accurately as possible. Therefore, to adapt to this trend, you need to:

• Try to give concise definitions, such as "A marketing trend is a trend that affects the way business is done."
• Write texts in a simple conversational style, avoiding over-optimization and complicated language structures.
• Use long keyword phrases, such as "Where can I find the best coffee shop in the East End of Boston?" 

3. Retention focus in social media

One of the current trends in digital marketing is to focus on retaining customers whose engagement rates on social media are constantly declining. According to Rival IQ, over the past three years, the average level of engagement has decreased by 20%, with a particularly sharp drop in 2023. 

The only pleasant exception was TikTok, where the engagement rate continued to grow and reached a record 5.69%. When working with other social networks, marketers are forced to change their approaches to avoid losses. Therefore, the latest digital marketing trend is the gradual transformation of communications. They are already focused on retention rather than engagement. Businesses need to create perfect conditions to retain their customer base:

• Be informative - concisely present useful information that meets the expectations of consumers and can be used in everyday life.
• Be a buddy, not just a seller - do not be limited to dry facts about the brand and products; mix them with interesting videos, memes, funny facts, moments from the company life, etc.
• Be interactive - make communications two-way by actively engaging customers in reviews, surveys, contests, and polls and using their opinions to improve your business. 

While customer engagement on social media is primarily up to you (as always), Claspo can help. Yes, our widgets work on your website, but they can invite visitors to social media (if it is an integral part of your strategy) and redirect them to your business accounts. They can also make announcements about intriguing content and other goodies they will find there.

Use this template

Still, customer retention is essential not only on social media but also on the website, which is your primary communication channel and central point of online sales. And here, Claspo can do a lot for your strategy:

• Collect the personal data of the audience to fill out customer profiles and build personalized communication.
• Promote your loyalty program by describing its benefits and redirecting to registration.
• Provide personal promo codes and discounts to regular customers.
• Offer quick access to your support team in any messengers for timely resolution of all customer issues.
• Conduct satisfaction surveys to give customers a voice and provide you with valuable insights for improvement.

Customer care is always on trend; Claspo will help you show it.

Use this template

4. Augmented reality

Although some brands already work in this area, their experiments remain few. Therefore, AR can be attributed to new trends in digital marketing that are just emerging in 2024. Fortunately, modern technologies simplify the use of augmented reality. Today, it doesn't require bulky headsets and powerful desktop computers — it can be built using a mid-range smartphone. 

This has made augmented reality technology phenomenally popular. According to AR Insider, there are already more than 1.4 billion users worldwide. Dynata surveys show that more than 90% of Gen Z representatives and 75% of people aged 35-55 are ready to make purchases in AR environments. 

Most marketers believe that augmented reality can only benefit large tech companies. In fact, it is possible to integrate it into the marketing of small and medium businesses, regardless of their field of activity. They can use the following solutions:

• AR advertising that integrates into other applications. This form of appeal ensures a higher level of engagement.
• Simple AR games, for example, searching for hidden virtual objects to get rewards. Although the Pokémon Go craze has passed, this app has left a very important legacy behind.
• AR that allows you to spin products, look at them from different angles, and evaluate them in your environment. The IKEA mobile app has had a similar solution for several years. If you want to follow their example, Claspo will make your app popular. We have a track record of increasing product downloads by 48% and are happy to repeat this success for you.

5. Generative AI in search engines

This newest digital marketing trend will soon become our new reality. In the first half of 2024, Google promises to integrate artificial intelligence into search results. The system will no longer generate recommended snippets based on top articles. Instead, it will be able to answer questions, provide short definitions, and write other texts summarizing all the information available. 

Search Engine Journal surveys show that more than 70% of people trust AI-powered search and are ready to use it in certain scenarios. 29% of users have already expressed a desire to switch to AI completely, refusing to use traditional algorithms for selecting information. As early as 2024, the market for AI-powered search engines could reach $20-50 billion, with Google taking the lion's share. 

What does this mean for marketers? The creation of such a system will have several consequences:

• The distribution of traffic in search results will become even more uneven, and users will be less motivated to scroll down the page.
• The volume of traffic to informational websites will decrease significantly. It will become unprofitable to optimize for questions and definitions.
• Generative AI will be able to provide links, but it will select them using machine learning. SEO may once again be dominated by robots, not humans.
• At the same time, the role of human-centered content will increase, and it will not be optimized at all. Its distribution will be viral and shared on social networks and messengers.

Future Digital Marketing Trends

It seems that all possible ideas have already been exhausted, and we will only have to improve what we have today. But people thought the same way 10, 20, 50, and even 100 years ago. Currently, experts believe the following future trends in digital marketing are most likely:

• Development of the Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg spends billions of dollars on his favorite project for a reason. He expects it to turn into a virtual world with at least a billion inhabitants. Therefore, marketers will have to come up with new ways to promote their business that combine the subtleties of digital personalization with the artistic skill of outdoor advertising.

• Social media transformation. Experts expect them to turn into self-sufficient islands resembling the Internet in miniature. Everything will be there: shops, delivery services, work, payment services, etc. To prepare for this future digital marketing trend, you should start building a completely independent company page that does not refer to external resources (and promote it on your website with Claspo 😉).
• Subscriptions to everything. Hyper-personalization based on behavioral factors and biometric information from portable gadgets will allow us to automatically order everything we need. So, in the future, we can expect subscriptions for food delivery, household chemicals, electronics, clothing, and many other products. This is convenient for both consumers and marketers. But such a binding will make competition even more difficult and fierce.