Tech tools undoubtedly played a dominant role in marketing in 2023, allowing businesses to streamline their campaigns, expand into new markets, reach new audience segments, enhance customer engagement, and drive revenue and profits.
Given the accelerated advancements and improved accessibility, technology has become an essential part of the marketing tool kit of modern-day enterprises, both large and small.
But what kind of role will it play going forward? Here are eight technology trends marketers will adopt as part of their marketing strategies in 2024.
1. AI-Powered Content Generation
In 2023, ChatGPT revolutionized how the world perceived content creation. It drew massive attention to generative AI, with Microsoft, Google, Meta, Alibaba, and other big tech firms scrambling to grab a piece of the market with their own products.
Platforms such as ChatGPT offer a variety of features, from developing campaign headlines and creating brand presentations to producing images and suggesting relevant keywords.
Marketers can even use them to repurpose content, summarize reports, create customer surveys, and translate content into multiple languages.
Of course, there’s much to be resolved in the application of ChatGPT-like tools, especially when it comes to copyright matters.
However, one thing is for sure—you can expect to see many more new entrants in the market offering similar or even better features.
For marketers, these types of tools will open up new opportunities, enabling them to enjoy significant savings in time, cost, and resources.
This doesn’t mean they can entirely rely on generative AI for their content-creation needs. Human intervention will be important for ensuring relevance, usability, customization, and, more importantly, the uniqueness of the AI-created materials, at least for the next few years.
But the efficiencies and creativity these tools stand to offer will make them an invaluable addition to a marketer’s tech stack in 2024.
2. Voice Search Optimization
Globally, voice assistants are expected to cross the 8.4 billion mark in 2024. Today, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and the like have become an essential part of life for many people in the US.
Voice search, in particular, is rapidly gaining traction, with one in two Americans reportedly relying on it for their information needs every day.
What does this mean for marketers? They’ll now need to relook at their SEO strategy to optimize content for voice-assisted searches.
To continue to dominate search engine result pages, marketers must prioritize natural language, integrate longer question-based keyphrases, and create content formats that provide answers to common queries.
Making websites mobile-friendly, optimizing for local SEO, and using schema markups are also important.
3. Hyper-Personalization Based on Data
Data will guide marketing decisions and determine business success in 2024, with greater intensity than it has in the past decade.
Marketers now have an extensive tech stack to capture, organize, and leverage data to boost campaign efficiency and marketing ROI.
For example, with Leadar’s sales intelligence platform, they can identify sales prospects with greater precision using customer profiling criteria.
With HubSpot, they can integrate critical marketing functions and streamline customer relationship management activities on a single, easy-to-use platform.
All these tools help gain deeper customer insights so businesses can tailor their communications, personalize engagement, and build stronger relationships for improved marketing results.
However, as marketers find more ways to access customer data in 2024, they must also take necessary steps to address customer privacy, data protection, and data security concerns that weigh high on regulators’ agendas.
4. User-Generated Content
Authentic content will surpass curated and brand-promoted messages to take center stage in the years to come. Naturally, marketers must get a head start on this trend to build trust and credibility.
User-generated content (UGC) on online platforms will be especially pivotal in this regard in 2024. Businesses can encourage UGC using competitions and other marketing tactics, enabling customers to share their brand experiences with authentic reviews and product moments.
5. Short-Form Digital Content
Shorter attention spans and content overload have driven the success of short-form material in 2023.
Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok videos, and micro-blogging will all dominate the digital content landscape in the future as well.
Chances are, more platforms will come up with features to promote snippet-like content in 2024. So, marketers will need to find creative and effective ways to leverage them in their campaigns to generate interest, engage audiences, and remain relevant.
6. Immersive Technologies
Many brands moved to the digital space following the pandemic. However, creating engaging digital brand experiences that match real-life product interactions has remained a challenge for businesses.
AR, VR, and similar technologies help tackle this issue by creating immersive environments that allow consumers to engage with products at a deeper level.
Understandably, they’ll be vital elements in marketing campaigns of the future to help customers try new products and engage with brands.
7. Social Commerce
The popularity of e-commerce has accelerated with the introduction of social media-based retailing.
The global social commerce market is pegged to reach $2 trillion by 2025.
This hardly comes as a surprise, considering the seamless customer journey that networking platforms can offer.
Unlike digital stores and marketplaces, social media sites enable customers to discover brands, compare features, find recommendations, purchase products, and share reviews without leaving their platforms.
For marketers, this has created new opportunities for reaching untapped audience groups, generating awareness, providing product demonstrations, and guiding customers toward the end of their purchasing journey.
8. AI-Based Automation
Automation tools that leverage artificial intelligence can improve marketing efficiency and ROI by leaps and bounds.
Today, there’s an automation feature for nearly every function marketers perform, from capturing data and sending out personalized email campaigns to scheduling social media posts and generating reports.
You can even automate customer engagement using chatbot solutions that offer around-the-clock customer support.
All these could help substantially reduce marketing budgets and resources and enable marketers to work faster, make better decisions, and focus on critical activities where they could add value.
Key Takeaways
Sophisticated technologies have become cheaper and more accessible over the years, allowing even smaller businesses with limited budgets to benefit from them.
The year 2024 will see them advancing further and making an even bigger impact, particularly in marketing activities.
AI-assisted content generation, voice search, data-based personalization, user-generated content, short-form digital communications, and immersive technologies will be major trends for marketers to adopt.
Social commerce and AI-powered automation are other technology shifts that could create massive opportunities for businesses.
