2024 Digital Marketing Trends: The 7 You Want to Know About

In fashion, 90s trends are well and truly back. In digital marketing? That’s harder to keep up with.

The world of digital marketing has been growing and growing ever since it began – the internet is graced with new tools and technologies every single day, and the way we search changes on a (seriously) regular basis too. New trends emerge every day, thanks to these fast-paced behaviors and, as marketers, we’ve got to keep on top of all of it.

So, here are some of the 2024 digital marketing trends you want to be considering for your strategy:

7 digital marketing trends you want to know about

1) User-generated content marketing

User-generated content is only going one direction, and that direction is UP. ⬆️

And rightly so. With around 62% of the population using social media, there’s definitely ‘homemade’ content floating around that can promote your business. And with consumers being 88% more likely to trust peers over brands (sorry guys, we’ll blame that trust-issue-triggering history of salesplaining), user-generated content or UGC is the best way to market – and profit quicker from – word of mouth.

User-generated content can look like a bunch of things, including:

• Images and photos
• Videos
• Reviews
• Testimonials
• Podcasts

The reason people go crazy for user-generated content? A u t h e n t i c i t y.

Real people in real life giving their real opinion about your product. Relatability is a huge persuasion tactic and UGC provides content that levels with your target audience, and entices them in as a result.

Your customers will trust the lack of Photoshop in the image or video, hearing both the pros and the cons, hearing the conversational tone that is oh-so-reminscent of your group chats at the weeks, and the fact there’s no real incentive for these people to tell you anything but the truth.

User-generated content making it to Zara’s homepage, but is also scattered throughout various product images.

So, how do you go about getting this content? You might be lucky enough to feel the love on social media already, meaning you frequently get tagged or mentioned in photos, videos and comments – from there, you just need the permission to repost or use the content from the creator.

If you’re not getting this sort of traction just yet, incentivize your audience to do so. The incentive can anything from a simple “We will repost” (more views, more engagement for the creator), to a competition to win $$$ to spend on your website, for example.

The rise of user-generated content has also inspired more ‘behind the scenes’ or ’employee-generated’ content for businesses too, showing the people and processes behind your product.

2) Hyper-personalization

Personalization isn’t exactly a new digital marketing trend. In fact, the standard types of personalization in marketing have gotten a bit boring and a bit predictable.

People have started to understand targeted ads and comms, and how they work. They see through it and see how little effort adding %%FIRST_NAME%% to your email cadences takes. And this can quickly take away from the authenticity of your brand.

So, our quick tips for *good* personalization in your marketing:

• Don’t overdo personalization in a single channel
• Get creative with your personalization

These days, it’s less about calling your customers by their first name. It’s more about delivering timely and relevant content that considers where they are in their user journey, as well as the customer persona.

To get this information and to get your personalized marketing right, you need three things: 1) buyer personas, 2) a well-thought-out content strategy and 3) DATA, DATA, DATA.

Some well-known examples of personalized marketing include Amazon and its list of product recommendations based on your purchase history, Spotify creating you a ‘taste profile’ to deliver Discover Weekly, Spotify Wrapped and other personalized playlists, and Netflix’s ever-changing viewing recommendations based on your recent viewings.

These three examples are constantly underdevelopment and improving, and so should your personalization strategies. The more data and insights you get, the more you can improve your personalized marketing. The fun never stops.

3) AI (we can’t *not* mention it, sorry)

Marketers have come to understand that ChatGPT and other AI tools aren’t the all-knowing, all-powerful things we believed they once were. They have their flaws and their limitations – but where they fall short, we come to the rescue. Yay, humans.

Well-known AI tools like ChatGPT have had a huge decrease in traffic over recent months, and that’s not down to guilt from us complaining that artificial intelligence was stealing our jobs. Instead, marketing roles have learnt how to adopt AI to help them work more efficiently – and that isn’t letting it do the whole job for you. That, plus a lot of companies are creating their own versions of AI and chatbots. (Guilty – say hello to SimilarAsk).

AI can power marketing, helping us achieve more in less time. You just need to understand AI and its limitations correctly, provide it with all the information, insights and data you can, and – please, we beg you – read and edit the results.

AI can’t do human the way you do human, but it can inform, inspire and increase speed for your digital marketing efforts, including:

• Content generation
• Sentiment analysis
• Audience segmentation
• Frequently asked questions
• Marketing best practices
• Customer engagement and help via AI chatbots

Here, our Keyword List feature shows traffic over time from search terms that relate to “ai marketing”.

4) Human content and storytelling

Speaking of robots…

Now, more than ever, your target audience – and beyond – appreciate real, proper, and authentic human conversation.

We’ve always had a separation between B2B and B2C, but really it’s all business-to-human (B2H), so make your content that way with storytelling.

Since we were children, we have loved stories – and whilst we’re less thrilled about witches, wizards and hungry caterpillars now we’re adults, we still love to tell, hear, read and repeat stories. So, apply this to your marketing!

Create content that engages your audience and speaks to them on a human-level. That doesn’t mean ditching the SEO briefs and target keywords.

Instead, you want to think about tone of voice, conversational and colloquial language, simplifying complex topics and themes as if you were talking to your friend at the bar, and reel them in with a story where people need to hear the ending.

The agency, Mother London worked on Ikea’s campaign where they asked shoppers to travel to its most sustainable store in the most sustainable way: on foot. The ads were placed outdoors throughout South East London, displaying the exact number of footsteps to the new Ikea Greenwich.

5) Immersive and interactive marketing

We’ve spoken before about the popularity and success of gamification marketing for engagement. So, it’s no wonder why immersive and interactive experiences are booming too.

Take a look at the traffic increase in 2023 for “immersive experiences”.

But what’s this got to do with your marketing strategy? How can you incorporate the world of immersive and interactive experiences into your digital marketing efforts?

… it’s fair to say, a lot of you have been asking yourselves these questions already this year. The search term “interactive marketing” saw a H U G E influx of search volume for some mid-year strategy revamping:

When it comes to big increases in traffic, it’s interesting to compare the traffic share before and after the boom. Here, we move from statistics and tech earlier in the year, to more educational and informational intent that leads to websites such as Marketing Tutor, Amazon (Guides) and HubSpot.

So, with that in mind, here are some of our ways to make your marketing plan more interactive, more immersive, and therefore, more engaging for your customers and prospects:

a) Interactive videos

Giving users control (albeit, limited control) of what they see is a surefire way to boost interaction and engagement – and they can be trackable. For example, websites in the real estate, hospitality and travel industries see huge benefit in providing 3D tours where the user can wander a virtual space, in whatever direction they want.

b) Calculators and other tools

Some of the most popular pages on the web include interactive tools like calculators (eg. for mortgage or taxes), and that’s because it provides value to users – and saves them from doing complicated math themselves – so they refer it to friends, and come back time and time again.

c) Quizzes and polls

People love being understood and people love being heard, which is why quizzes and polls work so well. It’s a great way to get contact information for email sign-ups and more.

d) Email and ad personalization

Addressing your customers by name in your email marketing or ad targeting adds a real personal touch that is hard to ignore.

e) Content repurposing

People enjoy taking in content in different ways – by repurposing content and creating blogs, videos, short tweets, or (/and) infographics, you appeal to a wider audience and boost your engagement by making it more digestible for them.

6) Keeping your friends close, and your competitors closer

Spying on what our competitors are up to has always been on our marketing to-do lists. Why? Because competitive intelligence gets you places; ‘places’ meaning on the screens of your target audience’s desktop or mobile devices.

With the digital world being more competitive than ever (seriously, over 250,000 new websites are created every single day), your level of competitive research needs to be switched UP. And Similarweb (hi) has got all the tools and features you need for effective and oh-so-powerful competitor analysis, in one easy-to-use platform.

A complete toolkit for competitor research looks something like:

• Website analysis: Get the lowdown on your competitors’ website traffic and engagement.
• Marketing channels: See what marketing channels perform well, and where their strategy might be focusing on and see how your business compares.
• Keyword analysis: Gain insight into your competitors’ keyword strategies, and which keywords perform well for them.
• Keyword Gap: Analyze competitive keyword gaps. Understand the keywords you share, as well as the ones you’re missing out on.
• Paid activities: Have full visibility into competitors’ paid keywords, ad copy, creatives and CPC.
• Popular pages: Analyze your competitors’ best-performing pages to understand why they perform so well, and what you can adopt in your own strategy.
• Segments: Compare specific niches in your competitor research, for example if a company isn’t a direct competitor but one of their specific products is.
• Competitive Trackers: Track your competitors online. Get monthly highlights into anything that changes in your competitors’ digital performances and engagement rates.
• Search monitoring tools: Keep your eyes on the (search) ball, with search monitoring tools like our Rank Tracker and Brand Protection alerts.

Oh, and what a surprise – Similarweb has all of those things. Here’s the Competitive Tracker, giving you monthly highlights (and lowlights) into your competitors’ performance against your own.

So, less of the superlative slamming with a “mine’s better than yours” style marketing, that has absolutely no – or very little – evidence behind it. Instead, more of the smug strategizing, which is exactly what this kind of competitive analysis and competitive intelligence gives you the opportunity (and the evidence) to act on and knock it out the park. ⚾

Competitor research is way less petty, and way more informative than old-school marketing tactics. And this way, they don’t even have to know that you know what they know – IYKYK.

That said, the Cognism versus Lusha rivalry is still iconic… Thank goodness for Brand Protection alerts on those branded keywords, eh Lusha?

7) Social media as a search engine

The development of social media from when it began to now cannot go unnoticed. 4.80 billion people around the world use social media, with a huge 150 million coming online in the last 12 months.

It’s not only the number of social media platforms that have been introduced over time – with the average person using an average of 6.6 social media apps each month – but how we use these platforms. The days of writing on each others’ Facebook walls are (mostly) gone, and we see much more video content, influencer sponsorships, and targeted ads on our newsfeeds than ever before.

Businesses and people have learned how to capitalize on social media – and it’s working. In fact, 67% of TikTok users use the app for brand discovery and new places to shop, and 63% of consumers use social media to find new restaurants or explore new menu items.

Move over Google, social media has got the content we want, in the way we want it: short and sassy videos.

This is just one example of a trend that is entirely consumer-led, rather than company-led. Like remember when Google tried to make voice search the next big thing? It didn’t work because it wasn’t how consumers like you and me worked. Videos about food? That’s how we work.

Find digital marketing trends with Similarweb

If there’s one thing we have, it’s digital data – and lots of it. And with that data, we can help you spot trends early. Here are some different ways that you can find the latest trends in digital marketing and on the web:

Competitor analysis

One way to make sure you’re keeping up to date with the latest trends is to see what your competition and inspirations are talking about.

At Similarweb, we have a whole set of competitor research tools for you to track and monitor your competitors’ digital performance, including how and why they’re getting the traffic. This includes gaining full insight into any of your competitors’ keyword strategies.

Whether you’re looking for branded or non-branded, paid or organic keywords, Similarweb is here to give you the lowdown with number of clicks, change in number of clicks, keyword difficulty, search intent, search volume, CPC, zero-click, top URL, and SERP features.

But, it’s better if you get there before your competitors…

Trending keywords

Fun fact: 1 in 6 Google searches are new searches, which means a lot of new search terms come through per day. Even more fun fact: Similarweb has got that data.

Using our Keyword Generator, you can take a core keyword and get all related keywords with the highest search volume, but you can also use our Trending Keywords filter.

This shows you related keywords that have seen an increase in search volume, which might be because it’s a new or seasonal trend.

Keyword seasonality

As mentioned, trends can be a seasonal thing. Not many are thinking about Christmas and Hanukkah halfway through the year, for example.

And yep, we’ve got a feature just for that: our Keyword Seasonality tool.

From this, we can confirm that most Christmas-related keywords are almost all searched for in November and December. ‘Halloween’ takes a similar approach – with last minute Halloween costumes being a big theme.

Using our Keyword Seasonality tool, you can also see the monthly search volume of the keyword, traffic share, cost-per-click (CPC), organic versus paid split, and the traffic leader for this particular phrase.

Traffic trends per country

If your marketing strategy takes location into account (which, by the way, it absolutely should if you want to make the most of all possible opportunities), we also have our Traffic by Country feature, where you can see the traffic trend of a keyword within a country.

Let’s take the keyword “resume tips” as an example.

Bearing in mind that ‘resume’ is an American term, it comes as no surprise that the US takes most of the traffic share. But what’s interesting to see is the ups and downs of search volume for the term throughout the year, showing when it’s popular to be considering new jobs.

Try Similarweb for free today

If being ahead of your competitors and being down with the kids (or just the trends) is something you’re looking for with your marketing strategy, you can try all these features and more with our Similarweb free trial. Or, you can book to speak with one of our experts to find out exactly how Similarweb can help you hit your marketing goals – and more.

FAQs

What are the top digital marketing trends for 2023?

In 2023, some of the most notable trends include the rise of AI in digital strategies, hyper-personalization of content and advertisements, an emphasis on in-depth competitor research, and the advent of immersive marketing experiences.

How can I start incorporating these trends into my marketing strategy? 

Begin by evaluating your current strategy to identify areas of improvement. Consider investing in AI tools that align with your goals, focus on gathering data to facilitate hyper-personalization, regularly conduct competitor research, and explore technologies like AR or VR that can create immersive brand experiences.

How can I stay updated with the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape?

Staying updated requires a proactive approach. Regularly attend industry conferences, participate in webinars, engage with thought leaders on social platforms, and subscribe to reputable digital marketing blogs and journals.

How can I stay updated with the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape?

Staying updated requires a proactive approach. Regularly use data platforms like Similarweb, attend industry conferences, participate in webinars, engage with thought leaders on social platforms, and subscribe to reputable digital marketing blogs and journals.

How do these trends impact the ROI of my marketing efforts? 

When implemented effectively, these trends can offer a significant boost to ROI. Hyper-personalization can lead to better engagement rates, AI can optimize ad spends, and immersive marketing can create memorable brand experiences leading to customer loyalty. However, it’s crucial to monitor and adjust strategies regularly to ensure optimal performance.