The Future of Digital Marketing—2024 and Beyond

Working in tech is both a blessing and a curse. 

On the one hand, we get to witness the development of cutting-edge technologies in real time and cross the chasm well before most people even know these tools exist. On the other hand, we are constantly learning and unlearning, predicting and reacting, to an industry that accelerates at a break-neck pace. The moment you let up, you’re a mile behind the competition. 

And with artificial intelligence penetrating every nook and cranny of the industry, it’s more important than ever to keep an eye on industry developments. With the New Year on the horizon (Already? Yikes.), let’s take a look at the emerging trends to watch for in 2024.  

Trends Shaping the Future of Digital Marketing

2023 will be remembered as the year that artificial intelligence took center stage in pop culture. Tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney wowed us all, demonstrating the creative power of generative AI. A quick look at the interest in the term “generative AI” over the last five years all but confirms it: 

Naturally, a good portion of this article will look at the major impact AI is having on marketing and content creation—from its ability to turbocharge content workflows to its impact on the SEO industry. 

But, as hard as it may be to believe, there’s more going on in the industry than just our slow replacement by robots. There are a number of other developments worth keeping an eye on, including: 

• The paramount importance of first- and second-party data in an era phasing out third-party cookie tracking
• The rise of hyper-personalized content tailored to individual consumer needs
• The burgeoning field of conversational marketing that’s reimagining customer-brand interactions

As we stand on the cusp of 2024, join us in navigating these pivotal trends that are poised to redefine the digital marketing landscape.

How AI Will Shape the Future of Digital Marketing

For decades, pop culture has romanticized the idea of machines serving as digital assistants—from Rosey in The Jetsons to Jarvis from Iron Man. In reality, while we might not have robot butlers or virtual super assistants, the current state of AI offers marketers a powerful ally. 

The current iterations of AI can sift through vast amounts of data in seconds, automate repetitive tasks, and even predict consumer behavior, making them indispensable tools in a marketer’s arsenal.

Here’s how our new digital assistants can drive substantial change in the world of content creation. 

Put Content Engines into Overdrive

Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.AI, are revolutionizing content creation. A recent study from Stanford, MIT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research highlighted that generative AI has the potential to boost worker productivity by an average of 14%, with some rates as high as 35%. Marketing is one of the industries that can push the upper limits of these productivity benefits. 

For decades, in-house and agency marketing teams have worked through a content creation workflow that involves topic planning, research, brief and framework development, draft writing, and publishing. This research stage has steadily grown to include SEO practices like keyword research, SERP analysis, and competitor research. No wonder marketing departments feel like there’s never enough time. 

But with generative AI, you can now offload numerous steps from this Content Workflow 1.0 to a new class of digital assistants, including: 

• Topic identification 
• Brief and framework development
• Rough draft creation
• Content repurposing 

For marketers, this Workflow 2.0 empowers the production of content at a faster rate without compromising on quality—that is, of course, if you use it right. Whether it’s drafting ad copy, generating blog post ideas, or even building out a rough blog draft, AI tools are enhancing the creative process. 

And the advantages of generative AI don’t stop with writing. 

The same prompt engineering techniques you use in ChatGPT can also be applied to graphic design through tools like Midjourney and Dall-E 3. Though the outputs often fail the test on closer inspection—an extra finger here, a misspelled word there—graphic generative AI immediately levels up your ability to create mock-ups. From there, your design team can quickly polish off the graphic, reducing the need for a lengthy back-and-forth or image-briefing process.

The same goes for the golden child of marketing in the TikTok era—video content. If you have a large library of video content already published or in the bank, you may be able to save some budget down the road. Video AI tools like Synthesia and D-ID, used together with voice cloning from ElevenLabs, help you create Deep Fakes like the Ross.AI you see below:

Again, it’s nowhere near perfect (and quite eerie), but these are very early days. 

The Beginning of the End for SEO?

It’s not often that a 12-figure industry faces an existential threat, but that’s what some experts posit about AI’s impact on the search engine industry. If you have any doubts about that, remember that just 11 months ago, Google issued a Code Red as ChatGPT embarked on a historic rise in user adoption. Even the behemoths of tech have fears, it seems. 

To understand these fears, you need to remember that Google’s revenue is heavily dependent on search ads—57.8% in Q1 2023. The company’s health is, for the moment, heavily dependent on the number of people using its search engine. 

The process of manually entering queries into a search engine like Google or Bing and then selecting webpages from a range of paid and organic results has been a fundamental part of the search process over the past few decades. But that could all change over the next few years. 

We often forget that people aren’t usually going to Google with a specific domain or URL in mind; they just want information. AIs based on LLMs can cut out the middleman of search, scouring their vast store of training data to find answers. And that’s before they’re connected to the internet.  

Naturally, Google, Microsoft, and other search engines are testing out generative AI as a way to deliver answers directly to users. 

Of course, there are myriad issues with generative AI tools in closed environments. There’s no telling the extent to which hallucinations, inaccuracies, and biases can impact our ability to navigate the web. However, given the resources going into the AI arms race and the pace of development among the front-runners, these problems may not be around for long.

2024 certainly won’t be the year that we say goodbye to SEO, but it’s a situation that definitely warrants monitoring. 

Facilitate Business Intelligence and Analytics

Data has always been the lifeblood of marketing, and this is especially true now that major changes are coming to the tracking landscape. With third-party cookies sunsetting in 2024, companies need to squeeze as much juice as possible out of their existing data stores. Full tech stack integration and eliminating silos are key to ensuring marketing and sales have the information they need to attract and convert customers through personalization. 

Once again, artificial intelligence will play a major role in facilitating this adjustment. 

Using AI for insights and analytics isn’t a novel concept, but the chat-style interface of OpenAI and competitors like Cohere and Anthropic creates new opportunities. For example, when integrated with enterprise tools, Coral, Cohere’s AI Knowledge Assistant, scours databases for information. With a few prompts, users can search, analyze, and report on data with links to sources for verification.

Essentially, these tools funnel the power of large language models and generative AI through the context of a specific enterprise, creating a kind of intelligent enterprise. This will lead to a new kind of efficiency for marketing teams and unlock a range of capabilities.

Other Emerging Trends in Digital Marketing

It’s often hard to ignore the big, honking elephant in the room that is artificial intelligence—especially in the marketing space. Though it’s clearly the most disruptive technology in the space, and it exerts influence on basically every other emerging trend, it’s not the only thing you need to pay attention to as we look to 2024 and beyond. 

Now, let’s get into some of the other developments you need to consider in 2024.

Rise of First- and Second-Party Data

Google is set to depreciate third-party cookie tracking through Chrome next year—closing off one of the most profitable methods for gathering consumer intelligence in the name of privacy. Predicted to phase out by mid-2024, brands are now pivoting towards other sources of customer data. 

This shift is not just a response to changing regulations but a strategic move towards more accurate and reliable consumer insights. Brands must have the infrastructure and processes in place to access and leverage first- and second-party data. 

First-Party Data: Information collected directly from site visitors, subscribers, and customers who interact with your content or make a purchase

Second-Party Data: The first-party data collected by a strategic partner or media brand

According to Twilio, nearly 80% of business leaders consider first-party data to be the most valuable source of information for creating personalized content. Still, in many cases, internal data stores won’t be enough to fill the void from tracking data. This is why brands will rely more heavily on collaborative business relationships where data is shared externally. 

To safely and compliantly collect and share consumer data, companies across both B2C and B2B need to invest in the following: 

• Newsletter, subscription offerings, and other avenues to supplement first-party data from product purchases
• Customer data platforms that integrate with other platforms to consolidate and centralize user information
• Data clean room platforms to easily access external data from partner brands and walled gardens like Meta, Amazon, and Google

By adopting solutions and tools for first-party data collection and sharing, brands also put themselves in a better position to meet consumer desires for targeted content. 

Hyper-Personalized Content

In case you were wondering, the era of one-size-fits-all marketing is still very much over. Regardless of the product or industry, today’s consumers expect brands to understand their unique needs and preferences. With the wealth of data available and the tools to collect it in a privacy-protecting manner, brands can now tailor their content, offers, and campaigns to resonate with individual consumers. This hyper-personalization enhances user experience and drives brand loyalty.

One way that businesses in B2C, and increasingly B2B, are reaching target audiences is through influencers. But instead of focusing on so-called “macro” influencers with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, brands are looking to “micro” influencers: creators with four- to five-figure audiences who engage a certain consumer segment. 

These influencers can be particularly impactful for SaaS brands with highly technical or open-source products, like Kong, where end users turn to communities of fellow product users for troubleshooting and insight. 

Another way to create content for your ideal customer: talk to them! Customer success stories and case studies are a staple of content strategies for a reason. Your product or service has successfully addressed the needs of a specific user—a user with demographic, geographic, or technographic similarity to many others. 

A little further along the road, brands will be able to bring a new level of personalization to onboarding and customer support content. Picture this: You use tools like Synthesia and ElevenLabs to generate an onboarding video with the likeness of your CEO or another executive. You then input point-of-contact data into your AI tool—getting as granular as you can. The result (ideally) is a personalized welcome video delivered straight from the top of your organization. 

For brands seeking to amplify their reach through programmatic advertising, platforms like Zeropark can help deliver hyper-targeted campaigns, ensuring ads reach the right audience at the right time, further enhancing personalized marketing strategies.

By pairing your arsenal of first-party and external data with these targeted delivery mechanisms, you can give users the type of personalized experience they crave. And by investing in conversational marketing tools, you can zero in even further. 

Conversational Marketing

Though this very much falls under the realm of artificial intelligence, the rise of conversational marketing deserves its own shout-out. 

The latest iteration of artificial intelligence tools brings a new level of immediacy and intimacy to digital marketing. This is key, considering that whether it’s an ecommerce product catalog or enterprise software landing page, brands can engage with consumers immediately through AI-powered chatbots. 

No more berating potential customers with phony, pre-programmed content. Companies like Drift, Intercom, and Rep.AI provide next-gen chatbots that engage customers at specific points throughout their journey based on data from previous interactions. And it’s not just in B2C and ecommerce—major SaaS brands like Okta already use customized chatbots for marketing and sales enablement. 

But conversational marketing isn’t just good for qualifying leads and closing deals; it also helps get them to your page in the first place through conversational search and voice SEO. 

The way people search for information is evolving. With the rise of voice-activated assistants like Apple’s Siri, Android’s Alexa, and Google Home, conversational search is increasingly important. This shift demands a change in how we approach SEO and content creation. Brands need to optimize for natural language queries—less “how to” and more “how do I.” The way people communicate via text can vary drastically from the way they speak, and voice SEO helps optimize your content for voice command queries. 

The field of conversational marketing is expansive, covering the way brands, consumers, and search engines interact with one another through technology. 

The Future Comes Fast—Prepare Today

As we close in on the end of another calendar year, there’s a natural tendency to look back and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. While instructive, it’s important not to get too caught up in the past because the future comes fast. This is especially true in tech. 

Now, you have a better idea of the emerging trends in the digital marketing industry and how new tools and tactics play into one another to improve results. In particular: 

• The vast impact of generative AI on content creation, search, and business intelligence
• The importance of leveraging first- and second-party data in the face of cookie depreciation
• How hyper-personalization will help brands win and retain customers
• The expanding role of conversational marketing across marketing, sales, and customer success

If you’re hungry for more insight into the future of marketing and content creation going into 2024, check out Ross’s recent appearance on GTM News!