Stay Ahead of the Curve: Key Trends in Marketing You Need to Know 

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• The Rise of Content Marketing
• Personalization and Customization
• Social Media Trends
• Influencer Marketing
• Interactive and Immersive Experiences 

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Q: What are the latest trends in marketing? 

A. The latest trends in marketing include the rise of content marketing, personalization and customization, social media trends, influencer marketing, interactive and immersive experiences, and the use of live receptionists for human interaction. 

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Marketing is a challenging business growth task to execute. The industry is characterized by rapid shifts fueled by innovation and changing consumer preferences.  

With each new year, prevailing digital marketing trends make way for emerging marketing trends; the top marketing strategies in 2023 are not necessarily the leading trends of 2024.  

To stay ahead of the curve, you must keep up with the trends in marketing.  

Keeping up with and implementing the latest marketing trends isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the effort.  

First, you must know the trends. 

This article highlights the top 2024 trends in marketing across various aspects, including social media, content marketing, and influencer marketing, as well as the growing demand for personalization, interactive and immersive experiences, and, most especially, human interaction.  

Let’s dive in right away.  

The Rise of Content Marketing 

“Content is king.” 

That’s a marketing quote you have probably heard or used a few times. It indicates that content creation is an integral part of marketing that you should approach like royalty.  

In essence, you have to put your best foot forward when it comes to strategic content marketing.  

In today’s attention economy, people are constantly looking for something engaging, entertaining, and informative.  

The better the quality and value to the target consumers, the higher the conversion rate.  

But content marketing has been around for what seems like forever—it’s clearly indispensable—so what about it counts as a “rise”?  

In Forbes’ extensive assessment of content marketing statistics in B2B and B2C scenarios across various applications and industries, there’s been a marked increase in various content marketing trends.  

For instance, the number of businesses using interactive content almost doubled from 2023 to 2024. Similarly, some other aspects of content marketing have also seen a spike as more businesses channel more of their marketing investments in that direction.  

Types of Content 

To keep up with the current marketing trends in the space, it helps to know the types of content that are currently popular. 

Other content formats nearing the lead include case studies, infographics, webinars, and success stories. 

With any of these formats, it’s important to have an effective content marketing strategy using the following steps: 

• Define your target audience
• Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals
• Conduct extensive keyword research
• Create content calendars, accounting for possible changes in consumer trends
• Optimize and automate every process as much as you can  

Personalization and Customization 

Businesses and marketers are going to great lengths to find out each of their target customer’s preferences, their purchase behaviors and history, the online channels they frequent, their topics of interest, and how they perceive given products, brands, or the industry. 

As long as there is data about a customer’s behavior, needs, or patterns, brands are happy to use it.  

The goal is simple: tailor marketing to meet the unique needs of individual customers, creating targeted and personalized experiences.  

The level of personalization done here could go as far as knowing the right time to send an individual customer—in a pool of thousands or even millions—a marketing email based on when they usually open their emails.  

It doesn’t stop there; the email could be a promotional offer for a product or service based on the customer’s demographic information and recent purchase or browsing activities. 

This and similar trends in marketing personalization in various industries are enveloped by a term rising in popularity: Hyper-personalization. 

Hyper-personalized marketing is an incredible tool for enhancing user experience and propelling customer engagement.  

By customizing marketing materials to be pertinent to individual customer needs, target customers are enriched with more valuable and relevant experiences. They spend less time in the decision-making process across the various stages of their journey and, therefore, have more compelling reasons to patronize the brand.  

Hence, it’s no surprise that personalization is one of the top digital marketing trends of 2024. To tap into this current marketing trend, you must take note of two important aspects: 

• Data Utilization 

Personalization starts and ends with data. So, everything about marketing personalization is data-centric, and more importantly, it involves the appropriate use of data to engage customers.  

You have to deliver the right marketing message in the right tone to the right person at the right time. And that requires collecting and processing large volumes of data in real time to personalize various marketing strategies, including product recommendations, offers, and messages. 

In essence, data analytics is foundational for effective marketing personalization and customization.  

• Tools and Techniques 

Hyper-personalization, especially in large customer bases, is not something that can be done by mere human effort. It requires lots of analysis and automation. 

Thankfully, many modern marketing software recognize the emerging marketing trends and demands for personalization, and they integrate necessary features and techniques to match.  

Here, you should think along the lines of: 

• Email marketing software and tools such as MailChimp, customer.io, Movable Ink, etc. 

• CRM systems such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc. 

Social Media Trends 

Social media marketing is currently all the buzz, and for good reasons.  

As social media platforms are continuously evolving and getting larger to capture a larger audience, businesses are making heavy marketing investments across these platforms in a bid to meet their target audience on their favorite platforms.  

So much so that social media ad spending is expected to reach $219.8 billion in 2024. Aside from the targeted spend, 73% of businesses are using organic social media to distribute their casual and marketing content. 

Whether you are going for social media organic marketing or social media paid ads, it’s important to know these latest marketing trends on social media like short-form video content and community building. 

Short-Form Video Content 

Popularly known as shorts, short-form video content—videos usually under one minute—is currently all the rage on popular social media platforms.  

Although Vine, the first shorts-focused social media platform, rose and fell without being able to appropriately monetize its audience, social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have cracked the code.  

Now, brands try to pack as much precise messaging as they can in the first 3-5 seconds of their video ads to capture their target audiences’ attention. Even entities that were popular for creating long-form content now also create short versions of their video content to drive and keep engagement. 

Shorts are a win-win situation for both consumers and advertisers. 

The unwavering growth in the popularity of shorts is an indication that it’s a trend that small business owners and marketers should jump on to maximize their marketing efforts.  

Let’s consider YouTube shorts.  

From 2022 to 2023, the average monthly active users of YouTube shorts rose by about 500 million, rising from 1.5 billion to 2 billion in one year. The number of monthly YouTube shorts users in the U.S. alone is expected to reach 164.5 million before 2024 runs out. 

Community Building  

Community building is not a new trend on social media platforms. However, it is becoming one of the increasingly popular social media trends for marketing.  

The importance of building and nurturing online communities for your brand on social media cannot be overemphasized. For a start: 

• It is an avenue for you to create vibrant communities around your brand, fostering what could be described as perpetual engagement, connection, and knowledge sharing with your target audience.
• You have a reliable community of individuals who are socially and emotionally invested in your product and are willing to help and guide others in their journey with your brand, providing community-driven customer support when you can’t immediately deliver in that regard.
• You have a community of people who anticipate and are willing to spend money on your products long before the public release. 

Additionally, your social media community members are more likely to provide honest feedback while expressing genuine willingness to provide insights or work with you to deliver products and services that better serve consumer needs.  

Many small business owners can build and nurture small communities on their own. However, if you want to tap into this social media marketing trend to grow at scale, it may be better to look towards using digital marketers and influencers. 

Influencer Marketing  

In the past few years, we have seen influencer marketing go from being one of the most promising emerging marketing trends to becoming a dominant marketing trend year in, year out.  

In what seems to be an unprecedented growth, the global influencer marketing market value is expected to reach $24 billion by the end of 2024. For context, it was barely $1.7 billion in 2016.  

Building Authenticity and Trust 

Influencer marketing is rooted in community building or leveraging relevant online communities already built by an influencer to facilitate your marketing strategies.  

The goal is to build authenticity and trust, qualities and attributes that most fans and followers of given influencers already ascribe to them.  

When successful, businesses ride on the perceived trust and authenticity to market their products and services through the influencer.  

A lot of times, influencer marketing doesn’t happen as outright marketing. Influencers sometimes use personal experiences and relatable stories to provide use cases of given products, subtly compelling community members to make a purchase.  

Collaborating with Influencers 

As one of the top trends in marketing, the influencer marketing space is seeing a tremendous rise in the number of individuals attempting to become influencers.  

Consequently, there has also been a rise in the use of various tools by supposed influencers to create fake audiences and portray a sense of thriving communities. 

It’s important that you research each influencer extensively before collaborating with them.  

To collaborate with influencers to reach wider and more relevant audiences, you should consider: 

• Going for influencers with proven experience in your target market and with your target audience
• Going for influencers who share similar values with your brand and may be willing to push your marketing message with genuine passion
• Implementing influencer takeover, allowing the influencer to temporarily control and manage your brand’s social media profiles to engage with followers and promote your campaigns on your behalf
• Using custom hashtags that help push your campaign across multiple platforms beyond the influencer’s communities
• Providing special promotional offers for their followers 

You should also consider taking the time to build your own community of influencers by empowering your employees to be your brand ambassadors across social media platforms.  

Metrics and ROI 

Given that the influencer marketing space is not the most transparent marketing strategy out there, it is crucial that you put measures in place to ensure effectiveness. 

How could you determine if your marketing efforts through a chosen influencer are effective?  

To measure ROI and the success of influencer marketing campaigns, you should consider the following: 

• Creating dedicated landing pages for each influencer,
• Measuring your earned media Value (EMV)
• Using urchin tracking module (UTM) codes to determine the flow of incoming traffic from their end.
• Creating an affiliate program with a designated affiliate link for each influencer.  

There are many other ways to measure success, but before anything, it’s important to set clear influencer marketing goals as a baseline for measuring success.  

Interactive and Immersive Experiences  

Having interactive elements in your campaigns to encourage user-generated content is always a good decision.  

It’s an even better decision when you throw in elements that make your ads an immersive experience for your consumers. This is exactly what companies are doing with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). 

The year 2023 saw many global corporations, including Coca-Cola, Toyota, Snapchat, Revolut, Circle K, and Warner Bros, embed these elements in their ads to drum up massive buzz around their campaigns. If you head to Times Square, you might end up in a head trip with all the immersive ads floating around.  

One thing is clear: interactive and immersive marketing experiences are the way forward, and consumers clearly love them.  

Interactive and immersive marketing experiences turn your audience from passive viewers into active participants. Boosting the emotional connection between the audience and the brand.  

Immersive advertising leverages different technologies, including VR, AR, 360⁰ imaging, and IoT, to create more captivating ways of connecting with your audience.  

Understandably, most small businesses don’t have the sort of deep pockets needed to fund AR- or VR-based campaigns at scale. 

So, where does your business fit in with these emerging marketing trends in experiential marketing? 

Interactive Marketing Content for Small Businesses 

Below are some marketing techniques you can use to create interactive marketing content that pulls your audience in: 

• Surveys and polls: Incentivize your audience to participate in promotional surveys and polls that help you gather data while familiarizing your audience with your service or product ideas.
• 360-degree videos: Offer your audience a 360-degree view of your products or marketing events, allowing them to explore every angle to their fill.
• Gamification: Create game-based campaigns that bring out the competitor in your audience, creating immersive experiences that boost customer loyalty and retention. Offer rewards, points, badges, unlockable content, leaderboards, coupons, etc.
• Calculators: How much impact can your product make on your target audience? Let them know with a specialized calculator!
• Shoppable videos: Create shoppable interactive videos that allow your audience to click on CTAs to discover and buy new products directly and quickly from the videos. Various formats of shoppable videos include unboxing videos, live streams, video ads, and product demos.  

When it comes to marketing, there is no limit to what you can turn into interactive content. Dare to break boundaries with your campaign’s creativity; your target customers will most likely love you for it. 

At a time when everyone is all about selling, consumers appreciate businesses that put in the extra effort to make them participants in their marketing process. To an extent, it shows that if you could put this much thoughtfulness into your marketing, you probably went all in for your products, too.  

This approach to advertising leverages stimulated presence and mental imagery and generally adopt the “Attract, Convert, and Delight” strategy to ultimately increase brand awareness and drive sales, according to Journal of Advertising Research.  

The Importance of Human Interaction: Leveraging Live Receptionists 

For all the seeming infusion of technology in everything, consumers now desire real human interactions more than ever. 

In fact, in a survey conducted by an AI live chat provider, Userlike, 60% of respondents preferred waiting in a queue if it meant that a human agent would speak with them.  

Furthermore, A 2023 poll conducted by Ipsos among U.S. consumers found that while 68% of the respondents have used chatbots, 77% would rather not use them at all, and 88% prefer to talk to an actual person. 

In their words, “People really don’t love customer service chatbots.” 

Do you? 

As a business owner tapping into digital marketing trends, it is important to have human receptionists at the frontline of your marketing strategies to help onboard new customers as they make contact with your business.  

Having chatbots at such crucial touchpoints could cost you potential long-term customers, resulting in lesser ROI on marketing. 

Why do consumers prefer human interaction? 

Building Trust 

There is a growing consumer demand for human interaction and trust in businesses. While chatbots are good for quickly directing customers to resources relevant to their problems, they lack the empathy to fully address customers’ confusion and frustration.  

For consumers, human interaction is also about accountability. Many businesses are using chatbots to dissociate themselves from their failures. When mistakes occur, some companies dismiss it as “testing” instead of acknowledging their fault. 

With live receptionists, consumers feel more at ease knowing that they are dealing with a human who can properly understand their confusion and frustration.  

Consumers also tend to perceive the business as more trustworthy and accountable for putting real humans at the forefront.  

Personal Touch  

Live receptionists can provide a personal touch, answering customer queries and assisting with purchases.  

Without being overly salesy, live receptionists can help your customers with their decision-making process, helping clear confusion about products and pointing customers to the right combination of products and services according to their needs. 

These personal interactions at the time of need make customers feel prioritized, further endearing them to the brand.  

Professional Image 

Live receptionists can enhance a business’s professional image, ensuring potential customers feel valued and heard. 

Live receptionists help businesses portray a sense of organization. Customers who are making contact for the first time are received by certified customer service professionals, who address them courteously and professionally.  

The respect and accord could be likened to how you are received when you walk into a 5-star restaurant. And for consumers, that says a lot about your business. 

Having an Alliance Virtual Offices’ live receptionist is your way of showing your customers that they matter because they do matter.  

Key Takeaways: Staying Ahead with the Current Marketing Trends 

There are lots of trends to keep up with in the current marketing climate, but there are only so many things you can focus on as a business owner or marketer.  

It is comforting to know that some good ol’ marketing strategies like content marketing and social media marketing are still very trendy and effective, offering new techniques to help you buckle up on your existing strategies and take the market by storm. 

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Further Reading: 

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Be open to taking the time to learn and adopt other trends in marketing, including hyper-personalization, influencer marketing, and interactive and immersive marketing.  

Above all, don’t neglect the continued consumer demand for human interactions at your business’s marketing touchpoints. Leverage the power of live receptionist services at necessary touchpoints to provide exceptional customer services and build stronger relationships with your newer and existing customers. 

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