Remember those old Visa commercials that ran with the tagline “It’s everywhere you want to be”?
For business owners and digital marketing leaders, the 2024 version of that tagline doesn’t talk about a credit card.
It’s all about artificial intelligence (AI).
Every top 2024 marketing trend has an easy AI integration that you can use to increase visibility.
One word of caution before we dive into the trends. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are based on what already exists. It is not a tool that perfectly tailors content for your company. Editing will always be involved because only a human touch adds authenticity and brings your brand to life.
Trend One: Return of the Newsletter
Newsletters are dominating content and email marketing conversations this year. They deserve a spot in your digital marketing strategy because sending a newsletter:
- Provides you the chance to directly engage clients and prospects
- Builds a community
- Showcases behind-the-scenes peeks into your organization
- Gives new, interested contacts an opportunity to join your email list and hear from you consistently
As you look to allocate time spent strategically creating content, shift some focus away from tactics where you are battling digital algorithms like Google and SEO for visibility. Shift it to where you are focused on fighting for attention in the inbox.
How to win the inbox
Because, yes, it will be a fight. Here’s what’s required to emerge victorious.
Healthy email lists
Sending to unengaged email lists could get you classified as a “spam” sender. Once that happens, all your emails will bypass the inbox and head to junk.
Business owners and marketers who want to protect their email reputation should:
- Watch: Protect Against 2024’s Significant Email Deliverability Changes
- Read: Adapt & Triumph: 2024 Email Marketing Changes You Can’t Ignore
A deep understanding of who your audience is and what they want
Everyone has a newsletter and people will only sign up for yours if they believe it provides value. Highlight your solutions but do not endlessly promote them. Tap into what your audience is interested in, broadly. Mix in interesting news stories, fun facts, and any relevant need-to-know information.
Unique content
To get people to subscribe and keep reading your newsletter, it must stand out with your audience.
Aligning the content with their interests is the first step. Next, you need to present it in a fresh way that informs and entertains your readers. Incorporate tips, current trends, and something about your team along with educational content.
A plan to drive subscriptions
Use ads, social media posts, direct messages, and social media groups to drive traffic to a landing page on your website where people see a preview of the newsletter and can sign up to receive it.
Cut down on work with ChatGPT:
Use ChatGPT to:
- Brainstorm names for your newsletter
- Draft content for the newsletter, social posts, ads, and landing pages
- Tap into how your audience feels about a problem
- Research links and news stories to include in your content
- Generate interesting facts or quiz questions to use in your newsletter
Trend Two: Audience Targeting and Messaging
Do not skip over this trend with a dismissive I’ve tailored my messaging for years.
I agree, targeting is not new. How you do it is.
Adapt or lose engagement opportunities
What the algorithms look for on social media platforms and in search has changed. To get engagement, you want to explicitly call out to your audience. Make your messaging as specific as possible, calling out who you are. Google and Meta are listening to strategy and it’s working right now.
How to embrace the callout
You might start your post with a question like: Are you an IT business owner? Or, do you manage three or more IT employees?
Advanced marketing tip: Pair your callout with where the person is in their Buyer’s Journey
How a person views a problem depends on where they are in their Buyer’s Journey. You want your content goal to align with where you expect your audience to be. We explored this idea in our Coffee with Kendra webinar.
Watch it now to get more context on using the Buyer’s Journey in your marketing.
Watch the Ultimate 2024 Digital Marketing Trends Roundtable
AI integration: leverage AI for problem statements
Tailoring messaging for different target markets and stages of the Buyer’s Journey is time consuming. Get ChatGPT to help. Use it to brainstorm problem statements. Then ask it for messaging directed at the target market from your callouts using those problems.
Do not accept the first draft
Take what ChatGPT gives you and refine it – or continually ask it to refine the messaging for you. No matter how specific you get with a callout, anything that sounds like a bot wrote it will never feel personalized.
Trend Three: Content Distribution Is King
ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) lowered the barrier to creating content. Few businesses will struggle to push out articles, infographics, ebooks, webpages, or scripts for video … you get the point.
This shift means “content” is no longer king – it’s still regal, a prince or lord maybe.
But the new king (or queen) is distribution because all the content in the world isn’t going to put your company and solutions in front of the right audience without a proper distribution strategy.
Consider this. You make a video explaining a key service you offer and so does your biggest competitor. You upload yours to YouTube and write an engaging description and strong call to action that links back to the Contact Us page on your website.
Your competitor does that too, but also actively drives traffic to their video by:
- Editing the original down into four or five YouTube shorts
- Sharing it in LinkedIn posts
- Uploading it as Instagram reels and TikTok videos
- Using it on their website and in blog posts
- Embedding it in an article that expands on a key topic from the video
- Sending the video via email
Which video do you think gets the most views? Which video – and description with the link to the contact page – has the most exposure and the best potential to create opportunities? Hands down, it is your competitor who proactively distributes the content to get in front of their audience, wherever they are.
You can do this too, and make AI do the bulk of the work.
Make AI do the heavy lifting for you
Let’s stick with our video example. In the pre-AI world, you or your marketing team would have been stuck splicing the video, writing articles and emails about it, creating social promos, and figuring out where to splice the video to maximize engagement.
Now you can use AI to quickly create promotional content, articles, and emails. Since it can scan the web, you can even get it to provide guidance on best practices for each social media platform, which will help you determine how to position the video to maximize reach.
Trend Four: Cultivate Your Community
Wanting to belong to and feel accepted by a community is a basic human desire. For many people around the world, it is not fulfilled. According to a Meta-Gallup survey, about half of the world reported experiencing some degree of loneliness.
AI integration:
Nothing feels further from community connectivity than an AI-powered bot, but ChatGPT is an incredible tool here too.
As you look to cultivate your organization’s own community, ask ChatGPT to:
- Brainstorm topics for webinars and in-person events
- Draft newsletter content and social posts that take people behind the scenes of what’s happening at your company
When you want to forge stronger ties with peers, tell ChatGPT to:
- Research local networking events
- Identify relevant groups to join on LinkedIn
- Find industry events you and your team can attend
ChatGPT Cannot Fully Replace a Marketing Team
ChatGPT cuts down on work required to capitalize on any of the above-mentioned trends, but there is still work involved. You cannot afford to have your marketing sound like a bot and you do not want to share any proprietary information with an LLM. Then there is the marketing work ChatGPT cannot do for you, like posting to your website or sending emails and newsletters.
Our digital marketing experts can do it all for you, or with you.
Every day, our digital marketing team leverages effective marketing trends for clients. When you work with us, you get content that is always tailored to fit your company and solutions. Your digital marketing manager will work with you to plan and promote events that foster a strong sense of community. Our implementation specialists send emails and newsletters on your behalf or can be called on to provide best practices and answer questions you have about email.
Whichever trend, or trends, you want to integrate into your marketing, we’re here to help. Schedule a discovery call with us today and see if we’re the right digital marketing firm for your company.
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