In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is not just a strategy; it's a necessity. With the key pillars of digital marketing, many new themes emerged in 2023 that we think are only going to become more widely used and popular this year.

Email - New Requirements

Email marketing is growing every year with the Return On Investment (ROI) for the sector due to hit an average of £33 in 2024. With new Gmail & Yahoo legislation having come into play early 2024, it’s best to make sure you have completed the necessary requirements. Adhere to the legislation and make sure you are up to date with best practices to skyrocket your email marketing in 2024.

Every year, people get more used to how brands carry out their email marketing. This means it’s more important than ever to stand out from your competitors as consumers become more savvy to email marketing tactics. Think, what annoys you about marketing emails? Are there ways you can avoid these in your own business?

SEO - Natural Language Processsing

User experience has and will continue to change the SEO game for years to come. With Google testing and adding new features all the time it can be hard to know what to optimise for and how to optimise.

Natural language has become an increasingly important topic in SEO over the last number of years. Google has dedicated systems to analyse a user’s search query and process the natural language used in that search term. This is so Google can serve other relevant results that might not match the search term keyword exactly, but that has terms that are synonymous with those used in the search.

A great example of this is a search for “cabin holidays Scotland”. Google could display results including “lodge holidays” or “holiday parks in Scotland” as it understands that lodges and cabins are very similar things.

This can be good since having a variety of synonymous keywords in your content may help you rank for a given term, even if they don’t match that term exactly. By all means include variations, but again, we always encourage writing helpful and valuable content that is grammatically correct and easy to understand as opposed to inserting numerous synonyms in nonsensical places to try and rank higher. This can instead have a completely opposite effect.

Video Content

It’s no secret that TikTok and Instagram reels are widely used by millions worldwide, but if there’s one thing to take away is that anything can go viral. Users will travel from all over the world to visit a chip shop in Coventry. The opportunities are endless.

If your brand is not utilising video content, it’s at risk of falling behind the curve. Of course this depends on your audience, target customers and goals for your business. If you have a product that can apply to the mass markets, producing video content both in short and long form could be your ticket to digital marketing success.

AI Interactions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t just being integrated into search results, companies are using it to interact with customers. There’s very little doubt that A.I will be integrated further into live chat as time goes on.

Live chats need to have the ability to respond to customer queries if agents are not available. Instead of getting stuck if users enter words they don’t recognise, A.I will be able to apply natural language into live chat to better understand what a user wants.

Social Ecommerce

Instagram allows brands to tag products on their posts so that users can easily shop straight from the app instead of having to go to bios, click links to websites and then search for products. We imagine that this feature is only going to become more popular in 2024.

With TikTok shop also becoming much more prominent in the app’s main navigation, brands can be sure that shopping via social media will get more popular as time goes on.

Collaborations

Another social media feature that has become more prominent on feeds is collaborations. This allows users to collaborate with other content creators and brands on a given platform - connecting their audiences together.

If users love seeing their favourite celebrities working together, why not their favourite brands? We think that brands collaborating and working together to create something special for their audiences could be a great way to gain some extra visibility, but also create something extra special for their audiences.

What Can Mucky Puddle Do For You?

Email marketing, SEO, video content, AI interactions, social ecommerce, and collaborations are not just disparate strategies; they are interwoven threads in the digital marketing landscape and our digital marketing team always stays up to date with emerging opportunities for all of our clients. Contact us today to see how we can help your business.