Five digital marketing insights for 2024

2024 is going to be a great year for social media. The AI revolution is changing the way we create content, and social media platforms are shifting their strategies with new and exciting ways to grow your audience and drive revenue for your business. After deep market research, I’ve developed five important strategies to take advantage of in 2024 to get your best foot forward and level up your social media presence.

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First on the list: Threads has integrated hashtags. This is a big bonus for the Twitter-killer that launched in July, considering that organic reach is the only way to grow your brand on Threads. This comes at a great time for Meta as Elon Musk is determined to burn X Corp. to the ground. Meta has seen large corporations migrate to Threads in droves and is now taking advantage of the opportunity. With hashtag capability, your business can now join relevant conversations to your industry and beyond to grow your audience and reach new potential customers. Using a platform such as Threads is a great way to connect with your audience on a personal level, too. I recommend beginning to post and interact with customers on Threads before Meta rolls out advertising, because by then, everyone is going to want to have a piece of the pie. Getting there early before Ads Manager is incorporated guarantees you have more space to grow your audience as Threads’ highly engaged users begin to grow in number.

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Secondly, I would recommend leveraging short-form video content. It may not make sense at first glance if you are anything but retail, but short-form content like TikToks and Reels have immense power in driving awareness to your brand. I began The Social Room Podcast in July of this year and didn’t understand what benefit creating this kind of content would have to my brand. Gen Z doesn’t care about digital marketing. However, I considered that creating my short-form content as an episode released and briefly summarizing the content of the podcast could be a great strategy to bring in more listeners. My first few reels brought in a total of thirty thousand viewers and drove my listeners for those episodes up by a hundred listeners. It’s not a sale, but I have positioned myself as a thought leader and brought more potential clients into the awareness stage of my marketing pipeline.

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There’s another bonus to short-form content now. If you’re a B2C retailer, you may have already had experience selling on social media through platforms like Facebook and Instagram shop. TikTok is rolling out that capability on their platform, allowing you to tag your products in live sales and in short-form video content. TikTok is now the most popular search engine for early millennial and gen-Z demographics, so being able to have a shop integrated with minimal steps from discovery to purchase is a huge opportunity for your brand. I would strongly recommend taking advantage of this opportunity as you begin creating short-form video content. Live selling is a powerful tool that businesses like Commentsold have been popularizing, and now that it is integrated into TikTok with no middleman, it will be an intuitive way for your customers to immediately purchase upon seeing your product.

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The fourth tip involves the current AI revolution. It seems every software is integrating some form of large language model to assist in content creation or to be an administrative assistant. I was involved in a meeting recently to discuss the advantages between potential CRMs. I absolutely fell in love with the capability of a certain CRM for one reason: personalization. I have never been a huge fan of email campaigns due to their nature of seeming like a template, but this CRM was able to customize each contact’s email within the campaign to their information. No longer was the email constrained to the template. Each marketing touchpoint included relevant information about the contact’s interests, buying behaviors, their company, and their position within it. I was absolutely blown away by this feature. Having personalized email campaigns now makes each email seem more “human,” and I would also wager this brings the email into less spam inboxes. If your CRM or automated email software has AI capabilities, I would strongly urge you to try these out. If they haven’t integrated these yet, I would consider switching to one that has.

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Finally, I would like to touch on social media influencers. Brands are finally moving away from big-name celebrities and personalities to take advantage of niche microinfluencers. I think this is a great change in strategy. For these smaller influencers, their audiences may feel a stronger bond to them because they have been around for every step of the influencer’s journey. I may even throw out the term “parasocial relationship” to describe this behavior. This causes the audience to feel personally attached to this certain content creator. By leveraging microinfluencers that are involved in your business’ industry or specific offerings, you bring in an audience that is pre-built to enjoy your product not only due to their interests, but because someone they trust has advocated for your business. I also think that because these influencers are smaller, by providing them with a sponsorship opportunity that is within their expertise, they will give more attention to the content they create for you. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a terrible ad read on a podcast by someone who doesn’t understand what they’re selling. By using microinfluencers, you’re going to get someone who understands your business and is excited about it to sell to their audience.

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However, that strategy isn’t quite the same when it comes to B2B organizations. Why would a recruiting company or a B2B SaaS company want anything to do with a YouTuber? I agree, but that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage that strategy in your own way. If your business falls into this category, use your younger employees as influencers to create content for you. They are experts in their field, and in many cases, understand how to create entertaining content as they are surrounded by it daily. I would look to Hootsuite as a prime example of this strategy. They use their young employees to market Hootsuite and their job within it, providing social media strategies and making Hootsuite seem like a fun place to work. If you’ve got the time, go look at their social media presence on LinkedIn. They do a great job.

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Don’t wait until next year to start implementing these strategies. They are just now rolling out, and if you’re too late, your competitors will likely beat you to the punch. By becoming an early adopter of these high-growth strategies, you have more time to grow your brand and reap the benefits of an increased social media presence for 2024 and beyond. I hope this article has been helpful to you, and I wish the best of luck to you for your marketing efforts next year.