Benefits of first-party data: Spot-on marketing, fantastic results
With the rise of the privacy-first web, marketers need to focus on harnessing the power of first-party data for gaining competitive edge.
In 2024, marketing innovation is advancing at a furious pace, and AI is leading the way, from helping to make content creation more efficient to predicting how customers will react. Simultaneously, the phasing-out of cookies – which have served as a foundational core of digital marketing – means that marketers are at an inflection point and must rise to meet the moment.
This wave of change is tempered by the pull of the tide towards honesty and authenticity. For example, brands are turning to micro-influencers instead of mega-influencers to make their products more appealing to consumers, aiming for lots of smaller audiences with potentially higher levels of engagement and loyalty.
This characterizes marketing trends 2024: a mix of advanced technology to speed up and streamline processes, coupled with a more human or authentic public face.
Despite appearances, these two elements actually complement each other, and offer a genuine chance to build a better relationship with your audiences.
Here are the trends we can expect marketers to focus on in 2024:
- Improving content with generative AI
- Replacing third-party cookies
- Emotional marketing
- Micro-influencers
- Video podcasting
Gen AI: Easing content creation in 2024
Despite all that we’re hearing about what AI can already do, we’re only on the cusp of this marketing trend. 2024 will see more professionals go from playing with AI to using it as a tool for core marketing functions to free up time so that humans can focus on the high-level strategic aspects that AI can’t do.
According to a McKinsey & Co. report, generative AI could boost marketing’s productivity between 5% and 15% of a company’s total marketing spend.
But using AI does not equal success. Although this is a transformative technology; getting the best from AI requires a certain skill set, as well as knowing when to use it and when to delegate to a human.
Done right, generative AI will be very good at removing much of the legwork required to come up with ideas and create repetitive content. A few examples:
- Creating 100 images of a new model of car, each needing a different background location for use in different markets.
- Making multi-channel versions of the same creative.
- Building a calendar of social posts for brand/cause/destination.
- Creating frameworks for series-led content such as speeches. The heavy lifting is made easier – and there’s potential for being clever with it, too.
- Connecting automation + personalization to create swathes of highly-targeted (and attributed) motions.
With generative AI, marketers and creatives are freed to do more interesting, less repetitive work that builds difference. Provided we use it properly, the technology has enormous potential to allow humans to create significantly better, personalized content where it really counts.
2024 marketing trend: The third-party cookie crumbles
As third-party cookies – the backbone of online tracking – are phased out this year, the precision and accuracy of user data will take a knock. So what will replace the way marketers measure attribution and target buyers?
We’ll certainly see innovation in alternative tracking technologies that gather information without relying on traditional cookie-based methods. Contextual targeting will be finessed, delivering relevant content based on what the user is doing now rather than their past behavior.
90% of consumers are concerned about how much data brands collect, while almost 50% of customers in North America say they’d leave their first-choice brand if their second-choice brand offers a better privacy experience. This should be a wake-up call: Half of your customers are ready to jump ship if you don’t protect + respect their data.
Major online platforms with large user bases and their own ecosystems, often referred to as walled gardens, will gain more influence. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have extensive first-party data and are less reliant on third-party cookies. Marketers may increasingly allocate their budgets to these platforms for targeted advertising. But.. caveat emptor – the walls could become a cage that limits marketers’ data control and visibility.
Marketers can prepare for the end of third-party cookies by focusing on a first-party data governance strategy that allows them to create a consent-based approach to personalization.
Emotional marketing emerges as a top trend
As it gets more difficult to gather traditional customer data, there’s a need to find another way to understand what people are thinking. Enter emotional intelligence and the means to predict how audiences feel. In 2024, more brands will lean on emotional marketing.
Marketers have long known that how someone feels about their brand is a big deal. Studies have shown the huge role emotions play in purchasing decisions and customer engagement.
Digital ads that generate strong emotions are four times more effective for brand building than ones that don’t, according to research from marketing data and analytics company Kantar and facial coding provider Affectiva.
Although emotional marketing isn’t new, predicting and measuring it properly is still emerging. A team at MIT has built a model to mimic a human’s ability to predict other peoples’ emotions, while market researchers BrandThro claim to offer the only “datasets that include precise emotional scoring… to predict how every brand experience will make customers feel.”
This trend signals is a chance for marketers to buy into a truly new way of analyzing customer sentiment, and one that could plug the gap left by the demise of third party cookies.
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In 2024, creator marketing takes center stage
It represents a subtle change in how brands work with influencers, but influencer marketing 2.0 is probably what influencer marketing should have been all along: more transparent, better content and with longer-term relationships between personality and brand.
82% of brands have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing, according to Influencer Marketing Hub research, which also found that a majority (80%) prefer working with small creators with less than 100,000 followers.
IM 2.0, as we’ll call this 2024 marketing trend, represents a shift away from using celebrities and influencers with big follower counts to something more subtle. Micro-influencers with specific skills and expertise offer audiences more. And they’re excellent content creators, often better than the brand that wants to hire them.
In fact, we’d be better off calling IM2.0 CM2.0, or creator marketing 2.0, as many micro-influencers aren’t really influencers, but they’ve made an impact because they create great content. Their audiences are more engaged and, as this graphic shows, they can offer better value than people with millions of followers.
IM2.0 will also take advantage of a diversification in platforms. As costs for advertising on established social media platforms continues to rise, new players such as BlueSky and Mastodon are growing in popularity. And because they don’t take ads, creating high-quality content becomes the only way to use them.
Click into the power of UGC marketing on TikTok
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Marketers turn to video podcasting
YouTube has been busy creating a home for video podcasting and with the demise of Google Podcasts in April 2024, everything is being shifted to YouTube. That’s going to significantly shift the dial in favor of video podcasts. Traditional podcast channels have never excelled at helping audiences find new content but YouTube is, of course, a master at promoting content.
Suddenly it’s going to be considerably easier to get your podcasts noticed. Podcast audio can still be uploaded to Spotify, Apple and the like, but it’s going to be more worthwhile to create video and use YouTube.
Audiences like the format: 32% of Americans want video with their podcasts, and one in three say YouTube is their preferred platform.
While this doesn’t mean the end of audio podcasts – YouTube itself freely admits that podcasting is primarily an audio format – it’s a growth trend that, for some marketers, is the perfect opportunity to offer differentiation.
Marketing in 2024: Humans + machines = better experiences
Other trends like the continued growth of mobile commerce will be top of mind for marketers this year as they try to tune into customer needs and wants. Overall, AI in marketing will loom large as marketers find ways to leverage it to speed content creation and reach new levels of personalization at scale.
Through automation, they’ll gain agility to keep up with constant market changes. Untethered from routine tasks, they can focus on creating the personalized experiences that keep customers engaged and drive the business forward.
