The Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2024

A new calendar year is just around the corner, and experts across every industry are already buzzing about what’s to come in the year ahead.

For local businesses planning their 2024 marketing strategy, though, there’s no time to wait and see which marketing trends come to fruition next year. Content must be planned, campaigns must be created, and media buys must be finalized before the best inventory is claimed by other brands.

The future may be unpredictable, but it doesn’t wait, either—which means your business needs to build a strategy that accounts for the latest trends in digital marketing and uses those predictions to position your campaigns for success.

Between new marketing technologies, evolving consumer privacy regulations and shifting consumer priorities and needs, these 2024 marketing trends could have a big impact on how you approach your digital marketing strategy. Here are four of the biggest trends we see on the marketing horizon in 2024:

1. Addressable Ads Will See a Surge in Demand

Addressable advertising isn’t a new technology, but two changes to the technology supporting this channel are laying a foundation for widespread adoption in 2024.

The first big change is the increased availability of programmatic ad buying, which is making addressable TV more accessible and cost-effective for businesses. Improved inventory supply and efficient buying methods are expanding the role of addressable ads as a cable TV solution.

Meanwhile, Nielsen’s analytics capabilities will now support better performance insights for addressable TV campaigns, giving businesses better information to evaluate the ROI of these campaigns—especially alongside other marketing and advertising channels where attribution and ROI was easier to evaluate. With improved infrastructure supporting this digital channel, businesses will likely see more incentive to invest in addressable campaigns.

2. More Marketing Campaigns Will Run On First-Party Data

The death of cookie-based tracking has been coming for a long time, giving both businesses and marketing partners plenty of time to build out alternative approaches to audience targeting. In 2024, though, Google plans to fully eliminate cookies from the Internet landscape, which will put more pressure on businesses to target audiences through first-party data.

Some businesses will make the transition with ease, while others will struggle to move forward after losing tracking capabilities they’ve relied upon for years. A digital marketing partner could be the perfect antidote to these troubles: along with your business’s own first-party data, a marketing partner has access to its own internal insights, as well as data available through other partnerships and platforms, to quickly enable a powerful audience targeting strategy.

3. The Limits of AI in Marketing Will Be Tested

Artificial intelligence has ranked among the top digital marketing trends for a few years. While the proliferation of AI tools is well underway, 2024 will be a pivotal year in understanding just what this technology is capable of—and where it still suffers from crucial limitations.

From steep declines in daily usage for ChatGPT to warnings that many AI businesses are vastly overvalued, some AI experts caution that there’s a risk of a short-term bubble developing in the industry.

But even AI can’t come close to writing the next great American novel, certain marketing AI tools can achieve new efficiencies to benefit your overall marketing strategy. Marketing automation and branded chatbots are two potentially useful ways AI might benefit your business, streamlining workloads while improving customer responsiveness at scale. Expect businesses of all sizes to be testing out ways to make AI work for them in the year ahead.

4. Data-Driven Strategies Will Drive Personalized Experiences

From emails to chatbots to product recommendations, one of the biggest marketing trends in 2024 will be the increasing effort to deliver personalized marketing experiences to your customers.

As businesses increase their access to first-party customer data—and adopt the right marketing tools to leverage that information—personalization is expected to become more widespread across branded marketing experiences. Even for a local retail business, the ability to integrate customer data with marketing automation tools can give you everything you need to put a personalized touch on simple customer interactions.

Today’s customers are increasingly drawn to personalized experiences from brands. Expect forward-thinking businesses to try and give their audience what they want.

The digital marketing industry is constantly evolving and innovating—which means your company’s marketing strategy needs to keep pace with those changes. The best way to stay on top of the latest digital marketing trends is to work with a digital partner that can make sure your strategy is always optimized to deliver the best ROI possible in this fast-changing environment.

Cox Media’ can help your business identify and account for new digital marketing trends in 2024 and beyond. As new opportunities arise, our marketing experts can adapt your digital marketing strategy to embrace the latest best practices and grow your brand in your local market.

Contact us today to get started.