The marketing trends of 2024 are pretty scary—not ‘Freddy Krueger’ scary, but ‘impressive’ scary! With artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and the metaverse on the rise, this year is shaping up to release some of the wildest digital marketing trends yet! Now, we understand that most of these new trends were made specifically for B2C companies, […]
The marketing trends of 2024 are pretty scary—not ‘Freddy Krueger’ scary, but ‘impressive’ scary!
With artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and the metaverse on the rise, this year is shaping up to release some of the wildest digital marketing trends yet! Now, we understand that most of these new trends were made specifically for B2C companies, but that doesn’t mean B2B brands can’t benefit from them as well!
In today’s article, we’ll look at some of the hottest digital marketing trends, show you exactly how they’re evolving this year, and how you can apply them within your B2B company.
1. Say goodbye to content overproduction
We never thought we’d see this marketing trend in 2024, but there is a growing movement for B2B content marketing teams to scale down their production. Blog posts, articles, emails, case studies, social media posts, podcast episodes—everything.
“Content is king” has been touted in online marketing trends for at least a decade, and we’ve seen B2B brands like Salesforce scaling their revenue into the billions because of it. Initially, it felt like the California Gold Rush—organizations were rushing to create content departments in pursuit of those same sales and profits!
Now, digital marketing trends show that there’s too much content. Over half of B2B brands who have a content marketing strategy publish every single day. That’s great if your content is getting seen, building traction, and generating leads and sales. However, new data alarmingly shows that many content pieces aren’t being consumed enough. For example, 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts, while only 27% consume them thoroughly!
It can take up to a week to write a single high-quality, long-form blog post. If only a small portion of the information is being consumed, that’s a lot of hard work down the drain! Other forms of content, such as emails and social media posts, are also being viewed less and less.
The 2024 marketing trend brands will focus on is less production and more quality. With less content overall, they can focus on getting the most out of their projects.
Here are a few ways B2B content teams will increase their quality:
- Updating old content with fresh information, data insights, statistics, and/or opinions that reflect new happenings in their industry. Google only shows relevant content, so this tactic allows work to show up in search engines without the need to publish more.
- Deleting old content that is no longer relevant or high-quality (i.e. low search impressions, low conversion rates, poorly researched and written, etc) so Google can crawl the best pages, increase your search rankings, and build domain authority with your best content.
- Repurposing content into new formats (i.e. turning blog posts into YouTube videos, podcasts into infographics, etc) is important for marketing in 2024 to get more eyes on your work and increase your ROI.
2. Chatbots will morph into humans
If you’ve used a chatbot recently, you may have noticed something different.
They are becoming freakishly intelligent.
When they first came on the scene, chatbots generated answers to basic product or service inquiries from website leads. They would redirect these leads or customers to the appropriate web pages, saving time for sales reps and customer service teams.
According to Smallbizgenius, 85% of customer interaction will be handled without human agents by 2021. If the bulk of customer service will rely on this tool, it only makes sense that it evolves to handle every situation.
Now, with the advancement of artificial intelligence, tech experts predict that chatbots will be able to hold full, sophisticated conversations with leads and customers from websites and social media.
This is the future of digital marketing. Here are a few exciting ways chatbots will become more human:
- They will recognize the mood of leads and customers to generate personalized responses through artificial intelligence.
- They will misunderstand questions less. Sentiment analysis (natural language processing) and predictive analytics will allow them to decipher the nuance in languages and answer questions correctly.
- They will be multilingual and able to differentiate between dialects and accents.
- They will have deep customer insights enabling them to carry out conversations with customers and leads. If they seem annoyed or upset, they can be routed to a sales or customer service rep.
3. B2B Video marketing is more interactive
One of the biggest trends in online marketing—B2B video marketing—will be even bigger this year for B2B companies. Many professionals still think video is best suited for B2C, and maybe it was in the past, but today’s ever-evolving B2B landscape is changing that.
According to a report from HubSpot Research, more than 50% of consumers prefer videos from brands over any other type of content! With such demand, B2B brands must get on board!
Customers want to see your face. Here are a few must-try video marketing tips for 2024:
- Optimized videos with short tail and long-tail keywords in the title, video script, and caption, so search engines can recommend your content.
- Silent videos with captions are a digital advertising trend. Don’t you hate when you’re scrolling social media and an automatic video plays loudly? It’s annoying! Remove audio from certain videos and add closed captions instead.
- Replace a few webinars with live streaming on social media. It’s a great way to interact with leads and customers and It can even generate more leads than webinars since contact information doesn’t need to be exchanged.
- Live shopping is a top digital marketing trend in 2024. It works really well during product launches and you can work with influencers to help you sell products or book services and help the consumer decision process live.
4. Thought leadership will dwindle (kind of)
We’ve been saying this for a while, but a lot of ‘thought leadership’ content creators are frauds. Yup, we said it!
Let’s recap one of the biggest online marketing trends today. Thought leadership is when an individual or company is recognized as an expert in an industry or professional role. They may be rebels, with controversial ideas and opinions, who don’t mind challenging the status quo amongst peers. All in all—they get people talking!
This emerging marketing trend is difficult to create. A thought leader first must be an expert and have years of knowledge and experience to form nuanced opinions, as well as the resources to conduct original research and analysis, backing up their opinions with straight facts. On top of that, they need the respect of their peers and an audience to actually influence the way people think and behave, especially in business.
Therefore, that leaves a small few genuine thought leadership content creators left. We believe, a lot of the frauds will fizzle out in 2024 and the rest will have to edge each other out with new tactics.
The latest marketing trends in thought leadership content include:
- B2B founders step out from behind the curtain and share personal and professional insights about their industry. There will also be companies with thought leaders from each department (marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, etc) to provide diverse angles.
- Thought leaders become more vulnerable and share personal stories of their mistakes, tragedies, and triumphs to build their audience.
- They’ll involve their audiences in the problem-solving process more. With open dialogue online, leaders will crowdsource ideas and feedback to inform their own opinions and enrich conversations.
5. ‘Voice search’ will give ‘text search’ a run for its money
“Hey, Google! When does Dominos Pizza open today?”
“Hey Siri, what’s 2,365 divided by 5?”
When you think of voice search, you may still think it’s a tool to answer simple questions when you’re feeling too lazy to type in search engines, but that isn’t the case. Voice search is increasingly becoming an important marketing trend in 2024 amongst B2B professionals.
Voice search allows anyone to find information on the internet simply by asking a question (as in the examples above). With Google Voice Search, Apple’s Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Cortana, this tool provides unprecedented SEO opportunities.
In 2018, only 11% of internet users used voice search. In digital trends of 2021, it rose to 40% and will continue to grow rapidly in 2024 with billions of voice searches. This means businesses must prepare their websites and social media for B2B users (usually lower-level team members who conduct research) and help them find what they are looking for.
Tips to optimize your content for voice search:
- Answer questions using common voice command words, such as who, what, when, why, and how.
- Answer questions using simple language, and succinctly, so mobile devices can read text back to users quickly. You don’t want to have answers longer than three sentences.
- Your website should be mobile-friendly, so after users discover it via voice search, pages are displayed clearly on their phones for easy browsing.
6. Decision-makers are backing away from sales reps
Above all else, there is no hotter digital marketing trend than .
Self-service is when leads and customers find all the information and resources they need on your website or social media page. This enables them to make a purchasing decision, weigh options with competitors, and send relevant details and resources to their colleagues as well.
B2B decision-makers love the B2C self-service model. In fact, 70-80% prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service. It means no unsolicited emails or calls from SDRs and no handing over contact information until they’re ready to speak to the sales team. It puts the power back into their hands.
In case you’re still on the fence about scaling back your sales activities at the beginning stages of the buyer’s journey, research shows that 70% of B2B decision-makers are open to making new, fully self-service or remote purchases in excess of $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000.
That’s major news! To implement this year’s latest marketing trend (the B2C self-service model), here are some ideas:
- Use chatbots! As we mentioned above, they handle basic customer service questions and help leads and customers navigate your website.
- Offer on-demand training—this includes free courses, tutorials, or tours of your products, and how-to videos.
- Create a hub of sales enablement content answering top questions and moving leads and customers quickly down your funnel.
BONUS! Use Lusha for the biggest digital marketing trend in 2024
Personalization has been the biggest trend in digital marketing for the last couple of years running.
Personalization in marketing means you use data (personal and business information—firmographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral) to create and send targeted messages to qualified leads and customer segments. When this happens, your campaigns have higher conversion rates and more sales
Download Lusha Extension, a B2B email finder Chrome extension tool. When you’re prospecting on LinkedIn, B2B websites, or social media, Lusha will populate a profile of your lead and give you up to 37 data points, including:
- Email address and phone number (with 98% accuracy)
- Full name
- Job title, industry vertical, and job description
- Employee headcount
- Company revenue
- Headquarters and geographic information
This B2B data enrichment tool is absolutely invaluable and will help you implement personalization in every marketing trend in 2024 mentioned above.
Key takeaways
- One of the major marketing trends in 2024 will be B2B companies taking on B2C trends and adapting them to their model for more creativity, flexibility, and fun!
- The biggest current digital advertising trend is video marketing. Customers are demanding this above all other formats.
- The biggest trend in digital marketing is personalization, and there’s no better way to personalize your campaign than with the right software. Try a 14-day free trial of Lusha, to receive all the right personal and firmographic data to customize campaigns.
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