Marketing trends reflect how companies adapt their strategies to promote and sell products or services to consumers. By staying attuned to these trends, businesses can gain insights into consumer behaviors, preferences, and technology usage, allowing them to develop effective strategies.
While many marketers have already familiarized themselves with the general marketing trends for 2024, today, we'll delve deeper into five specific trends that content marketers should prioritize. We'll explore the reasons behind each trend's emergence and discuss strategies for implementing content marketing initiatives in 2024 based on these trends.
1. Fall of Cookies, Revival of Content
With the advent of the cookieless era, marketing in 2024 is undergoing significant changes. As leveraging user behavior data becomes more challenging, there's a growing preference for securing customer data through organic content on company channels, rather than relying heavily on paid advertisements or social media marketing.
This shift signifies a return to the core principles of content marketing. Brands are now tasked with captivating users through their own creative and valuable content, fostering direct relationships with customers. In this landscape, SEO optimization and enhancing search engine visibility are also gaining importance.
2. Micro Trends and Hyperpersonalization
With the increasing diversity of individual interests, multiple micro trends are gaining traction simultaneously. Despite a brand having 1 million social media followers, it's common for people in your immediate circle to remain unaware of it. Consequently, providing a uniform experience based on overarching mega trends to yield meaningful long-term results has become challenging.
In this evolving landscape, customers in 2024 are seeking hyper-personalized content tailored to their unique preferences and needs. They expect information that is relevant to their current interests or beneficial to their personal or professional growth. To address these demands effectively without compromising privacy, it's essential to meticulously develop content topics for each marketing segment and integrate emerging keywords into the content creation process. Another way is to use AI technology to infer the context of content consumption by customer preference. Predict user behavior and preferences in detail and provide sharply tailored content.
3. Polarization of short-form and long-form content
A significant polarization between short-form and long-form content is anticipated. Short videos are going more viral than ever. However, at the same time, keywords such as ‘dopamine addiction’ and ‘popcorn brain (a state of seeking greater stimulation)’ are emerging, provoking a movement to move away from short-form content. This is because the nature of the short form, which requires intense delivery of concise information, has raised concerns.
Demand for long-form content is naturally increasing. This long-form content has a strong advantage in allowing users to gain deep and accurate insight into one thing. In conclusion, while short-form content is still expected to remain popular, the importance of long-form content that invests resources in quality is also expected to increase. Depending on the preferences of your brand’s target audience, plan long-form content in various formats.
4. Active Use of AI for Content Creation
Several Gen-AIs have emerged starting with ChatGPT, and you will notice that changes are occurring in the way information is searched and content is created. In fact, there is a survey result showing that 46.4% of office workers answered that they have used Gen-AI. There are many companies that already use AI in all aspects of marketing, from content material planning to campaign operation. As such, AI usage has now become essential for efficiency and completeness.
However, it is important to recognize that ‘Utilizing AI’ and ‘Using AI’ are different. Smart marketers are already using AI as a side tool in existing workflows such as customer data analysis, content topic ideation, research, actual content creation, and SEO. Rather than replacing themselves with AI, they are using AI as a stepping stone to leap forward in work performance. Don’t forget this point and create higher-quality marketing content.
5. Engagement and Experience-Driven Interactive Content
People want to experience and enjoy brands, products/services through direct interaction. The more actively a brand communicates and builds relationships with customers, the more positively the brand is perceived. In this process, some customers become ‘fan-sumers’. This trend shows that eliciting customer ‘participation’ and providing ‘experience’ have become more important than anything else. And the content that reflects this aspect is the ‘Interactive Content’. This is content that allows users and brands to interact on a response basis, such as tests or quizzes.
The strength of interactive content is that it encourages communication and immersion. Thus, it is effective when you want to naturally deliver a brand’s message to customers.In terms of performance, compared to static content, interactive content generally generates about 28% more traffic and makes users stay about 4.6 minutes more. Additionally, interactive content is emerging as a user-friendly way of collecting data in today’s world where third-party cookies are limited. So, create interactive content to engage your customers in a fun way and encourage a longer customer journey.
