2024 Marketing Trends & Innovations | 5 Important Tactics

Does marketing really change from year to year?

You may think that what was big 5 years ago – must be still big today right?

• This article will talk through Marketing Experts predictions for 2022 marketing trends
• We’ll share what was predicted a few years ago that was DEAD WRONG.
• We’ll talk through why marketing is changing so quickly, and what to do about it.

But first the TOP 5 Marketing Trends for 2024 According to Marketing Experts

1. Companies Will Push Further Into Short-form Video

Like Tik-tok? Yeah – like Tik-tok. Like Instagram Reels. Like short video clips on Linkedin + Facebook too. Shortform video is the biggest marketing trend for 2022 because everyone likes consuming it.

If you’re consuming video this way in your free-time, why are you not making these videos for your business? Here are a few marketing experts takes on this trend.

“Short form video on social media is the fastest way to create engagement with your target audience”

“I think short form video will trend through 2022. When done correctly, short form video can captivate people from all age groups and backgrounds. I work with blue collar companies who are trying to cultivate the next generation of labor. In my opinion, short form video on social media is the fastest way to create engagement with your target audience. I think the trend with influencers, unless they’re truly professionals in the field they’re targeting, are starting to fade out. In industry I think the trend is going to be to show the true grit it takes to work 70 hours a week in the field and the pride that comes with the projects that get completed.”

Jason Davenport

jdavenportphotography.com

“Video is the quickest way to help them with a purchase decision”

“Short form video is going to be key! Video can be used as a personal approach to be able to showcase your business, services, and products. People will start to rely on more and more information before making a purchasing decision and video is the quickest way to help them with that.”

Alexis Hayes

gradientfinancialgroup.com

2. More Companies Will Dip Their Toes into 2nd Party Data

“Audience targeting will move past lookalikes to acquire 2nd party data”

“Audience targeting. Move past lookalikes (a guess at best) and find a data source to acquire 2nd party data. Layer this data with your 1st party data. Advertise through OTT, connected TV & digital radio. Split the budget between retro/offer based and differentiator ads. Watch your market share grow!”

Colton Ray

fuseautotech.com

3. More small businesses will educate themselves on so-called ‘Smart Bidding’ ads and other automation (looking at you Facebook promoted posts.)

“Beware of Automation That Serves Corporations and Not Your Marketing Goals”

“More and more Google is pushing for automation within ad accounts, and that trend will be extremely important to be aware of in 2022. From the elimination of Expanded Text Ads to more emphasis on automated “Smart Bidding” strategies, advertisers need to educate themselves on how much or how little control they want to give Google next year. This is especially true for small business owners and contractors. Small businesses are generally working with smaller budgets, so the increased automation can impact those accounts even more if account managers aren’t educated on the potential results.”

Vincenzo Colosimo

hookagency.com

3. More Department Cross-training, to Understand Each Others Work + Be More Effective

“Cross-departmental Marketing Training”

“When compartmentalization exists, not only does it create discord amongst the participants in that organization because they don’t understand what a team or department – – it prevents the organization from collectively working together toward your business goals. Now, besides the benefit of everyone knowing what each department of the org truly does and the intricacies of their contributions – it allows for everyone to take micro-loads off of each other. If Diana the social media content creator is trained in local SEO – she’ll be able to put up YouTube videos of customers purchasing a new Jeep Grand Cherokee in Charlottesville that is properly optimized to rank rather than Johhny on the SEO team having to go in and optimize her content once it’s already up.”

Zachary Bennett

Click Initiate

5. More Businesses Crowdsourcing Content will help your SEO + Your Social Media Efforts

“Scale subject matter expertise by inviting referral partners to participate in your content strategy”

“This blog post might be an example of the simplest form of inviting others to participate in our content strategy, but here’s a killer example: Roofing Leadership Tips. We not only provided a ton of value to contractors looking for this kind of content, but we also made our potential referral partners look great in the process. This might be harder to scale for corporations, but the equivalent, is inviting influencers to collaborate with each other. I think more businesses are going to see the overlap between influencers, referral partnerships, and collaborative content creation.”

Tim Brown

HookAgency.com

Why previous year predictions may have been dead wrong

Recent predictions like:

• Taking up the ‘meta boxes’ on Google
• Using FAQ markup to get an unfair amount of interaction on search pages
• Videos on Linkedin being a major unfair advantage

Didn’t pan out as I thought they were going to. Partly – because too many people do the thing, and then Google (or Linkedin – or whoever) reacts and shows less of them.

Don’t underestimate BIG TECH’S Incentive to take away any ‘arbitrage’ or hack – does this mean don’t do them? No – it just means use it while you can, and they do go away, so don’t build your whole strategy on them.

Why marketing is changing so quickly and what to do about it

Marketing is changing quickly – because:

• People are constantly adapting and learning to see past marketing BS.
• Technology is improving all the time, and societal changes like Corona, inflation and social movements require thinking on your feet.

This is what to about it:

1. Don’t set it and forget it
2. Be ONLINE – don’t say ‘I hate TikTok’ – it’s ok to join things and be an observer.
3. Even if your company doesn’t use a method – it’s good to understand what the draw of those new platforms or methods are.

“People are getting shorter and shorter attention spans so meeting them in that spot is going to be good regardless.”

Bea Bonte, Chief of Culture – HookAgency.com

Previous Years! Marketing Trends 2020-2021

While many of the 2020 marketing trends posts out there say that 2020 will be the year of chatbots, shoppable posts, Artificial intelligence, voice search, and other vague futuristic predictions – I’m going to take a little different tone and try to go as practical as I possibly can. Each of our 2020 marketing trends will have one ‘to do’ / suggestion that I hope you can actually use in the next month – and if you decide not to take action, at least I tried.

• Video is going to reach a saturation point most of us couldn’t have imagined in 2020, mostly because companies are all finally coming to terms with the fact they’ll either do video – or sacrifice their customer’s attention spans to competitors that do.
• There will be a return to good old fashion PSYCHOLOGY, and a realization “no one cares about us – we have to talk about them”, and this might be the most wholesome shift towards what Donald Miller of Storybrand calls “making your customer the hero.”
• A lot of folks abandoned code, and got obsessed with “QUALITY CONTENT” the last few years– but as I heard straight from the mouth of the head of Google Search – John Mueller, those who dive into code and leverage for digital marketing will be swimming in feature boxes, and extras on search engine results pages. My personal favorite 2020 marketing trend is that I’ve seen a resurgence of UNFAIR ADVANTAGES that we can take as SEO professionals in search engine results. 

Before you tell me “some of these trends aren’t new!” – I couldn’t agree more, however, I believe these five 2020 marketing techniques have reached a ‘cultural moment’ where they are more important than many others, or they are uniquely important for 2020, I am a PRACTITIONER. I do these things every week, look at the data and see a huge upside for these particular methods this year as far as REAL RESULTS.

Why is an unfair advantage cool Tim?

Well – they don’t always last, so while you do have them, it’s important to remember you are in a competition.

It doesn’t have to be a dog-eat-dog, sad humanity competition – but in marketing, the competition is for the audience’s attention. So you either need to aim at a smaller audience (niching), or you have to broadcast your message at a higher volume (taking every possible advantage, and increasing effort and spending.)

For companies who want to dominate into 2020 and 2020 – I’d suggest doing both… aggressively.

1. Linkedin Video and Linkedin, in general, is having a massive moment, putting out videos weekly.

Quantity leads to quality. – Sean McCabe

Linkedin’s algorithm is allowing a very easy ‘viral-like’ quality right now. It really reminds me of 2010 style Facebook. I remember posting on a business page at that time I was doing marketing for, and seeing easy results – but then Facebook moved to a much more obvious pay-to-play model for business pages. I still suggest people leverage their personal LinkedIn profiles when possible to get the benefit of your connections, but even liking and commenting on a post will put that post into the feeds of everyone who follows the person interacting.

Video is powerful on LinkedIn because not a lot of people are using it – and it gets heavy-duty interaction, this has led to us getting over 1000 views on average for ‘DECENT’ videos on Linkedin lately.

To-do: Pull out your camera, turn it on its side and record a useful tip on something you’re expert at, upload it to LinkedIn and press PUBLISH.

2. Story Brand – position your ideal customer as the hero, and yourself as the guide.

It’s harsh, but your customers don’t really care about your business beyond how it can help them solve a problem and make life better. The sooner you realize this and embrace it, the sooner you can show customers how much you can help them. – Donald Miller

It’s crazy to me that the Story Brand – brand script tool is free. It’s that powerful. It’s just a template that asks you questions about your ideal customer, and the journey they go through, but it’s seriously ridiculously powerful.

To do: Read Donald Miller’s Storybrand if you haven’t yet, and fill out the StoryBrand Brandscript with your team.

3. Record your website visitors with Inspectlet to help make your website easier to navigate.

“Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they’d respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.” –Rand Fishkin

I realized that empathy can be used to be a better marketer this year while I was creating videos for social media. I realized I absolutely loved when videos had that progress bar at the bottom when they had captions so I could read if I was just watching a quick video while going to the bathroom – and that I was more likely to watch them when there was a spicy title at the top. Why wasn’t I doing that? Once I had empathy for my audience, I added these things immediately. If I’m 3x more likely to watch a video with those things, why wouldn’t they be too?

When watching visitors move around on your website – you’ll certainly get empathy for them, and want to help them get to places more easily. We’ve seen this over and over again installing this for clients. It’s just a lot easier to identify issues and address them with this kind of visibility.

To do: Install Inspectlet on your website for free 

4. Take up a crazy amount of space with your entire FAQ on Search Engine Results Pages

Matthew Woodward put out an article recently where he claims he found the #1 SEO tip of 2019-2020, and I have to believe it’s true. I’ve seen gigantic gains in click-through rate when employing this strategy and it’s not even fair. I have a feeling this strategy might be gone by the end of the year, but in the meantime, there is a giant arbitrage of attention happening, and if you wield it right it will significantly increase your ‘click-through-rate’, leading to a rise in your Google rankings for your top money-making terms.

To do: Find the top 3 pages that are currently getting you traffic and employ the FAQ snippet on those pages.

5. Position “0” in Search – can be incredibly powerful. Here’s how to wield the power.

Do you know how if the first answer on Google search is good – you barely look at the next 5?

Maybe you’re mad that Google’s scraping the internet and serving up content on page 1. I would be mad too if I were Rap Genius.com or Celebrity Net Worth.com or someone who’s business was ad revenue, but as it stands – being a premium service provider, all I need to do is:

• Take up as much space as possible and get the lion’s share of attention.
• Preach my gospel to the willing masses – namely, that the problem my company solves is important and can make their life better.
• Share as much value as possible, and possibly entice them to look deeper. In some cases, I might even provide the email address of our sales guy. If someone emails our sales guy and I don’t see it in Analytics is it still a lead? Hell yeah, it is.

To do: Create content clusters on your blog (publish 5 articles around the same subject but going after different angles people are doing searches for), write a press release about that and distribute it with a link back to the main service page that the topic cluster surrounds. For more check out the Hub & Spoke model of SEO.

In 2020:

• Attribution will improve, but C-level executives will be more obsessed with results than perfect attribution.
• Smart marketers will recognize that CRM and automation won’t do the marketing for them, and they’ll have to put blood, sweat, and tears into crafting emotionally resonant messages.
• Marketers will recognize that WHITE SPACE is more important than ever and they will have to find the places where their competitors ARE NOT, instead of following their competition like lemmings off a cliff.

A final send-off regarding 2020 Growing Marketing Trends

Certainly – the above stated 2020 marketing trends are likely going to resonate with the audience we serve most, premium service companies, but hopefully there’s been some truth in them for you, whatever your niche.

I say this often – but it bears repeating, examines your own situation closely.

What worked in 2020 – where did your leads come from. For us it’s easy – Referrals, Organic Search, Speaking, and Social. Boom – make sure you have that data down for real, for your self and double down on the top 2 or 3 as hard as you possibly can before pursuing some dumb chatbot shit that your marketing agency has ridiculous margins on. Trust your gut – especially if your gut doubled sales last year.

The original Post – 5 Types of Marketing Skyrocket This Next Year (A year ago)

Did these come true?  If not – take my predictions above with a grain of salt! LOL!

Bonus marketing trend for 2020:Going back and refreshing old content and keeping the exact same link, with a new meta title going after the current year, is so much more effective than creating a whole new post. REFRESH OLD CONTENT – for many companies, they could just do this, and massively increase their search engine effectiveness.

Don’t get stagnant in your marketing efforts! Many companies have created a lot of opportunities for themselves by pushing heavily into Google AdWords or some old-school E-mail marketing, but don’t get out when the rates start going up, or the open rates go down, and the methods are not as profitable as they once were. It’s crucial to stay nimble and swap out, or play down outdated methods (within reason for your industry), and start experimenting with heavier marketing budgets in other areas.

Here are five areas where marketing budgets are increasing next year – reasons include:  higher perceived ROI, more proof of concept from other companies doing it, and natural progression. Paid social for instance continues to grow, just because ad budgets that may have been spent on Google AdWords in the past may work better in the context of social proof and a more interactive experience.

1. Video

If you’re not using video, nimbly, that allows you not to pay 1000s of dollars every time you put one out, you’re behind the times. A mid-premium video setup can be as little as $2000 bucks, and pay for itself ten times in the first three months if you have a clear strategy to make compelling videos regularly.

• The Camera:  Canon EOS 70D Digital SLR – This camera allows you to flip the viewer towards the subject in case you’re filming yourself in tutorials or explainer videos.
• The Lens:  Canon EF-S 10-18mm – This lens was suggested by someone doing a video about Casey Neitstat’s (master daily vlogger on YouTube) video equipment. It should allow you to focus on your face or other faces in automatic mode without knowing a lot about focus.
• The Stand:  Joby GorillaPod Focus with BallHead X – This pod allows your camera to stand on tables, or cling to a tree branch, whatever you need.
• The Mic:  Rhodes Video Mic Pro R with Shockmount – This mic allows you to get a focused audio signal on the go.
• The Backdrop:  Simple White Muslin Backdrop – You’ll need something to give a consistent and decently clean feel to your videos, and this backdrop is an option.
• The Lights:  Limo Studio’s Photography Softbox Lights – Decent lighting will require you to play around with different setups, but these lights are a solid option for under $60.

2. Content Marketing and SEO

Content Marketing is just creating things your clients, customers, and prospects would actually want! It’s the best form of SEO and will stand the test of time. Use these methods and tools to get the most out of your content marketing and SEO efforts.

1. Persona planning template:  “Make My Persona” by Hubspot – You’ll want to plan your objectives, and really dig into who your core audience is and what would be most useful to them. Who are the company’s ideal clients? What questions do they have? What resources do they need?
2. Tool for keyword strategy:  Ahrefs – Do the competitive analysis and find what kind of traffic different terms have.
3. For monitoring search traffic:  Google Search Console – Google Search Console is invaluable for figuring out opportunities. It allows you to sort by impressions and to find terms you have a lot of impressions for but not a lot of clicks for – earn links and build out more content for these terms!
4. For getting granular on all traffic:  Google Analytics – Beyond just search engine optimization, monitor all of your paid ads, social traffic, and conversions in Google Analytics.
5. Setting meta-titles, descriptions, and basic technical SEO:  Yoast SEO – A great start for SEO, you’ll want to de-index slim content, write meta titles and descriptions, and get your site in order in a general way by configuring Yoast SEO based on your keyword strategy.
6. For planning content in context:  Editorial Calendar Plugin – If you have more than one person in your content team, this plugin can help you coordinate the different components, and plan content in a calendar form.

3. Paid Social

People are still mourning the loss of “free” marketing, as organic social media reach has gone down to almost nill for many brands, Facebook and Instagram are still crazy effective for brands if you’re willing to pay. Whether by promoted posts, video ads, or just straightforward offers – you want to save this for the best shots you have. Here are some keys to making it work.

1. Social Ad Template:  Customer Magnetism – Get your ad sizes right!
2. Ideas for writing social ad headlines:  Formula’s and Strategies – It takes persuasion and finesse with the words you use to make these ads truly effective + and offers that have an emotional resonance with your ideal customers.
3. Ad Refiner/perfector:  AdSpresso – This tool helps you put your images, headlines, and demographics in and tests them all in random combinations and then refines them based on what works over time.
4. Regular posting tool:  Buffer – You need something to schedule your posts at regular intervals and ideal times – Buffer is perfect for this. Then you can go promote ones that get better organic traction.
5. Social Media Analytics:  Sprout Social – For monitoring what’s working and reporting on trends.
6. Social Designs on the fly:  Buffer’s Pablo – Even if you’re not a designer, Pablo allows you to create nice-looking images for social media, and schedule them on Buffer quickly to go out to all your social accounts.

4. Strategic Use of Influencers

If you can find people that own your audience’s attention (in any situation, not just social media), it makes absolute sense to collaborate with them to reach those people. This method has been growing over the past couple of years – but it will reach a pinnacle this next year as companies have started to learn how to do it well.

1. Ways to reach out to bloggers quickly:  Pitchbox –
2. Knowing what to charge for Instagram Influencers – 6-12% per post engagement. 10 cents to keep it simple. So if your influencer usually gets 5,000 likes? $500. You’re going to pay less for younger influencers, and more for influencers over 25, and much more for influencers over 35 according to this white paper.
3. Platform for Social Influencer Connections:  Revfluence – Need to connect with influencers? Here’s a way to scale that and do it quickly.
4. An actual influencer plan:  Klear’s Influencer Marketing Template Plan – Klear suggests influencer marketing yields an average of $6.85 worth of earned media value, for every $1 of paid media.

5. E-mail Marketing and Marketing Automation

One of the third-highest perceived positive ROI marketing strategies (the other two are SEO and Content Marketing). E-mail marketing and marketing automation can be wielded well with practice and experimentation.

1. Something to handle your main e-mail list:  Mailchimp – Your main e-mail list needs a home, MailChimp is perfect for this and easy to setup.
2. Something to fill your e-mail list regularly and systematically:  Sumo – Particularly the welcome mat, and ‘exit intent’ popups are extremely effective in getting more e-mail signups.
3. Tracking your leads:  Hubspot Marketing – Another great way to fill your e-mail list (bottom right popout works great.) But it also can capture every lead your site gets for review and another rake to make sure you have attribution around your marketing
4. Way to segment and create trickle out e-mail campaigns:  InfusionSoft – Not crazy intuitive to get started on, but InfusionSoft is insanely useful for creating e-mail funnels and drip e-mail campaigns.
5. Ways to find people quickly and outreach to new e-mail lists:  Ninja Outreach– For guest posting, roundups, and your best content promotion Ninja Outreach is perfect.

I would be silly not to mention offline marketing methods that are growing as well. Brand activations, experiential marketing, and use of VR, and content producers are also going up as people recognize that there is some arbitrage in getting in front of people at the right moments. These methods are particularly effective when you have a captive audience at a trade show, a big event where a lot of ‘early adopters’ show up (like South by Southwest in Austin) or other places where tastemakers often show up looking for the latest and greatest.

But yes – digital marketing and digital-related marketing is on a steady rise.

Wrapping Up

These methods are growing because:

A. They Work

-and-

B. People are using their own understanding of where things are moving to slowly increase digital marketing budgets up to 40% (!) this year, up from 36% just a few years ago.

Slowly but surely marketing budgets are increasing. If you don’t find out where the ‘arbitrage’ (the best deals for the most effect) are until other people all have their budgets there as well – you will simply be fishing in a pond with all your competitors. The trick is to find a completely blue ocean (not one red with blood with all the other sharks around) and dominate entirely.

Keep your eye out for marketing methods that involve less competition.

Thanks for reading about where marketing budgets are growing this next year!