Honest Marketing

2024 Marketing Trends to Pay Attention to

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 54

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Are you ready for 2024? I sure am!

As we step into the new year, it's time to talk about the hottest marketing trends that will make a big impact.

I'm truly pumped for this episode because I'm sharing a goldmine of insights about the 2024 marketing trends that you absolutely cannot afford to miss. You'll discover how LinkedIn is poised to revolutionize the way businesses connect, why TikTok's growth is about to hit a turning point, and how AI will seamlessly integrate into your marketing strategy.

So, make sure to listen to this episode and get a head start in incorporating these upcoming marketing trends into your business strategies for a successful 2024.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • The rise of LinkedIn as a marketing platform
  • The maturation of TikTok as a marketing tool
  • Integration of AI into marketing operations

Want to give your podcast the boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition? Check out honestpodcasts.com and take the first step toward achieving your podcasting goals!

And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

And just like that, 2024 is upon us. And now, as you are trying to. Figure out your marketing plan, your sales strategy, what your revenue and profit goals. Are for the year, and you're looking. At the different strategies and things that. Are available to accomplish those things. I want to walk through three of the trends I'm paying attention to when it comes to marketing in 2024, so you can take full advantage of those opportunities. You, um. Welcome back to the Honest Marketing podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow. Your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton. And like I said in the intro, 2024 is upon us. We're halfway through January when I'm recording this episode. And now, as you look forward to Q one, Q two, Q three, and Q four, a lot of the conversation in the marketing space is what is going to happen this year. 2023 was transformative in a lot of ways. AI really became mainstream in some ways, but not in others. There's always people on the lookout for what's the next opportunity, what's the next underpriced attention? What's the next strategy to implement, to meet your revenue, your sales, your business goals? And so in this episode, I just. Want to prognosticate a little bit, which. I don't typically tend to do, where I'm kind of guessing about the future. I'm much more interested in reverse engineering the past and learning lessons and principles that we can apply forward. But there are certainly some trends that I'm paying attention to from my vantage point as a content producer and in the business of content and in the business of marketing, that a year from now, looking back, I expect will become the norm and how people will think about specific platforms and strategies moving forward. So if you are in a position. Where you're thinking about the marketing and sales of your business, if you're thinking. About your revenue goals, you're thinking about how you're going to strategically deploy content and assets and ads in order to get the most traction, the most reach. This year, then this should give you. Some good guiding principles and some ideas. That you can then apply to your own industries. So the first trend that I'm paying attention to for 2024 is I expect. 2024 to be the year that companies finally wake up to LinkedIn. So LinkedIn has you this reputation as the social media platform where your grandpa goes to pretend like he's some big shot, even though he's not, and where companies post hiring updates that nobody cares. Like we're pleased to welcome so and. So as assistant to the regional manager for the Stanford branch of Dunder Mifflin, and it's like nobody cares. But those are the kinds of posts. That companies typically use LinkedIn for. And it's less of a strategy of. How, you know, multiply the effectiveness of. Your campaigns for marketing and sales, and it's more about posting the headshot or having the professional headshot of you in the suit or the business suit or. The dress that makes you look professional. And where you can just kind of like, list your resume every once in a while. But LinkedIn is one of the few remaining social platforms that actually has the opportunity for substantial organic reach. TikTok is not really a platform that. Lends itself to user growth, because it's. A content first platform. You're not really growing big channels that people come back to, whereas LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook are much more about cultivating an online audience and then having consistent communication with them. TikTok, you're always going for the next viral hit. And we'll talk about TikTok here in a second. And so it really isn't creator first, it's more content first, whereas LinkedIn really is creator first. And as a business, whereas a person with a profile that wants to make a name for yourself increase your recognition, your name recognition, your brand, whatever it is, LinkedIn can be a place that you build something on top of it. And the unfortunate thing about Instagram and Facebook is those are largely pay to play platforms. Now, if you want your posts to reach more people, you got to shell out some cash to Mark Zuckerberg and his private Hawai compound or whatever he's building right now. And so LinkedIn really is one of the few social media platforms with an established user base and a culture of what works and what doesn't, that is evolving. But you have to wake up to it. And I think this is the year where businesses and business professionals really see that it's not just a place to kind of park your resume, but it's actually a place where business gets done and where you can grow. The impact of your content marketing, aside from the traditional channels that people think about. And what's really great news is that the content that worked on Instagram and Facebook three years ago is really overperforming on LinkedIn right now. So rather than just text posts or hiring updates, if you're posting short form video, whether that's vertical or horizontal, if you're doing carousel image posts, those were like all the rage on Instagram a couple of years ago. They're making a second comeback on LinkedIn, where you can actually share a lot of really great information, educate and inform people, and become a resource for the professionals in your industry. And so the kinds of content that you have built systems around creating for Instagram, you can now transplant that over to LinkedIn and get this second wave, the second boost, because that content's actually performing on LinkedIn. Another thing that works on LinkedIn is hashtags. They actually work, whereas with Instagram, it really is a dying art form where hashtags used to be the way you. Get discovered, and now there's so many. People using, it became so saturated that it really isn't an effective strategy anymore. But LinkedIn it is. So one of my predictions for 2024 is that LinkedIn actually realizes some of. Its potential as a marketing platform for businesses and professionals and that it's not. Just a throw in, like, oh, yeah. We should have a LinkedIn strategy, because. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, those are the more sexy platforms that people think about. I think LinkedIn is really going to get its due, and companies are going to wake up to the potential that it has for expanding their business. One little note that I'll give you if you want to pay more attention. To LinkedIn, is that people tend to. Respond better to personal profiles than company. Pages, in the same way that when you're following a company on Instagram, you're. Basically just expecting a continuous billboard. Whereas if you follow a person, you're following them for their thoughts, their perspective. Their ideas, the things they're talking about. And so even just taking the same content that you would post on your company page and posting it to the. Personal profile of the founder or the. CEO and positioning them as the thought. Leader that represents your company, you'll get. Even more leverage out of that same piece of content that you would if you posted it to a company page. Just a little trick of the trade for you if you want to get. Focused more on LinkedIn. The second thing that I'm paying attention to, the second trend that I'm expecting to happen this year, is that TikTok is going to mature as a platform and then plateau in its user growth. It's been on this just absolute bananas hyper growth trajectory since it was released in the US, and it hasn't slowed down yet. But because it has been growing so. Quickly, eventually you just run out of. Eyeballs, you run out of people to download the app. So you can't have infinite growth forever. And we're now seeing with, like, the one to 2 billion monthly active users threshold. That's pretty typical for a saturated social media platform. That's where TikTok is. And when that happens, when you stop running out of new people to show. Content to the demand curve eventually catches. Up to the supply curve. So the reason why being a first mover on a new platform that's growing is so advantageous for you as a business owner, or for your company even, is because there's more demand than supply. There's less people creating content than there are people consuming the content. And so think about TikTok. Five years ago, if you were a content creator on that platform, and there was 100 people with the app versus one person making content, there was a disproportionate share or need or hunger for that content that you were creating. And so you could get better virality. You could get better organic growth, because TikTok needed to serve people with something. And so if you happen to be. One of know few people that were. Making content on the platform, you would get more reach, you'd grow a bigger channel, et cetera. But now that their user growth is starting to stagnate, the content delivery, the supply is catching up, and so you're having fewer and fewer of those opportunities for outsized results. Now, is that to say that TikTok is dead? No. Is that to say that you can't go viral on TikTok or build a channel? No. It is to say it is much more difficult now than five years ago. And so the way people talk about TikTok, I expect to change. It's now joins the group of matured platforms that become a part of everyone's standard sops. But we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. It's not simply about getting millions and millions of video views anymore and likes and followers. It's really about having a strategy there, because you need to have a strategy there to cover all your bases for social. And so I think short form vertical video is here to stay. Instagram reels is all in. Facebook is using reels on their platform, LinkedIn. A lot of people are viewing vertical videos, YouTube shorts. So that format is here to stay. If your company doesn't have a short form vertical video content strategy, it's the near future of social media and how people consume content now because of TikTok, you need that. But I think TikTok as a platform will kind of stagnate in its user growth, that the supply side is going to catch up. It will inevitably age up. Whereas before TikTok was seen as kind of like the young kids generations social platform. Whereas millennials, it was Instagram and Gen X was Facebook. Now TikTok is going to age up. More millennials, more Gen X, more boomers are going to be using it, so it'll become less cool, and then the kids are going to go somewhere else. So that's the inevitable life cycle of a social media platform. Kids want to view where their parents aren't, and when their parents show up, they move on. And so TikTok is just the next platform in that spinning circle of life. The third marketing trend I'm paying attention to for 2024 is I expect AI to become fully integrated into the marketing Sops, or standard operating procedures of most companies. And that's because if you think about 15 months ago, when Chat GPT publicly launched, it was a total game changer. The way that people thought about AI before, it was always compartmentalized in very specific data sets for very specific applications, and it can never do a really good job. But with Chat GPT, all of a sudden you had this rapidly advancing and improving AI companion that you could use as a resource to supercharge the work that you're doing. And while I still think we're a ways off from it, being able to completely replace people in different aspects or elements, you still need input. It's still a machine just like any other. The output you get is determined by. The input that you give it. I think it has made enough progress in the quality of the outputs that it's giving you that companies are going to see it more as a tool and a resource. Just like the SaaS bubble, where you. Had all these SaaS companies come online and create software as a service that companies then integrated into their systems. I think AI is going to be very similar where there was definitely a first mover group of people that were experimenting with it, and kind of the wild, wild west of what could we do with this, how could we use this to optimize and improve and things like that? And I think it's just going to become more normal for companies to be integrating AI into their standard operating procedures, where for certain industries, there's a longer roadmap to getting it to fruition. I think anywhere where data privacy is important, whether it's a medical field and you have HIPAA restrictions, or if you have a proprietary database that you need to pull from in order to generate some of these outputs, there, there's going to be some more development that needs to happen in order to create custom language models within those data sets. But I think the shift that's going to happen is a, is going to be very similar to blockchain, very similar to crypto, where first it was like this weird thing that some people played with and made some fun images, and it's now going to be seen as a productivity enhancer, where first drafts of everything are now going to be written by AI. There are already AI chatbots that are writing blog posts, composing emails, writing sales copy, all the things that marketers used to do. Chatbots are now going to be the first draft, AI is now going to be the first draft generators for all those written assets. The differentiator for you and for me is then what is the human expertise that will air on top of that to differentiate our copy from somebody else's? Images will be edited and even created by AI this year. And whereas before it was very easy to pick out, like what did AI make versus somebody else? Human hands being the classic example where you see a picture and you're like, is this a person? Is it not a person? It's like, oh wait, well, they have seven and a half fingers. So AI made that because it doesn't quite know what to do with fingers yet. They're going to fix that eventually. That will eventually go away as a problem. And so images are going to be getting better. And just imagine that you are creating images for a new website, a new marketing site, and you need to show a very specific application of your product or service with a very specific demographic or person. You can now artificially create that image to be exactly the environment that you need to display your product in the best light possible. You don't have to hire a photographer, you don't have to scour through subsplash or giphy or wherever you get your images to find the perfect one that matches exactly what your brand style is and what you need to communicate. You just generate exactly what you want. And to the casual observer, it looks like a real picture that somebody took that's coming and that is going to happen. Video tutorials are not going to be created with AI. There are even platforms like Synthesia IO, which I'll link in the show notes below. If you want to go check it out, where you just pick an avatar, a virtual avatar, you upload a script and they just simulate what it would be like to record a person going through a training video. And so as more and more of these products and offers and things that are built on top of AI mature, they're going to become much more standardized and just accepted as the normal way of doing business in the online business world. Now, are there pros and cons to that? For sure. And I published an episode last year talking about the pros and cons of AI in your marketing and things to be aware of and things to be careful of and how to utilize it. So I definitely stand by all the things that I said there. But I think just from an observation standpoint, 2024 is going to be the year that AI really goes mainstream in the way that a lot of big businesses think about integrating productivity enhancers to get the most out of their teams and people. So those are my three things that I'm paying attention to from my vantage point. Number one on LinkedIn I think is a huge opportunity for anyone that wakes up to it and pays attention to it. I think TikTok is going to mature and plateau in its user growth and that's going to impact how companies think about utilizing it as a distribution platform for your marketing messages. And 2024 is the year where AI becomes mainstream, becomes normal, and just a part of every single day what you do and how you do it. I'd be curious to see what your predictions are, what you think is going to happen in 2024. You can send me an email at hello@honestpodcast.com I'd be happy to interact with you and bounce back and forth ideas. If you have questions about how 2024 can be fully leveraged to help you and your business's knees, I'd be happy to spitball things with you. Or you just comment below the YouTube version of this episode and you just go to the Honest marketing podcast YouTube channel. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, leave a comment. I'd be happy to interact with you there. Well, I hope this was a fun episode for you to listen to. And until next time, be honest.