If you are a small business owner or marketer, then this blog post is for you. As 2024 approaches, it's essential to start thinking about digital marketing strategies that will be most effective in the upcoming years.
The landscape of digital advertising and marketing has changed dramatically over the past few years, and many businesses have failed to keep up with these changes. To help future-proof your business in 2024, we've compiled our list of top digital marketing trends for small businesses!
1. Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence to Write Content
Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the past few years. It is now possible to use AI technology to generate content suitable for your blog posts, social media posts, and other types of digital marketing efforts. In addition, this type of machine learning-powered software will allow small companies to market smarter on a smaller budget, as they will optimize their content for search engine optimization with less time and money.
AI-powered marketing platforms like Jasper.ai are proving to be a massive asset to digital marketers, as they can cut the time it takes to create content up to 75%, which is an enormous saving on time and money.
In addition, the time saved from using these types of AI software will allow you to focus more attention on other aspects of your business, such as customer service or sales!
2. The Death of 3rd Party Tracking and Data
Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., are making significant changes to their data policies, which will substantially impact how you have always marketed your business before.
Google announced that they are rolling out plans to kill the cookie, and even though it looks like they have pushed back their plans to 2024, you still need to start preparing for this now.
Apple has already started rolling out significant changes to prevent sharing their user's data, making it much harder to re-target your audience who uses Apple products.
Many other companies will be following suit soon.
So, how do you start preparing for this now?
You must start leveraging CRM software to keep your data stored for your internal marketing purposes. If you're not using a CRM in your business yet, now is the time to invest in this technology.
There's no doubt about it. You will have to become a more creative marketer in 2024, but having as much data on your audiences stored in your CRM will be vital to your success.
Pro Tip: Top 7 Marketing Automation Trends in 2024 You Need to Know Right Now
3. Consider Doing Online Webinars or Other Online Events
Hosting online events is a great way to attract new leads to sign up for your online event and fill your pipeline with potential customers. This is also an excellent way to build a database in your CRM and not depend on the data owned by Google or Facebook.
If you're not doing webinars or other online events yet, then now is the time to start testing them out. You can use tools like Zoom, Stealth Seminar, or WebinarJam to stream your online events.
Choosing which software you want to use will depend on how many users you anticipate attending your event and what marketing features you would like. Zoom is a pretty basic platform in terms of its marketing features. However, Zoom can accommodate more attendees than Stealth Seminar and Webinar Jam which are more feature-rich with marketing functionality.
If you’re doing online events, you should be leveraging email marketing to nurture every lead that signs up for your event and use marketing automation to move them through different sequences automatically.
Here are a few examples of utilizing email marketing with your online events:
- Send out a Drive to Register email series to get people to sign up for your event.
- Use marketing automation to check logic if they attended the event or not.
- If the person didn’t attend, you could send them to a Drive to Replay email series or a Drive to Register series for a different event.
- If the person attended, you could automatically have different email campaigns triggered depending on how long they stayed on the webinar or if they saw your CTA.
It’s essential to have automation set up like this to maximize your results from the event.
This strategy will help you build more internal data on your audiences to leverage for other marketing purposes.
4. Leverage Artificial Intelligence for Social Media Marketing
Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer that let you schedule posts in advance have been around for a while now, but new artificial intelligence companies are raising the bar in this space.
Recently, companies like AIMIsocial and Lately.ai have created some pretty impressive software solutions that allow you to use AI for your social media marketing needs. These technology solutions make it easier for small businesses to create social media content at a lower cost and much more affordable than ever before.
If you’re a small business owner, you should consider leveraging technologies like this to get a massive advantage over their competition.
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5. Use AI to Write Emails for Your Drip Marketing Campaigns
The more you can automate, the better. You can use AI in conjunction with tools like Pulse Technology that can help with automated tasks, marketing automation, and much more. For example, you could use Jasper.ai to write emails for you and plug those into automated email drip campaigns inside Pulse.
Setting up email marketing campaigns has always been a challenge for small businesses because of the time it takes to get set up. Now, you create your email marketing campaigns faster than ever before!
Here at Pulse, we have a lot of pre-built campaigns that you can use without having to spend days or even weeks getting them set up.
Pro Tip: 9 Automations Every Small Business Should Implement to Increase Efficiency
6. Focus on Personalization with Your Marketing Strategies
As more people become immune to traditional advertising, the need for personalization will only continue. There are many ways to create personalized marketing campaigns, but the key is to do this efficiently and cost-effectively.
CRM and marketing automation software are an essential part of this strategy. The CRM holds the data you need to create this personalization, and marketing automation will put your marketing campaigns in motion.
If you are a service-based business, consider personalizing your quotes to stand out from your competition. For example, if your use a quoting tool like Pulse, can you add personalized videos to your quotes which will help increase your conversion rates.
You can also use companies like Handywrytten to send out personalized cards written by robots using actual ink pins. This personal touch will have a positive impact on both your prospects and customers. You can also trigger these cards to be sent with marketing automation and automate the entire process.
There are many different strategies that you can use to add personalization, and if you want to stand you from your competition in 2024, using techniques like this will be crucial to your success.
7. Invest in Your Branding and Building a Strong Brand Image
Another critical strategy for small businesses in 2024 will be to invest more heavily into building a solid brand image.
Branding is usually a strategy that small businesses skip because it's looked at as being expensive and having a low return on investment. However, branding is an essential part of every marketing strategy and shouldn't be overlooked.
This has also become much more affordable with services like Fiver and Upwork. In addition, you can hire freelancers that have the qualified skills but on a smaller budget.
When you sign up for Pulse, our experts can help you get your CRM setup and implemented using the best practices. So you can relax knowing that our experts have got you covered, and your CRM is set up for success.
Of course, you'll also get access to all other great features, email marketing, workflow automation, and much more. Try Pulse for free today, and watch your business grow.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are several emerging digital marketing strategies that you should be considering in 2024. So keep an eye out for these and other digital marketing so that you can stay ahead of your competition!
