content – Tonic Consultancy

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Blogs, Digital, Marketing Plan, Technology

16th April 20240

What Are The Biggest Marketing Trends For 2024

Keeping up with the continually shifting landscape of marketing can be a full-time job in itself, and just as you think you’ve got a grasp of what’s going on, it can all change in the blink of an eye. Keeping abreast of the latest marketing trends is never easy, but it’s vital to know what’s what in the marketing world.

We’ve had a look at what all the industry experts have been saying and predicting, so you can succeed and ensure you’re keeping up with the competition, if not staying ahead!

The Marketing Trends of 2024

Short-Form Video Is King

We’ve all been guilty of spending way too much time scrolling through TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels, and you may have then gone and made a purchase after watching too many short-form videos instead of working! Was it some new clothes, pet supplies, or a fancy new gadget?

But you’re not alone in this, as according to a recent survey in the US, 56 per cent of consumers admitted to making a purchase based on an ad they had seen on TikTok, and a further 36 per cent said they would be willing to make a buying decision based on short-form video ads.

These videos make a deeper connection with your customer base, and it has become simple for brands to repurpose video content into podcasts and text-based content. It’s therefore little surprise that 53 per cent of marketers are leveraging short-form videos, and 38 per cent are continuing to invest in short-form video social platforms.

While longer videos have the potential to include more information about products, brands and services, short-form use less bandwidth and appeal more to the fast-paced attention spans of online audiences across a wide demographic.

Content Creation That Aligns With Your Brand Values

According to data published by Consumer Goods Technology, 82 per cent of consumers want a brand’s values to be in alignment with their own, and a significant 75 per cent of shoppers said they had cut ties with a brand when their values conflict.

To ensure you remain on the good side of target audiences, brands need to make sure they make a point of showcasing their values on topics that have meaning to consumers. Studies found that 45 per cent of marketers will boost investment into the creation of content that shows their brand’s values, while only 9 per cent said they would be decreasing that investment.

Native Advertising And Sponsored Content Still Has Value

When a brand pays to have featured content on a third-party website, such as in the form of editorial-type content, this is an investment in native advertising. Over a third of marketers have planned to increase investment in native advertising in 2024, and over half say they will continue to invest the same amount as in previous years.

This is not too surprising, given the value that native advertising can have to brands. Unlike traditional advertising, which is designed to be disruptive and stand out, native advertising blends in and can help promote your brand to new audiences who otherwise might not have come across you before.

Native advertising ‘feels’ different to traditional advertising, and consumers are much more likely to pay attention to it, and research has shown that consumers view native advertising 50 per cent more than banner adverts.

Influencer Marketing Is Still Relevant

Influencers had a huge year in 2023, and it was nearly impossible to scroll through social media without seeing influencers promoting a massive range of products and services.

It’s highly unlikely that this trend will slow down in 2024, and 84 per cent of marketers have said they will be increasing their investment in influencer marketing this year.

By combining thought leaders with influencers in the relevant niches, brands can expand their awareness and gain new audiences from the influencer’s followers. But you don’t have to blow the marketing budget on a famous influencer, as micro-influencers with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers can be a much more affordable solution, and typically yield more success.

Leveraging AI Will Continue To Increase

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made huge leaps in the past year and is set to continue to bring changes to marketing in 2024.

In 2023, 48 per cent of marketers said they had used AI for content creation – writing blogs and website and social media copy, landing page CTAs, and product descriptions. Amazon began using AI to summarise the key points from consumer reviews to help other consumers make a more considered purchasing decision.

AI has become popular with marketers, with its ability to streamline processes and give marketers more time to do other work and pursue new projects. While there are still concerns about the use of AI, to ensure your brand remains competitive, it will be vital to look at how leveraging AI tools can help your marketing efforts.

The Return Of VR And AR

Way back in 2021, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) were being used by 35 per cent of marketers in the strategies, half of whom planned to increase their investment into 2022.

However, by 2023, a quarter of marketers had stopped using VR and AR altogether, with bulky headsets and pricey equipment being slow to be adopted. But in 2024, there seems to be a comeback on the horizon, with 84 per cent of marketers planning on increasing VR and AR investment, as VR glasses and AR apps become more accessible.

Content Marketing Trends

According to statistics, nearly half of all buyers view between three and five pieces of content before they engage with a sales rep, and brands are expected to create even more content to grab the interest of consumers, which is why, globally, brands have increased investments into content marketing.

But what are the best content marketing strategies to be investing in? Let’s have a quick look.

Podcasts And Audio Content

Podcast popularity has massively increased, and 2023 was a golden year for the format. According to a 2023 US report by Edison Research, 42 per cent of people ages 12 and older listened to a podcast in the month previous, which was up 5 per cent from 2020 and 30 per cent from 2013.

Also, 75 per cent of Americans aged 12 and older listened to online audio in the previous month, and 70 per cent in the previous week, so it’s no surprise that marketers have been keeping an eye on this trend, with 82 per cent planning to increase investment in podcasts and audio content this year.

Blogging Is Here To Stay

According to studies, 92 per cent of marketers plan to either maintain or increase investment in blogging in 2024.

Blogging has been a core component of many marketing strategies since brands first started building websites, but the tactic is far from looking out of date. Blogging has been used by marketers for so long simply because it works, with one in three marketers leveraging blogs in their marketing strategies.

According to Hubspot, most consumers read between one and four blogs every month and have then gone on to make a purchase after reading a brand’s blog. Blogs can provide consumer engagement and potential conversion, but they can also provide crucial benefits to websites by way of search discoverability.

Websites with blogs have greater search potential and can implement SEO strategies far more easily than websites without blogs.

Case Studies To Continue To Drive Leads And Brand Credibility

Case studies can help establish transparency and trust between a brand and the target audience, offering a much deeper look into how a brand’s products or services can benefit the consumer, and over a quarter of marketers leverage case studies as part of their content strategies.

Some brands may publicly publish case studies on their websites to help persuade consumers, while others offer them as a free PDF that requires a lead conversion in order for it to be downloaded.

But regardless of how it is done, marketers are still seeing a great deal of value in case studies in 2024, with 87 per cent increasing or maintaining investment this year.

Feeling Overwhelmed?

Marketing will continue to change, and it’s important to keep your thumb on the pulse of the latest trends, as well as always being open to change to ensure your business doesn’t fall behind.

But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the thought of trying to keep up with everything, don’t worry, Tonic will always be here to help, advise, and make sure your marketing efforts are always relevant and on-trend.

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Digital, Marketing Plan, Technology

9th April 20240

AI in Marketing

How Can Artificial Intelligence Help Boost Your Marketing?

Advances in technology mean that the world is changing at a dizzying pace, and it is set to have a tremendous impact on marketing. With tools such as ChatGPT, artificial intelligence (AI) is assuming a much larger role and helping to create a wealth of opportunities for marketers to be able to do even more with what they already do best.

By combining AI technologies with customer and brand data, marketers can gain access to highly precise insights into marketing trends and the customer experience. AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and others can help guide marketers’ decision-making, helping to stay ahead of the competition as well as helping to prepare for the challenges faced in a dynamic marketplace.

Let’s have a closer look at how AI can benefit marketers and how it can be leveraged successfully.

AI in marketing

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, AI-based marketing looks set to drive 45 per cent of the total economy by 2030. This will happen in a variety of ways, including data-driven product enhancements, personalised services, and influencing consumer demand. Let’s look at how this will be achieved.

Social media listening

With AI-powered social media, your efficiency will be significantly increased as social media listening is taken to a new level. AI tools will help to provide a range of suggested terms to include in your social media tracking to help marketers reveal essential audience insights far faster.

AI algorithms will help to identify and extract the relevant details from social media listing data that can span millions of data points in real-time. This will help marketers see the wood for the trees to gain a better understanding of the customer’s thoughts via social media sentiment analysis. Marketers can then anticipate their customers’ next move, and make strategic decisions and actions.

Content generation

AI social management tools can help analyse the voice of customer (VoC) data in social media posts to help inform marketers of the content that is of most interest to the target audience.

The same tools can also help to identify keywords and triggers so that marketers can devise and develop compelling posts, respond better to customer comments, and inspire better and more impactful product descriptions for websites and e-commerce. All of this will add marketing efforts towards brand engagement for an increase in market share and better earnings.

AI can also help generate ideas that can nurture and make campaigns more successful, as well as help create more compelling communications that will reinforce relationships with potential customers at all stages of the sales funnel.

AI prompts can help devise email subject lines that will achieve a better open rate, develop personalised content that can be adapted to buyer personas, and drive conversations based on intent, engaging with each customer/client on an individual basis, ultimately leading to stronger connections and loyalty that will stimulate sales.

Automation

By leveraging AI-driven smart automation, social media managers and customer service teams are empowered to improve operational efficiency via lexical and statistical-based triggers that can help drive intelligent workflows.

This can help marketers achieve their business goals better by removing the guesswork out of tasks such as scheduling posts at the optimal times for improved impact and better engagement, or by categorising incoming messages.

It can also help unify the brand voice in customer communications and reduce response times by half.

Audience segmentation and personalisation

Omnichannel business strategies based on market segmentation can be driven by AI marketing, helping to align campaigns with customers are are more likely to be interested and buy your product or services.

Programmatic advertising can be leveraged to help streamline the process of selecting and setting up digital advertising for the best return on investment (ROI), enabling more personalised marketing strategies and tactics to grow brand loyalty and develop powerful brand awareness campaigns.

Data analysis for customer insights

AI and machine learning can provide critical customer insights on a variety of aspects to help marketers make better informed strategic marketing decisions, with deeper insights into audience sentiments concerning your brand, full audits of customer care team performance, and social media engagement metrics.

This means marketers can quickly adapt to changing marketing trends, prioritise budgets based on what aspects require the most investment, and improve customer relationships.

Reputation management

When considering brand reputation, there will always be certain elements within the control, of marketers, while there will be some aspects that are not. Brands are subject to more scrutiny than ever in the social media age but with AI-based brand reputation management, potential threats can be averted before that can become a much larger issue.

With real-time monitoring of customer sentiments, using the right influencers and brand ambassadors, and providing proactive customer care, this can all be achieved easily.

Competitive intelligence

AI can help marketers identify opportunities that can help improve products and services and help fill in gaps in the market. It can help discern competitors’ share of voice and help find intelligent ways to become more agile in the competitive market. AI can also compare your social media performance to that of competitors via competitive benchmarking, enabling marketers to adjust strategies accordingly.

Multilingual advantage

A global marketplace means marketers need to take into account any cross-cultural aspects, as well as provide prompt and efficient customer care. With AI marketing tools, marketers can extract essential customer insights from multilingual data with ease, providing data that can inform strategies for particular regions.

It can also help ensure that target audiences are easily able to find social media posts, responses, and advertisements that they find relatable and adhere to their cultural standards.

Which AI technologies enable marketing?

Intelligent social media platforms will combine powerful AI technologies to provide marketers with the insights they need to succeed. With capabilities such as semantic classification, named entity recognition and aspect-based sentiment analysis, marketers can gain specific insights into their niche, while social media content can be optimised and customer engagement can be improved with the help of natural language processing, which all leads to a greater competitive edge.

Build impactful business strategies with AI

Marketing insights provided by AI are helping to empower brands to build a stronger foundation for growth and success by exploring new marketing, product and customer engagement opportunities.

AI tech such as sentiment analysis, NLP, virtual agents, chatbots and more are helping to determine how efficiently business goals can be achieved, in everything from revenue optimisation to navigating unpredictable market scenarios.

With access to targeted AI-driven insights, marketers can develop more proactive social media marketing tactics to help drive customer engagement, loyalty and retention, and ultimately market growth.

If you’re looking for help with AI marketing, brand growth, and social media marketing, come and talk to us at Tonic today.

Blogs, Digital

21st March 20230

What is Content Marketing?

In recent years, you may have heard more and more people talking about Content Marketing, and how it has become a game-changer for marketing for businesses.

But what exactly is content marketing, and how is it different from other tried and tested marketing methods? Let’s have a look at both what content marketing is, and what it isn’t, and how you can leverage it for your business.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

First, let’s have a look at how content marketing can benefit your business.

Attract a new audience and grow your website traffic – helping potential customers find your brand can be a big challenge, but content marketing can help you become more discoverable to search engines, and help attract attention on social media

Create value for your audience – Content provided to your audience is not only useful, it can provide a message to the right people at a time when they need it most, which will make you an authority on that subject and create value for your audience.

Engage with your audience – Content that your audience finds relevant and useful will likely be shared with their friends and followers, and help develop further interactions such as comments and reactions.

Generate positive brand perception – Increased engagement with your content will help boost the awareness and perception of your brand, and people are more likely to make business with a brand they know than one they don’t.

Educate the market about your products and services – People are likely unaware they have a problem that can be solved by your product or service, and content marketing can help show them that such a solution exists and how it works.

Generate new leads – Visitors to your blog may be encouraged to leave some information about themselves, such as an email address, which can be a potential lead. The more you invest in content marketing, the more likely you will generate potential leads, and increase the chances to sell.

Increase the customer’s lifetime value – The lifetime value is the total value spent by your customer on your business. The more they buy and the longer they remain a customer, the bigger their lifetime value. By providing relevant and useful content, you can encourage a customer to remain a loyal customer for longer.

Content marketing is not a strategy

There are two main aspects of content marketing: To provide valuable content, and to persuade your audience to take a certain course of action, determined in advance by the marketer. Of course, there are various ways of measuring whether the content is ‘valuable’, and actions could range from signing up for an email subscription to buying a product or service, or much more.

But content marketing is not in itself a viable strategy. It would impossible to produce effective content marketing without first having a marketing strategy in place. You should only be producing content that is relevant to your business, that will interest your audience, and that you can write about from a position of experience and authority.

This means you need to know what your brand is, its values, who your audience is and what they want. Content marketing is used to further your marketing and business objectives, and is not a strategy.

How does content marketing fit in?

Content marketing is an essential component of any business’s marketing efforts, as it is key to maintaining contact with the target audience and generating the right results.

It is typically a set of multi-platform techniques that encompasses blogs, email, social media, and video, and is a key component of digital marketing.

How content marketing is used will vary from business to business. If your company has a focus on B2B, then some social media, for example, Facebook or Instagram, may not be suitable. But for other businesses, it might be where they can find their audience.

There will always be some platforms and channels that are right, and some that are not.

You will also need to consider your objectives. Are you trying to grow your audience, or use your existing audience better? In either case, content marketing can provide the solution, but how it is applied will differ.

Content marketing can make it possible to create an immersive environment in which potential customers can learn all about your brand, its values, your products, your services and how they will help solve their problems.

It can also create a similar environment where you can build your reputation and engage with your existing audience.

While it might not always be the case, content marketing is best suited to the ‘inbound’ approach.

What is content marketing for?

Content marketing is for more than increasing your SEO rankings, attracting new customers, or boosting your conversion rates, it’s also about developing a lasting relationship with an audience who will consume and look forward to your content.

It can be used for a variety of purposes, depending on what would be best for your company and your business objectives, such as building initial awareness and augmenting your brand’s reputation, or for more specific objectives such as driving and growing traffic to your website. What sets content marketing apart from other forms of communication is that it is generally longer- term, multi-channel, and involves two-way communication. It can encourage the reader to submit their contact details, sign up for something, or become more engaged with your brand regularly.

What is it not for?

Content marketing should not be used for sales messages, and it’s important to avoid blogging about special offers and such, as this can destroy the trust you have been fostering with your audience.

It isn’t necessarily about selling content. Most content will be free, while some may be for subscribers only, and some might be paid for. It’s important to know when to utilise each type and how to monetise it if you decide to do so, which will depend on your business model and your current situation in terms of brand awareness and engagement.

It’s not really about SEO and keywords. There is a lot of value in having SEO-friendly digital content, but it’s important to avoid pushing the boundaries. One of the key parts of content marketing is building trust, and you cannot write for robots and expect humans to be excited about it.

Never underestimate your audience, they will know when an article or web page is there simply to game the system.

It’s not for converting every single lead. It might be debated that each sign-up you achieve through your content is a potential lead, and while it is true that they have shown they are interested in your content, it does not necessarily mean they are interested in your other services or products.

If you start trying to close each contact immediately, then your inbound marketing approach becomes outbound, and once again, can erode the trust you have been developing.

Where to start with content marketing?

If you’re looking to develop a well-planned and considered content marketing programme for your business, then talk to the team at Tonic today!

Tag: content