There are a lot of things that are changing next year.
The good news is next year hasn’t started yet. So, you have time to catch on to some of these trends before your competition.
Ideally, you would start leveraging some of them before the new year, so you can get a head start.
Here’s what we believe will come to fruition in 2024.
Trend #1: Companies will create podcasts over blogs
Ideally, you should have both, but podcasting is a blue ocean.
There are 1 billion blogs. And there are 7.8 billion people in the world. That’s 1 blog for every 7.8 people. On the flip side, there are 4.2 million podcasts. That’s 1 podcast for every 1857 people.
Just look at the visual below. It’s a wide-open opportunity.
When creating a podcast there are 2 main ways to get it popular:
- Email blasts – send out email blasts whenever you release an episode. It will get you a lot more subscribers. If you don’t have an email list, you can always pay others who do to promote it.
- Ad swaps – trade impressions with other podcasts. So within your podcast, you run ads to promote the other person’s podcast. And they do the same for you. It doesn’t matter if they have a popular podcast and you don’t. You are doing impression swaps, so if you only drive them 100 ad impressions, they will do the same for you.
Ideally, you should have both a podcast and a blog.
Trend #2: Companies will spend time on the less popular social networks
Although Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are the more popular social networks, they don’t provide the best return on ad spend.
Here are the social networks that provided the best return on ad spend in the last 30 days.
- X – 6.8
- Pinterest – 5.2
- Snap – 4.9
- TikTok – 4.1
- YouTube – 3.9
- Instagram – 3.3
- Facebook – 3.2
- LinkedIn – 2.6
Here’s a chart that visualizes it.
Keep in mind that just because a social network provides a better return on ad spend, it doesn’t mean it can drive the volume you may want.
It’s a balancing act and ideally, you should advertise on all profitable social networks.
Trend #3: Marketing moats will become non-existent, other than brands.
What makes Jordan shoes special isn’t the quality of the shoes.
There are a lot of other high-quality shoes.
It’s the brand!
What made Kylie Cosmetics popular was the brand… not the quality of the product.
Technology has made it easier to copy the competition. But the one thing that can separate you is your brand.
Check out the percentage of SEO traffic that is brand-related based on revenue size.
It just enforces the power of a brand.
You need to focus on building your brand.
Follow the rule of 7. Which when people interact with your brand 7 times they are more likely to evangelize you and promote you.
The way you get someone to see your brand 7 times is by being everywhere. Leverage all social channels, podcasting, blogging, and even your email list.
Trend #4: You’ll change the way you write content
There are two things in this trend.
First off, it used to be where 2300-word articles were the ones ranking at the top of Google. Then it became 1447-word articles.
And now look at the average article length by industry.
It’s because of tiktokification.
The average user spends 95 minutes a day consuming short-form content. And the second thing is that human-written content will outperform AI-written content. 94.12% of the time, human-written content outranked AI-generated content.
But what’s interesting is more marketers are relying on AI to create their content.
This should make it easier for your content to stand out.
Just leverage humans to create your content. If you decide to use AI, make sure humans modify the AI-written content.
The 94.12% stat is huge, especially because marketers are getting lazier and are relying on AI to do everything for them.
It’s not a bad thing, it’s just that the AI isn’t at a level where it needs to be for that to work and I doubt it will happen in the next few years.
Trend #5: Marketing will no longer focus on 1 region
Big companies are already doing this.
Mid-size companies and startups will start.
Instead of just focusing on the US or the UK, you’ll have no choice but to expand globally. It’s where the money is.
Plus it is less competitive in most regions outside of the US. Here’s our traffic by region.
When we first popped on the Inc 5000 list, we were ranked number 21. Our international expansion led the way for revenue growth.
We aren’t the only ones experiencing this… it’s why most Fortune 1000 companies have a global effort.
If you want to do well internationally, here’s a global SEO strategy for you.
It works well, just look at my results.
And we’ve done it for customers as well. It’s how we drove CNN an extra billion pageviews in 12 months through SEO.
Conclusion
There are going to be a lot of changes in 2024 especially because of AI.
But if you want to focus on the ones that will produce the big results, focus on the ones above.
It should move the needle for you and drive more revenue.
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