2024 SMB Digital Marketing Trends: Mid-Year Check-In

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2024 SMB Digital Marketing Trends: Mid-Year Check-In

Chris Cho, President of LocaliQ, Digital Marketing Solutions, Gannett.

We live in a dynamic era of digital marketing, where both the opportunities and challenges can feel endless and ever-changing for small businesses. As we continue through the back half of the year, these are some of the biggest trends I’m seeing as president of a digital marketing solutions company and what they may mean for businesses of all kinds.

1. AI-driven marketing is reshaping the customer journey.

AI is enabling marketers to deliver more personalized, data-driven and efficient campaigns that better resonate with their target audiences. I have also found that it can empower marketers to make more informed decisions, optimize performance and drive better business outcomes in an increasingly competitive and dynamic environment.

The use of AI to determine how a marketing campaign is built, managed and dispensed is reshaping strategies. For instance, small businesses can not only generate leads with AI but also better capture, prioritize, manage and follow through with those leads to serve their customers and generate more business.

However, implementing AI isn’t just relegated to marketers managing and understanding where to put spend to maximize ROI; now, we’re entering an era where AI is powering the pre- and post-customer experience. The consumer journey is evolving—shifting away from emails and instead beginning with a search, followed by reading reviews, clicking on an ad or link and landing on the company’s homepage. From there, consumers can engage with a virtual assistant powered by AI. That chatbot can lead to an offer, that offer can lead to revenue, and the many steps throughout the experience are orchestrated by AI. In my experience, this can be far more effective and efficient for advertisers who don’t necessarily have time to follow up with every lead.

2. AI is being integrated into traditional marketing.

People don’t necessarily think about AI being used to power things like offline experiences, such as mail in your mailbox or on a billboard. But AI can spot trends, understand consumer behavior and determine when—and how—it’s appropriate to implement traditional marketing. In essence, a business’s budget can work harder when AI is effectively employed to power its whole ad spend across channels.

Data-driven marketing is still king, and it is where I believe AI can drive the most value. By leveraging AI to analyze and review the success of digital campaigns, those key learnings can be implemented in your traditional marketing efforts to maximize their impact. Is a particular message resonating with an audience in one local market over another? Do customers in one metropolitan area have a particular challenge your business can solve better than the competition?

Hyper-local and traditional marketing methods are areas where combining the power of AI insights with personalized messaging that resonates in a particular market can help you gain an edge over your competitors and have an outsized impact on your spend.

3. SMBs continue to rely on responsibly gathered first-party data.

Even though Google has canceled their plans to phase out all third-party cookies by the end of the year, the way in which small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) collect data and target customers is still evolving, and first-party data is still a valuable asset.

SMBs typically gather first-party data through direct interactions (phone/text/chatbot/email/in-person). This is in large part because of the close relationships SMBs have with their customers, typically making gathering first-party data much easier. Unlike larger companies, who tend to have significantly larger (seven-digit) ad budgets, rely heavily on third-party data for advertising and tracking and/or are more likely to be impacted by the phasing out of third-party cookies, SMBs depend more on data collected directly from their own customers (e.g. search engine marketing lead-gen ads for fill on websites). Additionally, privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) aren’t as burdensome for SMBs since they’re not handling huge amounts of user data.

All of this together demonstrates how useful responsibly-gathered first-party data continues to be for SMBs. If you are looking for ways to maintain trust with your clients while gathering first-party data to grow your company, I recommend being transparent (offering options for cookie consent, posting your privacy policy, etc.), giving users options for choosing their privacy settings and preferences, creating a user-friendly platform, and even educating customers on the benefits of sharing their data.

In my experience, these tactics can allow you to further build on the trust you’ve established with your customers. As we navigate the rest of 2024, I believe that embracing these emerging trends could be instrumental in driving success and maintaining competitive advantage in the communities in which SMBs operate.


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