9 Digital Marketing Trends & Strategies for 2024

As Q4 nears, it’s time to start planning and budgeting for your 2024 digital marketing campaigns. Digital marketing, often the first touchpoint with a new customer or client, also keeps your current customers coming back. It’s both a lead generation and lead nurturing tool].

Digital marketing materials should depict a positive customer experience, so that when people see and read them, they will want to visit your place of business to experience it for themselves. That’s how you get a return on your digital marketing investment. It’s about creating awareness and converting followers and subscribers into paying customers and clients.

Before you get started on developing a digital marketing campaign, determine what your KPIs are. What does success look like to you? What are your goals? Then, you can figure out the steps to achieve them.

Here are some tips to help you jump start your strategy to increase your conversion rate and drive business through your doors.

1. Create a brand and style guide to maintain a consistent aesthetic and voice across all channels.

2. Determine which social media platforms make the most sense for your business to post on, based on your target audience. Then, figure out the types of posts your audience responds to best. Consider running a social media ad campaign or boost posts to promote a sale, opening a new location, or launching a new product or service.

3. According to HubSpot, when promoting a franchise’s product or service, influencers’ established credibility and reach can generate brand awareness and drive engagement. Their followers trust the authenticity of their recommendations. This partnership allows businesses to amplify their messaging to a wider audience and possibly tap into new territory.

However, if you’re thinking about working with influencers, use caution. Some influencers inflate their reach by buying fake followers and don’t have as much of a following as you might think. Click on a few of their posts and see how many people actually liked and commented. Make sure they don’t have skeletons in their closet that could tarnish your brand, and that their tone of voice and presentation are on-brand.

To see how worthwhile partnering with an influencer is, provide the influencer with a coupon code to include in their posts, which will allow you to track conversions. How many of their followers became your customer because of their post?

4. User-generated content really helps spread by word of mouth. If a customer posts a photo of a mouthwatering donut or chronicles their fitness journey, their friends and family are likely to head out for a donut or sign up for an exercise class. Your existing customers are some of your best spokespersons.

Reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, Nextdoor, and similar sites are another form of user-generated content. HubSpot says that when genuine customers share positive experiences, they become brand advocates and it enhances trust among those who read their comments.

5. Building an email newsletter subscriber list is a large part of digital marketing. This creates a direct line of communication with customers, whether to win first-time customers, retain current customers, or win back lapsed customers. When someone signs up to receive emails on your website, joings a rewards program, enters a contest, or connects to your Wi-Fi, they must share their information with you. This should automatically be entered into your CRM system.

Popular newsletter distribution services are MailChimp and Constant Contact, but LinkedIn is gaining a lot of traction, which is good for B2B communications and for franchisors to keep franchisees informed.

6. Texting customers isn’t used quite as often as social media and emailing, but some franchisors and franchisees have customers’ cell phone numbers if a they filled out a form to join a rewards or loyalty program. This is another route for both franchisors and franchisees to consider for sending promotional offers to customers.

7. It’s also crucial to set up a trackable link on all of your individual posts on each platform you use and in any e-blasts you send. This will enable you to determine which platforms and which types of posts are getting people to click and drive traffic to your website—and if it’s converting to business. This will drive your digital marketing strategy moving forward.

8. Invest in a CRM system to serve as your hub or home base to store customer data in a centralized location. Consolidating and organizing will help to streamline your analysis of this information. SuperOffice reports that 91% of companies surveyed agreed that data-driven decision-making is important for business growth.

9. Your CRM also can be used to study your customers’ habits. HubSpot says that by analyzing user queries, behaviors, and preferences, brands can uncover actionable insights that inform marketing strategies, content creation, and customer engagement. Additionally, they report that businesses are turning to AI to spot patterns, trends, and unearth predictive analytics so a human doesn’t have the tedious task of manually sorting through all of the data. AI can provide more efficiency in interpreting customer information so digital marketers can use it to make informed decisions.

Analytics to hone in on include the following:

• Click rates and open rates

• Time spent on website

• Number of pages viewed per visit

• Number of times visited website

• Frequency of website visits

• Conversion rate 

• Purchase history

• Percentage of return customers

• Demographics

• Time of day customers are clicking

• Whether people are using smartphones, tablets, or computers

• Whether pop-ups are helping or hurting

• Unfollow rate

• How people are buying

• Whether customers are shipping products to their home or doing curbside pickup or in-store pickup

Once you’ve compiled those metrics, it can help on many fronts, including:

• Learning what works in a franchisee’s market compared with the franchisor’s corporate digital marketing efforts. 

• Allowing franchisees to easily report numbers and findings to corporate, business partners, and fellow franchisees.

• Helping to determine where you should grow franchises or scale back your efforts.

• Finding out how the location of your franchises determines ROI.

• Training employees to provide a better customer experience.

• Finding the optimal time of day and how frequently to post and send emails. A scheduling tool such as Sprout Social or HootSuite helps with this.

Paige Feigenbaum is a freelance journalist, public relations specialist, and television producer based in South Florida. She has written for The Palm Beach Post, Jupiter Magazine, Stuart Magazine, The Boca Raton Observer, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, The Hollywood Reporter, TMZ, ABC News Radio, and Smart Meetings magazine. She can be reached at paigemara.news@gmail.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.