2023 will forever be known as the year that everything changed. The explosion of new artificial intelligence capabilities, particularly large language models used for generative AI, will transform every aspect of our personal and professional lives. Marketing is literally being transformed right before our eyes.
But while 2023 was the year of rapid development in AI, 2024 will be the year that these AI-powered innovations turn into practice. AI technologies will be integrated into every element of marketing functions, from how content is created to how marketers engage audiences and turn that engagement into actionable insights and data.
Every January, we reveal our list of marketing predictions, with a focus on digital engagement. These predictions are not only based on emerging technologies and trends but also on what we are seeing, and hearing, from marketers across every industry and region. It’s the unique challenges and needs they have, and that their customers and prospects have, that will change behavior in 2024.
It’s no surprise that this year’s predictions will revolve around the promise of AI. But what may surprise you is how quickly we are moving from promise to reality. And that reality has the potential to make us smarter, better, faster and more effective than ever.
Here are a few of the ways that AI will transform digital marketing in 2024:
1 AI will empower marketers to segment, target, personalize and create digital experiences faster
For so long, digital experiences like virtual events and webinars were mostly generic experiences, aimed at the widest possible audience. And that made sense. Each event required a lot of time and effort to ideate and create content, build and execute promotional strategies, and design, create and optimize the experience itself. It’s a lot.
But with the help of generative AI, all of this becomes much easier. Tools like ChatGPT can help us ideate topics and even produce content and designs. But in many cases, there is no need to even use third party tools.
Generative AI is integrating into many of the systems we already use today to make creating promotional content, like abstracts, emails and social posts an easy seamless process. We can even create pre-formatted event templates to quickly go from idea to execution.
2 Digital experiences will become hyper-personalized
We know that every audience member is unique, even as we create more targeted programming. One of the most exciting capabilities that AI provides us with, is the ability to deliver a personalized digital experience that maximizes engagement.. In each content hub, virtual event or webinar, you will have audiences with different needs, from different industries, at different stages in their journey.
AI can identify these audience segments and serve up unique content, resources and offers for each one. Imagine a webinar where visitors you are meeting for the first time are served a high-level offer to subscribe to your newsletter while audience members who are further down-funnel see an offer for a free trial or a demo. You can upload different resource lists that get served up to different audience segments.
The possibilities are endless. This will profoundly impact our ability to activate our audiences and improve conversion rates.
3 One digital experience will become entire multi-channel campaigns
This is where generative AI really shines. Imagine you just finished a successful webinar or event. When it’s over, AI can turn that event into a transcript, from which it can then repurpose information and create new content, such as a blog post or e-book.
AI can even identify key moments in your event where audience engagement was high, and turn those moments into short video clips, which can be used in a variety of ways, including as teaser content in social promotions and landing pages, to drive people to the on-demand version of that event.
Repurposing events into new content serves dual purposes: now you are getting more value out of your event content while using that content in new ways to increase the number of people who engage with the event.
4 Marketers will move from creating “point-in-time” experiences to enabling continuous journeys
Most digital experiences, from a simple demo webinar to a multi-day virtual event, are planned, built, and executed as live experiences only. Any value created from on-demand usage of those events is considered a bonus.
But today, with AI-powered content repurposing, one event can become an entire campaign of audience touchpoints. Further, every experience can now be optimized to provide a myriad of personalized CTAs and content options, enabling audiences to choose their own adventures.
In 2024 every digital experience should lead to the next experience, creating continuous journeys of content consumption – which should lead to faster sales cycles and higher conversions.
5 Digital engagement will transform professional certification and training experiences
It’s time. Over the past decade, marketing webinars have evolved from boring talking PowerPoint presentations to interactive, engaging, multimedia programs with accessible formats.
Digital training experiences, however, have remained largely the same: passive, one-way, old-school tutorials more likely to put you to sleep than educate and inspire. But in the last year, we have seen a new wave of companies that are transforming their digital certification programs, to make them more accessible, more interactive, and frankly, more human.
Many professional services companies are creating an entire training ecosystem with online training hubs that deliver live and on-demand webinars that are completely immersive experiences, resulting in more effective outcomes.
2024 will be the year in which the promise of new ideas and technologies, especially AI, turn into a new reality of more efficient workflows, more personalized experiences, more effective content creation, enabling companies to create their own unique ecosystems of continuous audience engagement. It’s going to be exciting.