Brands today are managing digital advertising across more channels than ever—from basic Google Ads to juggling the ‘traditional’ and always emerging social media platforms. Complicating matters further, marketing leaders are overseeing teams with representatives, franchise managers, distributors, and regional leadership all creating and launching localized digital ad campaigns for their own unique audiences.
As the volume of channels continues to increase—marketing leaders are under pressure to yield outsized results with undersized resources. Staying ahead of the curve in 2024 will mean two things: efficient management and impactful content. In this blog post, we’ll examine the trends that will support marketers to achieve these two goals in the new year.
Trend 1: Digital Asset Management
As brands continue to expand their online presence across various channels in 2024, efficient digital asset management will be invaluable for maintaining consistency in messaging and design across the entire asset library—and the entire sprawling ecosystem of brand representatives.
This challenge becomes more complex than ever with all the formats and channels at play, from print assets to social media to digital and even video ads. The solution will be brand management platforms with digital asset management (DAM) capabilities designed to streamline and automate workflows, ensure consistency, manage budgets, and enhance collaboration among team members.
Efficient platforms will empower marketers to organize, store, and distribute digital assets seamlessly—and they’ll empower individual brand reps to ideate, design, and implement their own campaigns without reinventing the wheel, diluting the brand image or messaging, or deviating from artistic (or legal) guidelines.
In 2024, centralizing marketing assets with a brand management platform like OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect will be a critical strategy for marketers looking to reduce duplication of efforts, minimize costly mistakes, and remove the logjams that would otherwise slow marketing initiatives at risk of dulling a brand’s competitive edge.
Trend 2: Personalized Content on Every Channel
Consumers today see up to 10,000 ads per day online—and only a quarter or less are even relevant to them. Suffice it to say, it takes a lot to get potential customers to stop the scroll (or unmute the commercials), and if your content isn’t tailored to your audience, your brand won’t stand a chance.
Consumers crave personalized experiences, and brands that prioritize localization and personalization will stand out in a crowded digital landscape. On every print and digital channel, ads must be tailored to localized audiences’ demographics, cultural nuances, and regional preferences—and, on many digital channels, even their browsing or buying histories—can significantly enhance engagement and conversion rates.
Of course, this means creating—and reviewing, approving, and keeping track of—multiple variations of the majority of ads. It’s a tall ask, but that’s where the digital asset manager comes in handy again. A platform like U.Connect makes it easy to customize content with modular templates that allow approved users to drag and drop video clips or blocks of pre-approved text and imagery into new assets designed with their local audiences in mind.
Trend 3: Efficiency through Artificial Intelligence
Unfortunately, marketing leaders’ loads will not be getting any lighter in 2024—in any industry. One way savvy marketers will be keeping all the balls in the air is by leveraging artificial intelligence to take over the more data intensive—or just more tedious—tasks that take away from the time they could be spending on strategic initiatives.
This includes using AI to target audience segments and even dynamical personalizing content based on user demographics and behavior; optimizing campaigns by tailoring bid strategies on various channels and predicting ad performance to help adjust strategies; and turning engagement data into strategy insights
While AI is, of course, a new and rapidly changing frontier, it presents plenty of opportunities for marketers to save time and resources to free up their focus for the very human elements that make the brand really shine.
Trend 4: Growing Privacy Demands
Privacy has become paramount in recent years, and that’s not going to change in 2024. As consumers become more and more conscious of how brands are using their data in targeted digital advertising, companies in every industry must prioritize transparency and data security. Regulations such as GDPR and CCPA have set new standards for data privacy—but as FastCompany reports, those are just the beginning:
“California may have been the first state in the US to introduce similar legislation [to GDPR] with the California Consumer Privacy Act, but 2023 saw Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, Utah, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Montana, Texas, Delaware, and Oregon pass similar laws, with some already in effect. In 2024, we will see this trend continue, and it’s likely that federal laws and regulations will need to harmonize standards across the US to provide businesses and marketers with one set of rules by which to operate. […] Anticipate seeing more fines and more companies investing in privacy compliance tools and audits in 2024—making marketing measurement and reliance on first-party data more complicated.”
Respecting user privacy is not just about staying on the right side of the law; it’s also a crucial aspect of building trust with your audience. At OneTouchPoint, we understand the stakes, and our platform and all of our processes are designed to comply with changing regulations and keep our customers’—and their customers’—most sensitive data secure every step of the way.
Trend 5: A Trusted Partner to Help with Digital Ads
In 2024, we predict a rise in marketers deciding it’s time to stop trying to juggle digital ads alone and seeking out a marketing execution partner to take the logistics load off their shoulders.
At OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves on being that digital marketing partner for our clients. We work side-by-side with marketing leaders to identify, build, and target just the right audience through paid search, display ads, retargeting, social media ads, social media and, and more.
Our U.Connect platform functions as a digital asset manager with robust personalization tools, security protocols, and customized analytics dashboards to track both overall, regional and by franchise location / territory performance insights. Between our powerful platform and our dedicated team of experts, we work with brands to build prescriptive, localized digital—and multichannel—campaigns that see measurable results.
When your team is ready to embrace the 2024 trends—and the evergreen best practices—behind powerful brand management and multichannel marketing campaigns, request a demo with one of our product specialists. We look forward to learning what supports you need and discussing how OneTouchPoint can help.