For 2024, we examine digital marketing trends, social media influencers, and brands’ shift to business. We delve into how influencer marketing will persist in leveraging, capitalising, and expanding its reach in an ever-evolving and dynamic market.

From the rise of ChatGPT and Twitter’s rebrand to X, which disrupted the market in 2023, digital consumers witnessed numerous shifts in the digital landscape. Users’ engagement on platforms changed, presenting challenges for businesses and brands to keep users engaged and retained. This extended to content and AI capabilities. What does this mean for digital marketers in 2024? A good question…

Content Risk & Reward

Social media management and digital marketing agencies are deriving value from content created by their clients’ customers. User-Generated Content (UGC) encourages customers to share their personal experiences with a brand’s product or service on their social media platforms. This approach has proven to be incredibly effective due to the genuine and relatable nature of “real” people sharing their everyday journeys. Customers showcase product use, share benefits, tips, and tricks, or “hacks.” Interestingly, UGC content creation is now becoming a paid form of marketing, with brands paying or collaborating with influencers to create UGC-style content and add value to their marketing channels.

Distributing the content across email marketing, social media platforms, and more is quite clever. Leveraging influencers’ profiles, both literal and digital, collaborating on contra-like agreements, and gaining brand awareness by aligning the product with the influencer – is it a risk or reward? Well, in all honesty, a bit of both.

Sharing UGC on marketing channels adds authenticity to messaging, creating a sense of value for consumers and leading to increased loyalty and trust. Is it the golden ticket to effective marketing? Potentially not. If an influencer is misaligned with a brand’s products, the perceived reward may backfire, as seen in the case of Kendall Jenner for Pepsi. This highlights the risk in 2024. The more authentic and creative the content, the better it connects with the target audience, and brands not leveraging their power may be left behind. Hello to the dice roll of 2024…

AI & its Impact on social media & influencer marketing

Throughout 2023, consumers became accustomed to mainstream AI, with ChatGPT being the most talked-about artificial intelligence product. Launched in 2022, ChatGPT generated an uptake in AI-written content and made waves across all digital forms of marketing. However, its role in the marketing mix remains uncertain. The question arises: What does this mean for influencer marketing? Does it change the landscape, ushering in the use of AI-generated influencers to market brands, endorse products, and influence consumer purchases?

In recent times, meta launched additional features across the platform, leveraging celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, and Dwayne Johnson to promote these new features. Meta reportedly paid these celebrities millions of dollars for their likeness, each receiving upwards of between $1 million to $5 million.

Questions arise: What does this mean for consumers? Are we going to be fed this form of “Social marketing” to influence our consumer behaviours? Is this the new norm? Not all is lost; AI’s ability to sift through online data to predict emerging trends will help influencers stay ahead, predict trends, and stay up-to-date with content marketing changes. The ability for AI to assess insights and feedback gives influencers the knowledge to analyse resonating content and make adjustments. It’s both interesting and nerve-racking. Right?

So, where to from here? Is AI here to stay? Probably, but more so, to be continued.

“AI will be better at some things than humans, but it will still be our responsibility to ensure that it’s used ethically and in a way that truly benefits humanity.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Meta

Whilst the risk and reward, emerging trends, new features and the ever-evolving social media marketing and influencer marketing industry continues to grow. Undoubtedly, leveraging social influence will drive growth & engagement in 2024; but at what expense? Risk or Reward. Only time will tell.

If you want to learn more, engage in digital trends and be ahead of the pack for 2024, reach out to the team now.