Digital marketing & consumer trends

The movement towards authenticity over polished IS the way forward though. Not every piece of content requires a videographer with pro lighting; sometimes, it's best to keep it raw to showcase authenticity and honesty.

As long as you tell your brand's and your product’s stories and you manage to build a whole experience for your customers, you’re heading in the right direction.

Your audience can’t wait to see how you interact with them on social media and how you show connection with them on the emotional side. So, content you create must have that same feel. Even better, getting the users to create the content they consume for you is the smart way to go and user-generated content from Gen Z, particularly in short form, is expected to gain more of a popularity in 2024

It’s no surprise, UGC is emerging as the champion for brands aiming to engage their audiences on a meaningful level. Brands particularly favour Instagram and TikTok users who share their opinions and experiences with products and services. By leveraging this user-generated content (UGC), brands can expand their follower base, strengthen their community, enhance brand visibility, and increase engagement rates.

This form of content is created and shared by fans from your brand… and you don’t have to pay them to do so. They bring authenticity to your community. They create content because they already love you. It’s a nice reminder that you need to speak to your community just as much as reach new people.

UGC is reviews, content, engagement and community building. It is there to help build your brand for you. Finding ways to encourage this is where the strategy is. Digital platforms continue to evolve to support this and you need to be ready to grow with it.

Online shopping has been on the rise over the years but with the ease of shopping while you scroll it’s creating a further increase in the social media commerce world.

With the right advertising and platforms making it easier to shop, you will see a boom in sales without a doubt. But this year, as we’ve already mentioned, content creation and ad creative will be a key reason for those increase in sales.

Generative AI is still growing and we’ll all start to use it in some way (we may not even realise we will) but it’s using it to our advantage to either help us produce more content, leverage analytics and data, or even a social caption that you just can’t figure out how to write. But there will be so much more, for example having it manage and automate operation systems.

Even more recently brands are creating AI videos for their social media advertising. Although this can be a great way to save on videoing and editing, there is still a way to go to get this spot on without users realising what they are watching (although the imminent roll out of SORA may be a gamechanger). This is just the beginning…

Of course, AI isn’t going to take your job (although the media would have you think differently sometimes), look at it as your digital personal assistant. Using it to help spark and idea, finding research or even generating an image. But AI will never (or will it?!!) have the emotions of a human to create a piece of content that will resonate with your audience. We’ve all seen AI create images that have people without faces!