2024 Digital Marketing Trends for SMBs:  Practical Tips for Staying Afloat Online on a Budget

The 2024 digital marketing trends present a unique challenge for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). With economic uncertainties on the horizon and the digital landscape evolving rapidly, staying afloat requires agility and strategic planning. This guide offers practical tips to help your business maintain a robust online presence, drive sales, and navigate through the 2024 digital marketing trends, all while keeping a close eye on your budget.

1. Understanding the 2024 Digital Marketing Trends

The digital world is ever-changing, with significant platforms rolling out updates that can significantly impact business strategies:

• Google’s Algorithm Changes and Gemini introduction: Emphasize user experience, page speed, and mobile-first indexing. The Gemini AI launch in 2024 should also be considered, as it will change the Search Engine Results Pages and could impact your current traffic. Third-party cookie deletion from Chrome will also bring challenges for paid advertising campaigns, and other angles must be explored to reach your target audience properly.

• Facebook’s Evolving Ad Policies: Focus on content-driven strategies with a nod to privacy and user data protection. Targeting might get more limited this year, and strong messaging must resonate with your audience to reach out to them efficiently.

• Instagram’s Shift to Video: Adapt by creating engaging video content to leverage visibility. Don’t forget a video that works is a video that tells a story!

• LinkedIn’s Enhanced Business Tools: Ideal for B2B companies, offering improved analytics and targeting. Whether you want to use LinkedIn for recruitment or business development, introducing advanced AI-driven tools for businesses should help you target your audience more accurately. 

• X’s (ex-Twitter): Since Elon Musk took over the platform, massive changes have been introduced, including the platform’s name. This is probably the platform to watch in 2024 as it is at its pivotal stage where X could become an exciting platform for companies to advertise on or a tool mainly used for propaganda due to the abandoning of moderation processes. In 2023, using X as a marketing tool has become a personal or corporate choice; we can see it now as more of a choice of brand positioning than anything else.

Now we know the 2024 digital marketing trends, how we can adapt to these changes is critical to developing effective digital strategies.

2. Leveraging Social Media

• Choose the Right Platforms: Focus on where your audience is most active. Don’t forget that a target audience can be found on more than one platform and that your audience’s online behaviour can vary from one community/culture to another. 

• Content is King: Regular, engaging content increases brand visibility. Share stories, insights, and behind-the-scenes glimpses. Don’t hesitate to stand out by being bolder than usual, using humour, for example, as a solid way to engage with your audience.

3. Content Marketing: A Low-Cost, High-Impact Strategy

• Educate and Engage: Create valuable content that solves problems for your audience. With the introduction of Gemini, keyword intent segmentation is critical. Educational piece may get less visibility than before, but is still necessary for brand credibility. Since questions will be answered by Gemini AI, users who are further in your marketing funnel will still need to choose between different brands. Consistent educational pieces full of personality will increase your brand credibility and authority. 

• SEO-Optimize Your Content: Enhance online discoverability with basic SEO practices – conducting regular website maintenance and checks will help you ensure your website is fully crawlable. Creating a keyword strategy you can update quarterly is also necessary, and its related optimization needs to be implemented regularly.

4. Email Marketing: Personalized and Direct

• Build Your List Organically: Offer valuable resources in exchange for email subscriptions. Of course, it allows you to nurture potential customers, but this will only work if you offer valuable insights. Taking time to segment your emailing list by interest and buying stage will take you a long way and allow better planning for your emailing campaigns.

• Segment and Personalize: Tailor messages to different audience segments for better engagement and tracking. Track the behaviour of those audience clusters to understand the tipping point that makes them move to the next sales milestone.

5. SEO: The Backbone of Online Visibility

• Focus on Local SEO: Particularly beneficial for SMBs to drive traffic and sales. Make sure you regularly update your Google My Business profile, and any information on there matches what you have on your website and the business directories you submitted your website to. 

• Regularly Update Your Website: Keep content fresh and relevant to engage your audience and improve SEO. Don’t forget that when periodically updating your website, you give strong signals to search engines that it contains updated information, making it a high probability to increase your rankings. According to an article from Techjury, as of June 2023, there are over 1.11 billion websites on the Internet, with only about 201,898,446 active. This staggering number highlights the vastness of the online world and the continuous growth of the Internet. Interestingly, despite this large number of websites, 82% are inactive. These inactive websites are those that don’t receive regular maintenance or updates. If a search engine considers your website as “inactive” and contains a risk of outdated information, they will discard it and prioritize a website they can trust more. Note that each website has several pages, which makes the number of webpages as of May 2023 4.77 billion pages… and the SEO signals you give a search engine will help it choose which one carries the most value.

6. Online Reviews and Testimonials: The Trust Factor

• Encourage Reviews: Prompt satisfied customers to share their experiences. You can create incentive campaigns to ensure your happy customers share their experience with your company. With so many products and services online, looking at customer reviews has become more and more critical for a consumer to decide.

• Respond to Reviews: No company ever had just good reviews! So, whether they are good or bad, you should demonstrate that you value feedback by engaging with all reviews.

7. Strategic Partnerships and Networking

• Identify Potential Partners: Collaborate with non-competitive businesses, sharing your target audience. If you share a common vision, those partners can become a vital asset for business development. 

• Leverage Local Events: Increase your network and find potential collaboration opportunities locally. Not only will it increase your brand awareness, but it will also engage with potential customers. Associating your brand with other local brands will help you strengthen your online ecosystem. 

8. Data-Driven Decisions

• Use Analytics Tools: Gain insights into customer behaviour and campaign performance through analytics tools. There are many out there – but don’t forget it comes down to proper tracking. We would advise you to conduct tracking audits every so often and ensure you are aware of their limitations and what impacts the tracking features when you implement something new on your website (new page, change of structure, etc).

• Test and Learn: Continuously optimize your strategies based on performance data but ensure you have set clear and achievable goals and relevant KPIs, matching or supporting the overall business goals.

Conclusion: Despite the challenges of 2024, small and medium-sized businesses can thrive by leveraging digital tools effectively and focusing on high-ROI strategies. Staying informed, adaptable, and customer-centric will be vital to navigating the evolving digital landscape. Identifying low-hanging fruit and introducing a straightforward process that includes some of the above advice will take a long way… even with a limited budget!

At Aeolus, we specialize in helping SMBs like yours navigate these complex digital waters. Contact us for tailored strategies and expert guidance to keep your business thriving in 2024 and beyond.