Digital Marketing for 2024 and beyond 🔮

I’ve been working in digital marketing since 2012. A lot has changed in the last 10+ years, but when I think about it, I’m honestly surprised by how much things have stayed the same. 70% of ad spend is still being done through Google and Facebook, and although new platforms like TikTok and vertical videos have become more popular, the same strategies and frameworks to grow still apply.

New Tech

So what is changing? Over the last few years, there have been many exciting developments in the web3 and AI space that I wanted to highlight. Here are the top principles I think you need to be aware of.

Web 3 marketing

The emergence of web3 marketing or marketing for crypto communities, which are mainly either NFT projects, DeFi platforms or DAOs. Marketing in “web3” in very similar to “web2” / traditional digital marketing, but with its own philosophy that puts more of a focus on organic marketing and incentives. I noticed this manifest in the following ways:

Focus on Community 
Most web3 communities converge around a chat platform like Discord or Telegram. This mirrors what many large companies use in the form of Slack channels, but these communities are often a lot more organic and open, taking from the culture of gaming, and allowing for intricate channels and access levels.

Focus on Organic
One of the paradigm shifts in web3 is a move away from paid attention marketing and towards organic permission marketing. Some of this I believe is due to many paid marketing channels like Google Ads and Facebook limiting or outright banning any ads in the crypto category, but I also believe it goes deeper than this. From what I’ve seen, the web3 community is sick and tired of the extractive model in web2 of a few centralized companies controlling our attention and monetizing users. This philosophical difference is the reason why many web3 users got into web3 in the first place.

This means that web3 marketing puts a focus on:

1. Being much more fun and active on social media channels (especially Twitter/X)

2. More educational content marketing in the form of social media posts, articles, YouTube videos and podcasts.

3. Working with influencers and thought leaders. This can also lead to scammers and grifters promoting “pump and dump” type projects, but for genuine projects, this is still a great way to build legitimacy.

4. Using built-in Web3 mechanics to amplify messages. This includes launching tokens, NFT’s (like POAPs, or proof of attendance badges), airdrops and more. Adding a crypto layer on top of your marketing is a great way to automatically incentivize audience participation.
   
   Some people may think adding a potential financial component makes things worse, but I think if done right this can democratize access, and make people feel real ownership over a project (similar to how incentives are aligned in traditional referral programs for example).

AI Marketing

There’s also been an explosion of AI tools in the last few years, the most notably being ChatGPT. Having such powerful AI tools at your fingertips is something that every marketer should learn to harness.

Are there limits to these AI tools? Of course. In fact, if you use these tools you’ll realize that we’re still very early in the adoption stage and they aren’t nearly as advanced as some would lead you to believe. That’s why I think it’s important to get started early and don’t be intimidated by them.

AI CONTENT

With AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, you can now write a blog post in seconds. One common question I often get asked is, how would all of this new AI-generated content affect SEO? Mainly, can you use ChatGPT-type tools to generate articles that won’t be penalized for being duplicate content on search engines?

The answer is for the time being yes (I’ll explain how in my next newsletter!).

Search engines are still trying to figure out how to detect and rank AI content. It will be interesting to see how SEO will change as AI content continues to grow.

For example, Google reluctantly started integrating AI into their search engine and launched tools like Bard. I say reluctantly because Google doesn’t want to cannibalize the revenue it generates from Google search ads (which still accounts for the majority of Alphabet’s revenue), so they’ve been a bit more reluctant to embrace AI, even though it has been rumored that the language learning models that Google have developed are on par and probably more advanced than OpenAI / ChatGPT.

It’s the classic Innovator’s Dilemma. Google needs to innovate to stay competitive, but that is difficult to do when they would need to sacrifice their profitability in the short term and hurt their existing business model.

In any case, I’m sure that we’ll soon see AIO (AI Optimization) for content, which would have techniques similar to SEO but for getting your site to rank high on AI prompts. We’ll just have to keep adapting to whatever comes next.

It's an exciting time for sure!

Stay tuned for my next newsletter, where I’ll get into detail on how to get AI content to rank on Google for SEO.

✌️ Until the next one,

Ahmad