4 Social Media Advertising Trends for 2024

In Proficio, we are experiencing many things first hand and as we can test or monitor new things across countries and verticals. Come have a look at four things that matter and which we will be holding in high regards for the current year within social media advertising.

#1 New artificial kid on the block

In the last year AI was mentioned all the time and we were able to witness not only the growth of hype of tremendous proportions, utilising AI as a buzzword, but also lightning fast development from infancy to an already useful stage of puberty.

To no one’s surprise we can easily say that artificial intelligence is here to stay. Yet what does it mean for social media advertising?

In the last year, the first big brand jumped on the trend with marketing campaigns leveraging AI engines within their landing pages to create entertainment, engagement and sometimes even collaborative AI/user generated content – among others Coca-Cola was one of the most globally visible. We already see similar ideas and approaches popping up even in the SMB segment and local companies.

Global campaigns are of course great but perhaps even more interesting are the possibilities of application of AI for everyday routines of marketing teams of all sizes and budgets.

Text creation, enhancement, fast summaries

Not every team has an unlimited pool of copywriting talent or even advertising specialists that can supply suitable texts. AI has proven itself quite quickly as an able companion and helper that can understand complex prompts including tone of (brand) voice, company values, customer insights and craft multiple variations of texts or headlines. All that in quite a short time.

That doesn’t mean all advertising texts should be AI generated, as you cannot fully replace the creativity and experience of a skilled copywriter.

But it can be a big help for situations, campaigns or companies with small teams or limited resources.

Just make sure your AI generated content is not too generic. For example, Meta is already implementing their own AI solutions within Ads Manager for easy use during ad creation.

Sometimes you will need a new variation, sometimes the enhancement of existing text. You can also use the AI to crawl your website, and point out a fast summary of key communication points for specific products which can be a good starting point for a human to keep that authenticity in.

AI Images: Unreliable past, bright future

For quite a long AI image generation wasn’t ready for advertising use - due to the inability to incorporate texts correctly, the need to alway count human fingers or the just too apparent uncanny valley.

The recent versions of engines such as Midjourney are becoming more powerful though and there is even adoption within tools like Adobe or Canva.

Thanks to that, we now have a new option to easily create or adjust any creative assets.

Add curtains to a photo of a room? Change the type of glasses in illustration? Include a lemon? Easy. Or at least easier.

AI should ideally always be handled by a graphic designer or someone experienced who can evaluate the quality of the output. Yet AI can make the whole process much easier – what took hours of graphic designers’ work is done within seconds. Add logo, texts, and some graphic elements and you are set.

This will gradually unlock new potential for (social media) advertising as you will be able to properly A/B test more variants, craft more messages and so on. It is still far too common that a campaign is stuck with just one text and one banner.

Look at how we used the power of AI in a campaign with our client in Czechia, SPP:

Nedovolte, aby vaší firmě došla energie!

What about video?

Just a month ago the answer would be – not yet. Peak of available options was to make static images move – quite useful too, though.

But with the latest peek behind the curtains of OpenAI’s Sora was breathtaking, and where major movie studios raise their eyebrows, indie artists scream with excitement and stand in fear at the same time, marketers are thinking fast about future applications.

This might be a game changer for smaller companies, teams and budgets.

It will make one of best performing formats on advertising easily accessible to everybody.

Conclusion

AI will be part of the marketing world in upcoming months and years. It will free some capacities, unlock some possibilities and allow everybody to finally fully follow best practices and properly A/B test. Without budget constraints on our mind.

#2 It should move, it should be authentic… And short!

Creatives, especially visual assets as images and videos are a keystone of every campaign. Especially within social media advertising, where you don’t want just to drive action, but also stand out, generate engagement and leverage opportunity during users’ free time, when he is more discovering than following some path.

And the trend within this space for this year is: video. Again? Yes. Same as last couple of years. But this year it’s more about really broad adoption across all demographics. Utilisation of new approaches. And answers to consumption trends and new formats.

Short videos are the king

TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Reels and Stories are setting up new standards and proving as one of key placements within digital and social media advertising. What supports that is that Meta is for a long time saying that based on all research, the first 3 seconds are crucial for grabbing attention and 10 seconds is enough to create intention to buy or ad-recall lift.

Video will keep playing an important part in upper parts of the purchase funnel.

It might prove quite effective even for driving actions and conversions.

Anything that moves catches attention and with a shortening attention span, short videos will be the most effective way to deliver your message, drive engagement and filter out the right part of the audience for your brand or business.

Have a look at videos that we create for our client Gigacomputer on TikTok in Czechia:

Authenticity creates trust, trust brings money

As one man said: every action drives an equal and opposite reaction. We mentioned the trend of AI adoption and its power to empower (marketing) masses. As fast was the development of AI capabilities, that fast was the appearance of a countering trend – authenticity in the communication on social media.

For some time now, we can see how small, family, local or responsible companies thrive and grow.

People have been speaking about “love brands” for years.

Lovebrands are all about the ability to identify with the brand, visibility of values, (customer) care and… Authenticity. Something that will make you stand out in huge numbers of cold conversion focused campaigns. Now this trend will definitely keep momentum even as a counter response to those adopting the AI trend fast. This year we will see collaboration of authenticity and video.

Authenticity creates openings for videos that are not as much post-produced, refined and therefore decreases need budget allocation for production. That will allow all the content to be leveraged also in ads as a fast and not costly way to use new formats, with imperfections as further advantage.

We might have seen some of these approaches pop up in the past within the dropshipping vertical, but now live broadcasts, unboxings or product showcase videos will not be just content, but also an asset for ads. Directly in specialised formats as TikTok Live Shopping or general video placements.

Not AI generated, people generated

Which opens another topic of UGC – user generated content. As you can create these type of assets yourself or leverage users and customers.

Everybody has quite a professional camera in their pocket nowadays. Ready to create memories for themselves or content for you. For the same reason video reviews are a new thing within not just SaaS vertical, but e-commerce as well. All this content can with small refinement make its way into your paid campaigns.

Which also changes the general approach to influencers, where we see movement from big influencers to micro and nano influencers, which generate less reach, but better engagement for less cost with… Authenticity, yes! Which brings trust and in the end that sweet ROI.

What will change is seeing the influencer just as additional reach and authority exchange, but also as asset generation for your ads.

Even your regular customer can be a content creator and influencer.

Conclusion

Videos will be a crucial part of social media advertising strategies, with appearance in high engagement placements, enabling cost effective reach combined with action. With further boost for ability to recall your brand and ad. Keep an open place in your strategy and media plans.

#3 Right message, at the right time, in the right channel

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, X… It’s not hard to find brands that are still trying to keep their presence across all platforms and channels. Spreading themselves thin, without a thought for overlap, incremental reach or if their audience is there. Not to mention the ability to create the right type of content for the specific (advertising) channel.

Find your core, find your ROI

With uncertain times comes a push for a voice of reason. Gradually brands will realize they need to do a proper customer/audience research and compare it with style of communication, type of use and demographics of each channel.

Simply put – do not jump onto every new platform just because everyone else is on it.

That can mean two things:

Focus on what matters – decrease the amount of channels and focus on those that matter for you and drive impact
Make the first step – finally get that final push to step outside of just Google and Meta and try something new

Even though text, image or video generation will not be an issue, not every brand or product is suitable for all types of presentation and communication. From this year on we will see an increase of brands questioning themselves or their agencies if they need to be everywhere or why they are not trying something new.

In both cases it will mean better impact and higher focus on ability to reach the right audience and drive ROI.

SEO will not be just a Google thing

For a long time Google Search was the place where you can effectively target already existing intent. Social media was more about generating new ones or broaden brand visibility.

Times change as well as user behavior. For the first time especially younger generations are reporting that when they are searching, Google is not the first place they go. Find a recipe for dinner tomorrow? Look for fashionable dresses?

Gen Z is more and more often searching on the platform they are currently at.

No matter if it is Meta, TikTok, Pinterest or X.

That’s why we start to hear about social media SEO. Ability to find you, your product and your content for specific search or keyword. And at the same time that’s why we are keeping our eye on the relevance of Search ad placements on social media as well.

The same way we’ve seen increased relevance with increased adoption of Bing due to introduction of AI implementation and therefore started to see reasonable impact in Microsoft search ads, we can expect further development within this area.

With increased adoption of chat and AI elements within social media, the changes in user behaviour can soon be big (if they already aren’t).

Cooperation between social media advertising and rest of the company

As we start to think about our target audience and our brand or product, we will run into the fact that cooperation between digital/social advertising and the rest of the company can be useful for both worlds.

Marketers can get to know their audience and product better through experience of other departments, be it sales, customer care or other. Explore what real customers think, what are their questions and motivations.
And on the other hand sales, HR or others, can leverage campaigns and data, to do a quick research or reaction test with much smaller budget than with research companies, measure effect on using different messages.

Conclusion

With balancing in between possible further economic growth and recession and all the uncertainty, we will see a trend of voice of reason within marketing strategies and media plans.

Revision of target audiences, used channels, overlaps and incremental reach will drive brands to focus on opportunities that matter and think about old and new behavior of their specific audience.

All that can be at the same time tested with data-based conclusions in cooperation with the rest of the company, enriching marketing and non-marketing oriented departments.

#4 Cold reality of the technical world

Even as we love new and fun things to try out or watch as they develop, we will as well run into trends that will limit us or challenge our approaches.

Cookies are going, snacking is over

It seems that the long envisioned moment is coming and we are stepping into a cookie-less world. At least marketing and measurement wise. Google Chrome will start to block bigger and bigger part of third-party cookies. Now it’s only 1%, but the share will be gradually growing.

Meta was quite fast to respond with a plan for deprecating their pixel solution and doubling down on their server side Conversion API solution.

This means two things for companies and brands:

Invest into implementation of server side measurement
Regaining some clarity around question of ad blockers and their impact on data

Share of ad-block solutions in the population is steadily increasing, driven both by ad fatigue and increased aggressivity of websites with their pop-ups and YouTube increasing the amount of ads.

Some of these solutions were influencing the ability to measure proper interactions on your website for a long time. With upcoming change, this should become an issue of the past. It will mean some necessary investments into the server side set up, but at the same time create infrastructure for other channels including Google Enhanced conversions.

Privacy means blacker box

Same push for changes is already for some time coming from the direction of privacy terms, GDPR and other influences including the long forgotten Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Even this year we see more and more detailed targeting options disappear on Meta, special categories of ads being regulated across channels and limitations increased.

Performance is mostly unaffected by these changes.

Machine learning algorithms are mature and strong across platforms, with maybe higher demand on budgets and the need to drive a minimal amount of data during a certain time period.

It might not be a black box yet, but the box is getting significantly darker. That will mean further increase of importance on the side of creatives, as you will need to stand out and drive more action to feed data to the algorithm. But also a new push for leveraging your own (customer) data correctly.

If you were leveraging lookalike audiences and similar solutions by just dumping all your initial leads or all customers together, you will start to have a more difficult or at least uncertain time.

Brands will need to start to think about their user behavior:

What is the most desired part of their customer base?
What do these people have in common?

All people buying cars will not have as common as buyers of SUV. People considering lawnmowers will have better significance and chance to help you find the right audience than combining them with other buying bicycles, laptops and phone cases.

Think about groups that have something in common and leverage it to drive faster and cheaper results.

Conclusion

Gone are the times of playing with specific targeting and ability to target specific users with ads. As marketers, we are gradually losing the level of insights and things to influence. That is the bad part.

The good part is that people (and companies) are thinking more about their privacy and data. And it will lead us to finally use the resources we have for a long time and focus on the core of marketing - product, message and creatives combined with proper A/B testing to get to know our customers.

2024 will be fun, as every year

Looking back, every year brought something new and fun to the marketing world. This year will not be different. We might get a couple of things on top as we go through.

Will AR finally step into advertising? Was Apple Vision Pro the final step to drive general attention in this direction?

This year, we will definitely have:

Something to play with - AI
Something to properly test - short videos in our strategies
Something to think about - what channels to leave and which add
Something to challenge ourselves - new demand and changes in measurement and targeting

What’s your favourite pick?

04. 04. 2024

Tomáš Javůrek

I love social media marketing for more than 14 years – from content to brand and performace. I’ve been there from the beginnings of Facebook to the start of Spotify Programmatic. With Proficio, we’ve been helping each other grow for two years already.