Reaching the consumer and achieving brand recall can become an increasingly difficult, challenging and ambitious task in the beauty sector. As the latest study published by BrandWatch indicates, consumers are constantly being impacted by advertising, receiving up to 10,000 advertising impacts per day, yet they are not even aware of 10% of them because their attention and retention capacity has been reduced to less than 10 seconds.
In an environment where it is very complex to attract a few seconds of consumer attention, what trends are going to succeed in 2024 and how can beauty brands make their mark in a beauty ecosystem in which new brands are constantly being born, some of them backed by the presence of influencers and public figures?
According to various marketing experts, companies will opt for the podcast format over blogs. The latest study by eMarketer has shown that the amount of time spent listening to podcasts has increased. Specifically, podcast listeners aged 18 and over spend an average of more than 50 minutes a day listening to this type of content. The same company predicts that this will increase to 56 minutes per day by 2025, while listeners not previously considered regular listeners are expected to spend around half an hour of their day listening to podcasts by 2025.
Secondly, companies will devote efforts and time to less popular social networks, without losing sight of those of the target group. This will also involve putting data to good use. César Alejandro Meza advances in a Linkedin post this year, Google Chrome has started a progressive roll-out to restrict third-party cookies in its browser and users will have to explicitly accept that their data will be shared with the company and advertisers will have to adopt inbound marketing techniques that encourage the collection of potential customer data. Email marketing will become a recurrent and relevant tool to stimulate users with personalised content and bring them closer to the purchase decision.
As NP Digital points out, the way of writing content will change because Google has changed the way it ranks. The top positions, and therefore the best positioning, were previously occupied by articles of 2,300 words. Then, it was those that did not reach 1,500, and now, this is going to be segmented according to industry, sector and activity. And this is due, as NP Digital points out, to 'tiktokification' and the trend that has taken hold to consume ephemeral, brief and fleeting content. Because of this, more and more marketers are entrusting content creation to Artificial Intelligence, so companies will be forced to 'humanise' content at this point, because even though 6 out of 10 content creators use AI tools, human-generated stories and narratives continue to generate more audience engagement and lead SEO in more than 90% of cases.
Finally, marketing experts point out that companies will not only focus on one region. As they point out, this is already being done by large companies, and will soon be incorporated by small and medium-sized enterprises as well as start-ups. Something that all companies will also have to initiate is the process towards hyper-personalisation. The Meta Group announced that in 2024 it will incorporate new generative artificial intelligence functions that will not create two identical images for customers. In the latest McKinsey report, when consumers were asked what they thought about personalisation, it was associated with positive and beneficial things. And this benefit, in the end, is not only for the consumer, but also profitable for businesses: it can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50% to increase revenue by 5% to 15% and increase marketing ROI by 10% to 30%. The same study also shows that personalised experiences increase customer loyalty and gross sales for the company.
For beauty brands, capturing consumer attention in 2024 will require adapting to new trends such as the rise of podcasts and personalised marketing due to changes in data privacy and content preferences. Strategies include focusing on authentic and short-form content, leveraging advanced personalisation with artificial intelligence to enhance the customer experience and optimise marketing campaigns. These adaptations not only aim to increase customer satisfaction, but also the profitability and efficiency of marketing strategies in a highly competitive market.