Digital Marketing Trends in 2024

What are the digital marketing trends in 2024 and beyond?

Becoming a successful attorney is no longer exclusively about practicing law. The legal industry is inexorably tied to the world of digital marketing and its ever-shifting trends. To gain an advantage over your competitors, it’s important to embrace this evolution in online content, as well as to keep tabs on the ways that it can change.

By leveraging evolving analytical tools and powerful large language models, you can optimize your SEO rankings, and increase your content output, all while tracking your performance with greater efficiency than ever before. Here are two of the most dynamic tools that could transform how you approach digital marketing and why you should keep your eyes on them.

Analytics 4 (GA4)

By the 1st of July, 2023, Google had migrated from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which was ostensibly an improvement over the previous framework, although it arrived with a rough landing. Users reported, and continue to report, a list of technical issues and frustrations with GA4’s features. Migration of historical data from UA to GA4 has not been intuitive for many businesses that hoped to integrate that information into their database moving forward. Other users have reported difficulties accessing reports that, while UA was active, were simple to generate and analyze.

You might be asking yourself, “Google Analytics 4 doesn’t sound great, why should I keep my eye on this tool to optimize my digital marketing strategy in 2024?” The answer is that Google Analytics 4 is not a finished product, and we don’t mean that as a pejorative. Rather than alternatives like HubSpot or Overtracking, GA4 is free to use, already integrated with Google Ads, and it’s always improving.

Despite the laundry list of technical limitations and the headaches derived from a messy implementation, Google Analytics 4 has more resources than any other developer in the industry to invest in its software. The framework is young, having only reached a full year of service in July 2024, and it has already announced various improvements in the coming months.

GA4 is aiming to allow businesses to import third-party advertisement data into its framework, enabling companies to create more comprehensive cross-platform reports. It plans on launching a cross-channel budgeting feature, which is currently in beta, that can create projection reports against a target report across channels. As you’d expect, GA4 will also have its own artificial intelligence engine built into its framework, likely enabling a swathe of unpredictable improvements in the coming years.

Most law firms will skim the surface of the information provided by Google Analytics 4, but the savviest attorneys will know to dig deeper into this rapidly evolving tool that can provide a competitive edge in the legal industry.

Artificial Intelligence

The phrase “artificial intelligence”, followed closely by “large language model”, dominated the zeitgeist of the legal industry and beyond in 2023. As we move further into the latter end of 2024, it has become abundantly clear that AI is not a passing trend, but an industry-shattering tool that must be the focal point for attorneys looking to grow their law firms moving into the new year.

The thing is, to a greater extent than Google’s newest analytical framework, artificial intelligence seems constantly in flux, making it difficult to discern what is or is not useful. 

AI became a popular tool for SEO in 2023, allowing firms to develop AI-generated content at a scale and frequency higher than ever before. A small case study from SEO.AI demonstrated that AI-generated content can outperform content that was otherwise written by an individual in Google’s SEO ranking, as long as both the quality of the writing and the backlinks embedded into the article are high. As you can see in the case study, however, AI-generated content has a tendency to drop rapidly in Google’s SEO rankings, likely as a result of poor user engagement.

To maximize your utilization of AI tools for digital marketing in 2024, it’s important to remember that you cannot place your trust fully into artificial intelligence or large language models. While it may seem counterintuitive to take advantage of ChatGPT or any other AI implement only to spend time reviewing, proofreading, and correcting the product, an unwillingness to do so may result in more harm than good for your firm’s SEO.

While these tools are powerful and growing stronger every day, it is imperative not to overestimate the benefits of AI. Rather, use it as a means of augmenting your work, saving time where it makes sense while maintaining the requisite quality required to compete for the highest rankings on the ladder of Google SEO.

The field of artificial intelligence is highly dynamic and rapidly evolving year after year. The work that a program like ChatGPT-4 can produce today was unthinkable only five years ago; you’d be wise to expect a proportional increase in capability in another five years. Plus, there are more artificial intelligence engines than ever before, allowing you room to pick and choose highly specialized programs based on your specific needs. 

AI has already changed the way that businesses approach digital marketing in 2024. By next year, the landscape will have changed even more. Be sure not to be one of the attorneys who falls behind.

Looking Towards 2025

In the legal industry, the best firms are the ones that reach out and grab every available opportunity whenever it presents itself. The tools that are available to you today are more powerful than they have ever been and leveraging them to optimize your digital marketing strategy will give you the edge that you need to grow your firm and outcompete your opposition.

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