Top 4 Trends to Know from HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report

So, HubSpot released its annual State of Marketing Report, and we’ve had a few months to parse the findings in the report and put them into practice. The report details some major marketing trends and tools for marketers to leverage to connect with their audiences.

Some of these trends are new, some are enhancements to classic marketing strategies.

As we move towards the last half of 2024 (wow, is the year half over already?), let’s take a look at the key marketing trends outlined in the report and how they will continue to impact marketing moving forward.

Top Trends for 2024 (According to HubSpot)

What are some of the top trends that HubSpot identified in their 2024 State of Marketing Report? Let’s recap them:

1. AI Adoption

The robots are coming! The robots are coming! HubSpot identified AI adoption as a key trend for marketers (and for businesses in general). In the 2024 report, HubSpot stated that:

• Marketers using AI and automation tools are 95% more likely to say their marketing strategy was very
• 64% of marketers already use AI and automation.
• Of the marketers that use AI for content creation, 45% use it for ideas and inspiration, 31% use it to create outlines, 18% use it to draft content, and 6% use it to write content.

Best Practices When Following This Trend

When creating content with AI, there are a couple of best practices that you should keep in mind:

• Always Manually Review AI-Generated Content. While AI can quickly spin up a post for you, there’s a reason only 6% of marketers use it to write content—AI isn’t perfect. AI can suffer from “hallucinations” wherein it makes up incorrect information or outputs gibberish phrases in response to your prompt. So, having an expert manually review and revise AI-generated content is a must.
• Add Research and Links. HubSpot’s built-in Content Hub AI tools cannot currently insert hyperlinks and quotes into content. To get quotes and data into your content, you’ll need to manually add them in. Taking the time to add links and quotes can be an invaluable strategy for getting more out of your
• Refine Your Prompts to Make Them as Specific as Possible. The quality of your prompts for generating AI content can have a huge impact on the quality of the output you get. A great AI prompt typically contains several key elements:
  • Task—Start your prompt with an action verb to help guide the AI tool.
  • Context—What is the context of the post being generated? What does “success” look like for the post? Spell out the context of the post so the AI tool can create a more valuable content piece
  • Call to Action—What should people do after reading the post that the AI tool has created? Specify your CTA in your prompt.
  • Persona—Who are you talking to? Your content should always be written with a customer persona in mind.
  • Format—What form should the content take? Is it a short-form blog, a long-form article, an infographic, or something else? Add details about the article length, whether to include tables or bullet points, and other formatting requirements.
  • Key Points—What are the key points that the article should include at a bare minimum? Be sure to specify any key points you want to ensure are mentioned in the content.
  • Tone—What kind of tone do you want the blog to have? Are you going for a friendly and personable content piece or a more formal one suitable for a professional setting? Make sure your content matches your brand voice by specifying a tone to use.

Refining your AI prompts can help you minimize the time you need to spend on editing your AI content outputs so you can get an AI-generated blog up faster and more easily.

These are just some basic best practices for leveraging AI content generation.

2. Social Media Marketing ROI

Social media marketing is nothing new. Ever since the creation of social media, organizations of all sizes and industries have leveraged it to promote their businesses and connect with potential customers.

Generally speaking, Instagram (25%) and Facebook (23%) have the highest ROI for marketing teams, followed by YouTube (14%), TikTok (12%), and LinkedIn (11%) (Source: HubSpot).

However, it’s important to note that the best social media channel for your organization might vary depending on your focus—Facebook is traditionally ideal for more informal communications or B2C businesses while LinkedIn is often preferred for more formal, B2B-focused communications.

Using Social Media for Search, Sales, and Service

What’s different for social media now is the emphasis on using it for more than just promoting a brand online or placing links to content (like product pages and blog posts). In HubSpot’s report, they outlined three key uses for social media:

• Social Search. Brands are using social media as a “product discovery channel” when marketing to Millennial and GenZ consumers. It’s also a channel for helping these consumers find answers to questions about a company’s products and services.
• Social Selling. Consumers are now buying products on social media. As noted in the State of Marketing Report, “87% of social sellers say it’s effective and 59% say they made more sales on social in 2023 than 2022.” Social is growing as a sales channel and it can be a great way to promote content and close deals without having to redirect customers to a product/service sales page—helping reduce friction in the sales process.
• Social Service. Social media platforms are becoming yet another channel for sending customer support/service messages to customers. This turns social media into another branch of your omnichannel communication strategy for your customer service team.

3. Influencer Marketing

Here’s another trend that isn’t all that new. Influencer marketing has taken many forms over the years—everything from sponsored videos on YouTube (you know the ones, where the content creator stops to say “But first, a word from our sponsor…”) to product placements and blog or social media posts highlighting a brand’s products or services.

According to HubSpot’s report, “In 2023, one in four consumers bought a product based on an influencer’s recommendation.” Marketing Dive likewise noted that “81% of consumers reporting that social media posts from influencers, friends or family members drove interest in an item or service within the past year.”

Part of the reason for this is that consumers trust influencers more than they trust brands. When a recommendation comes from a brand, the innate thought for many is a cynical one along the lines of: “Of course they’re going to recommend their product. It’s not like they’re going to promote their competitor!”

Meanwhile, an influencer is seen as an unaffiliated third party—one that can be relied on to be an independent and objective reviewer.

A Personal Anecdote about Influencer Marketing

If you’ve spent more than 30 seconds on YouTube, odds are that you’ve seen at least one example of influencer marketing—most likely in the form of a sponsorship segment where the YouTuber calls out the sponsorship and starts talking about the product or service their sponsor paid them to talk about.

This sponsorship system helps content creators earn more money to pay their bills so they can focus on content creation in the face of challenges within YouTube’s monetization system.

However, not all influencers are specifically part of a sponsorship deal. Some influencers go all-in on a hobby or brand within a hobby—creating content that naturally promotes the brand without the need for a specific sponsorship deal.

For example, I personally subscribe to a Gunpla review channel on YouTube called Mecha Gaikotsu. The channel covers news about Bandai’s Gundam model kits and reviews specific kits (called Gunpla—a portmanteau of Gundam and plastic model).

I have made purchases of Gundam model kits based on positive reviews of them by this channel. It helps that he isn’t always positive about the individual kits—he doesn’t hesitate to point out major flaws or issues that he feels detract from the model-building experience.

His videos aren’t sponsored by Bandai (they often feature sponsorships by other companies with a cultural enthusiast theme), but they help to foster a dedicated fan audience and generate interest in new products from the company.

4. Cookie-Free Targeting

So, if you haven’t heard the news yet, Google is phasing out third-party cookies as part of their Privacy Sandbox initiative and rolling out a new “Tracking Protection” feature. This is leaving marketers scrambling to adjust since many traditional marketing strategies relied heavily on information captured by third-party cookies.

With this in mind, it’s more important than ever to capture “first-party” data on your prospects. Leveraging tools like HubSpot forms to capture data about your website visitors directly so you can market to them via email and other channels will prove to be critical for maintaining marketing and sales momentum moving forward.

However, as noted by HubSpot’s marketing report, 41% of marketers they surveyed said “No” when asked if their company was working on a plan to approach cookie-free targeting. So, having a plan in place could be a great way to get ahead of the competition.

Quick Tips for Cookie-less Targeting

In a guest post on our blog by Eleanor Hecks, she outlined some basic strategies for navigating a future without third-party cookies:

• Consider Your Marketing Priorities. Try to identify how the absence of cookies will impact your marketing and prioritize initiatives that will compensate for this impact.
• Focus on the Physical Aspects of Marketing. Consider reinvesting in some analog marketing materials like billboards or one-off print ads to capture a local audience.
• Invest in a CRM System to Capture First Party Data. A customer relationship management (CRM) system that can track interactions on your website and store data submitted via online forms—like HubSpot—can do a lot to help you keep track of who your prospects are and what they’re interested in.
• Use Contextual Advertising. When creating CTAs and ads for a particular channel or individual piece of content, try to make that CTA or ad match closely with the content of that channel or content. For example, if you’re part of a marketing agency doing a blog about the benefits of HubSpot’s Content Hub, you would want to have a CTA or ad talking about Content Hub services.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the key trends featured in the HubSpot 2024 State of Marketing Report.

There are more details in the report talking about things like personalized content, email marketing strategies, leveraging video, and aligning the sales and marketing teams to create a more holistic marketing strategy for consumers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Looking for help with leveraging HubSpot tools to master these marketing trends? Schedule a meeting with the Bluleadz team to discuss HubSpot Onboarding, Implementation, and Training services for your organization!