Digital Marketing in 2030: Major Changes & How to Adapt [with on-demand webinar]

Big changes are coming over the next several years that will affect how digital marketers connect with and build strong relationships with their customers and prospects. Generative AI will be a huge driver of these changes, creating both massive opportunities and massive disruptions to the status quo.

We see these changes as falling into three major buckets:

• Shifts in the Media Landscape, where some digital channels will see declining use by consumers and brands, while other channels see growth and become increasingly important
• Shifts in the Regulatory & Platform Landscape, where privacy and other restrictions imposed by state and federal laws and by digital platform providers (e.g., Apple, Google, Yahoo) will complicate audience tracking efforts, but build consumer trust by reducing privacy abuses
• Shifts in the Operational & Technological Landscape, where strategic choices and tech stack decisions either complicate or ease the efforts of brands to adapt to current and new challenges

In the 55-minute on-demand webinar below, we discuss each of those in detail, as well as provide recommendations for how brands can adapt to each set of changes. However, in the remainder of this post, we highlight changes solely across the media landscape.

Shifts in the Media Landscape

As transformative as generative AI is, it's also disruptive. We're seeing that side of GenAI play out in our predictions around which marketing channels will rise and which will fall in the years ahead.

SEO Delivers Much Less Traffic

Search traffic is predicted to fall dramatically because of the impact of chatbots like ChatGPT and the expansion of zero-click search results, such asGoogle's AI Overviews.According to Gartner, Search traffic will decrease by 25% by 2026, and 50% by 2028. This is on top of AI-generated web content outranking and drawing traffic away from human-generated content.

This search traffic decline will be far less pronounced for branded search, so having a strong brand that consumers are searching for is a key advantage.

It's unreasonable to assume that optimizing your content for large language models and other generative AI models will allow you to make up for more than a small fraction of the search traffic lost. After all, the whole point of LLMs is to get answers without having to visit and sift through a bunch of websites. GenAI's effect on search traffic will not be a zero-sum game.

Social Media Suffers Trust Crisis

While social media is undeniably popular, signs of weakness are everywhere. TikTok is facing bans around the world, including in the US. Facebook's visitor traffic growth has slowed dramatically since 2021, driven lower by younger users leaving the platform,according to Sprout Social. X is a mere shadow of its former Twitter self, as both users and advertisers have fled the platform and its controversial owner, Elon Musk. And US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recently recommended thatsocial media carry a tobacco-style warning labelbecause of its proven negative effects on mental health, particularly among young people.

Generative AI will make social media even more problematic, helping to fuel deepfakes, more effective scams, and generally make people question whether anything they see on these platforms is real. As these concerns grow, social media usage and sharing will decrease. They'll also drive brand safety concerns higher, leading to a decline in social media advertising that's similar to what's been seen on X.

Direct Channels Will Grow for Trusted Sources

Looking to filter out misinformation and disinformation, consumers will turn to a small number of trusted brands and influencers. Email, SMS, and push messaging will be key ways that they stay connected to these sources. These messages will act as a new collective homepage for many individuals.

However, with that trust will come higher expectations for brands to deliver personalized experiences. Collecting zero- and first-party data will be key to meeting those expectations.

Omnichannel Expectations Continue to Rise

Consumers don't engage with channels. They engage with brands. They've had these expectations for over a decade, and have generally been frustrated by the disconnected experiences delivered by their favorite brands, which overwhelmingly are organized around and operate in channel silos.

Thankfully, new technologies like customer data platforms and AI advancements will make it easier for brands to better align with their customers, instead of aligning around channels.

Other Landscape Shifts

Shifts in the regulatory and platform landscape and in the operational and technological landscape will be just as tectonic. In live polls during the webinar included above, attendees expressed considerable concern about how privacy regulations and features would impact their business.

At the same time, every attendees described their current martech stack as either "somewhat manageable" or "barely manageable"-with not a single person describing theirs as "highly manageable." What's clear to us is that technology has allowed brands to better connect with their customers and prospects to this point. However, the current state of martech ecosystems at the vast majority of companies are an active impediment to them adapting to a very volatile landscape.

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