[Trends] What Channels Should You Be Exploring in in 2024?

Does it seem like there’s always a new marketing or advertising channel to try? That’s because there is! According to Hubspot data, 78% of marketers felt that the last three years of marketing have seen more upheaval and shifts than the last 50, and a top concern is how to know which of the many available marketing challenges they should leverage. Needless to say, this marketing landscape can feel overwhelming, especially since neither your time nor your budget are infinite.

In this blog, we’re using our own data to focus on two growing channels and how you can leverage them at your business. Read on to learn about using affiliate marketing and CTV/OTT to drive growth.

Affiliate Marketing

Overview

Affiliate marketing, though not a new marketing channel by any means, is a growing source of revenue for many brands. This marketing strategy involves partnering with people outside of your brand, such as social media influencers, to promote your product for you in return for a commission.

Valued at over $8 billion in 2022, the industry is showing considerable growth, with a projected $15.7 billion for 2024 and nearly $37 billion by 2030. Far from just a passing trend, affiliate marketing accounts for 16% of U.S. online purchases.

With the right plan in place and the right affiliates on your side, affiliate marketing is a solid, cost-effective way to spread the reach of your business and drive sales.

The Stats

Mirroring stats from other sources, Rockerbox’s own customer data shows nearly a 57% increase in brand spending on affiliate marketing over the past year, and a nearly 14% increase over the past month. Though still a relatively small portion of marketers’ budget (1.58%) affiliate marketing shows definite signs of becoming a more popular and relied-upon channel.

Tips and Trends

With consumer trust in social media influencers growing (particularly among millennials and Gen Z), now is the perfect time to explore an affiliate marketing strategy. For any affiliate marketing (or any type of marketing) strategy to be successful, you need to make sure to have a plan in place that includes:

• Revenue, new customer, or other types of goals so you know if your strategy is successful.
• A budget for commissions. Like any paid marketing strategy, you have to spend money to make money, but with new channels comes the risk of unknown performance. Make sure to keep a close eye on affiliate marketing as you add it to your strategy so you know if your investment is paying off.
• A pay structure that benefits all parties. Social media influencers know their worth, so you need to create a pay structure that’s both enticing, but still makes sense for your brand from a cost perspective. Some brands use a revenue sharing model, while others pay out commissions based on other factors like website visits, clicks, newsletter subscriptions, or impressions.

Additionally, focusing on the affiliates that are actually driving conversions vs. just acting as a last-click (commonly seen with coupon sites) can pay off in the long run. If affiliates are only last-click drivers, you may be wasting spend paying partners when the user would have converted anyway. Instead, lean into uncovering each affiliate’s individual role in the funnel to understand their true impact, then work on building your affiliate program with top of funnel publishers and influencers, vs. bottom of funnel coupon sites.

CTV/OTT

Overview

Across multiple trend reports and statistics roundups, CTV/OTT is heralded as a fast-growing area with lots of potential for advertisers. eMarketer predicts as much as $30.1 billion in ad spend for CTV in 2024—a 22% rise from the previous year. This spend goes hand in hand with the rising use of connected TVs and streaming services—with the CTV user base predicted to reach up to 80%+ of 25-54-year-olds.

Brands in 2024 are betting heavily on the channel with nearly a quarter of brands expecting CTV to account for 60-80% of revenue, up from just 7% of brands for the previous year.

The Stats

CTV/OTT has seen a 10% increase in spend among our customers since last year, echoing similar growth noted in other reports. The category currently has roughly the same share of average budget as affiliate at 1.59%.

Trends and Tips

To succeed in OTT/CTV, you need to have the right mix of content strategy and measurement approach. In a webinar with Tinuiti in 2023, we discussed some of the top tips brands can follow from messaging to launch:

• Think from your audience’s perspective and craft stories that will resonate with their needs.
• Present a unified marketing message with accompanying visuals across all channels, from search to social to OTT.
• Include a persistent logo throughout the spot.
• Reach viewers through two sensory channels simultaneously with visual and auditory elements delivered throughout.
• Include an end card with a large logo as the primary focus, a simple URL, and a strong CTA to elicit direct response from the viewer.
• Consider repurposing existing content from your portfolio of social or digital assets. Even vertically-oriented assets (think: TikTok, Instagram) have been proven to be successful on streaming TV.
• Run 2-4 variations simultaneously - consumers are heterogeneous: some will be more responsive to emotional messaging, others to messaging about price, others to quality comparisons, etc.
• On top of these guidelines, remember to set up a testing plan that takes you from initial launch to when you start to see conversions, as well as a way to analyze the potential channel overlap between CTV/OTT and other channels that play a similar role in the funnel.

Explore New Channels + Test With Confidence

You may be used to the steady high performers of Google and Meta, but it can be worth it to branch out and try new channels, especially when the numbers support it. When you do start to add new channels, make sure you have your testing plan in place.

At Rockerbox, we help you consolidate your data and provide access to the analyses you need to monitor new channel performance and avoid losing money on an untested area.