When we first published this list, “digital marketing” mostly meant a company blog and a Facebook page. Maybe it also included a Pinterest board if the marketing team felt ambitious. Seven years later, the underlying advice remains the same: diversify, entertain, and create quality content. Know your audience and use technology to reach the right person at the right moment. However, the way marketers execute that advice has been rebuilt from the ground up. Third party cookies are now effectively dead as a foundation for digital targeting. Generative AI tools have also changed how customers find and consume information. ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity now answer many questions once handled by search engines. Short form video has also replaced the static Facebook post as a dominant digital content format.
ChatGPT’s weekly user base has climbed past 900 million, according to industry reports. Google’s AI Overviews now appear in more than a quarter of all searches. These figures come from industry tracking cited by multiple marketing reports. This shift changes how businesses must approach digital marketing. Customers are moving from “search and click” toward “ask and get an answer.” That shift is the biggest reason this post needed a rewrite. It needed a rewrite rather than retirement. Below, we’ve kept every original idea intact and rebuilt it with the tools, platforms, and data that actually work today.
Diversify Platforms
Digital marketing clearly surpasses blogs, websites, and Facebook, it surpasses Instagram and TikTok too. To stay competitive in digital marketing, you need to diversify your platforms. However, “diversify” now means more than simply opening additional social accounts. It is also time to get creative. Today, creativity involves using different content formats and channels. Most modern companies should still maintain a presence on Instagram and Facebook. Pinterest, blogs, and short form video also remain valuable channels. However, the ideal platform mix has changed significantly since 2019. The content format now matters just as much as the platform itself. Messaging apps have become some of the highest leverage digital marketing channels.
They also face less competition than many traditional platforms. More than three billion people now actively use messaging platforms worldwide. Many marketers plan to maintain or increase their investment in these channels. Popular options include SMS, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Many consumers check text notifications within five minutes of receiving them. The more digital channels your company uses, the greater your reach can become. These channels include social media, blogs, email, SMS, and AI driven discovery platforms. However, using more platforms does not automatically guarantee better results. The businesses winning today are not necessarily on the most platforms. They match each platform with the content format its audience expects.
Entertain
It’s vital to engage with your audience, but “engage” means more than simply getting their attention. Your content must also survive the scroll, especially when audiences have trained themselves to skip anything that resembles an ad. Create content your audience genuinely wants to read, watch, or save. Today, advertising needs to entertain, but it also needs to move quickly. Short form video remains one of the top performing formats, even as longer formats make a comeback and challenge its dominance.
Sell the entertainment first and the product second. Audiences still ignore obvious advertisements when they fail to captivate, and that risk has grown as people become better at spotting sales pitches. Recent HubSpot research shows that most marketers believe AI generated content now floods the internet, and many say consumers have become noticeably better at recognizing it. As a result, generic, obviously AI drafted “entertainment” content can now backfire. If you successfully entertain your audience, they still do the marketing for you: the majority of marketers plan to increase influencer investment this year, precisely because a trusted creator entertaining their own audience remains more persuasive than a brand talking directly at one. Let consumers and the creators they follow, be the marketers of your brand.
Quality Content
Most marketing companies agree that content marketing works. AI search has reduced some traditional click through rates. However, quality content remains important despite these changes.
Google’s algorithms continue to evolve, but they still prioritize useful content. Google has also stated that its approach to quality has not changed. AI Overviews and AI Mode follow the same core quality principles. These features rely on Google’s existing Search ranking and quality systems. There is no special shortcut for earning inclusion in AI generated search results.
Create content that makes you proud to represent your business, because your content now serves two audiences: human readers and AI systems that summarize your industry for them. That shift explains why Denver Digital and the wider industry now discuss GEO and AEO alongside SEO. Answer Engine Optimization structures content so search engines can extract and present it directly in featured snippets and AI Overviews. Generative Engine Optimization structures content and brand presence so AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini can cite and recommend your brand in their answers.
Remember, your web presence is often the first interaction your customers will have with your company, increasingly, that “web presence” is a paragraph an AI model generates about you, built from content on your site and from what trusted third parties say about you elsewhere. Industry research suggests the large majority of brand mentions in AI search now originate from third party pages rather than brand owned sites, so quality content strategy has to extend beyond your own blog into earning credible coverage, reviews, and citations elsewhere. Stay fresh, current, competent and increasingly, stay citable.
Find a Niche Audience
To improve your web traffic, target a niche audience, this advice hasn’t aged a day, but the tools for actually doing it have changed almost completely. Know who you are marketing to and why. You could lean heavily on tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Pinterest’s buyable pins, layered on top of broad, cookie based tracking across the web, to build that picture. Knowing your audience today means building a first party data foundation instead.
Brands that never built that foundation are now competing for the same shrinking pool of platform level signals as everyone else, watching retargeting audiences shrink and acquisition costs climb. The fix closely mirrors the original advice, but with updated tools and methods. First party data now forms the foundation of effective, privacy safe targeting. This data can come from email signups, purchase history, and on site behavior. It can also come from loyalty programs and progressive profiling. Marketers can combine this information with CRM systems and on site analytics.
Consented survey data can provide additional insights into customer preferences. Together, these sources offer a stronger alternative to third party advertising networks. They rely on information customers have actively chosen to share. Understanding your audience this way can also improve your content strategy. It helps you create content that is more relevant and more shareable. In some cases, this approach may outperform traditional cookie based targeting. The key difference is simple: the data comes directly from your customers. If you use paid search, you can accelerate this process. However, the approach differs from the original “Identity Based Pay Per Click Marketing” model. Google Ads now offers more sophisticated and privacy conscious targeting tools. First party data strategies can connect CRM systems with Google’s Consent Mode.
These approaches are gradually replacing third party cookies as a targeting foundation. Contextual targeting has also gained traction in privacy conscious industries. Modern campaigns no longer depend on raw phone numbers or email matches. Instead, they use hashed first party data matched to logged in accounts.Interest based targeting can also reach audiences without individual level tracking.
Serious advertisers now treat Enhanced Conversions and server side Conversions API integrations as essential tools. These integrations send hashed first party signals directly from your server to ad platforms, and most digital advertisers have adopted server side tracking to reduce their reliance on browser cookies. You can still tailor your ads to an individual customer’s specific needs, but you now build that personalization around data the customer has consented to share rather than data collected quietly as they browse the open web.
Risks, Challenges & Future Outlook
None of this is free of friction, and being honest about the challenges is part of doing this well. Smart Bidding and AI driven automation now handle much of the work in paid media. However, these systems usually need enough monthly conversions to perform reliably. Accounts below that threshold can experience significant cost per acquisition volatility. This volatility often happens during the system’s learning period.Smaller advertisers therefore need a deliberate ramp up strategy. Simply switching on automated bidding may not produce stable results.
On the organic side, about half of marketers report declines in traditional search traffic. At the same time, many report increases in AI driven traffic. Gartner has also projected a significant decline in traditional search query volume. Many marketers say they can already see this trend in their analytics. However, there is still a major opportunity for businesses. Many marketers lack a clear understanding of their customers’ buying habits.
They also lack reliable demographic data about their audiences. This creates a competitive advantage for businesses that invest in first party data. Audience focused content can provide another important advantage. Denver area businesses can benefit by adopting these strategies early. Doing so can help them stay competitive before these practices become standard.
FAQ
What are the biggest digital marketing trends? The core trends are diversifying across short form video and messaging platforms, creating entertainment first content, targeting niche audiences through first party data, and running privacy safe, AI assisted PPC campaigns.
Are third party cookies actually gone? Not entirely, but they’re no longer a reliable foundation. Safari and Firefox block them by default, and while Google reversed its plan to fully deprecate them in Chrome, the larger industry shift toward first party data has already happened.
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)? GEO is the process of structuring, writing, and publishing content so AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews cite it when answering user queries, rather than optimizing purely for ranking positions in a list of links.
Is short form video still the top performing content format? It’s still important, but its lead has narrowed as long form video, live streaming, and blog posts have each gained ground ROI data, so a diversified format mix now outperforms a short form only strategy.
How do I target a niche audience without third-party cookies? Build first party data from your own channels, email signups, purchase history, on site behavior, loyalty programs, and consented survey data and combine it with contextual targeting and platform tools like Google’s Enhanced Conversions.
Does traditional SEO still matter if people are using AI search? Yes. Google has stated that AI Overviews and AI Mode draw from the same Search ranking and quality systems as traditional SEO, so a strong SEO foundation remains the base layer that GEO and AEO build on top of.
Should small businesses still use influencers and entertaining content? Yes, a majority of marketers plan to increase influencer investment because audience trusted creators still outperform brand produced ads at capturing attention before a sales message is delivered.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is constantly developing and adapting and if anything it undersold what was coming. The platforms have changed, the targeting infrastructure has been rebuilt around privacy and consent instead of quiet tracking, and a meaningful share of your future customers will meet your brand for the first time inside an AI generated answer rather than a search results page.
But the underlying discipline this post described, show up where your audience actually is, entertain before you sell, invest in content you’re proud of, know exactly who you’re talking to, and use the available technology to reach them precisely is exactly the discipline, just executed with GEO aware content, first party data, and AI assisted, privacy safe advertising instead of the tools available seven years ago. Our marketing team at Denver Digital will help your business stay current across all of it: platform strategy, entertainment driven content, GEO/AEO optimized quality content, first party audience targeting, and modern, privacy first PPC. Choose Denver Digital for your online marketing solutions. To schedule a meeting with one of our marketing professionals, give us a call at 720-316-4217. We look forward to working with you.
