Marketing predictions for 2024

My marketing advice for the year ahead remains the same as in previous years:

• Spend 75% of your time nailing the fundamentals and becoming more efficient at doing so. Those fundamentals will differ depending on industry, team size, goals, and a multitude of other things.
• Spend some time investigating new things, but don’t let it distract you from the fundamentals. Most of the shiny new things that are apparently working wonders for others will turn out to be a waste of time or someone trying to sell you a new tool or service.
• Launch campaigns and projects sooner. If your competitor can launch a landing page or campaign in a few days but it takes you a month to launch the perfect plan, there will only be one winner in the long run. Even if they’re wrong twice as often as you, they’ll work that out much quicker.
• Create less, distribute more. I’d hazard a guess that the majority of Marketing teams spend 90% in creation mode and distribution gets the remaining 10%. This usually translates to a mention in a newsletter and a post on social. A handful of high-quality pieces of content and successfully distributing your core message and product or service value is more desirable than creating content just for the sake of it.
• Spend more time with your customers learning what makes them tick.
• Spend more time with your target audience who aren’t customers yet. Existing customers know your brand and your product. Their feedback can be biased to their needs or experience with your product; you need to balance that out with people who are yet to engage with your brand.

That being said, here’s what I see coming down the line in 2024.

Brand awareness and education will happen more in-channel rather than on owned real estate

This has already been happening for several years, but I think we’ll see much more of it in 2024. When you consciously examine how brands and thought leaders are educating their audience where they meet them, it’s difficult not to see the shift that has been happening.

The ground has shifted. Your audience is getting bombarded with rich content experiences on their social channels, inboxes, and video-streaming platforms. You need a compelling argument for someone to click the link you’ve posted and read your blog post before they get all the wisdom you have to share with them. Even more so if it’s someone who has stumbled across you or your brand for the first time.

Yet many marketers, especially in the B2B space, still persist with the old way. Click the link, sign-up for the webinar, or download the whitepaper are call to actions we see on social media and in our emails every day.

I think this mostly ties back to the need to hit some aspirational lead generation goal - we must generate 2,000 leads every month - regardless of whether those leads actually go on to become paying customers. Job done and we hit our number? Except no one is really winning. How many people have we missed because we force everyone through some form of lead gen funnel? And if the majority of the leads we do generate are tyre-kickers with no intent of buying, we’re going to spend a lot of Marketing and Sales time talking to people (or trying to reach them) with little return for our efforts.

For too long Marketers have been thinking of these channels and their audience as a way to solve their problems, not their audience’s problems. We need more traffic, more leads, more downloads of our thing. Therefore we must force our audience down paths that they don’t want to go down.

With a mindset change on how we use these channels to engage our audience, we stand a much better chance of building trust and credibility with our audience. With trust and credibility in place we’ll get more engagement with our content as we have an audience who’s genuinely interested in what we have to say.

When the ‘event’ happens in their work life that they need to look for a product or service that you can provide, who is most likely to come to mind? The brand or person who tried to get them to sign up to a new webinar every week, or the folks who have been present with useful content, interesting opinions, and storytelling around others in their niche who have faced similar problems. I know who I’d trust!

The ideal outcome is that you have a steady and increasing stream of people each month raising their hand asking for help. Ask any Sales team which they would prefer:

1. 200 digital hand-raisers every month who have identified a need for a product like yours, know a bit about your product already and would like to know more (i.e. you’re already in their consideration set).
2. 10,000 leads every month who signed up for a webinar or downloaded a white paper.

Most will take the first option. Yet many Marketing strategies are aligned with option 2. If we start thinking about how we can get more people to a position where they become a digital hand-raiser, our Marketing tactics will change and the relationship between Sales and Marketing gets stronger.

What does this change look like I hear you ask?

Stop burying your best content on your blog or behind forms. The very nature of your blog means that after a few new posts are published, your great ideas are getting pushed further and further down your site architecture. There’s an old saying that good content goes to die on page 2 of Google. The same applies to your blog, unless you’re lucky enough to rank for popular search terms where you at least then have a shot at people finding your content through search.

Start bringing longer-form content to your LinkedIn and other social feeds. Combine it with a video and tell the story directly in the feed. There is no call to action needed to ‘find out more’. Just give it to your audience where they find it. Less than 1% of people who see your post on LinkedIn will click a link to read more. That means you’re missing the opportunity to build trust and credibility with virtually everyone who sees your post on LinkedIn.

This is still hugely underutilized in the B2B space, but I believe we’ll start to see more of this approach being adopted in 2024. If you’re looking for inspiration from a few folks who already do it well check out Chris Walker, Peep Laja, and Justin Rowe’s LinkedIn feeds.

The same is true for email. I’d guess I open about 1 in 100 emails if I don’t know the sender. Subject lines play a huge part in deciding whether an email gets opened. If I now have to read through your email to find something interesting, then click a link and read something else (or fill in a form) to get what I’m interested in, there’s a high chance that I’m pulling the pin on that journey.

Congratulations, you came in as the 100/1 shot with an awesome subject line but let it slip through your fingers because you prioritised your problems over mine.

Stop treating your website and content like a Mecca that your audience can’t resist visiting. That’s rarely, if ever, the case. At any point in time, most of your audience will be in the ‘not currently in the market’ or ‘researching a few potential vendors’ phase. Start treating them as such.

Do you still need a blog? Yes. People still use Google to find stuff and you want to show up for things that are important to you.

Should you still run webinars? Yes. Just don’t gate them forever and ask for a post code, phone number, and how many kids people have when they’re signing up. After the webinar is finished, cut it up into 5 or 10 1-2 minute video clips and start distributing the message on your various channels.

Should you still gate some content or whitepapers? It depends. Is what you’re giving away worth someone giving you their email address? They know what’s going to happen after they give you their email address. A bunch of nurture emails and likely someone from Sales reaching out. The question is do they want the content you’re giving away enough to put up with the hassle that comes with it?

Ask yourself would you pay for what you’re giving away. If you would be happy to hand over £10-20 (be honest), then it’s a fair ask to get someone’s email in exchange. If you have doubts over whether you’d hand over hard-earned cash to get the content, then perhaps your best to give this one away and use it as an opportunity to educate your audience about your brand.

More live events and community-led growth

This is a natural segway from my previous point. There are fewer better ways to build trust and credibility with your audience than demonstrating you have an active community and running your own events (digital, in-person, or both).

2023 also felt like we were still coming out of the COVID hangover. In-person events were coming back to life. A lot of people were also burnt out with the sheer volume of webinars that took place during the pandemic. Most of us also had to resort to talking to friends and family through a screen for a couple of years - we all needed a break from Zoom fatigue.

As 2024 ramps up I think we’ll see the continued revival of live events and more brands leaning into community building.

The brands and communities that typically get the most traction are those that are built around topics and pain points that your audience faces. It’s rare to find a community built around a product that has set the world alight. Not impossible but in reality most people outside of your organisation won’t think of your product as integral to their life as you think it should be.

However, a community built around something that they’ve dedicated their career to or have strong opinions on (DevOps, platform engineering, SEO, accessibility, etc.) is something they’ll be most likely to keep coming back to. Especially if they know other interesting folks hang out there and share some ‘trade secrets’ every so often.

It’s a smart play. Channels like SEO, paid search, paid social, or organic social can, and likely are, significant traffic and conversion drivers in your marketing playbook. However, they aren’t reliable. You’re at the whim of Google, LinkedIn, or Meta making an overnight change that puts a significant hole in your traffic and conversions. Whether it’s fair or not doesn’t come into it; it’s their world, you’re just living in it.

However, once you start to build your own community and build an engaged audience, you at least remove the risk of something outside of your control appearing suddenly to spoil the party.

Easier said than done, I know. The message is very similar to the previous section. If your community is a space where you only end up promoting your product, most of those who join will quickly see through it and engagement will drop off. Solve their problems, instead of trying to solve our own.

Email is going to get tougher, but for the better

In 2023 Google and Yahoo announced a raft of compliance changes that are coming down the tracks in 2024. The 2 standout changes for me are:

• Reducing SPAM and maintaining a spam complaint rate under 0.3%
• Allowing people to unsubscribe by clicking just one link

This article from Postmark provides a good summary of all changes you can expect to see.

What does this mean for your email marketing?

Email can still be an effective method of reaching your audience, both from an educational and commercial perspective. There is no denying however that inboxes are more saturated than ever before. Getting people to open your email, never mind reading it and clicking some links, is becoming more difficult.

On the whole, I think these changes will have a positive impact on email as a channel. If you’re consistently hitting SPAM thresholds, perhaps you should be a little more selective in how you segment your lists. If your unsubscribe process takes people down a 10-step flow before they can unsubscribe, you may be beyond help.

Here are a few things to consider if you run email campaigns for your Marketing team:

• Now is the time to clean up your email marketing database and lists.
  • If someone hasn’t opened one of your emails for the last 6 months, remove them from your database.
  • The ‘Oh, but they might open our email and buy something someday’ approach could now do more harm than good if those people start marking your emails as spam.
• Less ‘selling’ and more educating in your email marketing
  • The majority of people in your email list aren’t ready to buy. If the majority of your emails are in hard-sell mode (buy our product, start a trial, download our whitepaper), people will eventually get tired of receiving your email and your spam rates are at risk of increasing.
• Make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails
  • Your unsubscribe process should be complete in one click
  • If someone doesn’t want to receive your emails, there is zero benefit in making them jump through several hoops to make it stop. Pissing people off is never a great strategy.

The AI hype train will start to slow down (hopefully)

I remember when voice search was going to take over the world. The most obvious gap in voice search was how it was going to deal with searches with commercial intent. If someone is researching or ready to buy a product they’re willing to go a bit deeper, read articles and reviews, and get a look at what they’re going to get when they part with their hard-earned cash. There are some useful applications for voice search, but for the most part, it’s been reduced to telling fart jokes on Alexa.

While I don’t expect AI to go away any time soon, I do think it will begin to lose some of its fizz in 2024. B2B SaaS website homepages are now littered with ‘AI-powered’ this and ‘AI-driven’ that. Next time you speak to someone from that company quiz them on how they’re using AI. Once you get past the scripted response and buzzwords, you’ll often find that most people in the company don’t understand how they’re using AI.

In most cases their implementation of AI is a simple if, then, else statement. Yet there it is in all its glory on their homepage as their primary differentiator. Everyone else is doing it, so I guess they need to follow suit.

To level set, there are plenty of efficiency gains to be made from the plethora of apps that have popped up around AI. These are changes for the good and we should all embrace them. Things like summarising meeting minutes, coming up with headlines and copy for digital ads, or summarising articles for social posts are all solid use cases for AI. There will be plenty of others, but you get the jist. Removing somewhat mundane tasks from your list or summarising existing content can be a great time saver.

Where we start blurring the lines and issues start arising is when AI becomes the creator and humans are entirely removed from the process.

People who are using AI as an integral part of their content strategy to beef up their output are already seeing their content (and overall website performance) being hammered by search engines, despite some initial success.

Images and videos created from AI are also set to become the new stock images for many websites. Like stock images, they quickly grow tired and don’t resonate with people who land on your website. The fact that many AI-generated images feature people with 6 fingers or 3 eyes should also be a bit of a red flag.

Authenticity will win out in the end. Those relying on AI most are those who don’t have the expertise or skills to articulate their thoughts or create their own digital assets. For them, it feels like AI levels the playing field and they can skip the many years that others have put in as practitioners or honing their skills around their chosen craft. In reality, they’re pulling their ideas and output from others that have come before them. There’s no originality of thought so they’re always looking back to come up with their best ideas.

In 2024, look forward and create your own path. Be the leader that others will follow.