The world of digital marketing is known to be fast paced – well 2023 didn’t disappoint on that front and 2024 is bound to be even more exciting! Between AI advancements moving at lightning speed, budgets tightening due to a looming economic recession, consumers demanding more privacy, marketers are experiencing both exciting opportunities and tough challenges for the year ahead.
After a year dominated by AI, the Innovation Visual experts took a step back to look ahead and share their top 6 predictions and focus points for 2024. Discover what the new year has in store to make 2024 a successful year for your business.
1. Maximising marketing budgets for profitability
Getting savvy about your marketing spend
A key trend that is set to continue in 2024 is squeezing more Return on Investment (ROI) with less marketing spend. Budgets have still not returned to pre-pandemic levels and the economic climate is still uncertain. Marketers must be smart about their spending to ensure their business is profitable for future success. This includes investing in the right channels, eliminating waste and increasing efficiencies, whether through marketing automation or tech stack consolidation.
If you are trying to achieve more with less, you may not be able to do everything you once did. Focusing your efforts on acquiring high value customers to justify acquisition costs, and generating quality leads for your sales teams will help to improve efficiencies and maximise marketing spend. For ecommerce, focusing your efforts on generating revenue from higher margin products may also be a good approach to test.
You’ll always need to acquire new customers to increase business revenue, but when marketing budgets are being cut, a focus on retaining your customers and extracting as much value out of these as possible should also be considered. In B2B, the cost of acquiring new customers is said to be 4-5 times higher than that of retaining your existing customers - it takes a lot longer to convert a customer who doesn't know you in comparison to keeping one that already trusts and knows you. Customer retention can impact overall business profitability from being able to cross-sell or upsell new products or services to a lower need to invest media spend in paid campaigns.
Watch our videos on customer retention:
- How to increase sales through B2B retention strategies
- The best B2C retention strategies for your business
Streamlining your data stack
If you have an existing database or CRM, then you’re already sitting on a valuable resource when it comes to maximising your marketing budget. Whether you’re looking at using channels like email, social or biddable media, your database can hold the keys when it comes to unlocking value in these channels.
Using your data to create segments based on behaviour, buying history or position in the funnel, can help make your marketing activities more targeted and help drive higher engagement and conversion across the board. To achieve this though, you need a single source of truth, and alignment throughout your tech stack.
One of the key trends of 2023 – which will no doubt continue into 2024 – has been a business need for better clarity of data, better alignment of systems and clearer reporting built on clean, up-to-date data. Without this, maximising value from the tools you’re already paying for and the data you already own can be difficult.
Watch our Digital Marketing Answered to find out more about Why You Need to Audit Your Tech Stack.
Dissecting the customer journey for better insights
Another trend we’re seeing around databases and CRMs is the desire to really dissect the data and start to dig deeper to find powerful insights that can help to better inform budget decisions. Whether this be from Multi Touch Attribution reports, understanding Customer Lifetime Value or building out bespoke lifecycle models to better reflect and monitor the full customer journey, we’re seeing a big uplift in the need to see clearer data in this area.
We think this is a key approach to maximising the value from your existing database, as it allows you to understand which assets and campaigns drove conversions, which touchpoints your prospects engaged with, and in which order and, ultimately, where you should be focusing your budget in 2024.
2. Blurring the lines between sales & marketing
We are seeing marketing departments getting involved across the full customer journey - a positive shift that we’re very excited about! Gone are the days where a marketing team could qualify an MQL, hand it over to sales and wash their hands of the whole thing. Now and beyond in 2024, we’re helping clients set more RevOps focused goals, which means the remit of marketers should go beyond the sales hand-off and start to include lead assignment, re-nurture, pipeline automation, sales enablement and more.
The reason this is good news for marketers is that you can now squeeze more value from your database, by extending the reach of your marketing campaigns and assets. This gives you more opportunity to maximise the value from any given asset, and multiple opportunities to convert leads. Win, win!
It means more focus is required on aligning your internal teams, processes, and systems, but in the long run, it makes goal setting simpler and means your teams can focus on driving revenue, together.
Watch our video to learn how to build an effective revenue growth team
3. GenAI is invading the internet
We cannot talk about trends for 2024 without mentioning AI and generative AI. It was obviously a massive trend for 2023 and it will continue dominating the world of marketing – and many other sectors – in 2024.
The (r)evolution of search
Google and other search engines are very aware of the changes AI tools like ChatGPT are introducing in consumers’ behaviours. Why ask Google when you can ask ChatGPT? That’s why we’ve seen so many changes launched by Google in 2023 as the search giant is trying to stay competitive against AI.
Google is clearly evolving its search engine towards a more personalised and interactive experience – sometimes quite similar to a social media platform. Here are a few things they introduced this year:
- Search Generative Experience (still being tested at the time of writing) – the new search engine experience provides detailed answers to more complex questions using conversational AI.
- Perspectives – a new filter that provides different angles on a subject by bringing in content from various sources like YouTube, Reddit, and forums.
- Notes & Follow – new tools that provide a more tailored search experience by allowing users to add notes to search results that get shared with others and enabling you to follow certain topics like you would do on social media.
AI vs. human content
As content generated by AI invaded search results in 2023, Google added Experience into their EEAT guidelines to provide better results to users focusing on content that demonstrates first-hand experience of the topic (something that AI cannot replicate). This will dictate what content wins on search results in 2024.
Although organic rankings have been extremely volatile this year, we expect these changes to reshape SEO rules. However, these rules aren’t completely different to what we’ve been doing for years. Prioritising high quality, unique content that provides value to the reader and shows expertise and authority, all with outstanding UX has always been on our recommendations. Your strategy will need to evolve from this to fit the new shape of search.
Read our blog on helping your business to stand out from the genAI noise.
4. The Death of Third-Party Cookies
Third-party cookies have been in the spotlight for quite some time now, and the moment is almost upon us where action is set to be taken against them – Google have announced that it will stop the use of third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2024. Whilst other browsers, such as Safari, have been blocking third-party cookies for quite some time, this is a significant event due to the share of the browser market Chrome holds.
This change is a result of the increasing concern consumers have around protecting their privacy online and shouldn’t be ignored. This isn’t just about cookies but about building trust with your audience and respecting their preferences. Yes, they want more personalisation but not at the expense of their privacy and only if it provides them value. You need to understand what you audience needs to collect and use data in a way that will help them, not scare them!
If you’re an advertiser or a marketer who heavily relies upon third-party data for highly targeted or personalised strategies, this change may be of concern to you. Focus needs to be shifted towards the collection and use of first-party data, implementing enticing ways to capture insightful data from users and putting this to effective use. For example, utilising competitions and quizzes is a fun way to gain lots of personalised data points on users who can be incentivised in their participation with discount codes, prize draws, etc.
Email is making a comeback
With this shift away from third party cookies and a move towards a reliance on first-party data, email has made a comeback over the last year or so. Go back just a couple of years, and many marketers were saying that email was dead, inboxes were oversaturated, and emails were having to compete with push notifications from dozens of apps.
Now, email is seen as an attractive channel for a lot of marketers, as people tend to use their email inboxes for ‘real’ communications. Most apps have a transient feel to the communications features (commenting on posts or threads for example) but email is still a platform that the user can own.
Over the last year, we’ve seen a big shift in the mindset of most of our clients as they want to get more from their first-party data and use email as a core strategy for nurture, seasonal campaigns and more. What’s more, because email uses your existing database of contacts, you don’t need to worry that Apple or Google are suddenly going to make it hard for you to identify your audiences!
5. Providing a superior customer experience throughout the buying journey
Both B2C and B2B customers can experience anywhere between 3-12 (or even more) touchpoints with a brand, before they become a customer. A potential customer must know, like and trust your brand before they buy from you. And, with 86% of consumers leaving a brand they originally trusted after only two poor customer experiences, it's more important than ever before to provide a superior, consistent customer experience across the whole buying journey and all touchpoints - offline and online. Prioritising the customer experience can result in several business benefits from increasing customer retention, higher brand awareness, revenue growth, creation of brand advocates and increasing customer satisfaction rates.
From the first interaction a customer has with your brand to the post purchase stage, every interaction must be positive. But personalisation is also key. Over the last couple of years, customers have been requesting more personalisation, and this is only set to increase for 2024. Think about your different target audiences and take the time to map out the customer journey for each of these groups. This way, you can ensure you've considered all the touchpoints different customer groups will have with your brand and you can personalise their experience accordingly. This may consist of offering different communication channels for your customers or personalising content and offers based on individual's preferences and needs, to ensure you're solving the right problems and delivering value at every stage.
The lines are blurring between marketing and other departments, and even your customer service and sales teams have a marketing role to play. They should be aware of your company's vision, mission, and values so they can live and breathe it, to provide a consistent experience for the customer. Having an experience led strategy should involve listening to your customers too - actively collect feedback across the whole journey and implement changes to ensure your customers feel listened to. Sending customer satisfaction surveys, implementing website surveys, or conducting user testing are just a few ways to collect customer feedback.
6. Potential Rise of New Platforms and Changes in Current Ones
Digital marketing never stands still. Newly emerging technologies and innovation are causing overnight shifts in the landscape. The uprise of AI-powered platforms this past year has placed a spotlight on not only the tools available to the disposal of marketers, but also the responsibilities they must uphold whilst using such tools.
With news cycles involving industry mammoths, such as Microsoft hiring OpenAI’s CEO and then seeing him leave to re-join OpenAI just two weeks later, it’s hard to ignore the waves that AI is currently making and the importance that such large businesses are placing on AI. A plethora of new tools have released in the past year which have changed the landscape in one way or another – from copywriting assistants, tools which can produce detailed images from short prompts, and even platforms which can animate previously stationary images to bring them to life.
The extent to which these tools have impacted the digital marketing world cannot be emphasised enough, and their introductions are almost always unpredictable, as technological possibilities are continuously exceeding expectations. 2024 looks set to be an exciting year as we begin to witness the birth of new technologies, platforms, and tools which in turn shall spawn new industry trends and ways marketers will operate.
Optimise your Digital Marketing Strategy in 2024
Let us take away the stress out of keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends and help you to hit the ground running with a winning digital marketing strategy to kick start 2024. Our experts in each key area of digital marketing stay abreast of each trend so you don’t have to and bring you what’s relevant to your business for successful results.
