This time a year ago, marketers planning their 2023 budgets were bracing for a recession. A common motto might have been, “Fasten your seatbelts, folks, we’re going to be in for a bumpy ride.”
The same passengers now might be viewing blue skies ahead, or at least expecting some turbulence. Either way, it’s time to get airborne. The industry motto for 2024 might be: “How do we take control of this plane and move more aggressively?”
Mere survival is no longer the operating principle. Fifty-six percent of marketers say their companies plan to take riskswhen it comes to business strategy. That might entail an aggressive growth strategy, like a big purchase to broaden their organization’s capabilities. Maybe it means pushing a new product before customers or emphasizing something different in their portfolio. Maybe it means marketing their brand in new parts of the globe. All the above tend to signal “we’re not just surviving anymore ― we’re going to be successful and grow.”
Sometimes, aggressive business tactics and survival tactics present similarly. Continued volatility in the healthcare sector could lead to more mergers and acquisitions; aggressive spending in the tech sector could yield the same strategy. In either case, the ethos is the same: Businesses that aren’t growing are dying, so they need to figure out a way to stay profitable through some form of expansion.
The top marketing trends for 2024 emphasize agility and aggressiveness in its many forms:
Identifying better, more actionable data ― and putting it to use: Marketers are constantly gaining new ways of collecting data on their customers and clients. But not all data is created equal. Sorting through it all to form an actionable strategy is perhaps the top challenge of the information age. That’s particularly true in an aggressive strategic environment.
One-third of marketers believe decisions take too long at their company. Using data to uncover what works and why is essential to speeding up decisions and demonstrating impact. For marketers who feel like they have the data they need, that data might come from disparate sources. Some of it, they control. Some, their vendors control. Some of it is actionable, some is not.
Say a firm wants to increase its combined social media following through a brand’s various channels by 50%. If that firm’s main priority is to sell more of a specific product, social media growth doesn’t necessarily align with that specific objective. It’s important to hone in on the data that matters and figure out what to do with it. The organizations that do this best will gain a tremendous competitive advantage.
The buyer’s journey takes an alternate route: Customers want a personalized, “self-serve” experience that doesn’t require speaking to a salesperson every step of the way. It’s a lasting if unintended consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, when organizations of all stripes figured out how to operate electronically or remotely. For marketers, an important question persists: Do we really need a salesperson meeting with the customer or client at every step of their journey? Or should we wait, let the customer use our digital tools to do her research, then meet with her when she has a question?
Increasingly, the latter route presents more favorably to consumers and the brands they do business with. Deciding how to adapt that strategy for an organization can lead to growth in sales, managing a travel budget better (instead of chasing every lead), and managing customer relationships further down the sales funnel. This should come as good news for salespeople who formerly had to memorize complicated scripts, but now might only need to answer a few questions specific to a prospective client’s business.
This approach allows marketers to create customizable content and messaging, and deliver it via the buyer’s preferred channels. For organizations that aren’t already all-in on personalization and customization, 2024 is the time.
Hybrid selling: Effectively a combination of our first two trends, the move toward hybrid selling ― the right mix of in-person interaction, remote contact and e-commerce tools ― answers the logical question of how best to deploy human resources in a digital age. The answer? Outsource as many tasks as possible to digital tools, then direct the most actionable data to salespeople, who can anticipate where a buyer is in their journey.
Some organizations are taking deep dives into behavioral science, predicting probabilistic outcomes based on the digital behavior of customers. (A rudimentary example: When someone taps x on our mobile app, it’s best to do y.) A completely automated decision tree facilitates this thought process, but ultimately a human salesperson will need to execute when called upon. The buyer feels like someone is responding to their every need, but it’s actually an educated guess based on an algorithm.
To anticipate scenarios where, for example, a potential customer is at Step 1+x in their process requires a rudimentary working knowledge of those digital tools. But the payoff is tangible. One study found that when salespeople are working remotely, they can interact with four times as many accounts in a given period. Anticipate hybrid selling practices to become the norm in B2B environments.
Greater focus on customer success and retention: Typically, most of a company’s revenue will come from repeat customers and clients. The ability to retain a client is a more cost-effective way to grow revenue compared to finding new ones. But what’s the best way to promote customer and client retention?
Customer experience, according to one estimate, can exponentially improve the experience of a business’s existing customers ― enough to widen the gap between customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value by up to eight times. Converting the first-time buyer into a loyal, trusting customer makes practical sense.
Customer lifetime value has become increasingly important for sustainable business growth. For those customers who have already advanced through the sales funnel and discovered what a company is about, a more personal touch may be necessary ― but worth the extra effort.
Data privacy and security compliance: While focusing on customer success and retention, organizations must consider the central role of establishing trust. Clients and customers need to trust any potential business’s ability to limit their risk by safeguarding their private data.
As data protection regulations evolve, there are more ways to mismanage online data every year. Marketers must more aggressively prioritize data privacy and security to build trust with their clients. Europe has stricter guidelines for securing customer data than most of the United States. The need for businesses to provide visitors to their website the opt-out of data collection is increasingly necessary. Mismanaging data is also a legal minefield for businesses in 2024: Press the wrong button and run the risk of lawsuits from upset customers.
Even if few clients click on a privacy policy that explains what a company does with their information, the few who do will appreciate that it’s thorough and in compliance with the law ― so it’s important that businesses make sure it’s both.
Jordan Buning is president of ddm marketing + communications, a leading marketing agency for highly complex and highly regulated industries. Throughout Buning’s 28 years in marketing, he has served clients among a diverse range of industries that include healthcare, financial services and global manufacturing as well as public transportation, higher education and recreational products.
