What’s In And What’s Out In Marketing 2024

len Barreto Forbes Staff

Forbes Content Marketing Contributor Group

The new year always brings along an air abundant with possibilities. In both your personal and professional lives, you’re likely setting ambitious goals for the year to come. As you dream up innovative marketing strategies and fresh new ways to promote your brand, take a moment to look back to the year prior. Identifying things that no longer serve you or your business is arguably just as important as setting your sights on newness. The ‘in and out’ trend sweeping the internet is rooted in the idea of moving out something that isn’t working in order to make room for something better. Naturally, we gathered some insight on what we believe is in and what should make its way out of the marketing industry in 2024.

What’s In:

Hyper-Personalization

Gone are the days of generic marketing strategies that target just about anyone and reach no one in specific. Casting a wide net and reeling in a few new customers may work once or twice, but it’s nothing short of inefficient. To most effectively reach, entice and convert your target audience, you’ve got to know who they are. Make this the year that you take a hard look at your demographic data. Learning things about your consumers like their geographic location and average age-range can give you insight into their lifestyle and interests so you can connect with them better. Simultaneously, keeping your existing customer base engaged in the era of the-next-best-thing requires a personalized touch. Sure, you can add recipient names to the top of an email, but take it up a notch. Customers who receive personalized content from a brand are more likely to interact with it. Reward repeat customers with a surprise freebie on their nth purchase, send customers how-to content that pairs well with recent purchases and who doesn’t love a birthday discount?

One-stop social shopping

40% of consumers found the perfect product through a brand’s organic post in 2022, while 49% found a brand through a sponsored ad according to Sprout Social. Organic content isn’t over—in fact it’s just as important as ever. While social commerce is not exactly new, it isn’t slowing down anytime soon. With the launch of TikTok Shop, people are loving the convenience of consuming both content and goods without even having to switch apps. Consumer brands looking to attract Gen Z shoppers need to meet them where they’re at.

Leveraging AI

AI will never be able to replace the value of the human touch, but it can enhance your work. Leveraging the power of AI in marketing can help you automate processes, better understand user data and be more effective in your advertising. Keeping AI in your back pocket means you get to spend more time doing the parts of your job that you enjoy while increasing your efficiency. From programs that optimize your social posts for performance, to project management tools that keep you organized, we discuss all ways you can leverage AI in marketing on The Brief.

Experiential Brand Activations

Many argue that the digital age brought forth the slow painful death of the brick and mortar. But what if it’s just a rebirth? According to an IBM study, 55% of Americans prefer shopping online, while 45% still prefer popping into stores and discovering products in real life. Experiential marketing is sometimes interchangeable with event marketing which simply means activating and connecting with your customer base in person. There’s a ton of incentive for brands to invite their audience to engage with them in person. The kind of impression you can leave on a person is significantly longer lasting when done in real life. Taking your brand’s essence and turning it into a tangible experience can help showcase who your brand is on a level that isn’t fully possible digitally.

The influencer marketing landscape exists in perpetual evolution. As consumer demands shift and social media channels transform, the role influencers play in the discovery of your brand changes too. With the oversaturation of the industry came much needed regulations requiring influencers to disclose paid partnerships to their social media followers. Consumers are bored of being constantly sold to and can now clearly see when an influencer is promoting a product simply because they are being paid to do so. This has created a level of distrust between influencers and their followers. A one-time paid post may garner some traffic, but due to the blatant transactional nature of the content, it may not convert many. Alternatively, partnering with an influencer that organically engages with your brand can appear more authentic and actually resonate with their social media community. According to Grin, partnering with an influencer for an extended period means they will share more content with their audience over time, which can lead to higher sales overall.

Looking at Vanity Metrics

The emergence of vanity metrics like follower count can be attributed to an era where marketers were trying to look for any way to quantify the success of their efforts. This went left pretty quickly when buying fake social followers became possible. Since then, buying followers on social media has been seriously discussed in marketing forums and amongst peers, but this deceptive practice has got to go. What may feel like an elevation in the legitimacy of your social accounts is truly hurting the authenticity of your audience. What use is 20k followers if all of them are robots? Vanity metrics like this don’t mean anything anymore. In fact, if you have 500 followers and all of them are real humans who engage and believe in your brand, you’ll likely have a better relationship with them and a greater chance of converting them into long time customers. Instead of looking at numbers that don’t signify much, focus on your retention and engagement rate, they’re more likely to give you an indication of how your brand is doing.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing refers to copy and design choices that make a brand or product appear to be environmentally friendly, when in reality it is not. As we discussed previously on The Brief, marketing sustainable products without greenwashing isn’t impossible, but it does require honesty about your sustainability practices. 44% of modern day shoppers are being purposeful about the products that they are shopping, specifically looking for brands whose environmental and social values align with their own. The eco-conscious bait and switch has gotten old and shoppers are more aware than ever on how to detect it. Unfortunately it makes your brand look untrustworthy and raises questions about what else you’re misleading consumers on.

There are a few common threads connecting this list of ins and outs. For starters, prioritize connection with your audience through personalization and shared experiences. From your influencer partnerships to the way you communicate your sustainability efforts, authenticity is the way to go if you want to make a true lasting impact. Keep your finger on the pulse of digital and technological advancements, they might not only make your job easier, they might open new avenues for revenue growth.