When your company looks ahead at your marketing plans for 2024, you might be wondering how your brand can prepare for expected changes and take advantage of emerging trends. Based on anticipated market conditions and consumer expectations, we’re advising businesses to prioritize marketing strategies with proven results that address their customers’ biggest needs or concerns. Keep reading to discover our four strongest marketing recommendations for 2024.

Sales-Informed Goals

After years of warning about a possible recession, many economists are now confidently predicting a true cooling effect on US spending in 2024. The National Association of Business Economics (NABE) currently has the probability of a 2024 recession set at about 50 percent. Given the expected market cooldown coming next year, marketers in a wide range of industries will need to plan their strategies to prove a strong ROI and focus on driving sales, rather than building general brand awareness, in order to satisfy executives.

When the pressure is on to drive the strongest possible results, it’s critical for marketers to work collaboratively with the sales team. According to a LinkedIn report, businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67 percent more effective at closing deals. Because your salespeople are the ones working firsthand with customers each day, they have the best direct insights into what motivates your audience. Ask the team exactly what their customers are requesting, what kind of content seems to be most persuasive in the sales process, and which audience segments they’re seeing the strongest results from. These tips will help guide your marketing strategy to address the most pressing gaps in the sales cycle and ensure your 2024 plans support the activities that are most likely to positively influence customers.

AI-Driven Personalization

For years, increased personalization in marketing has been on the rise as brands hope to form stronger relationships with customers. Many brands have found that adding personalized recommendations simplifies their customers’ sales journey by helping them quickly find and purchase the most relevant products for their needs. Personalization can be an effective and worthwhile effort, but it’s also quite time-consuming and labor intensive, which your business may not have the bandwidth for in 2024.

Personalization is one of the areas that benefits most from AI assistance. AI may have been the biggest marketing buzzword of 2023 – nearly every week we heard about another way marketers were experimenting with it as they worked through the emerging technology’s quirks and strongest capabilities. However, most early adopters agree that AI is great at quickly analyzing and categorizing large sets of data. According to McKinsey, companies who utilize AI in personalizing their marketing campaigns see revenue increase by an average of 5 to 15 percent. When you feed an AI tool a large set of audience data, it can automatically sort line items by their unique interests, preferences, and other pertinent factors. Then, instead of spending hours sorting through the raw data, your team can use their time and expertise to craft content that appeals to each audience grouping.

Adjust SEO to Natural Speech Patterns

In recent years, voice search has become more common across nearly every consumer group – even B2B audiences. More than 50 percent of Americans now use a voice assistant every day, with an 8 percent increase in daily usage between 2021 and 2022, according to the Voice Consumer Index. Part of this increase is likely due to workers continuing to work remotely in many industries. While working from home, employees have more opportunities to use their personal voice assistants to perform searches than they would if they were in a shared office for 8 hours per day.

Optimizing content for search has long been a priority for marketers, particularly B2B marketers, because of how many people actively look for new products and services via search engines. According to BrightEdge, B2B companies generate twice as much revenue from SEO than any other channel. However, it’s not enough anymore to focus SEO strategy only on filling content with short, commonly written keywords. Instead, to capture the growing number of voice searchers, brands need to craft their content with natural speech patterns in mind. For example, most people tend to use longer and more complete sentences when they speak, while they might favor short phrases when typing a query into Google. As you plan for 2024, consider how you can work more conversational language and answers to common industry questions into your content to help your brand boost your presence in voice search results.

Stricter Data Security Practices

Cyberattacks have risen sharply worldwide since 2020. The Ponemon Institue’s State of Cybersecurity Report indicates that in 2022, 70 percent of businesses experienced a ransomware attack. The increase in the number of attacks and overall decline in data security has many consumers feeling concerned about how their online information is being stored. According to the Global Consumer State of Mind Report, 76% of Internet users believe companies must do more to protect their data.

In addition to impacting customer trust, poor data practices and data breaches can also have severe, long-lasting consequences for business operations. According to IBM, it takes companies an average of 197 days to discover a breach, and another 69 days to contain it. During that time, you may need to pause many sales and marketing activities until systems are back under control and new solutions are put in place. Those months of downtime can result in a loss of revenue, which businesses simply can’t afford in 2024. To avoid derailing sales and marketing initiatives through a cyberattack, prioritize taking simple steps to improve your company’s data security, such as limiting access to sensitive information, regularly updating passwords and software, and educating employees on how to recognize phishing emails.