Marketing trends are evolving and the theme amongst the trends is humanized and holistic in its approach. Gone are the days of faceless, hands-off marketing strategies that inundate targeted leads to buy, buy, buy. We’re moving into a radically new era of unconventional, face-forward campaigns that are emotionally driven. With that, these are 3 brand shifts to watch for in 2024.
Authenticity
People are growing tired of the endless stream of cold, unsolicited emails spamming their inboxes or the countless InMails showing up in their LinkedIn. You know, the people that treat LinkedIn as the place to indulge their most shameless tendencies and hawk whatever they have to offer. And the brands that have been led to believe that the best way to reach their audience is to annoyingly invade their inboxes alongside the other 12 businesses in a day, all with the same goal in mind, using the same sales pitch. Obviously, people are sick of it.
This year, you’ll start to see a trend emerge where brands find an authentic voice in the midst of boring, outbound sequences and unsolicited clutter, with refreshing, candid, honest conversations and stories unlocking connections we’re all yearning for.
Polarizing Opinions
Pick up the remote and flip to any streaming news channel. Thumb through your For You X TL. Dare to hop back on Facebook and take a quick look at your friends’ posts. Do you see a pattern? You should. That’s because opinions dominate today’s news and media. Why? Over 20 years ago, a noticeable shift began in the ways news is presented to the public. It was brought on by a pretty seismic realization: facts don’t push papers, opinions do. Fast forward to today and our news circuits and social feeds are bombarded by various voices vying for your attention by giving a voice to the causes you support in a way you can relate to. Slowly over the last few years, you’ve begun to see this wave enter into the corporate space, with brands getting more and more bold about the causes and voices they want to adopt.
In 2024, you will see that the only way to cut through traditional corporate speak is to take a hard stance on an opinion related to your industry – one that reflects your brand values and mission.
Guerilla Marketing
If you had to guess how many of your competitors have adopted the same tried and true activities to reach the same audience (blogs, white papers, newsletters, paid media, etc), how many would that be? Most likely the majority are. But in 2024, the type of businesses with the most to gain are the ones that invest in a non-traditional marketing strategy, designed to engage your audience in an authentic way they weren’t expecting from you or any of your competitors. It’s why when a guy like Tim Davidson (former Sr Director of Marketing at Directive, current Content Creator for Sendoso, and founder of B2B Rizz) does something like post himself cutting fruit day after day and talking shop, or shows up at Inbound not at a booth but holding a cardboard poorly handwritten sign in the same spot for hours on end, he amasses hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments, shares, likes, and connections.
In 2024, you’re going to see a lot of brands forced to get creative with their marketing approaches, thinking like a designer would and challenging the status quo to gain people’s attention.
Get ahead of the trend and consider these approaches in your 2024 marketing strategy.
Content Strategy – Feed me, Seymour!
Video and the Reduced Barrier to Entry
Everyone has been waiting for video to become a staple in B2B marketers’ marketing strategies. Hubspot has been talking about it for years (2023, 2022, and on and on). Lots of folks have documented the rise of video over the past decade. It’s well reported that video not only creates a halo effect on the rest of your content and paid ad campaigns but also boosts engagement and conversions considerably, making video an attractive investment. So why hasn’t it caught on and become the number one go-to content format in growth marketing strategies? Well, for starters, the investment is a big reason for it’s unpopularity. Video has had a stigma (and historically, rightfully so) as being the most expensive form of content you can produce, with a well-produced branded video costing tens of thousands of dollars to get right. That’s without even mentioning the considerable extra steps and extra hands that have to touch a video project to bring it from conception to life.
In 2024, you’ll start to see a trend of growth marketers looking to develop templated videos that can be easily configured to quickly produce repeatable content pieces, shortening the time and cost of video. This method will allow brands to add high-level video content to their growth strategies.
AI-Generated Content
Okay, so here’s the inevitable AI call-out. It’s the dirty little secret that nobody wants to admit, everyone sees coming, and people are already starting to feel. Unfortunately, you are about to see a meteoric rise in the amount of content produced by generative AI tools like ChatGPT. We all saw it coming, and AI is here to stay. Smart content strategists will embrace the technology to their advantage, becoming pioneer generative AI pilots in the sea of marketers who have no idea what they’re doing or how to create prompts that will produce truly bespoke content.
In 2024, you’ll find there’s just too much potential to exponentially grow your content library – and reach – for growth marketers not to employ AI tools in their content strategy.
Creative Strategy – Rise of the resistance
Bespoke design and imagery
The war against our machine overlords is officially on, and leading the resistance are the creatives. In 2024, you are going to see many creative agencies fight against the mainstream use of generative AI by advocating a fresh, bespoke approach to the creative process. This means more use of an emotive design that looks and feels like it has depth and meaning beyond a prompt. More hand-drawn sketches, more custom illustrations that look tailor-made for each brand. All of this will be for the benefit of the brands they create for, as most generative AI will not advance – at least this year – to the point that it can truly replace a talented designer or illustrator who can create something that makes you feel and perfectly illustrates brand messages: true art.
Creative strategy is going to be a thing
One of the challenges over the past decade in the B2B marketing space has, been designing fast and for an ad application. Most of the time, this ends up in an overuse of stock imagery or designs that feel disconnected from the essence of the brand message. Additionally, fast, affordable design usually results in graphics feeling underproduced and too safe, not engaging the audience in a way that leads to more conversions and meeting objectives.
In 2024, you’ll see the trend of ‘creative strategy’ as an agency and in-house discipline rise and grow with more and more designers being forced into strategy and art direction roles with the wave of AI counterparts.
Brand Strategy – Who are we, like, really?
Our positioning sucks – I can fix him
The last five years (maybe even then more) have dealt some pretty gnarly blows to the tech and SaaS space. With 2020’s end-of-the-world vibes and 2023’s recession woes, growth marketers have been asked to try and walk a mile with both of their kidneys removed, their higher-ups writing off the importance of marketing and slashing budgets left and right. As a result, many growth marketers have turned to cost-saving pipeline generation strategies, cutting corners when oftentimes there is a deeper brand issue at hand: a failed brand position and messaging framework that will never trickle down to pipeline expansion. Most of the time, SaaS and tech companies make the fatal flaw of creating their messaging as if they’re talking to a shed full of broken Xerox machines, or presenting a brand in a way that doesn’t move, compel, and inspire its audience to want to act.
In 2024, the long-awaited brand upheaval will be on the table for many B2B SaaS and tech companies, with many executives finally admitting they need to give their core brand message a thorough review.
