It’s full-on-fall in our beautiful headquarters of Peoria, IL. While many of our team members and clients are breaking out their long sleeves, filling their weekends with apple and pumpkin themed adventures, and preparing for the many holidays to come — we’re also keeping our eye on the horizon for what lays only slightly further ahead in our collective futures. It’s time once again for emerging B2B marketing trends: the 2024 edition!
Let’s get the disclaimer stated right out of the gate: it’s currently November 2023 and things can change quickly. We have no preternatural abilities to know the future and we aren’t always right, but we’re pretty proud of our track record. What we do have is an abundance of passion for marketing, the great privilege of working alongside and serving some of the best and brightest in the business, and our fair share of voracious readers — always looking to learn something new.
Here’s a teaser of our take on what’s in store for 2024. Download the full report for all the details. You may even wind up with an earworm from a few pop song lyrics sprinkled throughout. Why? Well, why not? Music makes everything better.
Trend #1: Obviously It’s AI, Right? Obviously.
Generative AI can feel like a looming threat while having incredibly limited regulation – a major concern for businesses and creatives wanting to protect proprietary information from becoming a part of the data feed that powers these technologies. Whether you’re a fan of AI (we are, with the proper guardrails in place) or not — we expect to see a continued increase in adoption of these tools in B2B marketing in 2024.
Trend #2: It’s the First-Party Data Party!
First-party data isn’t a new conversation, in fact many B2B marketers have been working on redefining their strategy to be focused on first-party data collection for the better part of a decade now with continually evolving regulations around tracking and data privacy, but we predict that this discussion and planning will take center stage in 2024.
Trend #3: Video: It’s Still Totally Dominating.
We’ve witnessed this trend first-hand in our work with our clients. Whether video-first campaigns, video verses static ad testing, hightest engagement with content in our web experiences – video comes out on top with the strongest performance – across application and industries.
Trend #4: Personalized Content: It’s Here to Stay.
With the shift towards more first-party data collection and adoption of machine learning and generative AI personalizing content for known users, the foundation is being set for brands to deliver highly personalized experiences at scale to their users. The companies that implement personalization well will be rewarded in ROI.
Trend #5: Marketing Forecasting: More, Please!
We talked about the ever-increasing role of predictive and prescriptive analytics way back in our 2021 predictions, but we continue to see this trend bubble up to the top of both executive and marketing leader wish-lists across the B2B marketing landscape. As much as we care about what happened, we care even more about what will happen, what should happen, and how we can help clients reach their goals.
The Year Ahead
There you have it. Our predictions for the marketing trends we expect to see in the coming year. Only time will tell how it all plays out. But no matter what happens, we’re all for helping our clients leverage new insights to create meaningful experiences for their consumers. If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to chat.
