Our 2024 Marketing Predictions

Also: Avoid “dictionary words”

Marketing Qualified
December 29, 2023

Good Morning, and welcome back to Marketing Qualified. Only a few more days left in the year. Hard to believe! But we’re looking forward to what 2024 will bring.

So, let’s close out this year and ring in the new one with our favorite topic: marketing!

Where marketing is headed. Our 2024 predictions. We’re back for year two of our marketing predictions.
Avoid “dictionary words.” A quick copywriting tip.

🔮 Where marketing is headed. Our 2024 predictions.

One of our most popular issues last year was our predictions about where marketing was headed in 2023. So today, we’re back for round two!

We spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about B2B marketing. In this issue, we’ve distilled all that down for you into our top predictions for marketing in 2024.

1) Content will get less formal.

The business world has slowly become more casual for years. But the rise of WFH during Covid rapidly sped up this trend's progression.

People used to wear suits to work in nearly every industry. Now, people log in to work in sweatpants from their couches.

Long and formal in-person meetings were replaced by phone calls, then emails, then Slack or text messages.

The decline in formality will keep accelerating in 2024, especially for B2B.

Most of the B2C world has already gotten the memo.

Consumer brands used to take six months and spend millions to plan and shoot one commercial. Now, they pay a social media influencer who makes and publishes an ad within hours or minutes.

B2C brands jump on trends and play on pop culture moments to create marketing opportunities.

Like when Jake from State Farm sat with Mama Kelce at a football game because Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had just gone public with their relationship.

Or when Heineken went viral because of this ad that jumped on the popularity of the Barbie movie this summer.

But as usual, B2B brands have lagged behind. Many companies are still trying and failing with content that is more “professional.”

But buyers don’t want that anymore.

They want authenticity and content that is fun and easy to consume.

B2B brands that have figured this out are already winning. In 2024, more brands will take notice and follow suit.

The tone of B2B content will get more conversational and less stuffy. “Write like you talk” will become the new motto inside many B2B marketing teams.

“Low production” style and short form videos will become more common.

Storytelling and stream-of-consciousness style social media posts will become the norm for brand accounts.

2) POV will be the most important part of content marketing.

With the rise of AI, generic content won't cut it anymore. Anyone can throw a prompt into ChatGPT and get a generic blog post, script, or social media copy in seconds.

Soon, the only way to stand out will be to have a unique perspective or take on a topic.

It reminds us of this quote:

“If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to no one. Dare to polarize; it’s better to be loved by some and hated by others than to be forgotten by all.”

To stand out in a sea of content, you have to offer something different than everyone else. Pick a way to be different, but make it authentic to you and your brand. You have to actually believe it.

The goal is to draw in the people who agree with you. Ignore the people who don’t. They’re not your market.

A great example of this is Tesla’s Cyber Truck.

Its design has been highly controversial. Millions of people hate it.

BUT… millions of people also love it.

Which was enough for Tesla to get over 1 million pre-orders. That’s so many that if you pre-ordered the Cyber Truck today, it would take 4-5 years for you to receive it.

3) B2B will embrace UGC.

For decades, B2B companies have relied on case studies and customer testimonials as their only forms of social proof. But we predict that UGC will be added to the mix in 2024.

User-generated content (UGC) is any content — text, videos, images, reviews, etc. — created by people rather than brands.

With the rise of TikTok, many B2C companies have doubled down on UGC and are seeing massive results because of it. We think B2B brands will jump on board now that the model has been proven.

UGC builds trust and brand affinity. People trust this content for the same reason they read and trust product reviews before buying. When content is created by real people using real products, buyers like it and find it authentic.

B2B buying cycles are longer than B2C. And products are typically significantly more expensive. So, B2B brands need as many touchpoints as they can get along the buyer’s journey. And since UGC content is considered highly trustworthy, touchpoints through this type of content are even more valuable than traditional touchpoints.

4) The rise of B2B influencers.

B2C brands have heavily relied on influencer marketing for at least the last decade. But as usual, B2B brands have lagged behind.

It’s only in the last year or so that major B2B brands have begun embracing influencer marketing to promote their products.

We predict that B2B influencer marketing will become even more common in 2024, but it will look slightly different than the B2C influencer model.

B2B influencer marketing will be built on “internal champions.” These are key employees selected to promote the brand and receive the resources/budget needed to do so.

Companies will start with any employees who've already managed to build an audience using their personal brand. They’ll partner with these “thought leaders” and begin compensating them as influencers based on agreed-upon success metrics.

If a company doesn’t have existing employees who’ve built an audience, they will either:

Recruit thought leaders with existing audiences and bring them on as employees.
Hand-select employees to become champions and then spend budget and time helping them build their audiences.

This influencer model will create many of the same benefits as the B2C influencer model: more buyer trust, engagement, and decentralized creation. But it might also raise some new issues that the industry will need to figure out how to navigate.

For example, who will own the profiles and audiences that are created? The company or the individual influencers?

Will competitors try to poach each other’s employee influencers?

Will this model create “shadow” employees who claim to work for a company for the sake of an influencer partnership but don’t actually have any duties outside of being an influencer? Will that degrade authenticity and brand trust?

It will be interesting to see how this new B2B influencer model plays out.

5) Zero-click content takes over.

Many B2B brands still link off on all their social media content. They post a link to their blog on LinkedIn. They post a link to a YouTube video on Facebook. They link to a press release in an email.

This is a lousy strategy in 2024.

Instead, B2B brands will start to embrace zero-click content.

Zero-click (sometimes called clickless) content provides valuable information to users without having to leave a platform.

In other words, each post stands on its own and directly provides value.

This type of social media content is better than link-style content for two reasons.

The algorithms don’t like external links.

Social media platforms want to keep users on their sites. They make their money off of ads. So they need as many eyeballs on their feeds as possible.

Posts that contain a link to a 3rd party website send traffic away from the social platform. That means less ad revenue for them.

So, the algorithms really don’t like posts with external links.

External links are bad for UX.

If you use social media, you probably already know this: users don’t like flipping between platforms. Most users resist clicking links because it interrupts their scrolling, requires effort, and means waiting for a new platform to load.

On the other hand, zero-click content gives brands the best of both worlds.

The algorithms like these posts because they keep traffic on their site, and users like them because they get the value directly in their feed versus having to click through to a 3rd party site.

This means posts get served in more people’s feeds and read/watched more because the viewer gets upfront value.

It’s a win-win for brands, users, and the social media platform.

6) Anti-AI companies will emerge.

It’s obvious that 2023 has been the year of AI. ChatGPT is in millions of people’s daily workflow, and it feels like virtually every company claims to have an AI product or be AI-enabled.

It’s been incredible to see the strides in technology made this year. But it’s clear that not everything related to AI has been positive.

There has been a lot of controversy around the ethics of how AI models are trained. There have been countless lawsuits about IP and copyrights. Many privacy and security concerns have been raised. Critics have warned about the accuracy of AI-generated content, and consumers have complained about the lack of quality and variety of AI-generated responses.

We predict that in 2024, certain brands will lean into the negatives and use being AI-free as a point of differentiation.

For more on why companies might take this contrarian point of view, scroll back up to prediction #2. 😉

2024 will only be the beginning. We expect this trend to keep picking up steam in the years following. According to Gartner, as many as one-fifth of brands will tout their anti-AI philosophy by 2027.

7) Decentralized SEO will become the norm.

Good SEO isn’t just about blog posts and backlinks anymore. Voice search and video are becoming very important.

71% of consumers would rather use voice search to find something online vs. physically searching. And 24% of U.S. adults own a smart speaker. So, ranking in the voice search results is becoming increasingly important.

Short form video has also shifted the SEO landscape in recent years. Gen Z already uses TikTok as their main search engine, not Google. And the popularity of using TikTok and YouTube as search engines is rapidly growing among all the other generations, too.

To stay on top, brands will need to create a decentralized SEO strategy.

Marketing teams will need separate strategies for each platform. What works on TikTok is not precisely what works on Google or YouTube.

Content will need to be adapted to rank across different mediums. For example, SEOs will need to understand the criteria for voice or video search results compared to traditional text search results.

What do you think? Do you agree with our predictions, or are we off our rocker? Reply to this email and let us know. Or, if you have your own marketing prediction for 2024, we’d love to hear it!