Flat Growth and ‘Do More with Less’ Puts the Focus on Optimized Data-Driven Marketing
As we begin 2024, several trends will continue to accelerate change for B2B marketing and revenue teams. Data, AI, content, and compliance will continue to define and drive the growth agenda and a wildcard from AR/VR. As we learned in 2023, marketers must continue to adapt, work smarter, and hone their data and analytics chops to generate predictable demand and demonstrate ROI.
1. Growth Remains Flat: According to a recent executive survey from Pavillion, roughly 30% of companies expect to go through layoffs in the next six months, with most of those layoffs expected to happen in January and after March 1. The biggest concern for executives heading into 2024 is increasing profitability despite slower growth. Although 4 in 5 companies expect to grow revenues in 2024, most respondents expect to grow at most 25% or stay flat.
Given this outlook, B2B vendors will focus on top-line growth by expanding deals from existing customers while leveraging data, AI, automation, and insights to improve the bottom line through greater marketing and sales efficiencies.
2. Marketing-led growth Emerges as a Primary GTM Motion: Digital selling will continue to become the norm, with more interactions occurring through digital channels. At the same time, B2B buyers are growing more self-reliant through digital and will only engage vendors once they are 70 percent through their decision journey. These trends will continue to elevate B2B marketing teams to lead growth and support the digital buying process.
3. Nurturing Out-of-Market Buyers Becomes a Top Priority: Since buying decisions are made much earlier through trusted networks and digital discovery channels, vendors must establish nurturing relationships with high-value accounts much earlier. This strategy must accurately identify the 10 percent of buyers ready to buy today while nurturing the 90 percent of prospects. Investing in the latter group ensures brands remain top-of-mind, creating ‘mental availability’ for when they are ready to buy in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
4. Marketers Invest in First-Party and Unique ID Strategies: Ready or not, the 2024 deadline for third-party cookies is rapidly approaching. Today, approximately 37 percent of marketing professionals are prepared for a cookieless world, while 60 percent of personalized experiences currently depend on third-party cookies. Without a source of “probabilistic” third-party data, marketers must close the gap by growing first-party “deterministic” audiences or investing in an identity strategy and unique IDs built around first-party data. Marketers can no longer kick this can down the road as their company’s future growth is heavily tied to this data set.
5. Demand Gen and ABM Continue to Converge: Over the past two years, we’ve seen the convergence of ABM and demand generation sharing the best of both worlds across people, processes, and tools. This integration signifies a strategic shift, where ABM’s personalized, targeted approach blends with Demand Generation’s broader, awareness-driven tactics.
Convergence will streamline marketing efforts, aligning targeted account strategies with more extensive market outreach to optimize resource allocation. More importantly, this evolution will eliminate well-entrenched data and operational silos and demonstrate marketing’s strategic value and ROI to the C-Suite.
6. Siloed Data and Email Spam Finally Have Their Day of Reckoning: High-quality, actionable, and accurate data is no longer a luxury. In 2024, companies that haven’t addressed long-standing data challenges, including siloed operations, will be at a competitive disadvantage. AI is also a driving force since it feeds on clean, current, and complete data sets.
At the same time, email providers such as Google and Yahoo and marketing automation vendors such as Outreach have announced rules to eliminate bulk email and spam. While most marketers have phased out spamming practices, these announcements will put the final nail in the coffin for “spray and pray.” Most importantly, these data and email operations changes will continue to drive tighter alignment between sales and marketing and ensure more focused buyer engagement from revenue teams.
7. AI Extends its Utility Across Revenue Teams: What a difference a year makes. ChatGPT was beginning its ascent this time last year, averaging 157K website visitors per month. Today, ChatGPT averages a whopping 1.5BB per month, reflecting the enthusiasm and promise of generative AI. According to Gartner, by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated. In 2024, marketing, revenue, and sales teams will continue to apply AI and automation across common workflows to boost productivity and focus human resources on higher-value tasks. In the upcoming year, generative AI will benefit content marketing and customer experience by creating copy, news stories, short-form content, and specific images or logos.
A cautionary note: While the promise of AI remains strong, it’s still in its early days. In 2024, marketing organizations and revenue leaders must continue to validate AI models and use cases against key outcomes. Finally, as marketers leverage AI, they should continue to rely upon their proven human skill sets of creativity and empathy.
8. Bolster Data with Contextual Content: As more buyers rely upon a digital buyer journey to research potential solutions and 3rd party cookies continue their depreciation, content mapped to buyer journey phases will be critical to measure and take action on high propensity intent behavioral signals. Most companies don’t have the resources to deploy an in-house media organization. That said, investing in a focused content strategy at key points of the buyer journey and customer lifecycle will bolster behavioral data sets and fill some of the void left by the demise of 3rd party cookies.
9. Vendors Balance Personalization with Data and Privacy Compliance: Delivering contextually relevant and personalized experiences at scale creates compliance risks for vendors to ensure that data is collected, stored, and used according to data and privacy regulations, including local GDPR and CCPA. The recent demise of third-party cookies has compounded these challenges as vendors seek alternative strategies to close the gap between their first- and third-party data.
Finally, here’s our wildcard prediction for 2024:
10. Brands will innovate to drive Personalized B2B Experiences: As AR / VR technology matures, it could become a game-changer for B2B marketing, offering immersive, personalized experiences for potential clients. B2B marketers might leverage VR to provide virtual tours of products and facilities or simulate real-world applications of their services, providing a deeply engaging way to connect with and convert potential clients.