5 Marketing Predictions for 2024
Employees as Influencers
I’ve been saying for a while now that no matter what your role is in society, you’re going to need to be more “social” online. I could literally write an entire blog on this topic alone, so maybe I will, but I’ll stick to the task at hand.
I am already seeing some employees becoming “influencers” on social media just for sharing the “behind the scenes” of their workplace. A business doing this well to me is Set Active. They’ll post Tiktok’s of literally anything behind the scenes and as someone in marketing, I love it. They’ve literally shared their marketing meetings and step by step how they come up with the social calendar for the following month. I’ve started to connect and relate to their marketing employees and now I am valuing the work they’ve done for Set Active even more. Guess what, makes me want a set even more than when they spent all that money getting influencers to wear their stuff back in 2018.
2. Forget Growth, Let’s Talk about Retention
Over the past few years, we have seen engagement and following percentages decrease like crazy. The national percentage of organic growth is literally 2% per year. That’s honestly… not great.
As we move forward on social media, your followers are going to be infiltrated with more and more brands and influencers. They’re getting picky about who they follow. You’re going to lose engagement and followers this year if you over post. You need to offer value in your content. Focus on connecting to the audience you already have and ask yourself, “What would my most loyal follower want to see?”. Post that - retain customers who have already made purchases. You’ve already gained their trust.
3. If your Product or Service is not Essential - Focus on Their Why
It’s not a surprise to anyone that consumers are spending their money differently, or not at all. Think about it, you’ve changed the way you spend your extra money in the past few months. With price increases of almost everything most of us have no choice.
So with that being said, if your product or service is not essential it’s very obvious that it is going to be more difficult to sell. It’s time to rally the troops and come up with a new marketing campaign. Focus on why you are selling, why they need the product and tell that story. Connect with your audience on a personal level and start showing your personality, or business personality. You need to solve a problem for them otherwise your product is useless.
4. Death to Subscriptions
I don’t know about you, but I am OVER subscriptions. Everytime I go to look at an app or a service, if it requires a monthly subscription I almost never entertain it. I thought about signing up for a fitness influencers workout platform the other day, but I simply cannot stand the idea of paying for something that has a chance of not getting used.
I understand if you’re offering something in person like ClassPass, I personally use and love this subscription, but if you’re selling makeup or supplements, let me buy it once and see if I like it first. You are pushing so many people away by offering a subscription and probably pissing them off. Netflix I’m looking at you.
5. Growing your Account - You Have to Run Ads (That People Like)
So here’s the thing, we already know people aren’t engaging or following like they used to on social media right? So we know we have to run ads to grow, but here’s the kicker, consumers hate ads too.
If you know you have to run ads, but also know people don’t want to see them, that makes life very difficult doesn’t it?
My solutions would be:
A) Make it entertaining - Humor is so influential
The Purple mattress commercials have stuck with me for so long because of this
B) Use AI to give you SEO rich text or images
C) Hire a great storyteller, but a “low budget” videographer.
(I mean like a good UGC creator and don’t use anything fancy to present it to them. Unless that’s your thing - we can get into that another day).
That’s a wrap, what do you think about some of these predictions? What would you include or remove from the list?