25 For 2024
Here are 25 things I think are going to happen in the agency & marketing world in 2024
I’m listing them in reverse order of importance…today we are going to knock down the bottom of the list. (I’d love for this to be a conversation…so if you have opinions, DO NOT BE SHY!)
25) It’s going to be a rough ride for smaller single point agencies: This has been coming for a long time. Throughout the “money is free” and “pandemic marketing mania” of the last decade, it was really pretty easy to be good at 1 thing and build an agency around it – email, or SEO, or whatever… But the world of marketing is so much more integrated these days, that point solutions aren’t all that helpful for small marketers. There are fewer and fewer brands under $5mm in annual sales that will be outsourcing a single part of their marketing – the big reason for that? There are going to be fewer and fewer brands under $5mm that survive.
24) “Scaling” is going to be a tough sell: Throughout the last few years, a big selling point was that “we can scale your business” or “we scaled our clients ad spend for $200 a day to $2000 a day”. Scale is going to be scary because the market is now focused on profitability & not scale.
23) Insight will beat tactics: The best marketers understand that any tactic (you know, “our secret campaign structure”, or “our advanced creative testing progression”, or whatevs) has a limited shelf life. And as advertising platforms get more secretive and AI driven, tactics will matter less because the platforms will execute them. The best marketers will know that it is understanding what data you can feed to the platforms PLUS what understandings you can pull out of the data around audience and consumer behavior that you can apply to your marketing & messaging that results in more behavioral data being fed to the platforms will be the winner. Digital marketing (finally) is changing from knowing which buttons to push or settings to check towards a deeper understanding of the impact of messaging on the target audience.
22) Trust The Process Won’t Buy You Any Time: You’ve probably said this to a client…when things don’t work exactly as expected, you could buy yourself some time with “trust the process”. Marketers are impatient & many marketers are suffering from compressed margins. “The process” isn’t going to save you – you’ve got to be able to confidently say, “Trust the process because the data is showing you that we are headed in the right direction…” and if you don’t have command of the data, well…it sucks to suck, huh?
21) Your SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) Isn’t Going to Help You Succeed: In 2024, it’s going to be clear that rote workflows that are the same for every client will drive your results to “average” at best. Because marketing is so integrated (eg, your paid search activity has an impact on your email list membership, and your FB spend impacts your Amazon results), your process will need to adjust with every client. You might have production workflows that are the same for posting videos or whatever, but if you are using “cut & paste” anything in 2024, you aren’t going to bring home any big wins.
20) Client Anxiety Will Be At An All Time High: The stakes are really big right now. Businesses are NOT feeling safe. A big effort on your part will need to be focused on being transparent about data, performance and opportunity. Client anxiety will last MUCH longer than any economic uncertainty, so your biggest and best account management skill will become helping clients back away from the ledge.
