Match-Point Marketing: How You Can Ace 2024’s Shifting Landscape

Editor’s note: This post is part of the LinkedIn Collective , which is designed to inspire excellence and success for all B2B marketers. The Collective will offer groundbreaking thought leadership and content resources informed by LinkedIn data and insights, our team of experts, and leaders across the B2B marketing industry.?

While they might not seem to have much in common, marketing is a lot like tennis. As a competitive tennis player, I put a lot of strategy into out-maneuvering opponents. This comes from diligent practice, careful planning, predicting my opponent’s next move, knowing when to play defensively and when to make bold moves (aka hit winners) … sounds a lot like marketing, right?

Strategy has to be paired with flawless execution. But you have to keep an eye on the trends to stay ahead. With a fast-crumbling cookie, increased privacy restrictions, generative AI (GenAI) permeating everything, and so much more, 2024 is really changing the game.?

Here are five big trends to help marketers predict where the ball is going (and how you’re going to react).

1. MEASUREMENT: The Elusive Quest for Brand Equity

Brand value has been important since the Mad Men days, but despite all the industry progress, it’s still difficult for brands to quantify as it's technical, and hard to pin down.

Brand equity is a wild mix of your audience’s perceptions – a cocktail (shaken, not stirred) of the positive, negative, and everything in between. All of these attitudes coalesce to impact consumer behavior, spurring them to either buy or not buy.

But the multi-step, internal process between consumer perception and consumer behavior is missing a lot of detail and measurement. This is for two reasons:

1. Brand equity is all about perception – and tracking that digital footprint is challenging
2. Inferential analysis takes a long time to develop. Thus, brand equity does not lend itself as well to small-scale experiments the way one-off action-oriented campaigns do

2024 is the year that everything changes. We’re cracking the code on measuring brand equity through sophisticated modeling and data analysis. After years of tracking latent behaviors and their influence on purchasing intent and activity, we’re putting a science to what moves the brand equity needle. It’s also a breakthrough year where we will help marketers answer the question on if their media investments are moving the needle on their brand equity (sneak peak, our Brand Equity product launches in Q2!)

And with continued economic uncertainty, increasingly critical consumers, and stronger privacy protections, it’s coming at just the right time.

2. PERSONALIZATION: This Year, It’s (More) Personal

Personalization is perhaps the most overused term in marketing, but with AI, personalization is going to a whole new level.?

For years, personalized marketing has been stumbling on its own promises, faulting on insufficient data, decreasingly sophisticated tools, and the treacherous ordeal of tracking the customer journey. But GenAI is helping marketers flip the script.

In the coming year, get ready to see a major uptick in:

• Emails, social posts, and blogs that speak your language
• Voice and visual search that actually work as intended
• Chatbots with a semblance of EQ
• Video interfaces that almost read your mind

On top of all this, conventional Influencer Marketing is facing a reckoning, courtesy of User-Generated Content (UGC) Creators. These star players are personalization experts, creating authentic and wallet-friendly content that resonates across the sales funnel.

Brace yourself for a content revolution where UGC and user reviews hold the crown – and authenticity is the crown jewel.

3. STREAMING: The Commercial Renaissance is Upon Us

After a break from commercials, the commercial break is back. But before you change the channel – these aren’t your run-of-the-mill ads. This time, they’re actually captivating audiences and (finally) delivering results with specificity and measurement baked in.

It’s driven by the rise of Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST), featuring heavy hitters like Pluto TV and Tubi, and ad-supported subscription services like Netflix, Hulu, and recent entrant Amazon Prime Video.

Unlike the commercial breaks of old TV yore, today’s streaming platforms are armed to the teeth with viewer data. The result? Ads that are more relevant, targeted, and actually being watched. But what is really exciting is the rise of ad engagement options.

Some major retailers are already getting on board – Roku’s partnerships with Walmart and Shopify exemplify the future where checkout meets streaming.

AI will only help expedite this shift. With its ability to crunch billions of data points in a fraction of a second, marketers can benefit from lightning-fast analytical capabilities, streamlined creative processes, and more efficient programmatic buys.

4. CONSUMERS: GenAI Takes Control of the Shopping Cart

Say “hello” to your new target consumer: the robot.

As marketers and consumers get comfortable in a world of signal loss and the last bits of the cookie crumble, GenAI is charging in to fill a gap.?

This is most evident in how GenAI is changing the shopping and research experiences. It’s already become the perfect shopping assistant, giving consumers personalized product recommendations without the backing of creepy, transactional third-party data.

That’s because customers willingly provide their zero- and first-party data to their robotic shopping sidekicks, who then hold product preferences and purchase history in their ever-powerful algorithms. As shoppers hand over their keys and wallets, these GenAI-powered machines emerge as the first line of defense in customer shopping journeys.?

With more than 7 billion smart devices worldwide constantly upgrading their mind-reading skills, brands better make room for this new robot persona in their mix. Plus, nearly half of the US population will be covered by privacy laws by 2025, so smart brands should cozy up to their audiences’ bot friends to retain effective targeting and communication.

This means marketers not only need to know how to engage their customers, but they also need to know how to engage AI. Make your product information AI-accessible and tailor your marketing accordingly, holding the conversation across social media, apps, and, of course, chatbots.

5. SEARCH: The ‘E’ in ‘SEO’ Now Stands for ‘Everywhere’

It’s a wild thought, but one day (sooner than you might think), younger generations might ask what “just Google it” meant. The search game is changing, with platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and Amazon seeing a rise in initiating search queries.

This trend may be attributed to Gen Z, who don’t quite trust the big search engines and the sponsored results they push. For them, TikTok is the new Google, serving as a hub for authentic human-to-human answers.

Reddit has caught on and updated its search game, too. Google recently rolled out “Perspectives” to tap into forums and social media. And let’s not forget YouTube, which informs roughly 68% of users in their decision-making journeys.

And when it comes to shopping, Amazon is the starting line for 50 percent of consumers. (Google and Bing are feeling that heat, pushing harder into Retail Media network inventory.)

With all of that said, marketers need to broaden how they think about search and all the places searches are happening. It’s time to revise your search strategy into something much more comprehensive, considering how consumers ultimately discover your brand.

It’s Your Serve

Clearly, 2024 is going to require some pretty significant shifts in strategy and testing and learning how best to leverage all AI has to offer. Brands must find a way to navigate drop-shots from measurement, personalization, streaming, shifting consumer behavior, and the expansive realm of search.

But with your eye on these trends, at least we can predict where the ball’s going. We’re all adapting on the fly – especially as GenAI so rapidly changes the landscape we’ve known for years. At the same time, this represents a chance to hone our skills and employ new, powerful strategies.

As we volley between challenges and opportunities, let’s remember: the game is ours to win, one insightful play at a time.