It’s that most wonderful time of the year. It’s trendspotting time!
I’ve been covering my top trends for the last fifteen years, and I do have a pretty solid track record. (Before you get too excited, please know that I can barely make popcorn. My skill set is fairly limited but oddly enough includes having a good eye for the future.)
Here are a few gems from history –
- I bet on social media before social media was an industry. The Zen of Social Media Marketing was one of the first books on the subject.
- I predicted the rise of frictionless buying from within a video a decade ago. I remember the audience audibly gasped when I talked about how you would be able to choose your ending on a show. (Netflix just piloted that this year.)
So, let’s get into my top marketing predictions for 2024. Think of these both as predictions but also as priorities. Where SHOULD your organization focus for 2024/2025?
I am putting them into three broad buckets.
I am very intentionally combining 2024 and 2025 because I think 2024 will start much like 2023, with a general miasma or fear and slower movers. As we get further into the year, I think things will again speed up into late 24 and 25.
Feel free to bookmark it and come back next year to see how this panned out.
Experience
Generative AI has been a game changer. If you are still playing with the 3.5 versions for ChatGPT, it may not seem like that, but the 4.0 version is something to behold.
Information and knowledge will become incredibly commonplace. The internet made information accessible. AI will make it applicable. What’s left? Human perspective. What calculators did for math, Generative AI will do for almost every other subject.
So, what do I mean when I say experience? It’s something that AI can never touch. It’s the first-person narrative. The qualitative. The boots on the ground.
Google has already made it very clear (just go look at some of my earlier posts) that as for EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, and trust), experience just got a major boost. AI can have expertise but it can’t provide experience.
If you are in any type of content marketing, you have to be taking a serious look at your strategy. Ask yourself this simple question: How can it be more first-person based? What is your earned media strategy to align with your owned media strategy?
Empower
Leadership must empower their teams. Get them the training they need and inspire them to start. Whether you work remotely or not, if you aren’t spending at least thirty minutes a day just tinkering with AI, you are going to get left behind.
It won’t be robots that take the jobs. It will be people who know how to work with robots that will replace them.
We are in a Wild West phase right now. There are a million considerations but none are valid enough to hold back experimentation. Start internally but start.
At Zen Media, we launched Snooze or News this year. The first generative AI Tool to predict newsworthiness. It was meant to be a fun tool to encourage folks to think about what’s newsworthy and what isn’t. It’s meant to spark discussions.
It allowed us as an organization to experiment, to have fun, and to be true to our brand of always being the first to try things. Our clients count on that.
I urge you to take the same fun approach to AI in 2024.
Events
At a recent keynote for professionals who work in the event space, as I talked about the future of business, I also made it a point to say that you can’t fake an event. This ties right back to #1 – experience.
If my speaking calendar is anything to go by, it looks like both intimate and large-scale events are leading the pack.
Events can solidify the community. They are an excellent way to build relationships with current clients as well as convert prospects.
If you have late-stage funnel prospects, events are the number one way to close them.
I think how we think about events will also evolve in 2024 as buyers continue to shirk sales and self-lead the process. The final leg of the journey will be an event.
I anticipate a trend where companies will increasingly opt for hosting quarterly events to invite prospects, shifting away from the increasingly ineffective and tedious outbound marketing processes.
A few other brave musings –
- Elon Musk will unload Twitter in the next 24 months. I say Twitter because I think it will go back to the Twitter brand and the current CEO (who has the title but no real power) Linda Yaccarino will exit.
- Spotify will sell. I saw their “cost-cutting” measures this year as a signal that they are preparing to sell.
- Tech monopolies scare me. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. They are getting bigger by the day and the American government doesn’t seem to have the teeth or know-how to rein them in and create a level playing field. It will get harder for any brand to compete without being subservient to them.
- I HOPE someone buys Disney. It’s surviving on nostalgia but will need more fresh blood to stay relevant. I don’t think Bob Iger can do it alone.
- We will see more fractional executives but I am not sure this is a sustainable model or even a good thing long term. What companies lack more than ever today is ownership and a sense of pride. This requires solid C-suite leadership though.
- Our continued generational vice will be envy. Every generation has one, or should I say societal because I do think it surpasses age. Researchers have long known that our happiness is relative to the Joneses. But, what happens when the neighborhood Joneses are replaced by the global Kardashians?
Shama Hyder is the Founder & CEO of Zen Media, an international keynote speaker, and a bestselling author.
Fast Company calls her a “millennial master of the universe” and a “zen master of marketing.”
She’s a Forbes and Inc. 30 under 30 alum, and LinkedIn has named her a Top Voice in Marketing four years in a row.