VShift’s Trends for Driving Growth in 2024

As the end of the year approaches, thought leaders across various sectors attempt to articulate an undiscovered epiphany. At VShift, we polled our strategy, tech, creative and project delivery personnel to weigh in on what trends CMOs, chief growth officers and heads of digital should keep their eye on. Here are our top takeaways with our recommended approach:

Do More with Less

Tight budgets and escalating expectations give CMOs the incentive to re-examine their organization’s tools, partners and ways of working.Don’t get too far into Q1 without going through this exercise:

• Plan from the top. Establish your marketing communications goals and show everyone how they align with your company’s biggest needs. Prioritize everything you do and drop anything that can’t deliver on meeting higher level goals.

• Examine your technology and understand how it operates—after all, it’s one of your biggest line items. Pay attention to the big-ticket, budget-eating expenses for licensing, operations and ongoing tech vendor contracts. Lead (or have someone you trust lead) a detailed analysis of what you are paying for and where you are getting value. While you are doing this, start some pilot projects with “composable,” “headless” and “decoupled” technologies because they are less expensive, faster, give you more control and are more flexible.

• More signal, less noise with your media & marketing campaigns. If you can’t measure the business outcomes of a media spend, don’t do it. Pay attention to the signal: things like leads conversions, CSAT (customer satisfaction score), awareness. Avoid the noise: don’t settle for doing whatever you did last year, running a campaign for the loudest voice in the room, or greenlighting any weakly-justified plans agencies send you.

Stay Focused When Exploring Generative AI

Yes, AI can probably do anything, but start out with small, focused pilot programs to find out what works for your organization.

• Test and learn. To date, there is no clear picture of how AI will benefit marketing capabilities and effectiveness. Instead of waiting, develop two to three hypotheses on how it might work for you and run small pilot programs to evaluate. Spread them across your major initiatives—for example, run a small pilot of a customer data-driven AI chat experience to improve CSAT, one aimed at media optimization and one at marketing workflow efficiency. Make sure you measure the results.

• Be skeptical of the pitches from big platform companies that want to sell you software and services. Become highly informed and always require that they show direct benefits between AI and your business goals. Don’t get caught up on big, expensive implementation projects until you know what works.

• Don’t wait to educate yourself on AI. AI really is going to change everything, and unless you are on the brink of retirement, you need to be fluent. Spend the time reading many of the excellent resources out there from analysts, and most importantly get some hands-on experience.

Technology is the tool of the CMO’s trade.

Use your role as a growth driver to influence the technology infrastructure and operating model. CMOs who are effective depend on their growth strategies and their ability to seamlessly and quickly deploy business-building initiatives that positively impact their customers. That’s why you need to play a deeper role in selecting, acquiring and managing digital technology. You wouldn’t hand off your plans to manage the brand—technology is no different. You need to have a high level of expertise in your organization that allows you to innovate, take more advantage of data-driven marketing and provide your target customers a positive experience.

Is there a trend we missed? Let us know! Meanwhile, from all of us at VShift, we wish you a happy and prosperous new year.