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13 Things That’ll Make You A Better Marketer in 2024

Advertising Analytics Data Marketing

January 8, 2024

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend and your 2024 is off to a fantastic start. It’s shocking to me that I’ve been writing this for almost a year – it feels like I started it yesterday, but here we are, on Issue #45.

While I’m not a major proponent of New Year’s stuff (I’d just rather you did it now vs. waiting around for an arbitrary excuse) ‘

Without further ado (and in honor of Ms. 2023 herself, Taylor Swift) here are 13 things I want to see more of in 2024:

1. A Diversified Approach To Growth

Over the past few years, the collective definition of “growth” has gradually been reduced to “acquiring new customers.” And make no mistake, getting more new customers is absolutely essential.

But there’s more to growth than just new customers.

Growth – from a pure mathematical perspective, comes from exactly three vectors:

New Customers
Selling More To Existing Customers
Improving Margins

2 and 3 have been relegated to the back burner (if they’re even on the stove) as a result of our (collective) new customer acquisition obsession. That’s not sustainable in a world with soaring CPMs, increasing competitive density and decreasing product differentiation.

The brands that win in 2024 will be ones that aggressively pursue all three growth vectors – which means a renewed emphasis on customer delight (retention is such a dirty word; after all, shouldn’t your customers want to continue to do business with your brand?), along with real financial accountability including + beyond the ad account.

At the end of the day, every brand’s new customer pool is finite. Digital ad markets are structured such that, all things being equal, the next click is more expensive than the last. If you’re focusing all of your efforts on acquiring new customers, but not putting at least that same level of effort into delighting your existing customers and improving your overall margins, you’re going to be in for a rough ride.

2. Financial Accountability & Financial Metrics

2024 should be the year that marketing and finance finally become friends.

In my decade-plus of writing and speaking about this exact topic, I’ve never been more optimistic that we’re genuinely, precariously close to seeing it become reality. A substantial share of the credit for this must go to the DTC community, which has vocally, transparently and relentlessly preached the gospel of marketing finance – though they are hardly alone.

My personal barometer for this is how many new business pitches ask for impression or view-based reporting. Just a few years ago, it was north of 75% – 3 in 4 clients expected it. Today? Less than 30%.

The same is true for access to the CFO. Just a few years ago, most clients were initially-resistant to the notion of their agency speaking with their CFO. Today? Many welcome it. Most clients voluntarily bring their CFO or COO onto calls, so we can get the business-level information we need to build smarter, more effective campaigns.

We’ve come a long way. And we have a long way still to go.

Marketing has been viewed as a cost center by CFOs (and the like) for far too long. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Marketing can – and should – be a profit center for every organization. The technology and the capability to communicate that in terms financial professionals understand is finally widely available.

It feels daunting to make the leap, but there are two easy ways to do so:

Get clear & specific about the business objective behind a marketing objective – the easiest way to move from Marketing Activity & Vanity Reporting (MAVR) to Financial Reporting is to get clear about the actual goal. This means asking precise, probing questions, such as:
1. What is the actual number of new customers we need? Over what period?
2. What is our expected churn rate over that period?
3. Is churn accelerating or decelerating? Is it higher for certain customer/client types?
4. At what rate do Leads convert to MQLs? At what rate do MQLs convert to SQLs? SQLs to Closed/Won?
5. Which products have the highest contribution margin? The lowest?
6. Are there products that correlate to higher repurchase rates?
7. What is the total expected contribution margin return for this campaign?
8. What is the expected value of different lead types?
9. What discount rate do we use as a company?
10. What is the lead lifecycle time lag?
11. Does how quickly a customer re-purchases correlate to their total value as a customer? How strong is that correlation?
12. What are the variable expenses associated with each SKU/Service?

Align Your Reporting with the Organization’s Reporting – it’s safe and comfortable to do MAVR reporting – after all, no-one knows what it means (not even you!). Take this example:

Hi Boss:

Here’s the Q4 paid media report for Acme Co:

Impressions: 75,257

CPM: $334.83

Clicks: 4,372

CTR: 5.81%

Spend: $25,951

CPC: $5.94

Conversions: 460

Conv. Rate: 10.52%

Cost/Conv.: $56.42

Qual. Leads: 227

Qual. Rate: 49.3%

Cost / Qual: $114.32

SQLs: 46

Qual to SQL: 20.26%

Cost/SQL: $564.15

This is the kind of thing that most marketing people send. And it positions marketing as a cost center in two ways: (1) you’re leading with the marketing results at the top (impressions/clicks) and putting the onus on the executive to read the entire thing, and (2) you’re expecting the executive to do a lot of mental math + work to evaluate if any of this is good or bad.

Instead, align your reporting to the business and include historical context. Craft a data-informed narrative that is easy to digest, leads with the thing the executive cares MOST about, and implicitly demonstrates progress. Use the data and the insights you gleaned from asking those tough questions to provide clear, organizational-focused reports:

In Q4, we generated a total of 46 SQLs via Paid Media on a spend of $25,951. This represents an increase of 23% vs. Q4 2022 and 48% vs. Q4 2021, on a 3% increase in spend. The pipeline expected value (total contract value * sales probability of close, as provided by Mark in Sales) for these SQLs is $725,295 as of December 31, 2023, representing a 26.9x return on paid media investment and an overall return of 14.2x on total marketing investment (including contractors, agency fees, contractors + overhead) during this time.

These results are 17.9% above the top-end of our forecast for Q4 (forecasted range was 31-39 SQLs), and represent a YoY increase in expected Pipeline value of 47%. This suggests that our adjustments to the campaign, revised targeting and new creative are much better at pre-qualifying prospects and ensuring that our sales team is only speaking with people who want to do business with Acme.

Yes, this will require more work (you’ll have to talk to Mark in Sales), but it actually includes *less* information. There’s no mention of impressions or clicks or CPMs or conversions here. It’s straight to the point: the executive cares about SQLs + Pipeline value + return on marketing investment. Guess what’s here? Those things. Progress? We gotcha – look at those YoY numbers and the comparison of actual vs. forecast.

This is the tip of the iceberg as to what the marriage of finance and marketing can look like. Go ahead – take a stab at it. Get out of your comfort zone.

3. Embrace Forecasting

I believe that the single-greatest needle-moving exercise that most brands – whether D2C, SaaS, B2B, Lead Gen, eComm, whatever – can do to improve their 2024 outcomes is to embrace forecasting.

Forecasting is often considered an exercise in modeling; I believe that’s fundamentally wrong. Done well, it is an exercise in shared understanding, accountability and execution.

A well-built forecast breaks down your target outcomes into their constituent components – impressions, clicks, costs, conversions, etc. using rates (CPM, CTR, CVR), and connects your marketing results to your business in the form of a P&L.

This enables three things:

Understand when a given top-line result is actually off-target vs. simply being unlucky or noisy
Diagnose the actual root causes of anomalous performance
Correctly set targets in ad platforms, based on the underlying realities of your business.

But even more than that, a forecast grounds everything that you do from a marketing perspective in business reality. It forces everyone to see the bigger picture and creates a shared understanding of where value is created for the organization.

When everyone involved can’t see how their inputs connect to a business (or a client’s business) outputs, there’s going to be issues. People are hard-wired to solve for what they can see; a forecast gives them the tools to see the full picture.

If you haven’t invested the time in creating a real forecast for your business/organization, I can’t recommend doing so enough. Done well and used properly, there’s no higher-leverage activity you can take. A great forecast is worth far more than its weight in gold.

4. Less Resulting + More Emphasis on Process

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made (and observed countless others make) is what Annie Duke describes as “Resulting” – evaluating something (a decision, a campaign, a creative) based on the end result, while ignoring the underlying process, metrics and context.

There are so many times where I see an ad account (especially a lead-generation account) evaluated exclusively on end goals like signed contracts, retained leads or contracted revenue, usually over very short periods of time (days/weeks).

The problem with this approach is simple: these end-outcomes are incredibly random and noisy in the short-run, but quite predictive in the long run. A proper evaluation must temper end results with an understanding of the underlying process.

Consider a recent account I reviewed:

For December 2023

85 Total Leads

65 MQLs

21 SQLs

16 Contracts Sent for Signature

5 Contracts Returned Signed

2023 Avg. Relevant Lead Rate: ~60%

2023 Avg. Contract Return Rate: ~75%

The client looked at this as the PPC campaign wasn’t working, as they were hoping for 8-12 returned contracts in December. And, by that metric, they were right. But I think this is the wrong metric, especially in this case over this time period.

Why? At least two reasons:

December is always a weird month. People are gone for 10+ days at the end. Everyone is busy in the week leading up to the holidays – and signing contracts isn’t exactly a fun activity
There’s a ton of noise that’s bombarding these users – December is perhaps the most ad-intense month of the year, and this company’s target (normal people) are getting bombarded with requests. Things are going to fall through the cracks.
Nearly 30% of the leads generated for this month happened on or After December 21, 2023. Most leads take a week to 10 days from start (lead submitted) to finish (signed contract).

This is a classic case of resulting.

Using this exact data, we can confirm two things: (1) the underlying process – defined as Relevant Lead Rate + # of Contracts sent for Signature – is good and (2) the return rate is abnormally low – 31% vs. a long-run average of about 75%.

The proper evaluation for this is to say that the process is good and on the right track, but more data is needed to understand why the return rate is so low vs. normal.

It’s easy to look at the top-line numbers: 5 Signed vs. 8-12 Expected and say the marketing wasn’t working.

It’s much more difficult to take a step back, communicate clearly what’s actually happening, evaluate the underlying process, and accept that sometimes you get unlucky in the short-run and that larger factors (like, for instance, December) happen.

Yes, results matter. 100%. But the underlying process matters, too. It’s very easy to get so focused on the big picture that you mistake luck + noise (good or bad) for the process. And that’s a very, very dangerous thing to do.

5. Smarter Budgeting

I hope 2024 is the year that marketers, CFOs and CMOs all internalize the fact that customers don’t shop, consider or buy based on a brand’s budgetary cycle. Arbitrary, month-based budgets are one of the most significant ways brands undermine their own growth and profitability.

The fact is that acceptable ad unit supply – whether that’s qualified searches, or impressions to qualified individuals on Meta, LinkedIn, etc. – are variable. Some days there are a ton. Other days, there are virtually none.

Adapting to this environment requires three things: (1) proper cost controls + performance efficiency targets based on your business; (2) a modern ad account structure that connects those targets to ad account platforms and (3) a fluid budget allocation.

My perspective on this is simple: as long as we’re bringing in customers/leads at or above our quality target and at or below our target CPA, I’m happy to keep spending. That’s the philosophy we use for our own advertising and for our own brands (with our own money), and it’s the one that I encourage every client to adopt as well.

6. Say “Goodbye” To The Brand/Performance Marketing Divide

For as long as I’ve been in marketing, there’s been a divide between “Performance” marketing and “Brand” marketing.

I think that divide is arbitrary, silly and fundamentally wrong.

At the end of the day, Brand Marketing & Performance Marketing have the same objective: to maximize the value of the organization they are promoting. That’s done in four ways:

Create Preference among your Target Audience
Accelerate Deal Velocity
Increase Deal Size
Drive Upsells & Cross-Sells

That’s it.

Preference – provides insulation against pricing (commodity) pressures and opens a new vector on which the organization can compete and win (brand).

Deal Velocity – Whether for B2B or B2C refers to the time it takes for a “cold” prospective customer to a real, paying customer. A strong brand increases deal velocity – after all, you know what you’re getting. No-one worries about what they’re getting (or feels compelled to do research) about buying the Louis Vuitton bag or the Rolex watch or the stay at the Four Seasons. Why? Because those organizations have built strong, rock-solid, trustworthy brands.

Deal Size – preference comes with premium pricing.

Upsells & Cross-Sells – if I’m already a customer, and I already love the initial product I’ve purchased, and I trust this brand – why wouldn’t I go back and buy more? Why wouldn’t I refer my friends and family?

Here’s the thing: brand marketing should impact each and every one of these four vectors. Performance marketing should impact each and every one of these four vectors.

Brand marketing should be held accountable to impacting those four vectors; performance marketing should be held accountable to those four vectors.

At the end of the day, brand + performance have the same objective. They use many of the same platforms and tactics. All brand marketing is performance marketing. All performance marketing is brand marketing.

The sooner we abandon the idea of top-of-maze (top of funnel) = brand marketing and end-of-maze (bottom of funnel) marketing, and start thinking holistically about the customer’s journey + how our brand impacts that journey, the more successful we’ll be.

7. Real, Authentic, Impactful Content

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have fundamentally changed how brands create content – though not necessarily for the better. At their core, LLMs reduce complex, linguistic questions into statistics problems – which is great for creating stuff that *sounds like* something helpful and authoritative, but often is not so helpful.

The best way to think about what ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest of these “AI” tools have done for content is to “explode the middle” of the bell curve:

These tools have made it easy for anyone to create solidly mediocre, moderately-accurate and quite-impressive-sounding content. Content today – especially content generated using AI tools – is a sea of sameness. It’s generic and bland. It’s not special.

But in that sea of sameness, the truly exceptional stands out.

The value of truly exceptional, authentic, “god-damn-that’s-good” content has never been higher. Commit to investing in that content for 2024, and you’ll reap the dividends from those investments for years to come.
And if you don’t believe me, believe the former Editor-in-Chief of Shopify Plus, the always-inspirational Aaron Orendorff:

8. One-To-One Communication

While I am bearish on LLMs as true, authoritative content creators, I couldn’t be more bullish on their potential to enable true, one-to-one personalization. I’ve previously used the example of Recart’s AI SMS, and I still believe that’s the gold standard for what this could be in the near-term.

The brands that identify the optimal ways to leverage these tools, along with guardrails and parameters, to create unique experiences for their customers/clients/users – whether that’s a custom SMS or email, a personalized direct-mail letter, or just a more user-friendly, user-centric chat experience will be at a tremendous advantage.

All this to say: the best brands – the ones who are poised to win tomorrow – aren’t simply focused on creating exceptional, “wow-that’s-good” content; they’re also thinking about how that content can be leveraged to power personalized experiences.

9. Make Some Ugly Ads

Finally, I wish more brands would embrace ugly ads. In the 50+ ad accounts I’ve reviewed in 2023, over 75% have exclusively “produced” ads. Only a few have exclusively “ugly” ads.

Far too many brands continue to over-invest in uber-polished creative. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with making nice ads, the reality is that they don’t look or feel authentic, and most of them (by and large) don’t perform as well as their less-polished counterparts.

Social media – whether it’s Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok – is an authenticity-dominated space. Uber-produced ads are the antithesis of authentic – they’re scripted, they’re cropped, they’re carefully constructed. And that is what makes them feel fake – and in the mind of your target audience, if your ad is fake, then your claims and your product are probably fake, too.

Most (50%+) of our top-performing creative isn’t polished. Some of our best-performing, highest-returning assets were shot on iPhones with poster board backgrounds, hand-drawn call-outs and our team members jumping in to be models.

Production quality (and production cost) does not correlate to performance.

It’s OK (and advisable) to test different ad types, formats and aesthetics, alongside different value props (and demonstrations of those value props).

For instance, I love this ad from Dragonfire Tools:

The thing is ugly. It’s shot on an iPhone. The lighting is suboptimal. There’s clutter in the background. But the entire point is to show just how strong and durable the workbench is – which it does pretty masterfully by showing the CEO standing in the drawer.

If you’re in the market for a workbench, and you’re worried about drawers getting busted by your heavy tools, this puts your mind at ease. And the best part of this ad is that it doesn’t say anything – there’s no text. There’s no direct claim being made. Instead, it shows the proof that the claim is true.

This probably took 2-3 hours, from start-to-finish, to create (if that) – and it has probably out-performed ads that took 50 hours to conceptualize, script, execute and produce.

This is an ugly ad, but it is an effective ad. Let’s make more basic, ugly, not–over-produced ads in 2024.

10. An Emphasis on User Experience

Growth doesn’t always need to look like new clients/customers, or larger budgets, or bigger ROAS numbers. It can also look like higher conversion rates, higher close rates, improved customer retention, and sky-high customer loyalty. All of those things – to some degree – are a byproduct of an exceptional customer/client experience.

The ability to create an exceptional user experience for your target audience is a superpower.

That starts with your website – but it doesn’t end there (and there’s 100% a CRO-based newsletter in the works that will drop in the next few weeks).

One of the easiest ways to get started is to go through your brand’s entire user experience – from start to finish to problem to solution – from the perspective of a potential customer/client.

A few ideas for what that might look like:

Review your ads + SERPs – not just the creative, but the ad unit on actual placements. Ask others unfamiliar with your brand if what you’re putting into the world makes sense and is compelling to them – and if not, why not? Ad/Experience misalignment is one of the most common – and most avoidable – mistakes I see in ad accounts.
Go through you landing page experience – I wish more brands would focus more on landing pages (as I wrote here) – but until that wish becomes reality, there is an advantage to be gained by investing as much time (if not more) on your landers as you do on your ad creative.
Check your forms + checkout – How often have you gone through your actual checkout/form submit experience? If you’re like most brands, the answer is “never” – and that’s an issue. Take 10 minutes and do it – then make sure you implement negative events (see here) on them. Ask yourself if the experience you have is the one you’d want – or if there are parts that are frustrating, rage-inducing and/or just clunky (like waiting for a discount, or a sale code that doesn’t automatically apply, or a redundant form field).
Review the post-conversion experience – while getting the conversions are important, what happens next year is more important. Go through (not just review – experience!) every aspect of the post-conversion experience – whether that’s a call from a sales rep, an email flow, an order confirmation, a lead-up series, a demo request, an in-person tour, whatever it is. These touchpoints are the highest-leverage elements of the entire journey; they’re make-or-break for marketing performance.
Call customer service/help – for a lot of marketers, the sale/contract is the end of their responsibility/purview – which is an incredibly limiting perspective/mindset. It’s 5x cheaper (on average) to keep a current customer than it is to acquire a new one – and your customer service/support are your front-line. While I often get pushback for doing it, I’m a believer in putting in support tickets or customer service requests on client sites/apps – some good, some bad – and observing the responses.
Listen to client calls – one of my other pastimes – especially for clients that use call tracking – is to listen to actual customer/client calls. As a concrete, yeah-it-really-happened example of how valuable this can be, our team identified that a key employee was simply not working and misreporting results for a client by observing a “no-answer” pattern in calls directed to that particular employee, then digging into over 250 calls during a 3-month period.

11. Robust Data Deployment

Data is the lifeblood and optimization lever for every modern ad account. I’ve written about this extensively over the past year, because it’s just that important. And somehow, despite all of that, only about 13% of Optmyzr Ad Accounts (which tend to be on the more sophisticated end of the spectrum) are actually using customer data to inform their bidding strategies.

There’s good news and bad news in that statistic:

The good news: there’s incrementality to be had for brands that embrace Enhanced + Offline Conversions.

The bad news: we’re getting awfully close to the tipping point, where these features will go from difference-makers to tax-avoiders. When adoption of these features reaches the tipping point – usually 18-20% adoption – the accounts that do not have them will start to experience a tax rather than gain a benefit.

Modern Ad Platforms are incredibly good at giving you *exactly* what you ask for; if that’s clicks, you’ll get clicks (whether those clicks turn into conversions is another matter); if you ask for conversions, you’ll get conversions (though whether or not those conversions are the ones you want is another matter). Better data – and better data passback – allows you to be ever-more-precise in what you ask of the ad platform. That makes improving your data deployment one of (if not the) the single-most-impactful things you can do to improve your results.

Yes, there are volume requirements (you need ~30 optimization events per 28 days) and lookback challenges (you can only upload from 90 days ago) – but these are easy to overcome.

My prediction is that we’ll end 2024 with about 25% of Optmyzr Ad Accounts using Offline + Enhanced Conversions – which means the true ad account population will be about 60% of that.

If you haven’t invested the time and resources necessary to implement robust data passback from your CRM to your ad accounts, please, please make the time in Q1 2024.

12. Less Fighting The Machines

Automated bidding is relatively new – it’s been around for a decade-ish, but it’s only started to become viable at scale in the last 5 years (and genuinely excellent in the last 3).

There are still way too many agencies, media buyers, clients and even brand owners/executives who feel compelled to try to out-trade automated bidding algorithms.

The simple reality is that no one is going to out-trade a machine, just as no Wall St stock picker is going to out-trade a trading algorithm, just as no Chess grandmaster will beat Alpha Go. Not only do humans lack the mental capacity to do so, we don’t have access to the same volume of data as Meta, Google, Amazon, Walmart and Microsoft, and our view is limited to our ad account (or, for agencies, a client portfolio’s ad accounts). Less data + less visibility across an ad ecosystem + less compute capacity = a staggeringly poor capacity to make accurate predictions about the expected value of a given impression.

Now, I’m certainly not a fan of mindlessly trusting ad platforms, but I think the proper role for an account manager is to set targets and guardrails for automation, not to fight against it. The sooner advertisers embrace this new, more strategic and more forward-looking role, the better off we (and our ad accounts) will be. It’s that simple.

Less raging at the machines. More fighting alongside them to achieve your client’s goals.

13. A Renewed Emphasis on the Basics

And last but not least because 13 is also my lucky number…..There’s a ton of talk + content produced in the marketing space about advanced tactics, strategies & techniques. That’s almost exclusively what I talk about.

But the reality is that 80% of the success of any paid media program is driven by the basics: high-quality, on-going research. Weekly SERP monitoring. Diligent management. Continual updates to exclusions (negative keywords, placements, audiences, etc.). Experimentation. Ad Copy Testing.

The basics aren’t sexy. They aren’t fun to do. No-one likes checking 75 SERPs each week to see what’s changed + how Google has evolved the SERP features. It’s even less fun to go through a Search Terms Report with ~1,250 lines to exclude terms, or a list of 5,000 display placements. My preferred Wednesday afternoon does not include spot-testing user experience, conversion actions and data flows, or submitting fake tickets to customer support just to make sure everything is working.

But those are the boring, unsung heroes of outsized performance.

I’m not going to sugar-coat it and say that it’s fun – it isn’t. But it’s necessary. And it’s a lot of fun when those fundamentals start to pay dividends in the big picture.

This is a screenshot from one of our client accounts, which we took over after a lackluster H1 2023:

This shows Cost/Conversion + Conversion Volume. Monthly spend is $22,500 +/- 5% in each month depicted above. The only change to conversion actions was that we removed all double-counted + non-qualified conversions from the conversion count (which caused the M1 decline in conversions), so that we’re reporting on what the client cares about + what’s real.

This is the power of getting back to the basics. This is transformational growth in paid media. And we’re nowhere near done scaling this client’s account – they have ambitious goals for 2024, and we have a concrete plan that’s going to get us there.

Until next time,

Sam

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