What Marketers Should Unlearn in 2024

The year 2023 was relatively a good year for marketers, but in the New Year, CMOs may be staring at a number of challenges, including economic uncertainties, the eventual demise of third-party data, and rising customer expectations, all occurring during a time when brands are trying to get more done with less. Hence for brands to succeed in the marketing game for 2024, marketing specialists need to unlearn some of the practices that were working for them thus far, but may not be helpful in the new year.

According to a recent Gartner report, 71% of CMOs believe they need more budget to fully execute their strategy in 2023, this means that only 29% of CMOs have the perfect budget in executing their marketing strategies. Every brand’s objective is to get higher visibility, more customer engagement and retain customers for life.

Let’s take a look at the 5 key things that Marketers should let go of in 2023.

1. Move on from 3rd party cookies:

Third-party cookies up until now were seen as an essential tool for marketers to offer personalized buying experiences. The end of the cookie in 2024 inhibits tracking and storing consumer browsing and shopping data, thus making targeted ads less accurate and effective. The retail sector is seen to be the most affected after the death of third-party data and are looking out for alternatives to target their customers.

So what’s next?

In order to survive and thrive in a cookie-less future brands need to be ready with alternative technologies and conversational channels like WhatsApp, RCS, Instagram, and Telegram which are promising channels, and be prepared with a solid cookieeless marketing strategy.

For instance, marketers can action opt-ins on WhatsApp, and target customers by sending promotional campaign messages straight to their WhatsApp chats. Depending on the ROI and value you want to gain brands should choose the best conversational channel that fits your needs.

2. Monetise ads more:
Your brand successfully runs compelling ads on websites and apps, garnering significant attention, but the challenge lies in converting prospects into leads. At this point, it becomes crucial to optimize your ads with precision and efficiency, exploring diverse options to enhance conversion rates.

An effective choice is utilizing Ads that Click to WhatsApp instead of landing pages as CTAs for your ad campaigns. By integrating your ads with WhatsApp, you reduce the number of hoops for your prospects to turn into a lead, making the experience conversational, enabling a better brand recall, and bringing the lead closer to conversion.

Also read: A comprehensive guide on Ads that Click to WhatsApp: Your roadmap to capturing 100% leads

3. Chatbots are passe – LLM-powered chatbots mean business:

Nowadays Chatbots are everywhere and every brand prefers to use chatbots so they can converse with their customer anytime, anywhere, and on their preferred channel. But these basic chatbots have all the pre-programmed answers and are too good at handling common queries.

But what if your customer texts, ‘ Sorry, I’m expecting a more detailed and personalized answer to my query.’ that’s where the Large Language Model (LLM) Chatbots come into the picture. As the world is buzzing over ChatGPT everyone knows how it’s helping us with human-like responses to natural language queries. Rather, the basic Chatbots are more often reactive and only answer the questions that they know, but we get a proactive answer from LLM chatbots deliver human-like answers that are more accurate and contextually relevant.

ACE LLM is highly capable of handling all customer conversations without any human intervention. They can even provide users with relevant and personalized product/service recommendations which will manage dialogue flow and automate end-to-end user journeys. LLMs can automate most of the marketer’s work freeing up employees that require human expertise. As these models are capable of handling vast data the accuracy of the tasks also increases as they can learn your customer patterns and then make better predictions.

4.Not overlooking First-party customer data:

As we all know, the era of third-party data will be over by 2024, and first-party data and zero-party data will be the future. First-party data is the foundation for understanding your customers better in real-time. As a marketer, if this data is been used vigilantly it gives you a complete outline of the customer profile.

Today’s customer just doesn’t rely on one channel to communicate with their brand, but they expect the communication to be omnichannel. So it’s important to create the personalized brand experience that your customers expect and know how to drive them back again and again. When you have first-party data of your customers and send out the right type of content you will have a complete view of the customer’s buyer journey on how he moved from one channel to another.

In third-party data, there are high chance that you and your competitor may have the same customer data, but in first-party data, all you have is the unique data points of your customers. With this, you can dive into personalization and test, tweak and retest your campaigns as per your customer’s preferences.

5. Understanding customer churn analysis & reduce customer churn:

If your customers ever feel inconvenienced in using your product or services they immediately switch to your competitors, and that’s how your customer churn happens. It’s vital to retain your customers by analyzing your customer data and taking proper actions. 

The mentioned costs highlight the crucial need for retaining existing customers.

Imagine this scenario: A customer who bought some items from your e-commerce store and wanted to return that product, he has been constantly calling customer care but no one is answering his calls. Due to this poor post-purchase customer experience your customer won’t feel like buying any further products from your online store. Instead, if your customer care agent is not available, the customers should have a segue from calls to chats. The customers could simply drop their queries on WhatsApp and get the proper response from the team. This is one strategy and a more specific way you can avoid a customer churn. Gupshup’s Customer Engagement Platform is the perfect platform for your brand to get timely analysis of customer information and to act accordingly.

In conclusion, marketers should be open to learning, unlearning, and relearning things as and when required to stay agile and grow in this rapidly changing world.
The year 2024 is a myriad of opportunities for marketers and should optimize the full potential of Conversational AI. Marketers should consider Conversational AI as their teammate in their team and how they can integrate it into their workspace to enhance productivity and creativity.

To succeed in winning customers marketers must master the customer experience to drive business growth while aligning their objectives with the company’s goals. Try Gupshup today and see how it can help your business grow.