Marketing strategy 2024: What should you stop, start or continue?

A new year offers an opportunity for marketers to undergo a transformation in terms of tools, approaches, content creation, and, of course, to develop a powerful marketing strategy that will bring results.

Together with Cambridge Network we hosted a panel event featuring Sookio specialists from campaigns, strategy and visual content to set out what’s on the horizon, like elections in the UK and US, the Paris Olympics, and big shifts in social media and AI.

What should you Stop, Start or Continue to create an effective strategy that draws on the latest trends and best practices in marketing? Here’s a snapshot of their thinking!

Kat Selby, Digital Marketing Strategist 

🔴 Stop: Using insufficient tools. Marketing teams of one and social media managers can easily find themselves knee-deep in admin and using multiple, sometimes clunky tools for regular tasks.  

Consider reviewing your tool selections for 2024 – perhaps finding a tool or two which can do multiple jobs for you.  

For example, at Sookio we love using Loomly for social media planning, content creation and scheduling. Canva’s AI integration has been incredibly helpful for swift, impactful graphic design, too.  

🟢 Start: Developing a generative AI policy. How will your company use generative AI in its marketing and comms? What do your customers, clients and staff need to know? Explore generative AI policies created by universities and UK Government for a basic guide in how to produce such a document.  

Blocking out time for strategic and creative thinking. Amidst all your high priority tasks, day-to-day admin and meetings, it can be difficult to carve out time for future-focused, strategic thinking and planning. Blocking out half a day in your calendar on a monthly basis (or more regularly if you can) may transform the quality of your creative ideas generation. Sitting in a neutral space you’ve not visited before, or gathering together for a walking meeting, can make a big difference too. 

🟡 Continue: Making the most of your progress. Celebrating wins large and small is something I’d recommend for 2024, and every year! Through external comms, profile your success stories in detail through blogs, testimonials, quotes, and case studies. Invite your community to review you on Google Business and social media, and to share their own content around events and notable milestones.  

With internal comms, take pride in collating marketing reports and sharing them with senior leadership where fitting, together with your closest collaborators, highlighting things which have fascinated, surprised or brought you joy in a given month or quarter. At Sookio we have a Slack channel to celebrate daily progress and wins, which we find both uplifting and motivating! 

Hector Corey, Campaigns Manager

 🔴 Stop: Marketing without data. Data analysis is a large part of managing paid digital marketing campaigns. Being able to analyse the data that is collected from a campaign will allow you to see in almost real-time what is and isn’t working.  

On most platforms this can be broken down into geographic and demographic data. For example, information depicting where your paid ads are being shown most, and in which locations your target audience are taking the desired action when seeing your ads. For demographics, the data will show which audience groups are responding to the ads and which aren’t. On LinkedIn these audience groups will be split by parameters such as company industry, the user’s job role, and their seniority. 

Analysing this data and then using it to inform decisions going forward in the campaign is crucial to its long-term success. Noticing which locations or audience demographics aren’t responding to a certain ad will allow you to alter your campaign to no longer target these demographics that aren’t responding, therefore focus your ad spend purely to those that are, leading to an increase in the efficiency of your ad performance as a whole. 

🟢 Start: Optimising your website for mobile. 33% of web traffic was from a mobile device in August 2023. Very often I see sites that look great on desktop, but when I go on the same site on my mobile the layout has shifted, with images and text not fitting onto the page correctly, and calls to action pushing to the base of the site or not being visible at all.  

Website visitors are not known for their patience when deciding whether or not the site they’re on is going to be able to deal with their query! An influx of web traffic that lands on a mobile site, finds the formatting to be an issue and then quickly returns to their search engine results is going to increase your websites bounce rate. This means the number of users that land on your site and leave again before taking any sort of action; an action being clicking somewhere on the site through to another page.  

An increase in your site’s bounce rate will in time lead to your ranking on search engines reducing, and your website will appear further down the Google search results, reducing overall traffic to your site.  

🟡 Continue: Using LinkedIn. The platform you run a paid campaign from is going to depend on the purpose of the campaign, as well as the audience you are trying to target. If your sector is knowledge-driven, LinkedIn is likely to be the most effective platform for your ad campaigns. 

LinkedIn may not be the go-to platform for you depending on where your audience resides, but if so, its advanced and precise targeting options are invaluable. Due to the personal benefit to LinkedIn users of keeping their profile up to date, in terms of things like current company, job role, seniority, advertisers running ads on LinkedIn can create campaigns in the knowledge that, if correctly set-up, they will be able to communicate directly with their target audience. 

LinkedIn is also a vital tool for driving organic growth, whether that’s on your own page or your company’s. Regularly posting and engaging with content relevant to your network will allow you to build your online presence and expand your network, also increasing the reach of your content exponentially.

This is important to do either way, as paid ads will link to your company's page, so having a LinkedIn profile that has already had some work put into it will do wonders for your credibility when being visited by LinkedIn users that are interacting with yours or your business’ page for the first time. 

Also, for those that are early in their journey and don’t yet have the budget to allocate to LinkedIn advertising, building up your organic presence is free, and has the most longevity of any advertising approach. If you build a great LinkedIn page, over time you won’t need to rely on paid campaigns to reach your community.

A paid campaign is going to be necessary when you want to reach people that aren’t already following or connected with you, but the campaign ends when you stop spending on it. Your personal LinkedIn presence can be powerful in reaching and building rapport with decision makers, stakeholders and colleagues alike.  

Sue Keogh, Founder

🔴 Stop: Worrying about what everyone else is doing. In challenging economic times, you might find yourself looking at the competition and thinking how they’re smarter, wittier, more commercially minded. Or on a personal front, spend hours on LinkedIn reading all the chest-beating success stories and feel like you’re falling behind. 

Truth is, you know your brand better than anyone. You know your audience. You know your products and services. All that energy focusing on everyone else could be put to better use in making your existing marketing efforts more effective.  

So in the spirit of stopping, which are channels can you cull? Which networking events have brought you plenty of hangovers – but zero business opportunities? Which tools are you paying for – but never using?  

🟢 Start: Experimenting. Speaking of tools, there is a ton of exciting stuff happening with AI right now that can give you marketing shortcuts, whether it’s editing, transcribing or research. Getting to grips with ChatGPT means you can talk about it confidently with customers and colleagues. 

You may also want to try different social media platforms, or a whole new approach, such as swapping blog posts for in-person events.  

Looking at the data means you may discover a whole new revenue stream that could benefit your business. Or a change in user behaviour that means you should adapt your approach. See 2024 as the year you shake things up a bit, try something different. 

🟡 Continue: To stay curious. There is SO much happening right now with artificial intelligence and big shifts in social media platforms and user behaviour. When developing the best marketing strategy for 2024, make it flexible enough to bend, because with the big shifts ahead in the economy and the upcoming elections in the UK and US, it could be a bumpy ride!

Lots of ups I hope, but a few downs along the way. And the best way to tackle this is to expect it to happen so nothing takes you by surprise.  

Keep up to speed with podcasts, industry events and blog posts. And keep an eye on the news all the time, so you’re always aware of what’s on the horizon. 

Gav O’Brien, Co-Founder, Clearhead 

🔴 Stop: Thinking you will just ‘fix it in post’. Plan your content to ensure that you get maximum bang-for-your-buck with your investment. Normally time-wise you should be looking at 60% planning time, 10% filming time and 30% post production. Try to give yourself enough time to ensure you don’t get into multi-version fatigue: you should only be looking at 3 versions of any piece of content… not 10. 

🟢 Start: Developing a content calendar. Pick two of your top social platforms if it seems overwhelming, get a template together (maybe Sookio can provide) and start filling it out. Perhaps use ChatGPT to give you some ideas for wording and ideas, then think about how your ‘hero, hub, help and home’ content will be to help to reinforce your message.  

Remember: hero pieces of content are at the very top of the funnel, to ensure that you get the maximum impact across a vast amount of people. Hub content is more to reinforce your message further down the funnel, case studies for instance, or informative, longer pieces to get a real insight into the product and service.

You then have help content, which are short, sharp pieces (normally animation) that help to answer your FAQs and then in turn, get your SEO rankings up.

Finally home, which is the user generated content that you get your team to do. Be careful to give specific focus for this. Daily content for Instagram stories is the perfect example. Anything more than that could result in quality that is below what you would expect, so steer clear! 

🟡 Continue: Putting storytelling at the heart of everything, which resonates on an emotional level with your audience. Does it reflect your values and ethos? Are your campaign pillars backed up with great stories?

In Olympic year for instance, heroes will be the name of the game – how can your organisation tap into that? The emotion can be funny, fun, inspirational, anything as long as it allows a feeling beyond just watching a piece of moving content. This will go a long way to creating a lasting impression. 

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