In 2024, digital marketing will have to be more precise and goal-oriented, especially with extremely dynamic consumer behavior. Marketing leaders need to focus on priorities and strategize smartly to optimize their budget to support their consumers’ growth journey.
Marketing budgets will be critical for 2024, to meet the challenges in data, technology, tools, and resources.
Gartner’s Survey reveals that 71% of CMOs lacked the adequate budget to execute their marketing strategy fully in 2023.
With emerging technology solutions and methods that help to collate relevant data and use tools, resources, and marketing channels, marketers need to look at 2024 with renewed focus. The threat of recession looming on this year has made CMOs wary of over-investing.
Here are a few strategies to optimize the marketing budget and make the company recession-proof.
Strategy 1: Market to Existing Consumers
Marketing to an existing customer base will be ideal for optimizing the marketing budget. It’s because marketers know their customers’ demands and how they want to perceive solutions. so resources can be spent on existing channels, platforms, and ad services to upgrade and use interesting methods to engage them.
It will be more convenient to market the products and services to existing consumers because of:
- Availability of right customer data
- Alignment of data with platforms, like CDP
- Integrated platforms or technologies like AI for content personalization for various campaigns and ads
Therefore, in 2024, brands must continue to engage their existing customers through emails, ads, newsletters, and events, with perhaps more creative methods of engagement.
Creativity and relevance can be added using technologies like Generative AI, natural language, and more.
Strategy 2: Boost Marketing Skills
Robert Half’s recent study on Marketing and Creative Hiring Trends finds that 84% of marketing leaders face challenges in finding skilled marketing talent.
That makes outsourcing of marketing and advertising services a viable option. This, in turn, also increases expenditure, which affects the budget adversely.
Investing in in-house marketing skilling will be a good option to cover the existing talent gaps. So brands need to identify a portion of the 2024 marketing budget for training and upskilling marketing resources.
Upskilling needs to cover different MarTech tools, extracting data, analytics, reporting, platforms, and using different channels.
Correct use of this component is a top priority as marketers move into 2024.
Strategy 3: Provide Value for Data
Customers are becoming particular about the privacy of the data they share with brands. That’s why marketers will now have to provide transparency on data collection and usage while heading into the new digital marketing phase.
This will boost trust with potential and existing customers, allowing marketers to build richer data profiles.
In turn, marketers can increase budgets to add more creative attributes to attract more valuable customers at scale.
Ways to boost the budget can include:
- Loyalty programs
- Offering customers discounts
- Special access to products or services
- Attending events for free
Through this, marketers can engage customers closely and boost revenue-generating activities such as purchases or referrals, thus boosting the budget for the future.
Strategy 4: Align investments for Using Right Marketing Channels
Multichannel marketing expenditure is an essential component for maximizing the marketing budget.
There are a number of online channels and platforms available today. The CMO has to make the right decisions about which media investments will generate more ROI.
This is a strategic activity that needs keen insights into the customers’ preferred channels, ways of perceiving ads, and posts on each channel.
With more information into customer data, it becomes easier to trace the buying journey, and enable brands to provide a much better customer experience (CX).
But interestingly, many CMOs have shifted from digital-first to hybrid multichannel strategies.
Gartner, in its blog, has mentioned that about 50.5% of CMOs will consider allocating channel budgets based on the consideration and conversion of customers per quarter in 2024.
In the same Gartner survey, a portion of the marketing budget for 2024 will be allocated to online and offline channels.
Online channels will take the largest budget share by 56%, and offline channels will account for 44% of the budget.
In this, social advertising will top the list, followed by paid search and digital display.
The base of this allocation is the marketer’s knowledge of channels their customers use the most. They can then use these insights to invest in more hybrid strategies for the best returns.
Strategy 5: Focus on Creating Smart Content
While businesses head in 2024, it will be more important for marketers to re-evaluate and re-arrange the content flow. Unique content delivery will catch customers’ and clients’ attention!
In fact, marketers will need to ensure that the quality of content remains intact over quantity.
With that said, customer-focused content will be an interesting way to highlight a brand’s offerings.
Such content will also keep customers updated and engaged with the latest trends in the content format.
This strategy suggests that CMOs should allocate a budget to repurposing previous content and innovate content production methods.
They can invest in AI tools like Generative AI and use platforms like ChatGPT and other chatbots to generate on-point content. Such content creations can be used for ads, campaigns, videos, emails, and more to compel customers to take action immediately.
For SEO, marketers can generate long-tail keywords, boost user searchability, and provide quick and exact content information.
This will increase the likelihood of achieving higher organic performance, leading to higher marketing ROI.
Conclusion
Understanding where and how much to invest in marketing to increase the budget can still be challenging in 2024.
However, analyzing and re-evaluating marketing efforts using these strategies can eventually help to align investments appropriately.
Under a suitable budget requirement, CMOs should focus on skilling marketing talent and upskilling their knowledge to meet emerging marketing demands and goals.
