If there’s one thing that preoccupies Every. Single. Marketing agency owner right now, or at least that preoccupies us greatly, it’s this: what will the agency of the future look like? Will there even be a need?
So we’ve asked around and also have our own opinions (shocking!!) but in order to answer this question, we first need to understand this: what will CMOs and companies of the future require to achieve their goals? Below is our take on what's waiting around the proverbial corner.
Want a TL;DR? Simply click on any of the topics below.
- No brand awareness, no leadgen!
- Measuring funnel correlations, not attributions
- Divergence of leadgen sources
- MoF and BoF content will rule
- The rise of SMEs and Voice of Customer
- AI won’t replace marketing jobs (yet)
No brand awareness? No leadgen!
In our recent event organized by and for B2B marketing pros, Avishai Sharon, CEO of TrenDemon shared some B2B buyer journey benchmarks they’ve been looking at. One of them observed that in H1 2024, marketers increased the spend on paid traffic to website by 120% as compared to 2023. The difference in direct & organic traffic was only 60%.
If you’ve missed the event, you can watch the recording here:
This is good, right? Yes and no. Yes because it’s always nice to have a bigger marketing budget, obviously. But no, because… your paid traffic will continue to bring poor results if you’ve no brand awareness. Companies are spending more online in order to cut through the noise and get traction. But too many are basically skipping over or not spending enough on brand awareness.
This means ROI will continue to be mediocre (at best) without sufficient investment in brand awareness. No one will click on your demo ads if they don’t know your brand. No one will give you their email address just to view an ebook. This means that all campaigns will need to include more brand awareness.
What to expect from your agency? Brand and creative will no longer be something on the side that is assigned what’s left from the budget after leadgen, but part of all marketing activities. F***ing finally!!! We’ll tie brand creative and messaging into everything we do, including lead gen.
Your agency will build ONLY integrated full-funnel brand awareness and leadgen campaigns that consider your audience’s level of acquaintance with your brand.
Measuring funnel correlations, not attribution
Marketing attribution as we know it is dead. There’s no way to determine a single source of attribution anymore (if there ever was one), and if we continue to rely solely on that, there will never be a clear picture of marketing’s performance. Correlation performance/dashboards will replace that.
What to expect from your agency? With marketing attributions becoming increasingly blurred, we’ll be looking at correlations between different marketing activities to better understand and measure the impact of campaigns. Correlations allow us to identify the connections between various marketing activities and business outcomes. Unlike attribution models that specify direct cause-and-effect relationships, correlations reveal how one factor may indirectly impact another. For example, consider measuring website visit growth following campaign launch, website conversions, increased time on site, and more.
Divergence of leadgen sources
Single platform marketing proved ineffective ages ago… Add to that the eye-watering Costs Per Leads and Opportunities, and it's clear marketers will need to explore alternative channels. The giants that dominate paid and organic campaigns–Google, LinkedIn and X–will not disappear but our reliance on them will fade as we embrace more niche, industry and ICP centric channels.
What to expect from your agency? Social media channel giants are not going anywhere and they’ll remain a necessity for a while longer–but they won’t be the only place where your audience lives. Your agency should be researching where your ICP is hanging out and suggesting niche channels and publications for you to market in.
MoF and BoF content will rule
Thanks to Gen AI, we'll continue to be inundated with more ToF content than we know what to deal with–and before you dare say that inbound marketing isn’t working anymore, think twice. Inbound strategies will need to be adjusted to embrace the MoF and BoF content that are designed around the full funnel.
What to expect from your agency? AI will write ToF content for us. In fact you don’t need an agency for stuff that AI can write; save your budget. Let your agency focus on providing real value in devising an SEO-based content strategy packed with MoF and BoF content to support your full funnel campaigns. This will become your differentiator!
The rise of SMEs and Voice of Customer
In order to provide the MoF and BoF content we mentioned above, we expect to see a rise in demand for specialists ready to share their knowledge and expertise. Marketers will also need to speak to customers as a default to ensure customer success. No more marketing to security professionals without ever having met one. Need to market to data scientists? Go and meet them at their next conference!
What to expect from your agency? In order to provide that value, agencies will need to become specialists within the sectors they work with. They’ll need to inherently know your ICP, where they hang out, what pain points they need to solve and who’s in their buying committee.
AI won’t replace our jobs (yet)
Instead it’ll be used (as it already is) more and more frequently to take over the menial repetitive tasks and also research and comparisons. This doesn’t mean a break. This means B2B marketers will be expected to perform and deliver at an even faster pace.
What to expect from your agency? Just like CMOs will be expected to deliver results at a faster pace, so will agencies. AI will help us chop, repurpose and scale, but agencies will still be the brains, the master planners, the folks that will help get your campaigns up and running as fast and as effectively as possible. Be very wary of an agency that claims not to use AI as part of its workflow.
What are we missing? Are you seeing more trends becoming patterns, and those patterns becoming expectations? We want to know!
