2024 Predictions

Last year was all about Generative AI. At least, that's what many analysts would like people to believe. As always, the truth is more complex, and businesses have multiple priorities. AI was a major discussion point throughout the year. There was lots of investigation and ad-hoc experiments, but relatively few companies reached the point where they were deploying it in production.

AI & Personalisation

2024 will be the year we start to see widespread usage of Generative AI across B2B marketing. Many marketing teams have been working on guidelines for when Generative AI should be used to create content, as well as what approval processes are required before generated content can be published.

At the moment, the process of generating and then reviewing AI content is a manual one. That is already beginning to change. Technology vendors have spent the past twelve months integrating ChatGPT with their platforms. Marketers will start utilising those tools, and then fill in the gaps with dedicated AI products.

There will be lots of discussion around the usage of AI for 1:1 content personalisation, particularly in the context of ABM. Data protection concerns have held back testing of account-specific content created using Generative AI. However, the required technology and legal frameworks are now in place. Expect pilot campaigns to launch during 2024. Hyper-personalised content is very much the next step on the AI deployment roadmap.

Data & Targeting

The drive for additional personalisation will lead to a renewed focus on data quality. In recent years, much of the attention has been on integrating first-party data sources and getting ready for the retirement of third-party cookies. Many companies have run out of internal data sources that can be used to enhance their marketing database, while at the same time, data quality still isn't good enough to meet modern segmentation and personalisation requirements. 

As a consequence, a renewed interest in the best third-party data sources is inevitable, particularly once the impact of Chrome's third-party cookie deprecation is better understood. Different ad vendors have utilised very different approaches to closing the capability gap left by third-party cookies. This will lead to further centralisation of programmatic advertising as brands flock to the data vendors with the best audiences and the best targeting capabilities.

Analytics & Attribution

The end of third-party cookies will also have a significant impact on reporting and attribution. Any full-funnel attribution solution that relies on web tracking will be affected. It will become harder to link web activity across different platforms, particularly now that Firefox and Safari are also restricting the use of URL tracking parameters. At the moment, browsers are not targeting UTMs, but other types of tracking codes are being removed from URLs, including those that link web activity to contact records in both Marketo and Hubspot.

Cookieless conversion tracking has been around for a while, but not everyone has implemented it. Expect a decline in tracked conversions as a result, although not in form fills. The challenge will be in tracing the source of those form fills as well as the preceding activity across both website and external channels. Much of the relevant tracking information will still exist, but not in a format that can be easily linked together for a customer journey analysis. AI solutions will emerge to fill that capability gap. Technology vendors can use machine learning to fill the missing data based on trends observed across their user base, in a way that can't be done using the data available to just one company.

Marketing teams with in-house AI expertise will try to conduct their own attribution analyses to supplement vendor-supplied insights. This will be particularly relevant when trying to identify target accounts or priority channels, as well as when selecting the most appropriate content for campaigns. For all the discussion around AI-based content generation, AI will become most useful in the realms of reporting and data analysis. 2024 will be the year that predictive data analysis becomes a mainstream part of the marketing toolkit, with automated content generation acting as a supporting tool for use cases where manual content generation workflows are unable to scale.