Episode Summary
In episode #2 of the 7 figures and beyond e-commerce marketing podcast, host Greg Shuey delves into his predictions for ecommerce in 2024. Despite podcasting challenges, Greg remains committed to sharing insights. He outlines ten predictions, emphasizing customer-centric strategies and the rise of niche communities. Greg forecasts tech consolidation, AI’s role in marketing, and the growth of affiliate marketing. He anticipates mobile revenue dominance and the impact of Meta & TikTok Shops. Greg underscores the need for brands to adapt to changing marketing landscapes and avoid influencer pitfalls
Key Takeaways
- Customer-Centric Focus: Greg emphasizes that brands focusing on understanding and meeting customer needs will thrive in 2024. This entails knowing customer behaviors, preferences, and purchase motivations to refine marketing strategies effectively.
- Rise of Niche Communities: Expect a surge in brands building and engaging with niche communities and micro-influencers. This approach fosters authentic connections and personalized experiences, contributing to increased engagement and revenue.
- Tech Consolidation: Anticipate a trend towards tech consolidation in ecommerce platforms, with brands streamlining their tech stacks by adopting all-in-one solutions. This move simplifies operations and optimizes resource allocation.
- Advancements in AI Marketing: AI’s growing sophistication enables brands to scale marketing efforts confidently. It facilitates personalized strategies and productized solutions while driving efficiency and effectiveness in campaign management.
- Shift in Marketing Approaches: More brands will explore “done with you” models and bring marketing in-house. However, they may face challenges in finding expertise, leading to the rise of fractional CMOs. Additionally, expect a transition from influencer spending to performance-based models, focusing on ROI-driven strategies for better outcomes.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Episode Transcript
Howdy ecommerce brand builders! Welcome to episode 2 of the 7 Figures & Beyond podcast.
I’m really excited to be with you today!
I think I saw a stat recently that said 90% of podcasters stop publishing after 3 podcasts. So, I guess my next episode will be my last.
Ha!
Hopefully not. I’m too far in now.
Can I tell you really quick how difficult it was to set up and distribute my last episode to all of the major podcast directories?
I still haven’t been able to push it to Apple podcasts. I don’t know when that will actually happen. Hopefully soon.
So in our last episode, I spent some time discussing what the state of ecommerce is now that we are in 2024.
In today’s solocast, I want to talk about a handful of predictions that I have regarding this year.
Predictions are just that… guesses. Who knows what this year is going to have in store for us, however, I’ve been at this long enough to be able to see some things that young brand owners and marketers might not be able to see as well, or at all.
I have ten predictions to go through today, so buckle up!
2024 Ecommerce Marketing Predictions
1. Brands that focus on the customer will win big!
You’re going to hear a lot about focusing on the customer in many of our podcasts this year.
One of our core beliefs at Stryde is:
In order to build and scale a profitable D2C brand, you have to intimately know your customer, what drives them, how they make purchase decisions, and what they expect of the brands they choose to do business with.
It’s something that we’ve gotten away from as marketers and it’s something we have to get back into and have to obsess over.
We are losing more and more data every year with privacy laws, iOS updates, platform updates, etc. The data used to be able to tell us who our customers are and how they interact with our ads and website.
The only way forward for brands is to get close to their customers and let their customers tell them how they want to be marketed to.
The brands that win this year will be those who deploy the right tech to profile their customers. The ones who spend time on the phone with their customers.
And the ones who figure out how their customers make purchase decisions, where they hang out online, and how to talk to them.
What this will do is help you do better marketing, lower your CAC (or at the very least, keep it flat), and beat your competitors who ignore this important part of marketing strategy.
2. We will see a rise in niche communities.
The rise of niche communities will be huge in 2024. Brands are going to be focusing more on building and engaging with niche communities and micro-influencers to create more authentic marketing campaigns.
Optimizing for Google, Facebook, or whatever is still a huge play, but more and more brands are funneling their communities to other social platforms or places like Discord to give a more personalized touch. This also protects them from putting all of their eggs in one basket moving forward.
People want to feel like they are a part of a niche community – they want to feel like champions of a cause (through a brand). Figuring out how to best rally the troops and bring people together will drive significant engagement and revenue for brands.
3. We will see a lot of tech consolidation.
I saw a LinkedIn post from a pretty large brand owner yesterday where he showed what his tech stack was. I kid you not, it was something like 15 different tools/platforms. This is completely unnecessary.
When I looked through them I was like… this one tool can do three of these things.
We are going to see a lot of ecommerce tech companies rolling feature after feature in order to be the “all-in-one solution” or the “most-in-one solution”. We’re seeing this with companies like Sendlane. They have email, SMS, and now reviews in one platform. We’re going to see more and more of this. I think the average brand owner will have maybe 5 or 6 different tools/platforms by the end of the year, cutting their tech stack by ⅔.
4. AI is going to get good enough to confidently scale marketing.
AI is getting good… fast. I think we’re going to see a few things come from it.
We are going to see lots of brands hiring an “AI guru” in-house, or reaching out to agencies to help them run these tools because they don’t want to learn something new.
I’ve seen a little bit of this in the last few months. I actually had a company last month reach out asking me if we knew how to use a specific AI tool and if we could do it for them.
Mind blown!
I also think we’re going to see strategies become productized to an extent.
I think it will be good enough to give us some very high-level strategy based on industry and business size. You’ll still need a strategist who can dig into the data, confirm assumptions, blow out parts of the strategy, etc.
5. More brands are going to look at ways to do marketing themselves or find an agency that deploys a “done with you” vs “done for your” approach.
As a result, we are going to see a huge influx of educational content being pushed to the market. Blogs, podcasts, webinars, training courses, etc. will be everywhere and pushed incredibly hard through paid channels.
That’s one of the reasons we decided to start this podcast and launch Ecommerce Marketing Institute.
People want to be educated. They want to know how to grow their brand. They want to do some or all of it for a time.
6. More brands are going to bring marketing in-house, but will quickly realize they don’t have anyone with enough expertise to drive the ship.
As a result, the number of people claiming to be “experienced” fractional CMO’s will explode and it will be incredibly difficult to sift out the good from the bad.
We see this with agencies, right? There are thousands and thousands of agencies in the US. Most have very little experience in a particular niche. They are just slinging crap. It’s the same with these fractional CMOs.
I have an example of this…
I came across a woman here in Utah who worked in-house for a brand for about 11 months and is now claiming to be a fractional CMO… and because she’s networking at all of these local ecommerce events and pushing her personal brand on LinkedIn really hard, she’s got people drinking the kool-aid.
Problem is, she doesn’t have nearly enough experience to be a C-level marketing leader. She’s a marketing manager at best. Only those with deep subject matter expertise can see through her BS.
It’s not going to be good.
At the end of the day, brands are willing to pay for it, so it’s only going to grow. The trick is going to be finding the right person to lead out. The person who has the 10,000 hours. The person who has seen everything and can solve tough problems.
It’s going to be tricky and I fear, a lot of trial and error and a lot of wasted time and money.
7. Brands will stop paying influencers huge amounts of money for access to an audience.
We’re finally going to get some insight into how influencers perform. I’m seeing this right now with a tool called Knocommerce. They do post-purchase surveys. My clients who do influencer work can ask their customers to specify which influencer drove them to the site to order.
It’s fascinating and allows us to redirect spending to influencers and other channels that actually perform.
We are going to have a mindset shift this year from “here’s $10k – hope it works” to either… “I’m going to run one test with you and a smaller dollar amount and track the actual ROI” or better yet, “Here’s my affiliate program – prove to me that you add value”.
I’m actually really excited to see fake influencers go away.
8. We will see affiliate marketing gain even more traction.
Affiliate marketing was huge when I got my start in 2005. In the past, it’s been used heavily for lead generation. To date, I haven’t seen a ton of small to mid-size brands pushing affiliate efforts, but I believe that will change this year.
9. Revenue generated through mobile devices will grow to 75% of overall revenue.
If you remember from the last episode, in Q4, 51.1% of all sales came through a mobile device. Pretty awesome right?
I did some digging and the total number for all of 2023 came in right around 60% of all sales came through a mobile device. That’s pretty significant.
I think we’ll easily add another 15% to make that a whopping 75% on the year.
It’s time to get serious about mobile.
10. Meta & Tiktok Shops will be a huge winner.
We are at the very beginning of this rocketship! The reason I believe Meta and Tiktok shops will be huge for two reasons:
- It is a much improved customer experience than buying through a clunky old website. Customers prefer a predictable experience when they are ready to buy. They want to find products fast and check out quickly and shops give us all of this.
- Conversion rates will be through the roof. Meta and TikTok can run thousands of multivariate tests constantly to get actionable information faster than any DTC brand. This allows them to improve user experience, conversion rate, and AOV faster than any brand out there.
D2C is going to get crazy this year.
Before closing, I want to quickly recap my ten predictions for 2024.
- Brands that focus on the customer will win big!
- We will see a rise in niche communities.
- We will see a lot of tech consolidation.
- AI is going to get good enough to confidently scale marketing.
- More brands are going to look at ways to do marketing themselves or find an agency that deploys a “done with you” vs “done for your” approach.
- More brands are going to bring marketing in-house, but will quickly realize they don’t have anyone with enough expertise to drive the ship.
- Brands will stop paying influencers huge amounts of money for access to an audience.
- We will see affiliate marketing gain even more traction.
- Revenue generated through mobile devices will grow to 75% of overall revenue.
- Meta & Tiktok Shops will be a huge winner.
In our next episode, I’ll be bringing in our VP at Stryde. Her name is Laurel Teuscher. She’s pretty awesome. Way smarter than me. We plan to chat about… customer research and data mining.
As always, take what you’ve learned here, make a plan, and take massive action this year.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
