Designed to provide marketers with data-driven guidance for prioritizing their resources and spending for the coming year, Forrester’s 2024 planning guides show where marketing, CX and digital leaders should increase investments, reduce expenses and experiment to maximize revenue growth.
Data and AI to keep an eye on…
Given the frenzy and impending obsolescence of data, B2C marketers must review your customer data strategy to explicitly define not only what data they want to obtain, but also how they will use that data to benefit the company and the customer.
They must also expand brand safety and governance efforts, given the risks associated with generative artificial intelligence.
Signal loss due to data deprecation will push executives to experiment with use cases ofa “clean data room” and explore new ways to collect primary consumer information.
Technology at the service of customer relations
To reverse the downward trend in the quality of customer relationships and maximize value for customers and the company, Customer relationship (CX) managers need to increase their investments in technologies to create and improve experiencesessential employee skills, unstructured feedback and predictive models.
Leaders should also address the two most important emerging technologies in CX: Generative AI and extended reality (XR) – with experimental caution.
Artificial intelligence at the center of all investment projects
Among global digital decision makers, 44% say emerging technologies are one of the highest priority digital initiatives for their organization in the next 12 months.
Explainable AI, zero-party data, and conversational AI are at the top of the list in the short term.
Digital leaders should also focus their innovation investments on the intersection of digital experience and resilience.
Proactive engagement and conversational interfaces will help leaders anticipate and respond to their customers’ needs, creating competitive advantage and customer value.
Marketing investments: focus on B2B
Despite uncertainties related to global political unrest and macroeconomic instability, three-quarters of B2B marketers expect marketing budgets to increase in the next 12 months.
In 2024, B2B marketers should invest in developing clear AI guidelines for marketing strategy and execution, especially with generative AI already accelerating the pace of use cases of marketing.
Leaders should also integrate lifecycle revenue marketing into campaign planning, as this spans the entire customer lifecycle and addresses the full range of purchasing movements and opportunity types that drive revenue for B2B organizations .
While the B2B sales managers planning their innovation strategy for 2024, they should leverage the value of generative AI by increasing productivity through simple use cases such as meeting note capture, summarization, and action identification.
THE ABM demand and managers they must evolve their culture by aligning with lifecycle revenue marketing.
At the same time, organizations should fund AI education and training programs to enable frontline marketers to identify use cases where AI and/or generative AI can solve real business problems and make teams more effective, efficient and impactful.
Investments in partner ecosystem marketing in 2024 will trend towards the formal evolution of partner ecosystem marketing as a function, as Over 40% of B2B organizations will say goodbye to their marketing channel function by the end of the year.
Partner Experience (PX) programs will also be a strategic investment area and key competitive advantage for B2B organizations looking to achieve partner ecosystem growth.
THE portfolio marketers meanwhile, they must improve their information gathering and analysis capabilities, update their go-to-market strategies, and explore new technologies to lead their organizations to success in 2024.
They should bring their expertise to markets and buyers as their organizations train generative AI models and user models, to ensure accuracy and consistency for both internal enablement and customer-facing content that will meet customer preferences and expectations. buyers.
For the product managers, Forrester recommends increased spending in the following areas: Upskilling and training to support AI-driven growth. They should also invest in expanded continuous discovery practices, augmented by generative AI.
Finally, in terms ofrevenue operationsB2B decision makers need to increase investment in hiring a revenue operations manager, building a best-in-class operational data center, and investing in tracking revenue-driven sales activity.
