The Marketing Mandate for 2024: Build Stronger Bonds With Your Audience

The Marketing Mandate for 2024: Build Stronger Bonds With Your Audience

I’ve been thinking about something that will impact marketing in 2024: Relationships. And I mean specifically the relationships between your brand and your audience.

If you want to develop and keep your customer and audience relationships in 2024, you will need to strengthen those bonds.

From a thought leadership perspective, you might consider the book by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One-to-One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, which provided the idea of CRM as a marketing strategy.

As they said in the 1990s edition:

“More and more companies have realized that interacting with customers is no longer an option, but a competitive necessity. And now they have questions: How should an interactive company treat its customers? What objective should a business set for the interactions that take place at its site? How can it measure success? Should different customers be treated differently? Is it sometimes necessary to reward customers for participating in Internet dialogue?”

Well, 25 years later, those same questions still get asked.

Develop better audience relationships

All brands should understand and commit to this concept.

From 2010 to 2015, the concept of customer relationship management peaked as social media emerged. The talk at the time centered on creating relationships with your customers through social media – engaging, entertaining, inspiring, and ultimately creating a bond with them.

I often heard brand and marketing thought leaders castigate that idea. I can’t tell you how many times I’d hear someone say, “No one opens up their refrigerator and says, ‘You know, I really want a better relationship with my butter provider.’”

Maybe the most spectacular example is Amazon Prime Video. On the surface, Amazon Prime Video might be the most unprofitable business in entertainment and media. In 2022, it earned about $5 billion in revenue and spent approximately $16 billion on content. I don’t care what Hollywood math you use. If it were a standalone business, you would say, “Put that thing out of its misery!”

But Amazon keeps Prime Video going because its business model revolves around Amazon Prime memberships. These members spend twice what non-member customers do when shopping on Amazon. Revenue from Prime memberships totaled $35 billion in 2022. Now, you can better understand the Amazon Prime Video math. Prime Video is a marketing play that entices more people to become Prime members.

Peel that idea back further, and you can see Prime Video is Amazon’s effort to develop a valuable and ongoing relationship with its audience. The relationship between any retailer and a member is weak despite the shelter of free shipping. But the member’s relationship (the value exchange) with a company that provides great movies and TV shows is strong.

How to meet the relationship mandate

As you move into 2024, you’ll have to make stronger bonds and relationships with your audiences, a core mission for your marketing.

These trends explain why that’s imperative next year:

Generative AI will make access to how-to and simple FAQs for information irrelevant. Enlightened content — content that brings a balance of experience, knowledge, creativity, and sound judgment — will be valued.

Trust in digital content will wane in the short term. The author or sources will more strongly signal value than the content itself. The storyteller will be more valued than the story.

Audiences will value personal – not personalized – communication. Personal content is contextually relevant, not driven by demographics. It’s the kind of content that makes someone say, “Wow, this is exactly what I needed.” (I wrote more about the difference between personal and personalized content a while back.)