So What? 2024 Year in Review of Marketing and AI Trends - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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In this episode of So What? The Trust Insights weekly livestream, you’ll learn about the most important marketing and AI trends of 2024. You’ll discover how AI impacted marketing jobs, the challenges marketers faced with paid media and organic search in 2024, and the surprising rise of email newsletters. Finally, you’ll gain practical tips for navigating these trends and setting your marketing strategies up for success in 2025.

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So What? 2024 Year in Review of Marketing and AI Trends

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In this episode you’ll learn:

What major trends happened in marketing and AI
How to filter out the noise of shiny objects
When you should pay attention to upcoming trends

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Katie Robbert 00:00
So, well, hey everyone! Happy Thursday. Welcome to “So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show.” I’m Katie, joined by Christopher Penn.

Christopher Penn 00:46
Happy holidays.

Katie Robbert 00:47
Happy holidays! John is off fighting crime, doing his civic duty—what he says is for the last time this year, but we’ll see. And welcome to our last live stream of the year. It’s been quite a year, Chris.

Christopher Penn 01:08
That’s putting it mildly.

Katie Robbert 01:10
Yes, to say it, to understate it, underscore it. This week, to wrap up the year, what we’re doing is a 2024 year in review—not of Trust Insights. If you want to hear what Chris and I were up to this year, you can catch that on our podcast, which is at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast. This week on the live stream, what we’re doing is a year in review of marketing and AI trends. So basically, everything that happened, everything you might have missed, and really sort of what you should be paying attention to. Last week on the live stream, we did the upcoming 2025 trends. So if you want to catch that episode, it’s at trustinsights.ai/youtube, and we also have a trends paper that goes along with that. Somewhere, maybe one of these buttons is that, but if not, there it is: TrustInsights.ai/2025Trends.

Katie Robbert 02:08
If you want to get that free paper—it’s what, an 89-page report? Ish.

Christopher Penn 02:14
It is.

Katie Robbert 02:16
So yeah, lots of trends, lots of good stuff in there. But today—what happened? So, Chris, 2024 marketing and AI—what happened?

Christopher Penn 02:28
Well, funny you mentioned our paper, because that’s exactly what I was going to reference. One of the things that we do in the paper is provide sort of a state of where things are right now—looking back as well as all the trends. So, a couple of the big ones—it almost seems ridiculous to even point out—like, yeah, AI was kind of a thing this year. So I think we can safely pass that one by because if you have noticed that AI has been a thing this year, it kind of has. What I think is worth pointing out, and really stands out in the data, is when you’re looking at employment—when you’re looking at jobs—that was actually the number one thing on people’s list of what really consumed attention this year.

Christopher Penn 03:18
So, if we look back at the last 12 months in marketing jobs—this data comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis via Indeed.com’s API—and this is for six different nations. Red is Australia, orange is Canada, yellow is Germany, green is France, blue is the United Kingdom, and purple is the US. The black horizontal line at 100 represents pre-pandemic baselines from February of 2020. What we see here—and this is part of a multi-year trend, I’ll bring up the multi-year report version—is that employment for marketers and marketing, in terms of demand for hiring, fell below pre-pandemic levels in 2023 and is continuing downwards. When you look at the big picture, this chart, marketing—particularly the purple line in the US, which is where we’re based—is sort of slowing.

Christopher Penn 04:16
The demand is falling less fast, but it is below pre-pandemic levels. It’s 75% of pre-pandemic demand. So the way you would interpret this is to say companies are hiring marketers at only 75% of the rate they were in February of 2020.

Katie Robbert 04:36
I mean, that’s pretty substantial. I know a lot of people that I’ve talked to who have been looking for a long time, and the job market in marketing is so competitive. The expectations are so high. And, without getting, too off track, a lot of times the pay and the responsibilities are not in alignment. So there’s a “we want to pay you less, but we want you to do more” because we’re not opening this up to two different people. But it’s really two different jobs, but you get the salary of one. And it’s made it really challenging for a lot of people to find steady, stable work. I feel like the notion of “you can find a full-time job with benefits” just, it almost doesn’t exist anymore.

Katie Robbert 05:30
I haven’t heard of a lot of people successfully finding a lot of those roles that really match the criteria of what they’re looking for. AI aside, Chris, because we know that’s certainly a component of it.

Christopher Penn 05:43
What’s happening is AI is part of it. So where you see AI’s impact—it’s not going to be visible in these charts—is particularly on gigs, so short-term gigs, content creators, and stuff like that. And entry-level work is substantially impacted by AI because it’s the easiest for machines to do. The bigger thing is kind of like an employment version of shrinkflation. Exactly what you said, Katie, which is same salary, but more work, AKA less time. And this is reflected—you can see this in other areas of data that are, they’re good for businesses, they’re bad for humans. So one of the things I look at most is that you can really see is corporate profits before, just after taxes. So if I go into the Federal Reserve bank thing, corporate profits after tax…

Christopher Penn 06:45
If we look at the last 10 years—there’s the pandemic at the beginning of the pandemic. And then if we zoom out to the maximum, in the last four years, corporate profits have gone through the roof. Corporations have added about $1.5 trillion in net new profits. This is for the United States, just put an asterisk on that. And it has been the wildest profitability growth in human history. But we see in the employment data that is not reflected. So what that means is you see profits going up considerably, but companies not being willing to hire. So the disconnect there is that companies are just pocketing more of the profits and not passing it along to workers.

Katie Robbert 07:42
Part of me wonders, I mean, so yes, there’s the greed aspect of it, “no, we’re just going to keep this, we don’t want to do anything different.” But I wonder if there’s been, for some of those companies, especially during the pandemic, if there was an emphasis on optimization and efficiencies. And so, companies that find those tend to find sort of the good news, bad news: “Great, we can do things a lot more efficiently, a lot more cost-effective, but that means we likely have some redundancies in our processes, and then maybe in our people.” And so, less jobs are created when you find those efficiencies. And so, I wonder if that’s a big component of it, especially during the pandemic where budgets were cut, things slowed down—all they had was time.

Katie Robbert 08:35
And in that time they were like, “Well, let’s take a look around and see what we’re actually doing.”

Christopher Penn 08:41
One of the things that we said—and you can go way back into our podcasts and live streams from that era—is that the world went through a 10-year digital transformation in three months. So a lot of things got moved ahead very quickly. A lot of—to your point, Katie—a lot of optimization happened. And a lot of companies discovered, “Oh, this whole internet thing actually can be used for productivity.” Because—what again, if we go back to look at this—ChatGPT really came out around here in Q4 2022. So that huge profit jump happened well before generative AI became mainstream. So generative AI is contributing to it for sure, but by no means is it…

Christopher Penn 09:27
Another part aspect of this is that, in the middle of 2020, the US government printed an extra $4 trillion—just created out of thin air. And that had a lot to do with a lot of extra cash just floating around within the financial system. Companies were obviously big beneficiaries of that. And, every company did take advantage. Even, we filled out our payroll protection program, loans, and grants just like everyone else did. That, to your point, made companies take a look at, “Well, how many employees do we have? What is it that they’re doing?” And demand has changed, too. Demand is very different. If we look at where the hiring is happening—this again is the same set of data—the vertical black line is equal demand prior to the pandemic.

Christopher Penn 10:23
Marketing is way down here, number four from the bottom. Below that is mathematics, information design, and software development is at below 70% of demand. When we go above the line, we’re talking therapy. Therapy is at 186% demand from where it used to be, followed by physicians, surgeons, personal care and home health, civil engineering, and veterinary. So what the market wants and the industries that are growing are very different now, too.

Katie Robbert 10:53
Yeah, it’s, it is really interesting, especially when you think about, healthcare, psychiatry, those kinds of fields. It’s not as—or it shouldn’t be as easy as—”okay, great, let’s just hire 10 more people,” because those are highly specialized. And, highly educated—years and years of training. So the number of people to fill those roles is obviously going to be a lot less. So there’s going to be less roles in general to fill versus a marketer. And that’s not a knock at marketers, but the ability to put together a Facebook campaign is a very different skill set than being in charge and responsible for someone else’s mental health. Very different.

Christopher Penn 11:42
Exactly. In this chart, you do see the bottom two fields are where I do believe generative AI has had a 4 or 5 point reduction, which is information design and documentation software development. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of generative AI’s greatest strengths is in software development. It is incredibly good at it, because programming languages have much less ambiguity than the human written language. And so, your developers with generative AI capabilities are three to five times as productive as they used to be if they’re skilled with it, which in turn means that you don’t need to hire more developers. The ones that you have can do the work of two or three or even five different people.

Katie Robbert 12:27
Well, in software development, for those who aren’t familiar with programming languages, it’s essentially a series of “if this, then that” statements. It’s very constrained, where basically the machine is only doing what it’s instructed to do. “I want you to make a blue ball. The ball must be this big. The color of the blue is this.” It’s not going to do anything else beyond that. And so, to your point, software development—like when I managed a team of software developers—it felt very black boxed in terms of what they did. And it was like, “Oh, well, they’re the highest paid resources in the company because they are the most skilled, so they have to be the most expensive because they’re the only ones who can do what they do.” And now you’re right—the tide has turned, and that’s no longer true.

Katie Robbert 13:18
It’s the people who specialize in people that are now the most skilled and the most expensive, because anything that you can do with a machine can be done by generative AI, essentially.

Christopher Penn 13:33
So, Katie, with this top trend of hiring being more difficult for people who are seeking jobs, what to you is the so what of this?

Katie Robbert 13:45
The so what is to make sure you are not getting rusty on your people skills, because at the end of the day, you still need people to run the machines. And you still need someone to take care of and lead the people and give them direction. And so, if you’re someone who’s used to being an individual contributor, depending on what you specialize in, you should be nervous. I’m not saying you have to go out and suddenly manage a team of 100 people, but definitely use this as an opportunity to make sure your communication skills are top-notch. That’s a big thing people are going to be looking for. They always have been, but now even more so. Make sure your communication skills are top-notch. And with that comes your ability to explain both technical and simple topics.

Katie Robbert 14:42
That is something that not a lot of people are good at. And so that’s the thing. That’s the so what for me is, okay, if the machines can do the thing, what else do I bring to the table? And so, making sure you’re thinking about, even if you’re not using generative AI today, assume that it’s your assistant. Assume that it’s going to take a lot of things off your plate. What’s left for you? What do you still bring to the table? That’s where people who are concerned should be focusing their time. And that gives them more of a leg up to say, “Okay, no, I really am good at the development of creative ideas, and then the machine can execute it.”

Christopher Penn 15:21
What do you say for folks who are at the very beginning of their career journey who are going to face the most pressure from generative AI—the interns, the junior most people who may not have that clarity yet?

Katie Robbert 15:36
Don’t skip the basics. Don’t assume that just because the machine can do it that you don’t need to know how to do it, because someone needs to know how to work the machine. So, for example, in a few weeks, Chris, you and I will be giving a measurement workshop to go over the basic foundational pieces of a good measurement strategy. Those are the kinds of things that you need to know in order for the machines to work for you, because you need to still be a subject matter expert when you’re using the machines. Otherwise you’re going to say, “Hey machine, here’s my data, give me analysis.” And it could go completely off the rails.

Katie Robbert 16:15
But if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you’re going to assume that the machine is right, give it to your boss, and your boss is going to be like, “What the heck is this? I think you should probably go ahead and pack up your cubicle. This is not what you said you were good at.” Just because the machines can do it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still know it.

Christopher Penn 16:36
Which brings us to one of the second themes in this, which is performance measurement, particularly GA4. It is specifically mentioned by name, suggesting that many are struggling with the changes in Google’s tools. That’s putting it politely and mildly. GA4 has been a hot mess for a while now, but it seems in recent times it’s gotten harder for almost everyone to use who doesn’t live in it.

Katie Robbert 17:06
I was never a power user of Universal Analytics, but it was user-friendly enough that even if it had been a few weeks or a few months between visits into the system, I could always find what I needed. It was pretty intuitive. And now, I just feel completely lost in GA4. I can never get the reports to work correctly. I never have the right sets of metrics and dimensions, and I feel like I can’t find anything. And in order to use attribution modeling, they want you to also be using Google Ads, which is not something everybody does. And it just feels really crappy, if we’re being completely honest, we all use this tool.

Katie Robbert 17:56
Google knew how many users they had. They knew how many people relied on it, and now they’re like, “Okay, so we’re going to change it completely.” And I wouldn’t be surprised to see if that number dropped. That said, some people don’t have a choice. It’s what’s baked into their organization. But it’s soul-crushing—like you just can’t get what you need from it. That’s where tools like generative AI can help you get what you need from it. But back to the previous statements, you still need to know what you’re looking for. You still need to have an understanding of what the data means and what it should look like in order to use the tools to help you with all of these new user experience deficits that Google Analytics 4 has.

Christopher Penn 18:43
GA4 really has. Google, in general, has made it clear it’s a data collection tool, and it fuels primarily their ads business. The fact that anyone else gets any benefit of it is kind of secondary in many ways because it really is about them. Part of the reason for the whole change to begin with was to unify the event model between Google Ads and Google Analytics. Google Ads got better conversion data, which is nice for Google, not so nice for everybody else. So, one of the things we have seen this past year is much more discussion, particularly in our Analytics for Marketers Slack group. If you go to TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers, you can pop on by—it’s free—about alternatives. So Matomo, the open-source tool, comes up a lot. Adobe Analytics by Adobe comes up a lot.

Christopher Penn 19:30
Just as cumbersome, just as expensive as Google Analytics, but at least is better suited in a lot of ways. For certain enterprise applications, Plausible comes up as an option. And one of the things that I’ve suggested to people is, if you’re using Google because the architecture is there, consider using third-party tools to process Google’s data and make it available to you more easily. So, for example, we run our code in Python code against Google’s API to make the reports that we want to see because you can’t in a lot of cases. And there are some absolutely incredible new technologies. One is called Taipy. That is a Python library that does incredibly nice visualizations and dashboards—things totally free. So if you have generative AI skills and can at least copy and paste code, you don’t have to write the code.

Christopher Penn 20:33
You have to know what to ask for. To your point, you can use Google Analytics as your data store, but then do everything else outside of it.

Katie Robbert 20:45
And, it’s one of the things that we haven’t mentioned is—so you started to, you sort of touched upon it is—that Google Analytics 4 is just a data collection tool. What Google has done from the transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 is they’ve really separated out the products. And so now, to get sort of a complete story, you need to have Google Analytics to collect your data. You need to have Google Tag Manager to manage the collection of your data, and you need to have Looker Studio to visualize that data collection. Whereas before, you could do a lot of it just within Universal Analytics. Tag Manager overall didn’t really change, but it’s still very cumbersome for a lot of people because of the way that it’s set up. It’s very technical.

Katie Robbert 21:37
It can be very technical. And Looker Studio is just… I feel like the quality of what you can get has just gone downhill because, yes, it connects natively to Google Analytics 4. However, if you try to refresh more than twice, you’re timed out for a while. A lot of the metrics didn’t exist in Looker Studio. I think before everything got finished, people just gave up on it because it wasn’t what we needed at all. We needed all the data that we had been looking at. Now, all of a sudden, it’s gone.

Christopher Penn 22:19
Yep. In fact, the fourth component in that stack is Google BigQuery. Because if you want to keep your data for more than 14 months, you also need to make Google Analytics talk to Google BigQuery instance, which costs you money. Not much, but it does cost you money.

Katie Robbert 22:33
Right.

Christopher Penn 22:34
So it is increasingly complex. So, what’s the so what on Analytics?

Katie Robbert 22:40
So the so what on analytics is, if you’re struggling with Google Analytics, for the first place I would start is with something like the 5P framework to reevaluate my analytics strategy. And see, are we using Google Analytics 4 because we always have, or are we using Google Analytics 4 because we actually need it? And are there alternatives? There might not be. And if there’s not, then let’s make sure we are focusing in on exactly what it is we need from Google Analytics 4 and getting just that data and ignoring the rest. Because there’s a lot of noise in there. There’s a lot of unnecessary things. And so I would start with the 5P framework, which is a very simple framework: purpose, people, process, platform performance.

Katie Robbert 23:32
That’ll just kind of help you get organized to make sure that you have your head on straight, or that you’re having the right conversations with other people on your team that are focused and stay on track. Because when we start—we were talking with a client earlier today and were talking about the amount of available data, not in the context of Google Analytics 4, but just in general to that organization. And one of the comments was, “If we give everybody everything like they’re asking for, there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation, especially if you’re not as familiar with the data.” And so, their goal, their job is to focus in those conversations. And using a framework, such as the 5P framework, can really help you do that and make sure people are staying on track to their purpose.

Christopher Penn 24:22
Yep. The next trend—or the next thing that happened this year—paid media, in particular paid social media and digital ads, went in the toilet. There was rampant click fraud from bots and bot networks, and all sorts of things. And not to mention, there was this kind of, this little event that called an election in the USA which consumed a lot of bandwidth, a lot of ad budget, and a lot of ad inventory. So it’s a very difficult year for advertisers. Some folks in the various different advertising formats, and particularly on Reddit, have said that their performance for click-through rates is down, in sub-1% levels, and their conversion rates have zeros after the decimal, which is really bad for conversion. So people are saying we’re spending a lot of money now, we’re not seeing a lot of results.

Katie Robbert 25:17
Elections and bots aside, people are tired. And by that I mean, we as consumers—it doesn’t matter where we are on the internet—we’re getting served ads that in some ways kind of creep us out. So, for example, my mother-in-law sent us this gift that is not something that we would have ever looked up, picked out for ourselves, talked about anything. And it showed up at our house, and we didn’t—we haven’t talked about it. And I started seeing ads for it the day after it showed up at my house. And as a consumer, that feels really unsettling and really invasive. And so, my first course of action is to start blocking those ads and to really make sure I’m not getting served those things.

Katie Robbert 26:08
As a marketer, I can totally understand why we are so desperate to reach people with the things we think they want. Personalization is something that we know people are asking more of, and the AI tools are getting smarter and allowing us to do that. But I don’t think people really want the personalization that we’re being delivered. And so, we’re very anti-ad. “I didn’t ask for that.” And marketers are saying, “But you did, you asked for personalization. This is what that looks like.” And I think that there’s going to be, based on everything we’ve seen for this year, where ads are struggling, I think ads are going to continue to struggle moving into next year. Because my feeling is, when consumers say, “I want personalization,” they’re not saying “serve me up an ad for something I may have been thinking about.”

Katie Robbert 27:04
And now you’re just being intuitive with it. It’s more “Give me that concierge personalized experience, but only when I want it.” And I feel like that’s going to be a really big challenge for marketers to really get right.

Christopher Penn 27:21
How do you respond to the executive who says, “Well, we can’t not be blasting people with ads 24/7 because even if we take a break, our competitors will just fill that void.”

Katie Robbert 27:37
It’s a sunk cost. I feel like it’s an old strategy, but if that’s the case, then use the tools. Use AI to write better copy, to really understand your target audience. To do an ideal customer profile, for example, give that to generative AI and really try to nail down the pain points that you’re solving for. So that if you are spending—and you have to spend to stay competitive—that you’re doing it better because you know your competitor. I mean, we’ve worked with those companies before where they’re like, “No, we have to spend six figures a month on ads. We just have to,” which is always going to be mind-blowing to me. But if you’re spending that much money, don’t just throw it away. Use the time to get it right.

Christopher Penn 28:34
Our next theme—unsurprising on the organic side—SEO was a very difficult year for SEO folks, too. Helpful Content Update has been rolling out over the last year and a half, and it has been putting—it’s been doing the Tonya Harding on people’s SEO plans. Sites are losing traffic. A good number of sites have lost 20% to 40% to 60% of their traffic. Compound that with zero-click marketing—zero-click search—which Rand Fishkin pointed out recently with his SparkToro study. Google is keeping up to 60% of search traffic now for themselves. They’re sending no traffic along, and that is before we even talk about Perplexity, ChatGPT search, and Google AI overviews.

Christopher Penn 29:20
All this paints a very difficult landscape for marketers who are focused on things like organic search and know that it still has some value, but are now facing a very uncertain future.

Katie Robbert 29:37
I feel like the drop in organic search dovetails with the drop in paid ads. It’s really easy to create a lot of content. It’s hard to create a lot of good content. And consumers are tired. We are slammed in the face, minute after minute, second after second, with something new, something someone created. There’s no shortage of content being created. How do we know what’s good? How do we know what’s actually worth our time? And so, for some of us who are just overwhelmed and exhausted by all of it, we just ignore all of it because we’re like, “That can’t possibly get to what really matters to me because I don’t even know where to start to find it.”

Katie Robbert 30:26
And so, for marketers who are still relying on older SEO tactics such as keyword meta descriptions—good, keep that foundation because that’s going to help with generative AI search. But it doesn’t help you actually—it doesn’t fix poorly written content. And generative AI content is still mediocre content. So you need to really focus in on the good ideas, the helpful, the pain points of your audience, and make sure you’re meeting those. And again, not just trying to be everything to everyone. SEO and search—it’s one of those funny things that people are like, “Oh, search is dead. SEO is dead.” It’s not, it’s just evolving, it’s changing. The way in which we consume content is changing. Therefore, those strategies and tactics need to change, too.

Christopher Penn 31:24
So what’s the so what there, in terms of the things that your average marketer has to do in 2025 just to even just not to lose more ground?

Katie Robbert 31:38
Get the basics on how generative AI search works, and how, depending on the models that you care about, or if you want to take the top five most popular, at least get a basic understanding of how those models are finding external content to serve up to consumers who are searching for things, because they are using those models like search engines. So, if you just take Google Gemini, for example, you can even ask the model, “Hey, I want to optimize my content so that it shows up in your model. What do I need to do?” And it’s likely just going to give you a step-by-step plan. You could ask it to do that. It feels very meta, but at the same time, that’s the way that you should start to approach it.

Katie Robbert 32:28
That said, a lot of social media tools, Meta—Facebook and Instagram, for example—are trying to build search engines into those as well. So while it may not immediately take away all of your search traffic, it’s something that you definitely need to at least start to get an understanding of who’s doing what. Because I think moving into 2025 and 2026, what we’ll start to see is a lot of overlap between search and social, depending on how those underlying systems are structured. And also, don’t forget the unsung hero of search, which is YouTube. If you are not creating video content, and if you are not putting it up on YouTube, you are missing big.

Christopher Penn 33:11
Opportunities, gigantic opportunities, just to build on that. If you go into Google’s AI Studio and look at their models, one of the things that you can turn off that developers will be doing is turning on grounding, which says, “I’m going to check my answers with Google Search.” So SEO may not deliver direct traffic to you, but it is certainly not irrelevant because a lot of models are essentially using it to fact-check themselves. “Am I in fact telling you the truth? I will look in a search catalog.” ChatGPT does this as well. And I believe, yeah, Meta’s AI within Meta apps also does this. It uses Google Search as its grounding. So, very important. The next thing: social media. It was quite a year for social media.

Christopher Penn 34:03
From all the changes that have happened to TikTok potentially being banned soon in the USA, to X becoming a… I don’t even know what words to describe it. A dumpster fire, but a dumpster fire with extra decorations, new platforms like Blue Sky, and very clear demographic splits into where people get their information and how they get the information. One of the social things that came out from Pew Research and the Knight Foundation was that 1 in 6 people under the age of 35 gets all of their news and information from influencer personalities on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X. Not traditional news sources, but just talking heads, kind of like us.

Katie Robbert 34:56
Well, and so again, sort of where paid media and search dovetailed, search and social dovetail. Because, as we were just saying, a lot of these platforms are building their own search capabilities into what consumers are looking for. So if you’re looking for, on Instagram, “show me cute puppy videos,” you get this whole Meta AI search, and it goes far beyond it. It starts a whole chat with you. It’s very overwhelming. I personally don’t care for it, but I’m also an n of 1. Social media is going to continue to evolve because it’s very much like paid ads. It’s trying to personalize to every single human being, give them that concierge sort of experience and cater exactly to what you want. And some of us, it’s too much, we don’t want that, but it’s going to do it anyway.

Katie Robbert 35:55
So to get into the so what of it, the so what is, as an organization, you have to reevaluate your social media strategy. Our knee-jerk reaction as marketers is to be everywhere, even if just a little bit. That is not going to be sustainable, especially as more and more platforms spring up, and they are—to your point, Chris—drastically different demographics. The people who are on Blue Sky are probably different from who are on Threads, who are on Facebook. At one point, there was this notion of, for companies, especially small businesses, “if you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist.” And for some companies, that is still the way that they operate. But Facebook is the wrong platform for a lot of people, for a lot of companies.

Katie Robbert 36:54
The other challenge with social media—and I think we talked about this on a previous livestream—is that brand channels are taking a hit. Unless you are one of the big consumer platforms like a Wendy’s or McDonald’s, where you have an established brand strategy of just completely being unhinged and you’re just a household name, brands are going to struggle to gain footing on social media, whereas they’re looking really for the people behind the brands to have a presence on social media. Which goes back to your original statement, Chris, of a lot of people are looking to other human beings to get their news and information. And so, if you, as a brand, don’t have at least one human from your organization identified as the quote-unquote “face” for social media, you should definitely start thinking about that.

Christopher Penn 37:52
So this is an example, Katie, exactly what you’re talking about, right within Instagram. If I trigger Meta’s AI, I am now in a URL—I’ll search this. I asked Meta AI, “What do you know about Trust Insights?” And of course, it’s spitting out information, which it’s still hallucinating. It says—it says I’m the CEO, and that’s clearly not correct. But the idea of influencer marketing, particularly in B2B, but just in general, is not new. But it’s more important than ever. If your brand doesn’t have a human-being-first strategy, it’s going to be a rough year for you in the year ahead.

Katie Robbert 38:38
I mean, it goes back to likely the psychology why younger generations are not trusting news media outlets. They don’t know who the people are behind that information. They don’t know the journalists. That’s not the way that industry has typically worked. You don’t know who the people are writing the things. You just read the thing and accept it as “that’s the information.” And now the expectation of information sharing is, “I need to hear it from somebody that I”—whether or not it’s true—”that I identify with and believe.”

Christopher Penn 39:19
Which brings us to the last trend for today’s broadcast. The big winner in 2024 was the humble email newsletter. Email marketing was the number one channel for marketers and for people. Platforms like Substack have done amazingly well this year: 1,000% growth in individual newsletters. It’s been fascinating to watch as newspapers and publications have laid people off. Those individual journalists have gone to create their own Substacks and Ghosts and Beehives, and so on and so forth, and are finding more success individually than they did with their publication, and in some cases, even more revenue. Some authors are seeing—Heather Cox Richardson, for example, has over a million subscribers to her Substack and can have paid models, tiers of payment and membership. Given this backdrop, the email inbox has also gotten very crowded.

Christopher Penn 40:19
And so is having that kind of—which has sort of been a theme dovetailing from the individual influence—the influencer and the person has to have a platform that people will follow you to.

Katie Robbert 40:36
They have to have a platform, but they also have to have something to say that people are going to spend their time on, because, to your point, Chris, email inboxes are getting more and more crowded by the minute. And so, what do you do that makes your newsletter, your email, stand out? If I may, for a hot second, toot my own horn. I actually got some feedback on this a couple of weeks ago from someone who said publicly on LinkedIn, “I’m pretty ruthless about unsubscribing from newsletters that don’t consistently add value for exactly where I am or where I’m trying to get to in the next three to five years. Katie Robbert’s emails have kept their spot in my inbox for a long time.” As we close out the year and look ahead, it’s time to recap and a time for planning.

Katie Robbert 41:31
And, this person said very kind things, but I’m reaching the right people at the right time with the right information in a consistent way, in a way that’s trustworthy and authoritative. So that the audience that I have found to consume my content looks for it. That’s where they’re getting their news. So, I’m not a social media influencer. I’m never going to be a big online presence. That’s not something I’m comfortable with. I am comfortable in an email newsletter channel telling you exactly what my opinions are about things, because that’s the content format that I’m the most comfortable with. And I think that sort of goes into the bigger so what of: figure out what is best suited to the people that you need to put out in front. So, Chris, you love video content.

Katie Robbert 42:25
It’s one of the mediums that I think you’re the most comfortable in, whereas I’m not necessarily as comfortable in video content. But let me write something all day long and I’ll give you newsletters and blog posts and those kinds of things. Play to the people’s strengths, and you’re going to get really good content.

Christopher Penn 42:43
Something to think about for folks in the new year: Where is it not crowded? So everyone and their cousin’s got a podcast, doubly so now—everyone and their cousin’s got an AI podcast. Everyone’s got a newsletter. Everybody’s got a social media account. Everyone’s got a YouTube channel. Where aren’t people? Where aren’t people? And this is something to think about. You’re creating content. Would it be… Is there an audience with your audience? Is there a market for something like a print-on-demand magazine—that’s an actual paper magazine? Because there are plenty of companies that will do that will say, “Okay, you give us the content.” Could you imagine, Katie, a Trust Insights magazine where we just take our newsletter content, the entries, we bundle up that quarter’s, and then that’s the…

Christopher Penn 43:36
The Trust Insights spring quarterly. And it’s a 20- or 30-page magazine that someone could have—that, for those people who want that physical medium, because guess what’s not full? The postal mailbox. What do you get? The occasional pizza ad and bills. That’s it. There’s nothing else in there. And the companies are trying to get rid of the bills as fast as possible. So it’s really just going to be the occasional postcard and random slip. But that delivery system is mostly empty. So what else could you do? What else could we do that where people aren’t, but we know that there is an audience that might want to have our content that way?

Katie Robbert 44:20
It’s interesting. To me, it’s not so much where people aren’t and what, because every channel, depending on the industry you’re in, could be crowded. The number of landscaping and gutter cleaning direct mail pieces that I get is insane. Like, there’s a million companies in my area because of where I live. I would actually encourage people to really focus in on things like your market research. And if you don’t have time to do market research because it can be unwieldy, do something like an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile using generative AI can come together pretty quickly and be pretty detailed—and by pretty detailed, I mean massively detailed. And give you a lot of the insight and answer questions like, “Where is my audience? Where do they want to be consuming my content?”

Katie Robbert 45:20
“What content do they want to be consuming? Do they want video content? Do they want audio content? Do they want written content?” But do the ideal customer profile first. And to no surprise to anybody, that is something that Chris and I can do for you. So if you want to go to TrustInsights.ai/contact, you can learn more about our ideal customer profile service. That said, a lot of companies have what they call their buyer personas. This is a little bit different than a buyer persona because a buyer persona means you’ve already got them in your funnel. The question is, where are the people that you need to bring awareness to even get in the funnel in the first place?

Katie Robbert 46:02
And so I would definitely encourage you, if you don’t have it on your roadmap for 2025, find a space, make some time, build a couple of ideal customer profiles, and use that to help figure out where your marketing needs to be. Is it email? Is it paid? Is it search? Is it social? Maybe it’s all of the above. Maybe it’s none of the above. Maybe it’s something you haven’t thought of. Maybe it’s in-person networking events. Maybe it’s—to your point, Chris—maybe it is direct mail. But until you do that research, you don’t know. You’re just guessing.

Christopher Penn 46:39
And we did a whole thing very recently—in fact, we’ll probably turn this into a webinar in the new year—on what’s in these things. Because if you look at this ideal customer profile, this thing is 21 pages long of information about, in this example. And then this then goes into a tool like a generative AI tool. So if I bring up AI Studio, I switch to the brand new thinking model and say, “Embody this ideal customer profile. How likely is it that they would be interested in reading a paper magazine from us? Explain your reasoning.” And then put in our profile, hit go, and let the brand new thinking model think this through. This, by the way, for folks who are interested, is new as of this morning. So you’re getting the very latest and greatest.

Christopher Penn 47:46
Let’s go ahead and turn down the menu here so it’s thought through, and it says, “Based on the customer profile, overwhelming preference for digital pain points not addressed by a paper magazine.” And so on and so forth. So, conclusion: “While a well-crafted paper magazine might be perceived as a premium offering some context, this ICP strongly indicates a preference digital ch instead of a paper magazine. Consider high-quality digital content, exclusive online communities, a personalized digital experience,” and so on and so forth. So in this—for this sample ICP, which is the sample is on the website if you want to get a copy of it—Yeah, no magazine for me.

Katie Robbert 48:22
But think about how much easier the conversation is going to be if I come to you, Chris, and I say, “We should do a paper magazine. I’m the CEO. I make the decisions.” You can respectfully have a disagreement with me and give me all the information directly from “Here’s what our customers think about it.” It’s not my opinion. “Yes, I think it’s the dumb idea, but let’s position it as our customers won’t buy it. So we’re not going to spend the bandwidth and the resources and the money to do the thing because we already know it’s going to go nowhere.”

Christopher Penn 48:56
Exactly. So that’s it. That’s it for 2024. It was a very busy year. It was absolutely insane. 2025 is likely to be even crazier again. It’s totally free. If you want to grab a copy of the 2025 trends report that has an explanation of what each trend is, the so what of each trend, and then the now what of what you should do about it, you can go ahead and grab your copy there. Any final parting words, Katie, as we send 2024 off? It’s easy…

Katie Robbert 49:31
…to get swept up in trends. And this was sort of my message on last week’s livestream. It’s easy to get swept up in the trends. The way to navigate it is to make sure that your foundational pieces are strong. And so, make sure you understand the basics of your particular focus area. That’s going to help you navigate all of the trends that are going to be coming at you. There’s going to be a lot. Technology changes fast. It feels hard to keep up with. So the way I personally navigate that is to make sure I don’t lose sight of the things that I personally am good at, and then where my skill sets fit into the technology, not the other way around.

Christopher Penn 50:11
Exactly. So that’s going to do it for us. We hope that you have a safe and happy holiday season, however it is that you choose to observe it, and we will see you all back in January of 2025. This is it for Trust Insights for the year. Take care. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. See you next time.

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