By James R — Dec 13, 2023

10+ Digital Sales Predictions for 2024

The digital world movies fast.

This means you need to continually assess and improve your digital sales and marketing strategies to keep up.

As we reach the end of 2023, I wanted to share predictions for what 2024 will look like. What digital trends should you be planning for in the new year?

I’ll share three of my own predictions, along with some trends that my expert friends are seeing.

Let’s dive in!

My Top 3 Digital Sales Predictions for 2024

We'll start this article with my personal predictions for 2024.

More and more social platforms are beginning to offer “premium” or paid features to user accounts. LinkedIn has had recruiting and Sales Navigator upgrades for some time, and in 2023, we saw X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram begin to offer premium subscriptions as well.

I see this trend only increasing, with more features and bonuses being offered for users who are willing to pay for their accounts. The social platforms will continue to offer incentives as they look for ways to diversify their revenue streams away from primarily advertising. As users, we’ll need to decide how much we are willing to pay, and if the benefits that come with premium offers are worth the cost.

2. Email Delivery Gets More Difficult

The major email providers are increasingly cracking down on spam on their platforms. As they battle to have the best user experience, email spam is one of the largest targets. This means that email marketing campaigns and cold emails are more likely to get caught in spam filters.

I strongly recommend you verify your domains, follow unsubscribe link best practices, and only send to addresses that have opted in to receive your marketing emails. If you don't comply with these practices, I would expect to see a sharp drop off in your deliverability and open rates in the coming year.

3. The Sales Skills Gap Widens

The skills gap between the okay and the best sales representatives will continue to grow. Those top sellers who are embracing new technologies and learning new skills will continue to dramatically outperform their peers who are not.

The leverage that is available in sales, using tools like sales intelligence platforms, generative AI, and social networks is only going to get stronger. The best sales rep will continue to invest their time into harnessing these tools for their own strategy.

Other Predictions from The Experts

And now some trends from friends! I asked 7 people in my network to share their trends from topics ranging from SEO to content marketing to social selling.

Check them out below!

Short Form Video STILL HOT

Dan LaCloche, a video content consultant, says that short form video will be as hot as ever.

I don’t want to call myself a trend setter, or a person that is ahead of their time; but someone should, because I have been doing short-form video to promote my business and support my personal brand since 2018. It seems like the rest of the world started catching on to this trend over the last couple years in the form of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok. As we start to forecast trends for 2024, I’m here to tell you that short-form video isn’t going away; in fact, it will dominate your feeds in 2024.

No one wants to read anymore. As I type this, I acknowledge the irony of contributing to a blog post; with that said, video is now the content king. But short attention spans are real, so the king of kings in the world of digital content is short-form video. Although, not many people do shorter-form videos than my renowned LinkedIn series called 10 Second TUTs (most short-form videos fall in the range of 15 to 60 seconds); I think anything under a minute is the sweet spot for sharing your message while maintaining the attention of your audience. These videos are perfect for mobile feeds, they’re fun to create, and you can create most short-form videos right on your phone. I recommend trying behind the scenes videos, demonstration videos, or FAQ videos.

Now it’s time to get that phone out of your pocket and get started!

Google Provides AI Analytics

Shane Hampson, an SEO Consultant, shares his prediction on Google providing more insight into AI analytics.

“Google will finally give digital marketers the key to the castle and give us analytics and data for BARD and SGE. It will come first on the paid search side, then trickle into Google Search Console shortly after”

Digital Engagement Plays a Central Role in Sales

David Fisher, a sales expert and trainer, shares his predictions on social selling in 2024.

“Though “sales” is hardly a monolithic entity, the one thing that everyone in sales will navigate in 2024 is change. Digital engagement will continue to play a central role for sellers and tools like LinkedIn will provide an important communication channel. Some trends to pay attention to:

The growing importance of one-to-one trust when content is easy-to-create and mostly low-quality. Tools like generative AI will create a lot of background noise on platforms like LinkedIn. To stand out from that noise, it will be important to bring an individual perspective to posting and engagement.

Cold outreach will remain challenging, so leveraging multiple channels will be key. Top sellers will integrate LinkedIn with email, offline channels, and in-person engagement. It’s not enough to have a “digital” outreach strategy. It must be connected with all of the other customer-facing outreach.

In a world of low-effort automation, the key to effective engagement will be relevance. Uncovering and then acting appropriately on interest signals and buying intent will be important. Whether it’s leveraging Sales Navigator, Bombora, or other intent platforms, top sellers will work to reach the right buyers at the right times with the right solutions.”

AI Will Have More Impact on Content, Positive and Negative

My friend Greg Mischio, owner of Winbound, provides insights into how AI will affect content marketing.

"AI, as is the case with most new technologies, will have both a positive and a negative impact on content marketing. I see some huge potential gains in time management. Research, repurposing content, and idea generation for the non-writers will help the industry in exciting new ways. But there are and will be big issues with the quality of the content people are producing. Readability, structure and overall style are already suffering. Those who use AI as an assistant and not a stand-in will be the winners."

AI Platform Integrations and More Personalization

Kaylie Gugel from Common Core Marketing shares her predictions for trends impacting marketing automation and web platforms.

By now most people have heard of AI/started using AI tools in their business practices, but we're seeing AI tools become more integrated into platforms like HubSpot for creating blogs, meta descriptions, SEO insight, personalization in marketing, and more. Users don't have to use a separate AI copywriting application like Jasper, the AI is already in these automation platforms and streamlines the process. I think this will ramp up even more in 2024.

With AI becoming increasingly popular, focusing on originality, authenticity, and credibility will be key to standing out for business content creation in 2024.

Personalized marketing will be even more crucial in 2024. Customers are becoming more discerning, and building trust with your target demographic is harder than ever. A lot of marketing automation platforms already have tools for personalization but are underutilized by businesses. If businesses aren't personalizing their content already, they can start by first creating a customer persona, looking at their customer's journey and lifecycle stages, and finding ways to tailor that experience to their target demographic's needs through personalization. Use data to truly understand your customer's preferences, buying history, and how they interact with your brand. Mass marketing is a thing of the past.

Shift from growth at all costs —> growth and efficiency.

My friend Josh McDonald from Brainheart Growth shares his predictions for sales in start-ups and early-stage companies in 2024.

Alignment of Go-To-Market Teams (sales, marketing, CS, product) under a single revenue operating methodology and playbook will be the biggest competitive advantage for "small" companies and start-ups to predictably generate and grow revenues. Siloed GTM teams are slow, lack internal operating efficiency, and waste time on non-revenue generating activities.

Shift from growth at all costs —> growth and efficiency. Though the pandemic money was cheap and capital was "easy to get" which resulted in companies operating in abundance, they didn't need to worry about generating cash flow to fight off burn rates. Now companies are being forced to operate under an "efficient growth" mindset to manage cash flow and consume operating cash very carefully to fuel growth and can't be reliant on the next round of funding to keep them afloat. VC is being conservative with investments to manage their portfolio because they saw valuations tumble across the board in 22/23. They need to pick the winners very carefully. It's also a dual-fold issue because some VC's invest seed and exit on a series B/C, with fewer rounds being raised, these VC's are not getting liquidity at the same valuations they were even just 24 months ago. So lots of contraction in this space.

Google Removes More Paid Ad Options

Eagan Heath, a paid ads and ecommerce expert, and founder of Caravan Digital, expressed his concern about a trend in Google's PPC options.

Google will likely continue to remove or hide PPC options for marketers. While the promise of automated bidding can seem exciting, to me the central challenge remains: how does an auctioneer maximize performance for all bidders? That would be nonsense to cede your bids to the auctioneer in-person, and it's no less absurd just because Google is doing it automatically.

Watch your Google Ads account closely for runaway cost-per-clicks (CPCs), costs per acquisition (CPAs), and other changes you didn't authorize. The longer professional PPCs are in the game, the less they trust these big tech platforms, and I agree that's warranted.

Short Form Video Even More Critical

And we'll end with a prediction on short form video from my Co-Founder here at Roloff Consulting, Ema Roloff.

“Short form video is going to become an even more critical tool for building brand authority and trust. As AI generated content continues to make its way onto company blogs and websites, users will connect deeper with brands that demonstrate HUMAN expertise.

Younger generations use video content on platforms like TikTok to crowdsource recommendations and become knowledgeable about a purchase. This propensity will continue to build in the coming year.”

For this week's action items, I want you to consider which digital sales predictions and trends are going to impact you most.

Do you agree with the list above? Do you have others to add?

I want to hear your thoughts in the comments section!