Demystifying Marketing's 6 Biggest Mixed Messages of 2024 with Jasper's Head of Enterprise Marketing

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Welcome to HubSpot’s Expert Edge Series, where we interview top execs at major brands to explore their perspectives on the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the industry.

“Use AI. But not too much AI … and in the right ways.”

“Optimize for SEO – but it’s changing completely and irrevocably, so also optimize for other channels.”

“Speed and relevancy are top priorities. But we also need a 3-6 month content calendar which will require rallying a cross-functional team.”

Sound familiar?

These are just a few of the six paradoxes Jasper’s Head of Enterprise Marketing and Communications, Samyutha Reddy, recently posted on her LinkedIn:

I’m willing to bet her thoughts resonate with plenty of marketers. 2024 has already felt like a consistently-shifting video game with plenty of unexpected pitfalls, cliffs, and trap doors.

As everything about marketing changes — from SEO to content creation to goal-setting — Reddy encourages marketers to stay focused on what matters: Storytelling.

Here, let’s dive into some of her tips for dealing with the mixed messages we’re hearing in 2024, and what to stay focused on, instead.

Why These Six Paradoxes Exist in The First Place

First, I was curious if Reddy had an assumption about why these paradoxes exist in 2024.

Why is this year so challenging for marketers? Is it AI? Google’s upcoming SGE changes? Something else?

Surprisingly, Reddy doesn’t believe these paradoxes are new to the world of marketing.

As she told me, “There is always a pendulum swing in marketing tactics and the industry being quick to adopt it, then swinging the other way once it shows diminishing returns. A couple of examples of this includes our reliance on paid ads, where the biggest budgets determined who the industry leaders were, but the efficiency of that ad spend has now been called into question. So we shifted to content, and it was about who had the capacity to create the most content possible, and those tech companies that behaved like media companies took the market share.”

She continues, “Then, we had diminishing returns on that tactic as well. We were spending so much time on the content treadmill and short-changed critical aspects of content creation like distribution strategy and message pull through.”

Which leads me to wonder: Where is the pendulum swing heading next?

Reddy says, “With AI coming into play, the pendulum is again swinging away from traditional content creation tactics. In my opinion, the big swing is headed squarely toward organizations recognizing the importance of consistent storytelling across their brand with relevant spokespeople dedicated to each niche of their audience. In my opinion, the companies that are telling the most impactful stories to their target audience through the voice of relevant spokespeople will rise to the top of the leaderboard in …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog