CXL - 5 Simple Marketing Lessons From 2024💡

5 Simple Marketing Lessons and Reminders From 2024
by Stefan Maritz, from CXL

It's that time of the year. Our inboxes are filling up with out-of-office mails, everyone and their mom is posting their marketing predictions for 2025 on LinkedIn and incase you've missed it (spoiler alert), it's mostly about AI, again.

For today's issue, I'm not going to bore you with my predictions for 2025, but rather take a look back at 2024 and round up some marketing lessons and reminders that helped me move the needle here at CXL as well as some other projects I've been working on throughout the year.

And, I promise, AI is not one of them.

The power of emotional benefits

Emotional benefits relate to the feelings or emotional responses that a brand can evoke in its customers. For example, buying and wearing Patagonia makes a person feel like they are positively impacting the planet.

I've recently helped a team of a big ecommerce brand on a rebrand project and one of the things we zoomed in on was breaking away from just being another generic product option in their category that gets lost on Amazon. 

We decided to add more purpose, and give people a reason to buy from them instead of the next best, super similar product from a competitor. They committed to donating 1% of every sale to a charity of the shopper's choice at checkout.

This small, but impactful change increased conversion rates by 18% in a matter of weeks.

Reminder: Sometimes a small change can make a big difference. Give people a reason to choose you over your competitor. Especially when your product is identical to that of your competition.

Doubled our email subscriptions

At CXL, emails remain one of our most powerful channels (thanks for being here). The more email addresses we get, the more value we can add and the more we can grow. It's not rocket science. Fairly basic if you ask me. Yet, so many companies still neglect this channel, but that's a topic for another day.

In just a few months we've managed to double our email subscriptions from our website. Without doing anything clever or spamming website visitors with invasive popups. 

1) We added a subscription form with a clear value proposition to the bottom of almost every single page.

2) We added a small, non-invasive banner that pops up after 5 seconds pointing to CXL Lite, where we host all of our free video content.

At the same time, we are taking some serious hits on SEO front from Google updates. Organic traffic is down, while our email subs have doubled. Genius? No. Just the basics.

Reminder: Offer site visitors a clear reason to engage and subscribe, and make it as easy as possible for them to sign up. You don't need highly targeted, clever popup strategy to capture emails.

Valuable content drives growth

A simple truth I've always stood behind firmly. Value drives growth. If you consistently add value for your audience, they will eventually convince themselves to buy whatever it is that you are selling. Paid advertising is getting less effective by the week, founder-led marketing is taking over and brands spamming "buy my product" is slowly but surely falling behind.

I see this with CXL, I see this in the industry and I see this on every single project I worked on over the past year. The moment brands switch focus from pushing product benefits and updates, to addressing the challenges of their audience, they start winning.  Demand Generation 101 right there, but it works.

The results don't always immediately come in the form of sales, but they come in the form of willingness to listen and willingness to engage. When these are managed effectively, they are turned into sales and growth over time.

Reminder: Focus on providing value through content, consistently. Educate, entertain and help solve your audiences challenges. Stop asking. Start giving.

Back to basics - understand your customer

This one follows on the previous. How do add value? You need to understand you customer. You need to understand their challenges and what motivates them. 

Research Research Research.

Synthetic data is making it easier by the day, but we are not there just yet. It can help with market research, but not so much to understand your customer and audience. Take the time and invest the budget to speak to your audience. Run surveys, ask questions, do interviews. The more you know about them, the better you can align your content and proposition with their challenges, beliefs and desires. And, the more you align with those, the better your content will perform, the better your website will convert, the more you will sell.

It's something I've always known, but from working with a lot of startups, I also know that often times this takes the back seat. Ultimately, not doing research and working with assumptions just lead to wasted time and budget.

Here at CXL, we constantly invest in customer research to understand our audience. We test messaging and landing pages, validate assumptions and then use that to direct the experiments we put out into the world. This allows us to put out ads that straight-up hit 12-13% CTRs, absolutely crushing benchmarks and helping us not waste money through trial and error.

Reminder: Don't assume anything. Take the time and put in the effort to do the research. It really makes a difference. 

A little goes a long way.

I'm just going to say this as it is. You don't need big teams and big budgets to drive growth.  Understaffed and under resourced are excuses that some people in this industry love to hide behind, while others are writing success stories with tiny teams and even smaller budgets. Founders willing to step into the spotlight are building million dollar companies by merely posting on LinkedIn every day. You don't need a team of 15 specialists to do a decent job at marketing. You just need a few people that know the right tactics.

Reminder: Marketing teams are getting smaller and smaller and money is not as freely available as it was just a few years ago. That's the new reality we all have to work with. But, marketing will remain a critical business function and growth lever for every company on this planet. We just need to do more with less.

See you on the other side.

Thank you for your support throughout the year. We hope we helped you solve some challenges along the way. Have a great festive season and remember to keep those ads running, people might not be buying but they are still scrolling. The return on investment will come in the new year.

See you for an exciting 2025. We have some great things lined up.

Regards,
Stefan

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