Top marketing lessons from 2024 to spark your ideas for a winning 2025

Action Box: Get Productive With AI – January 8th at Noon EST

Kickstart your year by gaining a new level of AI mastery to propel your 2025 marketing success. See the 7 principles you will learn in this session at MeclabsAI.com/GetProductive (from MarketingSherpa’s parent organization, MeclabsAI).

In the year 2024, the team at MarketingSherpa and MeclabsAI (MarketingSherpa’s parent organization) brought you:

• 18 experts, 14 apps, and 16 libraries in MeclabsAI
• 41 in-depth interviews with marketing leaders, jam-packed with lesson-filled stories from their career, in the How I Made It In Marketing podcast
• 55 marketing case studies – taking you behind-the-scenes into your peers’ campaigns to spark your next great marketing idea

But nothing we do really matters…unless it helps you. So for our yearly wrap-up, I turned to our readers and asked them what we sparked in them this year. Their responses are below, and hopefully sparks a great idea in you to help you win 2025. But first, let me add my two cents.

Simplicity is not about dumbing down – it’s about making it easy for your customers to say ‘yes.’

via me

Sometimes our biggest lessons of the year are not necessarily new lessons. We remember and re-learn something we knew but lost amid the intensity of constant deadlines, fire drills, and striving to get results while truly serving customers.

For me, I love the Albert Einstein quote – “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

But then, I (along with our team here at MarketingSherpa and parent company MeclabsAI), dive in every day and try to create value for our audience and customers. Take the AI Guild for example. In trying to create more and more value for members, it was getting pretty complex.

Sometimes, the universe keeps trying to give you a message, and you keep ignoring it. And then I realized, I’d been hearing a lot about simplicity over and over again on How I Made It In Marketing interviews. Guests kept telling me about it:

“It’s hard to be simple”
– Emily Campbell, CMO, Infinite Electronics, in Digital Transformation: First team first, it’s hard to be simple, get out of your comfort zone (podcast episode #29)

“Be the person who doesn’t give up when things get complicated. Be the one to simplify them. Then, your creative teams can do phenomenal things.”
– Jasmin Guthmann, Head of Corporate Communication, Contentstack, in Corporate Communication and Marketing Innovation: The dangerous delusion of safety – playing it safe can hurt you more than you know (podcast episode #41)

“You should almost always do less than you think.”
–  Jake Watts, Vice President of Marketing, PDI, in Innovation Leadership and Coaching: You should almost always do less than you think (podcast episode #46)

“If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.”
– Kelly Cutler, Lecturer and Associate Director of the Spiegel Research Center, Northwestern University, in Substance Over Style: Good work has to speak for itself (podcast episode #111)

“Ask yourself, ‘what happens if I do nothing?’”
– Jonathan Kaufman, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Sage Dental, in Marketing Leadership: Embracing questions and overcoming pretense (podcast episode #74)

So when Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MeclabsAI, asked me to take the lead when we were launching a new cycle of MEC050: Get Productive With AI (one of the training session in the AI Guild), I said – we have to simplify.

The AI Guild was too complex to be early in the funnel. Let’s start with a simple event, and then once people get value, we can invite them into the Guild.

We set up a registration page, and we even did a Zoom meeting instead of a webinar so we had a single link we could give people if they had any issues. We put a calendar invite on the thank you page and sent followup emails and text messages (for people who included their phone number) with the single meeting link. Again, a bit more simplicity than a webinar, where attendees would get an individualized link directly from Zoom (emails that are easily overlooked).

Flint built on the idea and said – instead of seven one-hour sessions, let’s just do a single session and condense it down to three hours. An accelerated version of the training.

And the result – we got 10x more registration (literally 10x, I’m not using hyperbole) 5x more attendance.

If you’re reading this, it may seem obvious to you. We essentially did a webinar. Not necessarily a cutting-edge breakthrough marketing technique you haven’t heard of.

I included this as a reminder for you. We are living in the era of AI, and we can do some pretty phenomenal things with breathtaking, cutting-edge tech. And hopefully more to come on that this year from us here at MeclabsAI.

But while you’re learning all of these new things, don’t overlook the things you already know but lose in the daily grind.

I’ve been at MarketingSherpa/MarketingExperiments/Meclabs/MeclabsAI for 15 years now. And yes, half of the feedback I get is from a marketer or entrepreneur that read a MarketingSherpa case study or heard an interview and got a breakthrough new idea.

However, the other half of the feedback I get is that a case study or interview simply reminded them of something they already knew and forgot. They weren’t shocked that another marketer or entrepreneur got a lift from a tactic. The tactic was pretty obvious. And yet they overlooked it in their own organization until they were reminded of it.

Hopefully this sparks some ideas for simple fixes you can make in your own organization to better serve customers and improve results. And these insights from our readers give you more even more ideas…

Patient-centric website redesign helps increase form submissions 104%

via Sam Driessen, SEO consultant, Meta Creative:

Firstly – big fan of your site, particularly the fact that you share real-world examples and screenshots. It makes a ton of difference and is so much easier to follow than broad concepts.

With full disclosure, only a small piece of this project was completed by me. It was brought to life through a collaboration between our Founder & Creative Director (Michael Duncan) and our Senior Creative Designer (Veron Djojo).

Earlier in the year I stumbled across this case study that you’d recently published, about CRO for healthcare websites.

It came at the perfect time. Our client Lamp Chiropractic had just signed off on a new website project. They wanted to create a website that spoke directly to their potential patients, rather than simply listing their services.

Their old website was dated. It spoke more about the clinic than the relief their patients were seeking. With too much text, and undifferentiated copy it was hard for users to resonate with the website.

Creative Sample #1: Old website

A direct quote from your case study “Making the page more ‘patient-centric’ was done by putting ourselves in the patients’ shoes to try to understand their common problems and questions” echoed what we were seeing and what the client expected.

Your case study was perfect, and really set the direction of the website. It was great to have something that mirrored the position we were in, with such clear direction and examples.

With the article shared in the company Slack channel, our design team got to work.

The Project: Setting the tone that we understand and can help their issues

We understood that the copy was the most crucial part. Normally we’d build a website based around the copy provided by a copywriter or the client, but as getting it right was so important, we decided to tackle it in-house with Veron and Michael working side-by-side to match the design and copy on the fly.

The first heading on the page “Moving Freely, Living Fully” dives straight into the benefit of treatment.

Creative Sample #2: New website headline

From there we move straight into the reasons one might be seeking a chiropractor. Setting the tone that we understand and can help with their issues.

Creative Sample #3: Services menu

A small video highlights what it’s actually like to receive treatment. This was an attempt to give users understanding of what a chiropractor does, and ease nerves.

Creative Sample #4: Video on homepage

From there we dive into introducing the clinic’s Head Chiropractor. For local businesses we find it crucial to put a ‘face’ to the website to build a level of comfort.

Creative Sample #5: Profile section of homepage

This site even features a video section, which hosts a range of exercises or stretches that patients are prescribed. A common complaint for patients was that when they go home, they can’t always remember how to properly do their exercises, so these videos give them assistance during their treatment.

Creative Sample #6: Free videos with patient exercises

The Results: 104% increase in form submissions

Not only did Lamp Chiropractic get a modern website that reflects their brand and focuses on their patient. But they saw the benefit in terms of bookings.

With a nicer design, better copy, and a more direct CTA their clinic is busier than ever.

While their old website didn’t have analytics tracking, so I can’t give a clear conversion rate, I can see their form submissions in the months post-launch have increased by more than double (104%).

Make sure you explain what will happen next (and other lessons from the AI Guild)

via Ken Ducey, co-founder, HamletHub

Here’s what Daniel Burstein has taught me in MEC300: Develop Your Creative (part of the AI Guild):

1. Lots of anxiety out there. Three ways to get over it on your web page – Specificity (specific results), proximity (put anxiety reducers next to CTA or anxiety), intensity (security seals, message from owner).
2. Sharp Numbers – Not this: “We have over 3,000 events you can publish.” But this: “We have 3,245 events you can publish.” (learn more about sharp numbers in Marketing Jiujitsu: How Sizzler and Wellow turned burdens into triumphs)
3. Action words to begin your buttons/ads/headlines
4. “You don’t write because you want to write something, you write because you have something to say” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Not what you make, but what you make possible. Stress what you make possible, the dream outcome. (learn more in Strategic Advertising and Marketing: It’s not what you make, it’s what you make possible [podcast episode #117])
6. Make sure you explain what will happen next.
7. Think about it from the perspective of the last lecture (learn more in The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing).

Here’s what I learned from Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MeclabsAI, in the AI Guild:

1. Audit for too much or too little – Have I provided sufficient information to get them to say ‘yes?’ Is there anything on the page I don’t need to get them to say ‘yes?’
2. Be careful of friction that is easy to avoid – length, difficulty, implied (learn more in Call to Action Principles: Four keys to achieving maximum conversion).
3. Sales makes claims, marketers foster conclusions.
4. It is either a goal you want to meet or a pain you are trying to avoid.

Replacing industry jargon with easier words increases customer engagement 23%

via Sam Jacobs, head of marketing, Ammo.com:

Earlier in the year, you shared a lot about the ‘curse of knowledge’ here. We always think of deep knowledge as good, and this article taught me the opposite.

Our deep familiarity with the products we market can create a disconnect with our customers who don’t have the same level of understanding. It explained why our engagement rate was stalling even after using authentic stories and featuring experts in our industry. I decided to give it a try.

I held off uploading additional content for three weeks and asked the team to update some of our old product descriptions. The goal was to replace industry jargon with easier words. We replaced “consistent muzzle velocity” with more relatable phrases like "it performs exactly how you need it to, every time.” I also adjusted our content writing guidelines and shared them with the team.

In September, our customer engagement was up by 23%. A simple change in language and not assuming the audience understands the terminologies led to more relatable and inclusive content.

Total ROI of social media marketing channels grew by 44% by shifting media spend

via Alexandra Dubakova, Head of Marketing, Freetour.com

I learned about a project planning tool in MeclabsAI. A colleague shared this post with me. I was surprised that there is a marketing AI assistant much better than ChatGPT. It incorporates knowledge based on more than 10,000 marketing experiments and it can help me with my own growth goals.

First, I wanted to test the MeclabsAI Project Planner expert assistant. I described two marketing experiments we conducted recently and asked it to predict the possible outcome. The assistant earned my trust after its predictions almost fully matched the results of our tests. After that, I decided to use it to strategically redistribute the marketing budgets among social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, and X. The Project Planner asked me about the campaign durations, budgets, CPC, and costs of the content along with less obvious data points such as user sentiment before building a plan.

As a result, the Project Planner helped me to build a methodology to gradually shift resources from X to Facebook and test the intermediate results to confirm the hypothesis. That's exactly what we started doing from March 2024 to October 2024. As a result, we decreased the budget allocated for X by 80% and increased the Facebook marketing budget by 130% and our total ROI of social media marketing channels grew by 44%.

How to send PR pitches to the media in 2025

via Vishal Shah, Sr. Technical Consultant, WPWeb Infotech

This past year has been transformative for my approach to content marketing, thanks in large part to an insightful article from MarketingSherpa about HARO alternatives.

The article opened up a whole new world for me by introducing platforms where I could connect directly with top publishers and share industry insights. This knowledge was a game changer, allowing me to elevate my content strategy beyond my usual reach. One of my major takeaways was understanding the importance of being featured in authoritative publications, which had always seemed out of my grasp.

Thanks to the strategies discussed, I managed to get an article featured in Search Engine Journal. This achievement not only expanded my audience within my niche but also enhanced the visibility and recognition of my brand. It was exhilarating to see my work appreciated on such a prestigious platform, and it affirmed the power of strategic outreach.

Reflecting on this experience, I'm grateful for the practical advice from MarketingSherpa. It not only guided me to new opportunities but also showed me effective ways to contribute to and grow within the community. This journey has been a significant milestone in my career, showcasing the real-world impact of applying expert insights to one's work.

Develop a strong umbrella message that all your content aligns with

via Elisa Montanari, Head of SEO, website strategy and conversion rate optimization, Wrike:

I love hearing about the experiences of others in B2B marketing leadership, so this article and podcast was quite insightful. Hearing from a CMO on how brand-building and demand gen can be combined and built off each other was eye-opening, and much of that comes down to developing a strong umbrella message that all your content aligns with.

The content also shows why we must nurture and maintain a strong sense of empathy if we hope to be good team leaders and marketers because both sides of our job are all about people.