What I learned..

For starters, nothing matters. This is the main takeaway, so feel free to stop reading now. We’re well into the era of feed and creators, where the next 90 seconds are the only ones that matter. The following 90 seconds are the ones that matter, and you only need to win the 90 seconds once or twice a quarter. Plan accordingly with well-developed and packaged content and prepared engagement. Here are the tangible takeaways from Rising Tides and fractional client growth in 2024. Seo is(n’t) DeadFor years, we’ve heard that SEO has shifted from Google to social platforms, primarily X and YouTube. With AI content flooding the market, the concern has grown that it will be challenging to own keywords and topics of interest organically. This is not true, AI has brought an increased focus on search optimization. Now, with AI exploring ads and Google optimizing for quality/interest over quantity, we can expect that SEO will continue to be an opportunity for long-tail, organic traffic. X has jumped the SharkI’ve held on as long as I can, but Musk’s obsession with monetization has crushed the core function of Twitter: conversation. As pledged, X has transitioned to a platform for reach and creators. While still useable, it has digressed into the TikTok/Snapchat/IG region of entertainment-only consumer platforms. We're still holding out hope for X, but we’ve shifted to using it as a cross-post, branding-only platform.

Linkedin is Everything It’s not Bluesky but Linkedin that has benefited the most from X’s regression. We are seeing an explosion of prime Twitter behavior leading to LinkedIn. Threads, Engagement Farms, Social Selling, and Community Nurture are now standard ways to grow on Linkedin, along with their existing features. Accordingly, we’re successfully building new brands on LI and leveraging X community management to train audiences on engagement. Any audience is your AudienceOne of the most significant challenges in growth is audience nurturing, moving prospects from lead through conversion. In 2024, we’ve taken qualification and enrichment out of sales and into the hands of Agents, message sequences, and AI wrappers to expedite months’ worth of sales loops into a few conditional messages. One of our favorite tools has been scraping social audience from X, enriching, and qualifying with email marketing. A good audience will provide up to 45 days’ worth of conversions!

Outreach is now everywhere, and email is Undervalued. See above, but it’s worth repeating. Distribution lives on email, and with outreach now on all platforms, it’s never been better for email marketing.

Social selling is Field Sales Remember reaching out to your first customers and doing those live demos? Or actually, dropping by the front desk, sourcing who the champion and influencers are, then setting up the demo for next month? We knew digital technology would take over everything except personality, and now we’re here. Where your competitors are throwing themselves against the wall in the DM, you’ve got to be living in the replies and comments. Field sales are now done entirely underneath the posts. The hidden benefit is one-to-many reach. Sales aren’t DeadIf you correlate all of this learning, it’s that we’re here. Marketing has taken over. Sales is now an endpoint, similar to landing pages where conversion happens. Whether it’s called revenue operations (DevOps), email, or just digital marketing, the primary functions of audience building, messaging, and prospect conversion are now owned under the functionality of marketing. and finallyYou are not using AI CorrectlyAlmost none of us are. We’ve run through v1 of AI where we all got excited with prompts. Some of us turned agents into AI wrappers and profited. However, the primary use case of AI is processing power. To prepare for the oncoming wave of direct LLM implementation, you must clean your data and document your processes.

Look at Klarna as an example, laying off nearly 1/3 of their workforce and rewriting internal processes to cancel all of their enterprise software. Anticipate more of this. The fields of marketing and sales are rife with manual processes that AI will take over and own; leaving us with conversation and analytics. So clean your data lake and document your user journey. 2025 is here. -Grady