In 2024, artificial intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. As much as there are still concerns about how AI will affect jobs and productivity, it is undeniable that AI is accelerating innovation and growth in the current fourth industrial revolution, especially in the startup ecosystem.
Ankit Maloo, founding partner of Cogito Group, a full-service growth consultancy and a growth marketing expert who has helped dozens of companies, including two unicorn startups, reach new heights. With additional experience in the consulting industry, Ankit can look back on more than 10 years of hand-on growth marketing.
We spoke to him in an exclusive interview about how AI and other new technologies will change the way startups grow and market themselves.
AI and marketing
In this day and age, marketing spans over numerous different field that includes anything from something as simple as door to door salesmen and out-of-home advertising to highly technological practices such as optimized digital ads and search engine optimization. As Ankit puts it, while AI can certainly be used to help with all of these practices, some fields can leverage AI to much greater extent (at least as of 2024).
One of these fields, he says, is content creation. According to Ankit “What AI does is two things – it takes the marginal cost of content creation to zero, and then it democratizes the expertise and makes it accessible to everyone.”
This shift has opened up new avenues for marketers to produce high-quality content, develop effective strategies, and reach their target audiences more efficiently.
Businesses can now make a lot of interesting, personalised, and useful content with the help of AI-powered tools. This includes everything from blog posts and social media posts to product descriptions and even whole websites.
AI is also significantly changing the way marketing is done and how data is analysed—AI-powered analytics tools can sort through huge amounts of data, find patterns, and give marketers suggestions they can follow.
From Ankit‘s perspective, “The analytics, the insights, the strategizing, everything can be created at the push of a few buttons with barely any prior education required. You can ask one AI model to formulate ideas, then ask the other to refine it, and you have a plan that is comparable to anyone in your market.”
Apple Intelligence and iOS 18
Of course, with the launch of the iPhone 16 that features Apple’s brand new AI-focused software updates, iOS 18 is another hot topic to watch out for as a marketer in 2024. In fact, the recent launch of iOS 18 has introduced substantial modifications to the Apple ecosystem, especially with the advent of Apple Intelligence.
“With iOS 18, Apple made a lot of changes in their APIs and introduced new ones,” explains Ankit. Applications can now incorporate Apple Intelligence to provide contextually aware functionalities, thereby broadening their applications and inherently enhancing the shareability of their content.
One significant implication of iOS 18 is the equitable environment it establishes for app development. As Ankit observes, “Now it becomes a level playing field. Existing apps cannot leverage contacts to grow via social graph, and new apps and existing ones can leverage Apple Intelligence and other features to grow in ways that are still not as well known.”
The modifications to Apple’s Contacts API, which now necessitate users to selectively choose each contact for sharing, underscore the imperative for developers to adjust and investigate novel growth strategies.
Developers must embrace experimentation and innovation to leverage these opportunities. Ankit asserts that Apple Intelligence offers “a great opportunity for many apps” to transform their growth trajectories – and developers who adapt quickly to these changes will be best positioned to succeed.
The Decline of Meta and Google Ads
For years, startups have depended significantly on advertising via platforms such as Meta and Google. Nevertheless, as Ankit observes, these channels are becoming progressively saturated and costly in this decade.
“Meta and Google have been saturated, and the costs are too high for new and upcoming startups to make any headway,” he says. This has necessitated the development of alternative strategies.
Ankit posits that influencer marketing, especially via specialised platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, will gain further popularity as a result of this. “One thing that caught my eye was influencer marketing and how well it’s working for B2B startups,” Ankit remarks.
Instead of concentrating on conventional advertisements, startups can engage influencers who can adeptly convey the value of their products to their specific audience.
He cites companies such as Perplexity and Cursor, which have experienced rapid growth by utilising influencer campaigns instead of making substantial investments in advertisements.
This transition from prominent advertising platforms may represent a pivotal moment, particularly for startups that must optimise their marketing expenditures.
Ankit further stated, “The competition would be high, and CACs (customer acquisition costs) would be higher than ever. Startups need to focus on niche channels and influencer-driven campaigns to achieve sustainable growth.”
A changing playing field
With the rise of AI adoption being in full swing, various strategies are expected to gain steam over the next months and years. “I expect the popular channels to be flooded with AI-generated ads. The competition would be high, and CACs would be higher than ever, so much that it’s practically unsustainable for new startups,” Ankit predicts.
“One thing that I have seen work recently is how well niche audience converts – this gives in to podcast ads, newsletter ads. These are costly on the face of it, but do work remarkably well when we look at the ROI and Lifetime value,” he concludes.
