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Taken from SEJ’s PPC Trends 2024 ebook, our yearly compilation of expert insights outlining the anticipated trends for the upcoming year.
In light of the numerous potential challenges expected in 2024, diversification stands out as a key strategy to safeguard your business against disruptions. Embracing new developments, understanding evolving user behaviors, and exploring additional channels are essential steps in this direction.
Expanding into more channels and incorporating diverse data sources necessitates:
Adapting to change is essential in marketing, necessitating a willingness to explore new platforms and methods of engagement while staying true to the core concept of meeting people where they are.
Relying solely on one channel or data source is no longer effective; instead, embracing diverse channels and data streams is crucial for drawing insightful conclusions.
Ultimately, integrating innovative approaches into established marketing strategies is key to navigating evolving landscapes while staying grounded in proven principles.
Alex Macura, the Founder/CEO of Your Digital Assembly, underscores the significance of harnessing user-generated content (UGC) in today’s era of personalization. UGC, exemplified by customer reviews and experiences, offers authentic feedback that can significantly bolster brand visibility and resonance.
This genuine interaction between consumers and brands fosters engagement, potentially attracting new clientele. Social media platforms serve as fertile ground for content creation, presenting opportunities for brands to amplify their presence and even achieve viral status.
Building a genuine rapport with customers and cultivating a loyal community not only enhances brand value but also ensures a sustainable source of goodwill and support.
The Rise Of Online Video Shopping
Looking to enhance engagement while offering customers seamless, real-time access to your products? Enter online video shopping – an influencer marketing tactic enabling customers to browse, shop, and make purchases directly through dynamic live streams.
Utilizing influencers on social media platforms, live video shopping presents a powerful opportunity to bolster brand visibility and engagement. Unlike traditional methods, users can purchase products instantly within the stream, eliminating barriers to conversion.
Embracing this innovative approach can set you apart from competitors and provide a competitive edge. However, success in online video shopping requires meticulous preparation and strategic implementation to capitalize on its full potential.
The Future Of Marketing
As we approach 2024, the anticipation for upcoming marketing trends is palpable. In just a few months, we’ll uncover the strategies that will shape the landscape. Which trends will resonate with your brand?
The answer lies in exploration and experimentation. Time is of the essence; staying stagnant risks falling behind in an ever-evolving market. Embrace the journey of discovery to ensure your brand remains relevant and competitive in the year ahead.
Amalia Fowler, Principal Strategist at Good AF Consulting, emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach to marketing in 2024. Rather than fixating solely on individual platform metrics, there’s a growing trend towards holistic planning.
This entails integrating various platforms and channels to optimize towards overarching marketing goals, rather than being overly focused on isolated key performance indicators (KPIs). For instance, relying solely on search ads neglects potential engagement opportunities at the outset of the user journey, such as through social media or video content.
Furthermore, marketers should not overlook owned properties in their strategy. Fostering a more integrated approach and broadening perspectives beyond on-platform activities unlocks untapped optimization potentials across the entire marketing ecosystem.
In navigating the attention economy, marketers must craft a unified media mix tailored to address users’ needs at every stage of their journey, encompassing paid, owned, and earned marketing endeavors.
Success hinges not only on platform selection but also on the alignment of ad messaging, strategic calls-to-action, and maintaining message consistency across channels and from ads to landing pages.
Moreover, accurate measurement is paramount. Failing to effectively gauge these elements can lead to significant setbacks. With the shift towards GA4 adoption and ongoing debates surrounding tracking, prioritizing practices like importing offline conversions and utilizing tools like UTM tags has become increasingly crucial for marketers.
Ben Wood, Director of Growth & Innovation at Hallam, highlights a significant trend expected to persist into 2024 and beyond: privacy-first measurement and advertising. This approach involves delivering targeted ads without divulging users’ personal information, a practice gaining traction as Google prepares to phase out third-party cookies.
In anticipation of this shift, more advertisers are exploring contextual advertising as an alternative to traditional targeting methods. Major brands like the Guardian, Bauer, and Haymarket have already joined forces to test privacy-enhancing technologies for ‘post-cookie’ advertising. As the efficacy of third-party targeting diminishes, smaller advertisers are likely to follow suit, aligning with initiatives such as the Privacy Sandbox project.
The landscape of measurement will persist with challenges, particularly concerning multi-touch attribution.
Commonly, multi-touch attribution tends to overemphasize the impact of lower-funnel advertising strategies, overlooking the significance of brand-building and upper-funnel investments.
In response, I anticipate more advertisers will explore alternative approaches like media mix modeling (econometrics) and incrementality experiments. These tactics aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of return on investment (ROI) by triangulating various data points and assessing the true impact of advertising efforts across different stages of the customer journey.
Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google, underscores the increasing significance of first-party data strategies in light of impending changes such as the deprecation of third-party cookies and stricter privacy regulations.
These transformations are reshaping audience targeting methodologies, exemplified by the sunset of similar audiences in August 2023. Instead, leveraging first-party audience segments becomes pivotal for optimized targeting, audience expansion, and Smart Bidding, all while adhering to privacy-centric practices.
Moreover, the accessibility of first-party data is paramount. New tools are emerging to streamline the utilization of consented first-party data, regardless of its storage location.
In terms of analytics, Google Analytics 4 prioritizes privacy, making it more resilient to evolving privacy measures. It achieves this by minimizing reliance on cookies for user data observation and employing data aggregation techniques to safeguard user anonymity. Additionally, GA4 utilizes AI to generate predictive audiences, enhancing the effectiveness of Ads campaigns when sufficient data is available.
Video, Video, Video
The growth of video content persists across various platforms, whether in concise formats for mobile devices or extended forms for television. While video has conventionally served brand marketers in building awareness, adept marketers have demonstrated its effectiveness in driving performance outcomes.
Anticipate a shift among brand marketers towards utilizing video to propel performance metrics, while performance advertisers will continue leveraging video for performance-driven objectives. Moreover, expect to witness a convergence, with performance advertisers incorporating video to enhance awareness initiatives.
Additionally, the integration of AI technologies will streamline video creation processes. Already, AI can autonomously reformat horizontal video ads into vertical or square formats, exemplifying its potential to optimize video content for different platforms and viewing experiences.
Lisa Raehsler, Founder and SEM Strategy Consultant at Big Click Co., discusses the ongoing migration to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and its evolving utility for advertisers.
While the transition to GA4 has presented challenges for some advertisers, the process is expected to stabilize and become more beneficial in 2024. Despite many advertisers having migrated to GA4, there remains a need for customization to fully harness its capabilities and extract actionable insights.
Customizing GA4 is particularly valuable for optimizing paid search efforts and refining strategies, budgets, and creatives across various digital platforms, including display, video, shopping, social media, and retargeting.
The events-based model of GA4 offers deeper insights into traffic acquisition, audience behavior, and engagement across PPC and other channels.
Advertisers who adeptly embrace and excel in utilizing this new model will gain a competitive edge and enhance performance across digital channels.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal
