Our Top Current Digital Marketing Trends for May 2024

In last month’s blog, we featured our 5 recommended strategic focuses for 2024. These were:

1. Drive New Customer Acquisition
2. Engage Existing Customers
3. Embrace AI In Your Processes
4. Build An Omni Strategy
5. Continuous Test & Learn Strategies

This month, we’ll focus on one very topical strategic focus which is ‘Drive New Customer Acquisition’. This is something that all brands should be focusing on in light of cookie depreciation, however, one of the key focuses we are working on with several of our strategic partners is driving new customer acquisition through an Onesearch strategy.

For one of our clients, we’ve been working on a conundrum around PMax lead gen – to bid on brand or not? We’re doing lots of testing here to find the best balance for the brand on paid and organic search.

Here’s the Samantha Czajka, Digital Marketing Manager at HCG’s thoughts on the testing so far:

“This year, we have evolved our approach when it comes to paid advertising and are testing lead gen campaigns to drive new customer acquisition in addition to optimising our existing revenue-driving campaigns.

It has been challenging to find the balance between these at times, and each month the campaigns are optimised and adjusted to make incremental, continuous improvements. Brand bidding is a hot topic for us; we believe it is important to protect our brand from the competition but we also want to ensure we are investing in audiences that can drive new and incremental revenue.

Given our brand terms are also generic in some cases, there are many complexities we are working through with the Pattern team in order to find the sweet spot for our specific business.”

As the PMax campaign is a bit like a black box with limited access to data, our team has implemented custom scripts and put together a very comprehensive dashboard to get deeper insights into what is driving performance across PMax. We can now analyse search terms as well as placement and cost splits by campaign on a very granular level and make informed decisions based on that data.

To complement this testing on PMax, Pattern also looked at growing the non-brand SEO area to drive new customers to the site. Throughout the test on PMax our SEO team monitored the impact of branded paid search campaigns on organic brand keyword rankings, clicks and impressions. This allowed us to review the performance from a One Search perspective without being siloed by channel in our new customer acquisition strategies.

Six Key Industry Insights

1. 1. COOKIE DEPRECIATION:

      Google has delayed the Cookie depreciation for the third time. This was originally meant to roll out in January 2020. The delay provides more time for advertisers to pivot their strategies, but it shouldn’t be a reason to delay the strategic pivot. Digital marketing is an industry built on data, so take this additional time to build more data for your business. Read more about Google’s Cookieless Future & How Brands Can Navigate

   2. ALPHABET’S POTENTIAL ACQUISITION OF HUBSPOT:

      The merging of these two companies could revolutionise the CRM landscape and put Hubspot miles ahead of its competitors. Stay tuned.

   3. TIKTOK’S FATE IN THE US:

      It’s been a rocky time for TikTok and this uncertainty looks to prevail. The parent company, ByteDance, of TikTok has 9 months (plus a 90-day extension available) to sell the app otherwise it will have to cease operations in the US.

   4. META AI CHATBOT:

      Many will have noticed an update to the UI on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Mark Zuckerberg has high expectations for Meta AI to be “the most used and best AI assistant in the world.” We did a test run – see image – and weren’t too impressed with the results (just yet).

      

   5. REDDIT DYNAMIC PRODUCT FEEDS IN BETA:

      Reddit is becoming shoppable! From experience with other platforms, these types of ads often outperform others; so this could be a new era for Reddit advertising. Read more here.

   6. DEBATE AROUND SIGNIFICANCE OF AD STRENGTH IN GOOGLE ADS:

      In newly published Betas, Google is emphasising ad strength. This again opens up debate around how much ad strength influences an auction. Read more here.