What Does the Future Hold?
1) Removal of Third-Party Cookies🍪
Let’s start by saying: do not fret! Not all cookies will be dumped by the end of 2022. This is just referring to third-party cookies. Hallelujah! But, yes – this is going to be quite an adjustment for those of us in the digital marketing world. Why? A really important and useful tool for marketers is “remarketing”.
Third-party cookies allow marketers to curate strong visitor profiles of consumers who are showing awareness either of your brand or other brands selling similar products to you. These cookies show target audience behaviours online. This allows marketers to have access to deeper insights when it comes to how to create a remarketing campaign, with the goal of guiding visitors further along the customer journey from awareness to conversion (sale!).
Remarketing uses Pay Per Click advertising to re-engage with consumers who have shown some level of awareness or intent on your website without it resulting in a conversion. Let’s face it – not everyone is as decisive as we’d like to think. Buying can take some time.
On this subject – I think we have our next blog topic sorted: What is Remarketing?
So what do marketers need to think about? GetAPP conducted research, given to Hubspot, suggesting that marketers should:
1) Find ways of gathering the right data in order to market to their target audiences.
2) Be prepared to increase spending to reach the same goals achieved in 2021.
3) Look closely at investing into email marketing more heavily – a great remarketing opportunity.
Hubspot has an informative blog all about this topic.
Click here to read.
2) The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is a conceptual framework through which marketers establish at which point they are interacting with their target audience.
This enables marketers to tailor their campaigns in alignment with each stage.
The stages are: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty and advocacy. Advocacy is the ultimate goal because this is free marketing!! Also known as word of mouth marketing (WOMM).
If you get to a point where your customers are so loyal to you that they love to advocate for and recommend your brand then, we’d say, you’ve won the ultimate prize!
Traditionally, Pay Per Click has fallen at the end of the marketing funnel. It is normally seen as the last step you take to lead your target audience towards converting. It is based on the assumption that people have become aware of your offering through research and are now ready to put money into the mix and buy what you’re selling. This is great because you can measure your ROI for PPC campaigns.
An example of how we have used Pay Per Click to boost our clients’ visibility is our Maxas Design & Build project. Our ultimate goal is always to help our clients achieve their growth objectives!
Here’s an idea. What if Pay Per Click began to have more relevance earlier on in the marketing funnel, like awareness?
There is a compelling argument for this to be something we see more of in the future. Why? Imagine you’re offering a service, let’s say employee payroll management. A way in which you could channel your Pay Per Click budget is to offer your knowledge base on everything about employee payrolls: management, legalities, latest changes and insights etc. Essentially, you are using Pay Per Click to enhance your share of search online and pointing users to informational pages rather than sales pages.
Of course, the trade off here is that you won’t see an immediate ROI and change in your bank account because you aren’t calling for immediate conversions.
However, when your target audience does come to wanting to convert/purchase your service, you will be at the forefront of their minds. You will likely be the brand they remember and that they ultimately give their money to. Therefore, it is in this way you’d be using Pay Per Click to enhance awareness of your brand and service. Why? You’re using Pay Per Click to play more of a role in the research stage.
A useful way to make the most of this concept is to think about introducing sign-ups for newsletters on these pages…or one could entice their readers with inspiring content only to be accessed through exchanging contact details (AKA gated content). This way you’re adding a whole new avenue of value for your business in data collection. KPIs you set for your Pay Per Click strategy can now be divided between achieving a 5x ROI on ad spend while also aiming to achieve a certain amount of newsletter sign-ups for your upper-funnel Pay Per Click strategy.
It’s a long game but it can and will show ROI if you have the budget for it.
3) Automation
What we really want to point out here is that automation is becoming more and more prominent in Paid Search and there is no stopping it.
AI is the future of Paid Search.
In fact, Google recently beta-tested AI-run Performance Max Campaigns.
In a nutshell, this boils down to Google asking you two questions: what are your goals for this campaign and what is your budget, and then doing all the rest. That is it. No keywords, nothing. Imagine a world where keywords are now a thing of the past!
If you’re a Pay Per Click manager – don’t be alarmed! This may sound like a bad thing, when in actual fact these advancements in automation wi
ll take away the tedious and monotonous tasks required of you. Result?
You will be working more closely and efficiently with clients on establishing the right and most effective KPIs for them – happier clients! One could even equate them to becoming more like some form of business consultants for their clients to achieve better results for their bottom line.
BTW – Performance Max Campaigns are now live and can be used.
4) Increasing Cost of CPC
There isn’t much more to elaborate on here except that with the increasing popularity and need to utilise paid search to stay competitive – cost per click is going to naturally increase.
This isn’t an easy pill to swallow, especially for small businesses. However, the reality is that CPC doesn’t actually matter for bigger businesses as long as it is bringing in large ROI as a result. Even more so, some multi-channel retailers know that a high value CPC click has the opportunity to also result in a business transaction in a bricks and mortar store. What does this mean for their actual ROAS (return on ad spend)? It may be more than initially perceived.
Either way, a decisive budget with an understanding of what the value of a ‘click’ means and what more it can bring to the business in other avenues, is essential!
Get planning and budgeting, guys.
