9 Performance Marketing Trends to Follow in 2024
The digital landscape is growing by the day and so is the competition for consumer attention. From content creators to brands - big and small, it’s getting tougher to reach and engage the right set of target audiences organically.
That’s why performance marketing has become a crucial part of growth strategies, where brands are able to cut through the noise with paid ad campaigns to promote their products and services.
But performance marketing, just like other promotional tactics, has been evolving rapidly over the years.
In this post, we look into the top performance marketing trends for the year.
9 performance marketing trends to follow in 2024
When devising performance marketing campaigns, businesses should take note of these trends for the year:
1. Leveraging AI ad creatives
In this trend, marketers are moving beyond the traditional approach of creating design briefs for each campaign. Instead, they are embracing AI to rapidly adapt and optimize their campaign creatives.
For example, tools like Eacel.ai are helping performance marketers to not just deep dive into creative analytics, but also generate high-converting visuals for the campaigns in minutes. From automated content generation, dynamic creative optimization and predictive analytics based on the engagement a creative drives, AI is making it easier for marketers to use ad creatives to maximize campaign potential.
Here’s taking a quick look at how an AI ad creatives platform works:
- Connect Eacel with your chosen Ad platform
- The AI will diagnose your creatives and your performance,
- Next it will generate multiple creatives for your ad
- You can choose and launch from the suggested creatives
- It tracks and learns from the performance of each creative
Want to see how AI ad creatives work? Book a demo of Eacel.ai today.
2. Leveraging AI targeting
The ability of AI systems to process vast amounts of data is unmatched. It helps you save manual efforts and delivers superior results.
With AI, businesses get a more thorough understanding of their target audience. AI can enable marketers to uncover insights on user behavior, preferences, and interactions to identify common patterns and trends.
Some of the benefits you’ll enjoy with AI in performance marketing include:
- Enhanced precision: For more accurate targeting of specific audience segments based on their behaviors and preferences.
- Real-time analysis: Process data in real-time enables marketers to adapt their strategies quickly based on the latest user trends.
- Improved ROI: Target the right audience with personalized content to improve the return on investment (ROI) of their campaigns.
Not to forget AI is a machine. It will only do what it’s been told. So, to maintain the quality of the results, AI requires significant training and requires your past ad targeting data.
3. Real-time Bidding
Real-time bidding (RTB) with AI is one of the emerging marketing technologies that allows for the buying and selling of digital ads in real-time, bidding for ad placements in milliseconds. AI-driven algorithms help to process and analyze various factors, such as user behavior and demographics, to make split-second decisions. This optimizes the chances of securing the most effective advertising opportunities.
To understand how real-time bidding works, imagine a user visiting an e-commerce website and browsing for running shoes. In real-time, AI processes this information, and during an auction for an ad placement, it bids more aggressively for impressions related to running shoes, increasing the chances of displaying an ad for the exact product the user is interested in.
Some of the benefits of RTB will be:
- Efficient Ad placement: Allows advertisers to place their ads in the most relevant and high-performing spaces, maximizing visibility.
- Cost optimization: Help make informed bidding decisions, ensuring they pay competitive prices for ad impressions.
- Dynamic campaigns: Advertisers can adapt their campaigns in real-time based on the performance of different ad placements.
4. Cross-channel integration
A successful marketing campaign includes understanding the needs of your target audience present on multiple channels and using it for targeting. Digging into the data of one channel is a task in itself, but AI is making the process a lot more efficient.
Use AI to unify data from various marketing channels, creating a comprehensive view of user behavior across platforms.
86% of senior-level marketers state the importance of a cohesive customer journey across all touchpoints and channels, and AI helps with it too. AI allows marketers to create a customer journey map to understand how users move through various touchpoints in their product discovery journey. This information helps in customizing marketing strategies to align with the user's path.
It also helps with sensible budget allocations to different channels of marketing as you can know which channels hold the maximum chance of returning the investment.
5. Privacy and Data Regulations
Governments and regulatory bodies worldwide are enacting laws and regulations to protect user privacy, govern the collection and processing of personal data, and ensure transparent and responsible practices by businesses.
Complying with privacy regulations is not only an ethical obligation but also a legal requirement. Organizations that fail to comply may face severe penalties, fines, or legal consequences.
Some of the key data regulations that performance marketers need to comply with include:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
- Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL)
This brings back focus to marketers gathering audience insights and data through authentic channels, building their own audience for better campaign targeting.
6. Voice Search Optimization
In 2024, voice assistants are expected to reach 8.4 billion units. This could be either due to the added convenience, where users do not have to type to get results, or simply because voice search results tend to load 52% faster than the generic search results.
Whatever it is, you need to hop in!
In today’s time, voice search optimization has become the future of performance marketing. It involves adapting Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies to cater to the nuances of voice-based queries.
Here are some ways to get started with this performance marketing trend in 2024:
- Voice searches often differ from text-based searches. People tend to use more conversational language and ask questions more naturally. Marketers need to understand these changes in behavior to optimize their campaigns for voice search.
- Many voice searches are location-based, hence optimizing for local SEO becomes essential as users frequently inquire about nearby businesses or services.
- Integrate long-tail keywords into your campaigns.
- Voice search devices often rely on featured snippets and Position Zero results. Marketers should focus on creating content that is more likely to be featured in these prime positions
- As voice searches are often performed on mobile devices, ensure a mobile-friendly user experience.
7. Video Dominance
Video content is expected to make up for 82% of the internet traffic in 2024. This is because:
- Our brains process visual information faster
- Videos efficiently trigger emotions
- It increases the retention power
Many major social media platforms, like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc favor short form video content, making it more likely to be seen by a larger audience. With the increasing use of smartphones, people are also able to consume content on the go, which makes it important for performance marketers to also focus on video ad formats to stop the scroll and engage their target audience.
Some of the video types we see performance marketers leveraging this year include:
- Featured / Product videos
- Live videos
- User-generated videos
- Webinar / online event videos
- Personalized videos
- Short-form social media videos
8. Influencer Marketing Evolution
In the early stages of influencer marketing, brands often collaborated with celebrities or macro-influencers with massive follower counts.
However, there has been a shift towards micro-influencers – individuals with smaller but highly engaged and niche audiences. This trend is driven by the desire for more authentic and relatable content, as micro-influencers often have a closer connection with their followers.
There is also a rise of Nano-influencers. These nano influencers individuals with a relatively small but highly engaged follower base, have a more personal and authentic connection with their followers, making their recommendations and endorsements highly influential.
Brands are moving beyond one-off influencer collaborations and are increasingly opting for long-term partnerships. This shift emphasizes the building of sustained relationships between brands and influencers, fostering a more consistent brand narrative.
And performance marketers can be seen catching up on this trend as more brand advertisements start to feature influencer or user-generated content.
9. Social Media Trends
Social media importance for marketing can’t be overstated. So much is going on social media and with that, some important information can come out for your business. AI not only helps with data analysis but also with sentimental analysis, which will help you understand how people behave, their feelings, and what they like, so marketers can know what to focus on.
AI not only helps with finding trends, but also assists in figuring out when to share content, and predicting what will be popular. This helps brands to walk in a very directed direction.
From being an aspect commonly used by social media managers, this will now serve as a direction for performance marketers to create campaigns that capture trends as well as capitalize on the ongoing sentiment around it.
Conclusion
With increasing competition online, businesses need to change how they approach performance marketing. By embracing technology, businesses can scale campaigns with data-driven strategies, leading to positive business outcomes.
And one such technology is AI.
With the help of AI, performance marketers can be seen improving their audience targeting, creative campaign strategies and attribution for the smallest and biggest of campaigns.
Want to know more using AI in performance marketing? Read this post here.
