Boy, oh boy, do we have a bumper issue for you?
We’re finally officially releasing our 2024 GLOBAL MARKETING REPORT — and Happy Marketers get exclusive access now! Check it out below.
In other news, we’re diving into our rebrand, the perfect ad strategy from Crumbl Cookies, and the Bey-conomics of a new Beyonce album.
Buckle in, cowboy! 
Miss Me?
If you noticed that your inbox was missing a certain je ne sais quoi last month, it’s probably because we missed our regular programming in March.
First up, I’m sorry. But also, I’m kind of not sorry.
You see, our team was BUSY. I mean full-time, heads-down researching and writing for the release of our Global Marketing Report (SEE BELOW!).
Keeping it real, creating great content month after month is tough. There’s a whole process behind the scenes. With a huge Report coming your way, a new brand revamp over at nouvelagemedia.com, and a big onboard of incredible new clients, sometimes, somethings gotta give.
So, this is your sign to give yourself grace if you miss a month. As a marketing friend once told me, ‘It’s only an email. No one died’.
But I’m glad to be back to my original programming because high key this is my favorite piece of content to write. I missed you last month 🥺
Fortunately for you, I have been thinking about this edition of Happy Marketing for about six weeks. So, grab a coffee, get settled into your favorite reading spot, and get snuggly with your fur baby (not compulsory but 100% recommended).
Happy Marketing’s back, baby!
🎉 THE ONLY MARKETING REPORT YOU NEED THIS YEAR 🎉
*drum roll please*
All that time last month wasn’t going to waste. We spent it hard at work, creating our most comprehensive marketing report to date, with incredible insights you don’t want to miss.
I’m so proud to announce the 2024 Global Marketing Report by Nouvel Age Media is now available!
This Report has been in progress since last year. In October, we invested into a survey campaign targeting CMOs and marketers from leading companies across the world. We then asked them to complete our detailed survey, sharing with us their thoughts, goals, challenges, and future plans.
Then, we distilled all that data, sprinkled our magic, and pulled out valuable, unique insights that will give you a lead over your competition.
The Report covers all the big hits, including AI, tech tools, ROI struggles, and key trends we’re predicting, plus identifies unique opportunities that are designed for you to use in your next quarter strategy.
This Report is 100%, completely free and we’re giving it to you, our subscribers, right now. This means you’ll get our exclusive insights in advance, and a few precious days where you can get a head start on incorporating our findings into your strategy, before we start promoting this to the general public.
What are you waiting for? Download the Report here.
Notice Anything Different About Me?
Does my new logo look big in this?
Same old outstanding quality, whole new look.
The brand is the heart of who your business is, and we felt we needed to change. Here are three reasons why:
- Our old branding didn’t represent who we really are.
We’re a young team and we work best with innovative new businesses that are on their start-up journey. Although we do work with government agencies and enterprise businesses, all our clients are working to bring something exciting to their industries, and we want our branding to reflect that.
That means taking it from our old, more ‘grown-up’ branding into a fresh new look that felt more like ‘us’.
- Our old branding wasn’t working like we wanted it to.
But perhaps the biggest signal was that our old branding wasn’t working the way it should have been.
I’m going to be honest with you, Happy Marketers, that was a tough pill to swallow.
We were doing so much excellent marketing, outreach, and cold calling, but our website didn’t live up to expectations. It was time for a frank discussion about why.
- It was time.
I think every business owner goes on a journey with their business, and I’m no exception.
For me, this year has been the year where I’ve truly seen the potential of our work. I don’t want to blow our own trumpet (okay, maybe I do), but I think you’d be hard-pushed to find a team that’s better than ours.
Time after time we show up and deliver exceptional results for our clients—so much so that strangers on LinkedIn don’t believe the stats I tell them!
The results?
🚶 Website traffic has increased by 50%
🌱 Organic leads have tripled
💸 Our revenue is 2x higher than last year (and it’s only April 👀)
Here’s what I had to say about it over on IG – check it out and give us a follow while you’re there!
Dusting Off The Old
Our journey into our new brand has cemented what I already know: GRAPHIC DESIGN MATTERS, GODDAMMIT.
But this is also one of those things that I struggle with personally. I know great design makes a huge difference, and I can recognize great design when I see it, but if I didn’t have my team of excellent designers behind me, then I’d be a little stuck.
If that sounds familiar, then here is some excellent inspo you can draw on this month:
- Trends to look out for in 2024 that you can embrace in your designs right this second.
- 5 OOH designs that made us look. Then look again.
- My personal favorite I spied on IG – the sofa, the font, the placement, the subtle ‘kinda’. PER-FEC-TION.
- Expert branding in soft pastels from GenZ’s fave skincare brand, Bubble. Don’t pretend this doesn’t make you click ‘add to cart.’
- These TV ads that we enjoyed (plus a look at their success metrics, too. Sneaky.)
Goodbye Cookies. You Were Great While It Lasted.
We had some good times, cookies and me. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
But this quarter marks the official end of cookies, and the official start of a whole new way of marketing.
It’s now more important than ever before to get connected to your own primary data and third-party data. But what exactly does this look like?
Well, a B2B company can rely on prospecting intent data sourced by ZoomInfo to enrich targeting in paid advertising platforms. Or, you can enrich your ads using your primary data sourced from booked calls.
For B2C brands this might mean tapping into your shopper and newsletter data as primary sources of data, delivering a targeted approach your customers will love. Or why not get location data (think Foursquare or other third party data providers) to enrich targeting?
I don’t want to say I told you so… but I have been preaching this method since 2020 LOL. It’s innovative, but it’s also a low key best practice that only really good paid advertising strategies actually implement.
Why? Because it puts YOU back in control.
Whenever you rely on another service for your leads to work, you’re putting your business at risk. But with data you own, you’re building sustainable practices you can scale.
While the 2010s were a great moment for cookies, this has been a slow decline that good marketers saw coming. So, don’t freak out. This is a great thing that will make your business stronger. And if your paid ads agency can’t get you the same results after the phase-out, you know where we are!
That’s the Way the Cookies Crumbl
(I spent about 5 minutes coming up with that headline; pls appreciate it.)
*drools*
Crumbl Cookies deserve an honorable mention this month for their EXPERT ad strategy — with a huge variety of tests running they’re smashing it out of the park when it comes to all that juicy data.
But they’re not just running any old ad. They’re creating masterpieces of color that make the cookies pop (JUST LOOK AT CONFETTI MILKSHAKE). I love the playfulness, the whimsy, THE COOKIES 
But it isn’t just the graphics; the copy too is so great:
“Our delicious Confetti Milkshake cookie rolled in rainbow sprinkles and topped with cake-flavored buttercream and a dollop of whipped cream.”
‘Rolled’ and ‘dollop’ have a delightfully clumsy symmetry, and ‘cake-flavored buttercream’ just makes me want to get stuck in. Even the Spanish copy is great – ‘Una fiesta de colores y sabores’. Outstanding.
*eats my third cookie of the day*
Now THAT’S an ad.
A Love Affair: TikTok Shop + Your Customers ❤️
My partner downloaded TikTok in an ironic moment of anarchist rebellion and now we’re getting new parcels arriving almost every day.
He’s bought slime (???), a neck massager, and a sink drainer. I mean, what the hell is that shopping list?!
Don’t tell me you’re not tempted.
But it got me thinking about the aggressive energy that TikTok Shop has entered the ecom space with. (TikTok Shop is HUGGEEEE and it’s taking no prisoners.)
And the most exciting part of this strategy? The TikTok shop affiliate program. This means that even if you don’t have a big brand presence, you can get your brand on there and take advantage of other creators creating content about your products for an affiliate share.
Our best example? Tabs Chocolate, which blew up a few months ago on TikTok by hacking TikTok’s affiliate program.
Tabs seized on the program by encouraging micro-creators to sell and earn using specialist UTMs that tracked their purchases. That means 100s of micro-influencers making great, high-quality, and effective Tabs content that reached a whole new level of customers.
(GE-NI-US)
TikTok’s organic algorithm makes it one of the best places in the world to still get organic reach through decent content. And the best thing?
When TikTok started heating up a lot of brands felt the pressure to go in and look at it. While some brands have figured it out, a lot of brands have meddled with it and backed away.
This means TikTok is HOT right now, and the opportunities are ripe for the taking.
P.S. If you’re planning on creating TikTok content, check out these future trend predictions to get ahead.
🚨Changes in SEO
Here’s what you need to know:
- SGE is coming. In fact, it might already be here.
AI isn’t just for ChatGPT. To compete with the traffic that OpenAI is (supposedly) stealing, Google knows it must pivot its strategy to a no-click search, giving answers immediately. Enter SGE.
What does this mean for your content strategy? Well, when it gets down to the small details (i.e. word counts, types of media, meta description best practices) it’s still up for debate.
But here’s the thing. I’ve seen some out-of-touch SEO influencers dismissing the whole thing. They’re wrong. SGE is coming—it might already be here—and tech never goes backward.
- The tension between trends and holistic content is more complex than ever
In the fast-paced world of social media, trends pass so quickly that it’s almost too late to hop on it by the time it shows up in your FYP. But as search changes, do the old holistic content rules apply?
Tricky to say, but in general, a great content strategy hits both. That means trending, fleeting content on TikTok and lasting, value-packed content on your blog. It’s still possible to channel traffic through SEO, and for big businesses (as our Global Marketing Report shows), this is still an avenue packed with opportunity.
BUT maybe the tides are turning. My advice? Never put all your eggs in one basket. Things are unstable in the world of search, and the best content marketers are looking for ways to hit multiple touchpoints.
- Nothing will be the same. But that doesn’t mean give up.
There are big questions about the future of search right now, but content isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the market for digital content creation is predicted to reach $38.2 billion by 2030 (an almost 4x increase from its $11 billion valuation today)
While search is changing, your customer’s desire to consume content is not. My mantra is always to create excellent content first – your audience will find itself.
My evidence? Well, you’re reading this right now, aren’t you?
The April Fools Ad Campaign That Hits Home
Ever been ghosted?
Yeah, no, me neither 🫠🫠
All in on authenticity. Except sexy business owners like me can’t relate… 🫠
This April Fools, Tinder took their ads to the next level, and I loved it. Playing on those tropes we see coming up time and time again (authenticity, simplicity, and humor), this was a big win for the brand.
It definitely stood out among the sea of April Fools jokes we saw on the first, but did you see one that beat it? Let us know by hitting reply.
Let’s Talk Beyonce 👑👑
The queen of modern pop is also a fantastic marketer. So, get ready for my spicy take on Bey-conomics: Five key takeaways from her recent album launch.
- Be famous
LOL sorry—but one of the big things about Beyonce’s success is her audience and her notoriety. There’s a lot to be said about building a personal brand and its correlation to success.
- Don’t be scared to reinvent yourself
- Take advantage of surprises
I love a launch strategy, but surprises are a great way to shake things up. A surprise drop, a flash sale, a free gift in your customer’s order—these are moments that delight your audience.
(Case in point: I used to work in a bank as a teller, and we used to keep cheap boxes of chocolates behind the counter. If someone came in and it was their birthday, they had a bad day, or they just bought a house, we’d give them the dollar chocolates and they’d remember it forever. It’s not just expensive / strategic surprises that matter).
- Focus on the visuals
Embrace a color palette, a new outfit, a horse. Get visual. Embrace art. Show off symbolism. In today’s world, genuine creativity stands out and generates clicks. Big-time celebs know this.
- Be authentic
Bey has never shied away from supporting the communities that mean the most to her or the causes she loves. That’s why people love her. In today’s saturated markets, the best strategies should do the same.
- BONUS: Piggyback on the hype
Here’s the lowdown: Uber revealed a 16% discount code to celebrate BBeyonce’s new album release, but many Uber customers were disappointed with the measly offering.
Enter Lyft, who trolled Uber’s campaign on X, offered Lyft users a 60% discount, and changed the cars to horses on the Lyft maps of all Houston users. #drama
I love it – engagement, hype, and drama racks up the views and impressions organically, and leaves a good impression if you do it tastefully.
Tales from AI
AI is the hottest craze ever, it seems, and the wave of new technology, below-average innovation, and AI-washing shows no sign of letting up.
Hold on. AI washing? What’s that?
Well, dear reader, let me explain. In a world where even the most mediocre tech bros are generating VC interest for anything to do with AI, regulators are wising up to the increase in AI mentions in company pitches.
Turns out, if you don’t have anything to do with AI, you probably shouldn’t mention it too much. Just like greenwashing, it’s deceptive and can lose you customers. Not to mention some of the negative headlines that are hitting the news about AI — it might be best to stick to the truth.
Phew, That Was a Biggie!
If you made it here, congrats! You just read the longest Happy Marketing ever!
Now, your coffee is cold, you’re ready to dive back into work, and you’re feeling inspired AF to get that marketing strategy going.
So, now’s the perfect time to remind you that, as a subscriber to Happy Marketing, you’re entitled to two things from me:
- A FREE copy of the Global Marketing Report for more of my wisdom, expertise (and downright hilarity). Download this now.
- A FREE Marketing Strategy for an expert look at your in-house strategy, a whole load of new opportunities, and an exciting peek at what we would do if we were on your team. Book your initial call here.
And with that, April is done! Look out for me in your inbox very soon,
Natalie xoxo