Marketing Strategies to Reach Next Gen | ClickZ Indie Agency News

PLUS: GoodBrand Impact Drives Marketing ROI Through Social Good

Author

Zihan Lyu
April 30, 2025

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Welcome to ClickZ Indie Agency News, your essential newsletter for marketing agencies and eCommerce professionals.

Editor’s Pick 🌟

Marketing thought leadership has a tendency towards binaries. The funnel is either completely dead or very much alive. Brand marketing is either pointless or the solution to all your problems, and ChatGPT is ending 30 years of search overnight.

At Fospha, we love the measurement challenge of any new channel that offers our clients ways to reach more customers. However, Google is still very much the biggest advertising platform. Performance Max (PMAX) and Search products alone represent around 30% of our clients’ digital share of wallet.

In uncertain times, it’s more important than ever for brands to nail these core channels, so we produced the definitive best practice guide on PMAX and Paid Search. Here were our top findings:

  • ⚖️ Best performing brands allocate 55% of Google budget to PMAX and 12% to Paid Search.

  • 🏆 Brands that pair Search and PMAX with ~50% of their budgets in YouTube, Demand Gen and Paid Social see optimal results.

  • 🎨 Especially for PMAX, high-volume creative is key for AI-powered optimization.

Sector Spotlight 🎥

INNOVATIVE PAID MEDIA

April’s paid media updates include significant shifts:

◾ Google Ads now appear at both top and bottom of search results, influencing visibility strategies
◾ TikTok and Reddit introduce advanced brand safety and management tools, enhancing campaign control
◾ Google partners with Roblox for immersive ads targeting Gen Z

Marketers must adapt to expanded placement options, automation, and evolving adtech to optimize campaign performance and audience engagement.

UNIFIED COMMERCE INNOVATION

Tony’s Chocolonely unified its DTC, B2B, and reseller operations on Shopify, achieving 2.5x faster site speed and double-digit revenue growth across four major markets, including a 70% increase in the US.

By leveraging Shopify’s robust app ecosystem and custom integrations—like personalized product tools and automated credit checks—the brand streamlined workflows, reduced manual labor, and positioned itself for rapid, scalable international expansion.

For marketers, this case exemplifies how consolidating commerce channels and deploying flexible eCommerce infrastructure can directly translate to operational efficiency and measurable business growth.

GEN ALPHA MARKETING

Gen Alpha, born from 2010 onward, is set to become the largest and most digitally fluent consumer group, already directing $ influence through parental purchasing and demanding authenticity, interactivity, and social responsibility from brands.

Marketers must prioritize video-first, mobile-optimized, personalized experiences and embrace meme culture, user-generated content, and dual-targeting to engage both children and parents. Successful strategies require platform-specific campaigns, measurable engagement metrics, and adaptive approaches to remain relevant as Gen Alpha matures.

SOCIAL IMPACT MARKETING

GoodBrand Impact, founded by Seth Zimmerman, helps brands maximize their marketing budgets by pairing paid advertising with pro bono social impact campaigns, driving measurable community outcomes and enhanced brand loyalty.

With a proven model previously generating $800M in revenue and $80M for nonprofits, the agency now offers brands access to these integrated campaigns across all media platforms. Marketers gain actionable value by transforming advertising spends into visible social contributions that also strengthen consumer advocacy.

INNOVATIVE AI STRATEGIES

Generative and agentic AI present marketers with new avenues for enhanced automation, efficiency, and measurable business impact, as illustrated by successful use in customer engagement and operational optimization.

Rapid AI adoption, strong leadership, robust data infrastructure, and a culture fostering experimentation are essential for maintaining competitiveness. Immediate, organization-wide commitment to purposeful AI integration is critical for those wanting to lead in an evolving eCommerce landscape.

Influencer Corner 📢

Meta Ads vs. Google Ads: Which One is Better for D2C Brands?

Meta ads excel at:
👉 Building brand awareness.
👉 Nurturing new customers with engaging content.
👉 Retargeting cold leads who didn’t convert initially.

Google ads are great for:
👉 Capturing demand when people are actively searching for solutions.
👉 Generating high-intent traffic with low CPC.
👉 Converting cold leads into paying customers quickly.

Which one should you focus on?
👉 Meta ads work best if you’re focusing on top-of-funnel and brand-building.
👉 Google ads work best when you’re ready to convert customers actively searching for your product.

Rumour has it that OpenAI might be quietly working on a native Shopify checkout inside ChatGPT.

Apparently ‘leaked’ code shows:

👉 'shopify_checkout_url'
👉 'buy_now'
👉 'product_offer_ratings'

No redirects. No search. Just chat, compare, and buy in one flow. Unconfirmed, but catching attention.

If this happens?

Google, TikTok, even product pages as we know them are all about to change.

Optimization Hub ⚙️

SEARCH INNOVATION

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) integrates traditional SEO with AI-focused strategies, ensuring content is both visible in classic search results and cited by AI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Marketers must structure content to answer specific questions, prioritize authority, and track AI-driven citations. Adapting to GEO is essential for maintaining discoverability in an AI-driven search landscape.

DISCOVERY COMMERCE INNOVATION

TikTok Shop’s newly released playbook, developed with Accenture Song, provides marketers and brands actionable frameworks for driving growth through discovery commerce, leveraging real-time creator content and robust measurement. With TikTok Shop rapidly capturing eCommerce market share, ignoring these trends risks falling behind competitors capitalizing on content-driven online retail.

INNOVATIVE PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES

Cookieless personalization is reshaping digital marketing by requiring brands to use first-party and zero-party data, contextual targeting, and server-side solutions instead of third-party cookies, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This shift enables marketers to maintain effective, consent-driven customer engagement while safeguarding user privacy. Marketers must adapt quickly to sustain relevance and trust.

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