On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a founder’s letter to outline the brand’s decision to change its name to Meta, suggesting this phase as being the beginning of the next chapter for the internet. He went on to say:

“The metaverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networking was when we got started,”

Facebook has made this move to pursue opportunities in the virtual world of “the metaverse”.

Adidas also joined the growing ranks of those entering the metaverse, releasing a one-of-a-kind token that functions similarly to an NFT, while Nike and Roblox collaborated on virtual realm, “Nikeland”, marking their first step into this new space.

And these are not the only big brands to see potential in this rapidly emerging technology, and how it could permanently change the way we network, shop and do business.

To most of us, Facebook is seen as a social media company, an almost iconic social media brand, but things are changing and while no-one is entirely sure exactly what the metaverse will look like, the rise of a new iteration of the Internet, Web 3.0, has meant social media is changing, and many of the original pioneers of social media are already moving into this exciting new space, and applying those hard-won lessons to these new technologies.

Having spent my entire career immersed in the world of social media, using these platforms to maximise the success and growth of businesses, it is fascinating to see how colleagues, associates and industry leaders from across the world have begun investing in both the metaverse and Web 3.0 ventures, and are already seeing seven figure returns.

Social Media is changing

Most of us consider social media as ubiquitous, but there was a time when many businesses did not view it as something worth investing in. As technology caught up and revealed huge opportunities in eCommerce, the value of a social media presence quickly became apparent, and these companies found themselves 10 steps behind their competitors – I predict this will be the case with the metaverse and Web 3.0.

Those that took the plunge into social media when it was still an emerging technology were able to build up hugely influential followings as well as create powerful brands . We are seeing the same thing happen as entrepreneurs are using the infrastructure of Web 3.0 to create and invest in emerging metaverse platforms.

Who is doing what?

We have already seen the explosion in cryptocurrency platforms, with Jack Dorsey’s financial services company, Square, investing $50 million into Bitcoin, and Tesla following suit with an investment of over $1.3 billion. Similarly, non-fungible tokens [NFTs] are rich in opportunities for businesses and investors beyond simply trading digital artworks and collectibles.

While Facebook’s name change may have bought mainstream attention to the possibilities of the metaverse, the road is already being paved by many big names who first cut their teeth on social media.

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, identified the Internet as a land-grab opportunity and opened one of the first eCommerce platforms in the late 90s. He essentially grew with social media, becoming a hugely prolific and influential name within the industry, and has been investing in the Metaverse for the past two years, creating and developing Vee Friends, an NFT brand company, as well as other Web 3.0 initiatives.

Other early-adopters of social media, such as Social Chain co-founder, and youngest-ever investor on Dragon’s Den, Steven Bartlett, has also begun investing in a number of Web 3.0 companies, while social media pioneer Cathal Berragan moved from Social Chain New York to a Web 3.0 business in London.

While these are just a handful of names, all are using their significant social media followings and the skills they learnt on those platforms to make the transition into this new space.

Early social media adopters have the andvantage

With Web 3.0 and the metaverse poised as the successor to the current iteration of the Internet, it is those trailblazers who were able to adapt their mindset and take a leap into social media who have the greatest advantage in making the next move into the metaverse.

They already have great experience in cultivating a following and building a community and are able to bring that community on board with them into new ventures, such as those who started off running meme accounts on platforms like Twitter and transitioned to buying and creating NFTs.

The ability to communicate your message clearly on emerging platforms is something that early adopters of social media have already had much experience in, and crucially, are able to hit the relevant tone of voice as well as iterating their content style to keep and engage their audience. People that were willing to take a risk by investing their time into new platforms such as TikTok or Snapchat, staking their claim in these new spaces, and it is these people who are now reaping the benefits of being at the frontier of the metaverse.

Read more:
Facebook became Meta – Are we all about to jump in to the Metaverse?

This hotly anticipated event is just around the corner but what will it look like for businesses this year? Consumer interest in Black Friday dipped by over one-third in 2020 and as a result, businesses are looking to capitalise on the 2021 event both on and offline.

It looks highly likely that the BFCM period will extend across the whole month of November this year, being dubbed “Black November”, where sales are expected to run from the start of the month, giving online retailers a larger window of opportunity to convert customers to make a purchase as they look to find a bargain.

Has iOS 14 made a difference?

A significant affecting factor this year is confidence in iOS 14 (or lack of!) and could make your approach to BFCM 2021 a bit tricky. If you’re going to spend a significant amount of budget, you won’t fully know if it’s going to work and that will cause a lot of confusion for advertisers and brands.

The changes in attribution, not just for Facebook, but across numerous mainstream platforms have significantly impacted on advertising activity, being almost impossible to track off-platform activity via third-party browser cookies and no way of reaching consumers on a 1-1 basis across sites and apps if they haven’t chosen to opt in.

This makes it very difficult for advertisers to target consumers on a personal level and even harder to measure the results of their marketing activity. There is no way of attributing purchases made on advertisers’ sites to the ads served and has therefore had a substantial impact across the digital marketing network. There is a much bigger risk and reward as you don’t get that instant feedback from the ad, which of course influences the activity by digital advertisers for the BFCM period.

Reduce risk where you can

You need to fully understand your core audience with your performance advertising as this isn’t a time to be taking risks, so use your tried and tested creatives, landing pages and offers that you know will work for your audience and then extend that sale window for as long as possible to maximise impact.

You might be tempted to create an all singing and dancing landing page or website that looks great and has amazing offers, but this might compromise the quality and effectiveness of the user experience. The ads might look attractive but if it’s not your traditional formula or page, then maybe you have overthought it, while those competitors who have played it safe and stuck to what they know and what works have the advantage.

Carry out your testing in advance

All your testing needs to be done well in advance, being up and running and incrementally scaling from mid-October until that core November sales period. As mentioned, many businesses this year will do a full Black November as this massively reduces risk and allows you to spend more consistently.

Competition will be tough, so you need to ensure you have the more competitive and compelling offer. Understand what the competitors are offering because if they have a better discount or a better proposition, especially in that short window, people will buy from them.

Frontloading investment is key for brands to win

What doesn’t work well is spending a large amount of money in a short period of time. If a brand wants to spend 100 – 200K in a week but hasn’t done enough pre-launching and testing before that, it’s very likely to go wrong because there is so much margin for error.

The brands who do well have built a strong foundation and have put a decent level of spend into these ads and then incrementally scaled them up. Those who go from, for example, £100 to 10K per day on an advert could get lost in such a competitive market.

Run more lead generation campaigns

Try to generate as many email or SMS sign ups as possible and then track the success of these i.e. how many people bought through an individual email campaign.

Converting through email marketing for lead generation is going to be essential so you need to exploit this method, particularly as there isn’t any significant cost associated with sending the emails. You need to capitalise on your digital customers and show them what are you offering has added value so that you at least have some confidence that it’s going to convert.

Watch out for fluctuating CPM’s

This year the cost to reach 1000 people will be at a record high. Generic CPM’s across the board in November 2020 were around $19, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that increases to closer to $20 or $21 CPM for November this year, or even higher.

This will make a difference from a client budget perspective, so be prepared for this. For some, Q4 equates to 60 or 70% of your budget, and businesses generally up their budgets to cash in on this selling window or this buying window for customers.

Summary

From a trends perspective I am certain BFCM 2021 will break all Ecommerce sales records globally compared to last year so there is a massive opportunity to cash in on this if you have done your homework, spread you budget and avoided the temptation to take unnecessary and potentially costly risks.

Get started now and blow your competition out of the water.

Read more:
Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2021 – How to stand out and win sales

Across the world, businesses of all sizes have spent the last 18 months doing everything they can to stay afloat.

Whether ‘pivoting’ the business, reinventing their brand, shifting to or developing an ecommerce platform or strategy, or thinking outside the box to try to stand out so as to retain and attract new customers and/or spending money in areas that they previously hadn’t considered; there aren’t many stones left unturned.

In all of this, digital advertising became vital to reach the fast-growing number of online shoppers, and soon weeded out those businesses that were willing to adapt and adjust strategies, those who didn’t want to or those who simply couldn’t. As a result, many businesses grew in ways they couldn’t have predicted pre-pandemic, others kept on an even keel and many sadly folded.

Budgets that were initially set aside for other channels were pumped in to digital spend with the realisation that this was going to be the most effective way of reaching customers who had had to shift to online shopping due to the restrictions of the pandemic. It became evident as time passed that the majority of these digital customers would stick to this newly adopted consumer behaviour post-pandemic and as a result, the decision for businesses to continue to allocate more spend for digital advertising has become the popular strategy. This is reflected in the AA/Warc expenditure report which shows that digital spend now equates to 70p for every £1 spent.

So how does this translate in to figures?

According to the latest AA/Warc expenditure report, the UK is set to see digital ad spend grow 18.2% to £27.7bn in 2021 which is the largest growth since records began.
The report also suggests that Social Media advertising and Display will accelerate by 17.2% and that search is up 19.7%.

A recent article from The Times cites that, according to the latest forecasts, marketing spend will move back above pre-pandemic levels in 2021 thanks to a bounce in consumer confidence.

So how does this affect the social media marketing industry?

More spend and predicted spend is going to be deemed a positive in any industry so the AA/Warc figures are exciting for the digital sector. It is hard at this stage to work out just how these figures will benefit specific sectors, but any growth is good and reflects a growing confidence and trust in the industry and a growing optimism in our service from consumers. There is also a realisation that digital will reap rewards if used correctly, However, there is a lot of room for error if approached naively and poor execution of a digital marketing campaign or money spent in the wrong places could be detrimental to the success of the outcome. To compete in this sector, businesses need to invest in experts to ensure success and maximise the skills of people in this area of expertise.

The downside to fast growth.

Of course fast growth is positive but there is often a downside and, in this situation, as soon as more people start to spend in a particular area or on a particular product, competition grows, and prices start to escalate. Agencies need to remain competitive but also need to be aware of not pricing themselves out of the market. Consumers need to do their homework and establish what the real value to their spend will be before making their decision.

UK vs US

While the reported numbers appear high from the report, we are still way off the US in terms of spend. As an example, a well-known brand in the UK might be spending £500,000 to £750,000 per month on digital advertising but in the US an unknown brand will be spending in excess of £2,000,000, so what a ‘large company’ in the UK is spending monthly is only a fraction of what quite small companies are spending in the US.

In summary

Maybe these results expose that overall, as a trend, people are investing more in trackable and scalable channels. If this is the case, it is positive for digital marketers and means that differentiation will need to occur through creative excellence and storytelling, rather than trying to out-spend competitors.

Read more:
Digital Ad spend in the UK hits record growth

This is the question I have been pondering after listening to the speculation and undercurrents of conversations across various social media platforms that have been muted over the last few months.

While this analogy is, at this stage, a prediction, all the pointers are indicating that is it highly likely to happen and from my perspective there have been too many signs that Apple will bring out a Universal, self-serve, advertising platform similar to Facebook and Google.

Why wouldn’t they?

To get an idea if the size of the market that Apple could get a slice of, figures from statistics.com for the 2020 ad revenue for Facebook and Google show Facebook generated close to 84.2 billion U.S. dollars in ad revenues while Google’s ad revenue amounted to 146.92 billion US dollars. Staggering figures.

If Apple could take even 10% of that, why wouldn’t they launch their own ad platform?

Apple is now the world’s most valuable company. Apple has power. Apple doesn’t need Google’s money. Apple has been investing heavily in search. And according to a recent Business Insider report, Apple has recently hired Antonio Garcia Martinez, who previously worked at Facebook’s ad team. This hire indicates that Apple is moving forwards and investing in its advertising platform, but according to the report, nothing is confirmed as neither Apple nor Martinez will comment at this stage and so the speculation grows.

Erratic effects on ad accounts post iOS 14

With the new privacy implications with the iOS 14 and soon to launch iOS 15 updates, Apple has a significant advantage to track user behaviour and attribute accurately compared to the flawed data flow which other platforms are facing.

Since the launch of the iOS 14, clients across the board have been on a roller coaster journey experiencing record sales days followed by zero sales days, with no set pattern or reason. It has been chaotic and unpredictable and at times has felt like a firefighting exercise.

Over the last few weeks, the ad accounts of clients that I have been managing (between $1-$3m a month) have seen and experienced erratic performance and a number of accounts have had to rebuild due to performance falling off a cliff. Conversely, others have been without issue.

Apple’s focus on privacy

Apple has too much of an advantage over anyone else and the market is too big to let an opportunity like this pass it by.

What is frustrating is that their sentiment to date has been about protecting consumers’ privacy, whereas in reality it’s about safeguarding their premium userbase. Apple has been running a series of ads recently which address the issue of privacy, showing their marketing is focussing on this issue.

The most recent of these ads being a scenario showcasing the app tracking transparency (ATT) privacy feature on iOS. The advert follows someone through a typical day, highlighting the apps that are frequently used by people, such as supermarket shopping, getting a taxi, buying a coffee etc until a strapline appears on the screen reading, ‘Choose who tracks your information’ followed by a screenshot of the phone screen with the individual clicking on the option ‘Ask app not to track’, declining the ATT requests for apps to track him, leaving him with a peace of mind that privacy is secure.

With the advantage they have, Apple launching an advertising platform seems inevitable. Not just because their app will work but because they have the intelligence to be able to track Facebook and Google and beyond. They would steal a significant chunk of the advertising dollar just because arguably, their ad platform would be superior and it would be more accurate, so a winning combination.

Watch this space…

Read more:
Is Apple going to launch an advertising platform?

Scaling your business, whilst maintaining efficiency, is possibly one of the hardest things to do in performance advertising. The reason for that is down to the way the platforms are set up.

There are two traditional scaling methods – horizontal scaling and vertical scaling

Vertical scaling

Vertical scaling increases the daily spend on each of the ads. As an example, you could start off at £10 a day and push that up to £1000 or £10,000 per day. This used to work, but things have changes and now it’s pretty difficult to do unless you’ve got an amazing advert and performance.

Horizontal scaling

Instead of increasing daily spend from, for example, £10 to £1000 per day, you run 10 different £10- a-day ads to get you to that £1000 per day total spend. To scale horizontally you need to create more adverts rather than just increasing the daily spend.

You will see much better performance from horizontal scaling when you use rules to incrementally increase daily budgets, rather than massively increasing them over a given time frame.

You can set up automatic rules; if your target is 3 times your return on ad spend, you can tell Facebook to automatically increase the daily budget by 10 or 15% if your ad is hitting that target and this is probably the most effective way to scale vertically.

Comparability between accounts and platforms

There is a huge advantage to outsourcing your performance marketing as not only do you get access to a specialist but also the advantage of that agency being able to compare against other brands in other locations, and potentially even brands in similar verticals

For example, if we can see that the CPM’s are really high in the US and this is consistent throughout, this identifies a universal trend across the platform. If you are only working on one brand and one ad account, it would be almost impossible to make those sorts of assumptions with such limited data. With multiple clients, you can study overall performance and whether specific ad platforms are broken or have been down for a period of time. This insight can then be offered to the client and changes suggested to their plan or strategy based on this evidence.

Interest based versus lookalikes

New clients often haven’t had a pixel setup implemented, so there is no pre-existing data to work from. This means that from an audience perspective, you have to target cold or upper funnel audiences, and the way to do that is through interest-based audiences. On most platforms, you can target people based on their interests, age and in some cases, financial information. Using some of our bike brands as an example, we have generic bike audiences which are really broad- those who have an interest in cycling, cycling teams, the Tour de France and so on, but we also have a specific audience in cycling publications which have similar attributes.

In addition, you can also create persona-based audiences. These are created based on different interests but instead of getting everyone interested in cycling (from the previous example), we would target someone of a certain age group. We can then use this customer profile and target your ideal customer through their interests; this is really effective.

Once you have over 100 conversions through the pixel, or if you’re working with a client who has pre-existing data, you are then able to create lookalike audiences and these audiences are your best performers

What is a look alike audience?

If you have 100 customers, Google will then duplicate that audience by targeting people with similar characteristics to your customers, based on aspects such as finance or demographic. Your existing audience has already bought your product so by duplicating it, you have doubled your audience. Therefore, on a paid social, the lookalike audience will probably be your best performing audience.

You can also stack lookalikes. Instead of targeting one lookalike audience, you can put lookalike audiences together, creating an even wider reach.

Funnel/messaging structure

Brands love to hit people with offers because they are a good converter. If you offer a 20% discount on your product, you’ll get a much higher clickthrough rate and probably a conversion. One of the problems that we see over and over is that brands are only trading on discounts. As a first interaction with your brand, customers are likely to make a purchase because people like the offer and want to buy it ‘now’, but this means you are only trading on one messaging style. To avoid this, it’s better to tailor the copy or the type of creative specifically, depending on where people are within the funnel.

In the upper funnel, videos explaining the proposition of the brand and the USP of the product are effective, making sure that you are educating your audience about your brand and offering so that even if they don’t purchase, they will know more about you, and you will have infiltrated their subliminal radar.

In your lower funnel, your audience is already educated about your brand and this allows you to push the sales boundaries and provide them with an offer because they’ve already been through multiple touchpoints, so your final right hook could be a 5 or 10% offer.

The results from these methods will be your guide on what is working and what to avoid but regular tweaks and refinement are key. And your safest bet? The advice of an expert who does this morning, noon and night – it’s a minefield out there!

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How to use social media platforms to successfully scale your business

It has never been more critical for your business to understand how to get the most out of your advertising budget.

But advertising on social media platforms can feel like a minefield and getting your strategy wrong can be very damaging to your business. Getting expert agency advice will show you where you should be spending your money and how that will convert to sales.

How does ad spend work and where do you start?

This really depends on what you have done before. Some businesses will have a really clear idea in mind, typically when you have previously worked with an agency as you will have more insight into how things work and the best way to do things. Others are starting from scratch and have no idea and no experience, either with an agency or attempting it for yourself.

Either way, phase one is key – this is setting objectives or the ‘digital plumbing’, making sure everything is tracking and set up correctly.

From an advertising perspective, an agency will usually look at the low hanging fruit and make small improvements that have a big impact, largely based on whatever you have been doing previously. A balanced and effective retargeting funnel can get them going with a couple of easy wins. From here, and once you’ve got a bit of a platform, an agency will be able to start to compare and contrast.

Diversification of spend

Diversification of spend is going to be one of the dominating topics throughout the decade. Facebook + Instagram and Google’s ad network have dominated and, in the future, will be challenged as there will be spend going to other platforms such as TikTok, SnapChat and Pinterest.

It is highly likely that we will also see Apple ads, and this could be one of the reasons why they made the iOS 14 changes, in preparation for launching their own ad platform. This means they will be able to target the iPhone or iOS users and it’s going to be incredibly valuable. Watch this space.

Spread your budget across a number of channels

A competent agency will understand how to do this effectively, but it can be risky if you don’t have an innate understanding of each channel. Done well, it can be highly successful. One aspect of your diversification of spend is about mitigating risk; you don’t want to be solely reliant on one channel, even if it is your best performer.

It is also really important to understand where and how those channels work together. For example, Google is very much an intent based platform. It is phenomenal for remarketing and really effective if you have already generated brand awareness and someone searches a specific term or your brand name. For this aspect, it is arguably the best marketing tool available. But it is very limited when it comes to scaling.  One of the ways you can scale that channel is to increase your budget elsewhere, to make that pool of people or potential customers much bigger.

Maximise your impact with the right approach

Rather than you approach being different for each channel, it’s more about your approach being appropriate. You need to hone your style and your language to each platform as diversification of spend optimises the other ad platforms. If you use TikTok, your creative will need to be more tongue in cheek and have a ‘native’ editing style or it will stick out like a sore thumb. Facebook & Instagram can be considered more premium and even more so for YouTube as your creative has to be longer and of a certain calibre. Google is mainly copy based so allows you to hit people in lots of different, creative ways on different platforms. This is really one of the keys to diversification of spend

Identifying or quantifying the value of your sales when using multiple channels

Understanding how each platform attributes sales will play a big part in identifying or quantifying the value of your sales. The big change with iOS 14 is that Facebook has gone from, at its highest, a 28-day view down to only a one-day view and seven day click. This means that if someone clicks on an ad and then purchases within seven days, you’ll have an attributed sale.

However on TikTok and even Pinterest, the attribution windows are much shorter, so if your return on ad spend on Facebook is 3.5 but on TikTok is 1.5, then within the same attribution window, TikTok might be out-performing Facebook because on that last click basis, that performance is quite strong.

Understanding the parameters of what success is on different platforms is really important.

Influencer marketing

Whilst this is a big topic, ad spend can be extremely effective on influencer marketing if it’s used as part of an upper funnel awareness strategy and its success isn’t measured solely by an uplift in sales. The use of ambassadors or other channels distributing your media can be hugely powerful and definitely needs to be considered as part of your online marketing mix and incorporated within your paid spend.

Getting ad spend right and utilising social media platforms to maximum effect is an art, and to ensure you maximise your success, finding an agency to steer you through could be your most effective use of budget.

Read more:
How to successfully allocate your ad spend across social media platforms

In an ever-changing landscape, marketers and digital businesses alike are forced to adapt with the times as new opportunities arise and existing strategies become redundant.

Since starting my career 8 years ago at TheLADbible, the updates to iOS14 and the subsequent changes to ad platform attribution has been one of the most significant. As an example, in response to Apple releasing iOS 14, Facebook has changed its attribution window from 28days to 7days meaning that some advertisers have seen 50% drop in recorded sales, overnight.

The changes in attribution, not just for Facebook, but across numerous mainstream platforms will have a huge impact on advertising activity as it means there will be no way of tracking off-platform activity via third-party browser cookies. There will be no way of reaching consumers on a 1-1 basis across sites and apps if they don’t choose to opt in. This will make it very difficult for advertisers to target consumers on a personal level and even harder to measure the results of their marketing activity.

The fallout from this is that there will be no way of attributing purchases made on advertisers’ sites to the ads served across the platform and, as a result, the implementation of the iOS 14 iPhone operating system update is likely to have a substantial impact across the digital marketing network.

Apple has a framework known as App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and with the implementation of the new iOS system, app developers will have to notify users if they want to gather their information, otherwise known as their IDFA. IDFA is Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers and is a persistent ID used by mobile devices which run an Apple operating system.

Often used in tandem with cookies, the IDFA helps to create identity graphs for ad targeting through tracking behaviour. Moving forward, it will only be present if consumers opt-in to give their consent to the advertiser to use their data for advertising purposes.

This will create a massive change for advertisers who have previously served targeted ads to key audience groups through the use of IDAF’s. They will no longer be able to effectively target consumers on Apple devices or have any way of measuring results. If iOS advertisers don’t prepare or ensure they have the right tools in place, they will have to use generalised messages served to a non-specific audience which will likely result in fewer installs and a less effective experience.

How to prepare for these changes:

• First off, assess how much affect the rollout of the iOS 14 system will have on your current marketing activity, and evaluate your strategies keeping in mind how reliant you are on in-app advertising.
• As an advertiser/digital marketer, one of the best ways to prepare for these changes is to make sure you are maximising your capture of user information. As other ID’s disappear, capturing emails and phone numbers will be critical to targeting consumers.
• Make a move towards Media mix modelling. As an analysis technique, it allows marketers to measure the impact of their marketing and advertising campaigns and allows marketers to hone their campaigns based on a variety of factors. It uses aggregate data and is therefore able to evaluate a wider range of channels, both traditional and digital. It will help you understand the true impact of your spend in different advertising channels.
• Establish a new performance framework based on the new conversion window. Creating a performance matrix using existing data that measures both a 28-day and a 7-day window, you can calculate a ‘new normal’ as to what a ‘good’ Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) should be – post iOS14.
• Understand your customer base better by using your first-party data to create in depth, contextual profiles. In doing so, you will be able to share these profiles with both app and web publishers. These publishers collect data themselves and can therefore target the relevant consumer groups.

Although it’s still early days, we have found that scaling horizontally, through multiple adverts at a lower daily spend, has been more consistent from a performance perspective while the Facebook algorithm begins to re-learn, as it has less data-points to work from.

The true impact of the impending launch of the iOS 14 system on digital marketing is yet to be felt, but it is worth getting your head around it if you want to ensure that you can keep your strategies in-line with the changes and build them around more reliable first-party data so that you can keep delivering personal and effective experiences which are specific to a segmented audience.

Read more:
How will iOS 14 change the Digital Landscape?