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How to prepare for the death of cookies and privacy reforms of 2024

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By SEBASTIAN DIAZ

Privacy is poised to be a big topic in 2024, with multiple ramifications on the digital advertising front.

Sebastian Diaz, iAB council member and senior digital solutions lead at Bench, explains how marketing teams and agencies must prepare themselves for Australia’s privacy purge, and Google’s cookie phase-out.

Privacy is poised to be a big topic in 2024, with multiple ramifications on the digital advertising front.

As we sit with the stalemate that is the Government’s response to the Privacy Act Review Report, marketing teams as well as agencies must prepare themselves for Australia’s turn for the privacy purge.

This has been a long time coming with the rise of consumer privacy legislation sweeping the globe since Europe’s GDPR’s in 2018.

In addition to that, Google has finally kicked off phasing out the cookie on Chrome this month, with it expected to take full flight in the September quarter this year. Be it legislation or technology changes, brands will have their hands forced in changing their advertising tactics. It’s time to get on the privacy and cookieless train before we feel the pain.  

Let’s take it from the top – what is the Privacy Review? 

Since 2019, the Australian Government has been looking at giving a measure of control to individuals on how their personal information is used in direct marketing and advertising. At the time, they announced the need for the Review to investigate the effectiveness of Australia’s current data protection regime to ensure it “empower[s] consumers, protect[s] their data and best serve[s] the Australian economy”. In February 2023, they published their Privacy Act Review Report, which was met with some concern in parts of the marketing industry.   

Some of the proposed changes that affect the marketing industry include a) a user having the right to ‘opt out’ of their personal information being used in direct marketing, and b) a website needing a user’s consent when ‘trading’ their personal information. However, the semantics around what direct marketing, targeted advertising, targeting and trading are all still in discussion.

The government is now undertaking impact analysis, in consultation with the industry, before coming to a final decision on the Review this year. This has set brands into a tailspin of what to do – particularly those who have been dependent on cookie-based targeting. Without this ability to target and collect users information as easily, brands and publishers are losing one of their most valuable assets.  

How to best prepare for the 2024 cookie and privacy double whammy:

Non-cookie based targeting solutions are making a comeback

What’s old is new and better than ever. Contextual targeting, which is based on the content being consumed, has made a resurgence, as strong as 90s fashion and flip phones, but is much improved. 

While the dust settles on the upcoming cookie changes, it is likely for advertising to step up their reliance on contextually-based environments as an interim, though alternatives to cookies that involve anonymisation-based targeting will continue.   

Contextual targeting has recently been supercharged by AI, which enables it to be delivered and tested with greater accuracy, speed and scale – using a combination of image, video, text and audio content. It’s far less word prescriptive than it used to be, and has proven to drive lower funnel activity. 

What’s old is new again, but definitely stronger.   

Data warehousing is all the rage

If you can’t buy it, make it. And there’s no stronger audience than the audience you already know. With most brands already collecting their customer’s data in one way or another (be it through loyalty programs, email addresses or site activity), 2024 will be the year to scale this up as a necessity.  

 It’s one thing to collect this data – but it’s another to utilise it. Brands often get stuck with this – either due to internal politics or red tape or the lack of expertise in building a valid consent framework and preventing potential data leaks.  

As data volume, variety, and velocity continue to outpace many teams’ capabilities, organisations face the challenge of collecting, transforming and putting customer data to use while adhering to new and evolving regulations. Still, data-first strategies are gathering plenty of advocates.

For brands leveraging significant amounts of customer data for various use cases, investing in a CDP would be a no brainer. As would be engaging in data partnerships with other brands, allowing brands to collaborate on data and utilising this across their marketing activity. Further to this, engaging in a data clean room comes up as one of the best ways forward to remain legally compliant.  

Data providers and publishers are the experts – they’ve been making the change for years

Publishers and data providers have been preparing for regulatory changes for some years – even if they haven’t known what the new regulation will look like.  

Big buying platforms with first party data such as Google (GoogleID), Yahoo (Next-Gen and cookieless), Meta (via Facebook) and Amazon (especially as a major player in the retail media space) are ready to go with their identity solutions. Other interoperable cookieless identity solutions such as The Trade Desk’s UID, or Lotame’s Panorama ID, enabling brands to target first and third party audiences on ‘cookieless’ inventory are also ready. 

Publishers have been testing these cookieless identity solutions, and will be protected once third-party cookies completely exit the ecosystem. 

Know – and embrace – that changes are for the greater good

Change doesn’t come without fear – but what’s most important is to keep perspective as to what drives the need for change, both legislatively and technologically. Though it may feel as though Australia is being dealt a double whammy in 2024, it’s important to remember that the privacy change is ultimately about consumer trust which, according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)’s latest surveys, is at an all time low. With privacy becoming a core expectation among 89% of consumers, this expectation demands that brands re-evaluate how they handle their customers’ data to ensure they prioritise privacy focused practices and technology to keep data safe. 

Some big brands such as P&G and tech giant HP have also been very proactive in implementing new cookieless technology and alternative identifiers (such as UID2), and have built consent frameworks that are compliant across privacy legislation worldwide. These players have enjoyed the maximum value from their investment and have built innovative new advertising solutions with a data collaboration platform at the core of their strategy. The same should be done for brands of any size looking to be ahead of the curve and capitalise on industry changes. 

Brands shouldn’t wait for legislation and Google to force their hand – they must prioritise privacy today, and as a framework for their business to make the best change possible, and not a band-aid job.  

By SEBASTIAN DIAZ

iAB Council Member & Senior Digital Solutions Lead at Bench

Sourced from Mumbrella

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The Algebra Of Advertising On Meta’s Platform

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By Nate Lorenzen

Meta, the digital advertising giant with billions of users, continually adapts its algorithms to remain competitive. As a performance marketer in 2023, comprehending Meta’s evolving ad ecosystem is crucial for optimizing your brand’s CPA (cost per acquisition) or ROAS (return on ad spend).

Many marketers, however, struggle with understanding the essential components influencing CPA or ROAS. But don’t worry—mastering three straightforward formulas can help streamline your approach, save money and give you a competitive edge on Meta’s platform. In this article, I’ll demystify these formulas and demonstrate their impact on your marketing strategy.

Years ago, when I started in user acquisition, I wish someone had clarified how these elements intertwine. Grasping these formulas can eliminate confusion, improve testing plans and ultimately drive your marketing success.

Formula 1: APM

Finding the action rate or its cousin APM (actions per mille impressions) helps to get an overall idea of the effectiveness of a campaign. To find the action rate, you’re going to multiply the click-through rate by the conversion rate:

Action Rate = Click-Thru Rate (CTR) * Conversion Rate (CVR)

For the mathematically minded, you will notice that the action rate can be computed more simply as conversions/impressions. So, you can find the APM with the following formula:

APM = (Conversions/Impressions) * 1000

In Meta’s auction, action rate is used as a measurement of an ad’s relevancy. Based on how this metric compares to other ads in the auction, Meta sometimes penalizes or subsidizes ads that are not up to par. Relevancy is very important to Meta’s algorithm. The action rate makes up one part of how the algorithm measures an ad’s total value metric, which basically weighs how relevant it is to the end user. The ad that wins an auction is the one with the highest total value.

Total Value = Advertiser Bid * CTR * CVR + Ad Quality

or

Total Value = Advertiser Bid * Action Rate + Ad Quality

In the formulas above, ad quality is a combination of feedback from users that includes likes, comments, shares, x-outs, etc.

Scaling action rate into APM is quite handy. As APM is directly tied to action rate, it means optimizing APM is the key to winning Meta’s auction.

Formula 2: CPA

Turning the action rate into APM means:

CPA (cost per acquisition) = CPM (cost per mille)/APM

Many marketers overlook this relationship. Uncovering it enables swift performance marketing evaluation. In brand audits, we identify underperformance and create targeted action plans. Instead of vaguely aiming to “improve CPA,” it’s more effective to state, “We’ll enhance CPA by increasing the conversion rate while maintaining CPM and CTR.”

To improve one’s CPA, you need to either decrease your CPM while holding APM steady, increase APM while holding CPM steady, or do both in concert by decreasing CPM while increasing APM.

To help tackle this, Meta is increasing the volume of ads on the platform to decrease CPM while improving the efficiency of the ad delivery environment, which will improve APM.

Setting up your internal monitoring to reflect CPM and its relation to the components that build APM will allow a marketer to quickly triage and act on how to improve their performance marketing.

Formula 3: ROAS

As stated earlier, APM is a useful metric that is the lynchpin of common KPIs for advertisers. Outside of APM and CPA is ROAS (return on ad spend), which is the other most common metric leveraged by advertisers. Lo and behold, APM allows the construction of ROAS in a unique fashion that highlights the important building blocks of the return.

ROAS = (APM * AOV) / CPM

As we already know that APM is how efficient the advertising is at closing a sale, this shows that ROAS is also constructed with how large of a purchase a person makes on average, AOV (average order value). Also, the costs that the advertiser pays to show the ad is the denominator since your return will decrease as costs increase.

This might seem complicated, but as a marketer, you already know that you can increase ROAS by increasing someone’s purchasing frequency when seeing your ad (APM); increasing how much they purchase (AOV); and/or lowering your ad cost (CPM).

Again, we see that Meta’s focus on ad volume and ad efficiency will drive an increase in ROAS for the advertisers on its platform. Also, it’s useful to understand that CPA and ROAS are intimately linked and not two different views of the world. They are constructed from the same component parts, which means that building out plans that can help decrease CPM, increase APM or do both at the same time is worthwhile for all performance marketing organizations.

Conclusion

The next time you face a marketing challenge on one of Meta’s platforms, try using these three formulas. They can help you get to a solution more quickly!

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Nate Lorenzen

Founder of dysrupt. Want to work with dysrupt? Click here! Read Nate Lorenzen’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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Three ways data will change marketing in 2023, ‘the year of assertive action’

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By Kazuki Ohta 

Bye-bye cookies, hello customer-centricity… This is the year it all happens, writes Treasure Data’s Kazuki Ohta.

The ad business is approaching a transformative moment. New privacy rules enacted by both state governments and tech giants have made digital advertising more expensive yet less effective. Innovative strategies designed by marketers to overcome these hurdles have not yet made it into media plans. If 2022 was a year of reaction to dynamic forces, 2023 is set to be a year of assertive action. Brands should keep these data-related predictions in mind as they begin to consider annual budgets and map out their avenues of escape.

1. Campaigns will go completely cookieless

The impending death of third-party cookies has petrified nearly every advertiser. At this point, many brands seem committed to going down with the ship, relying on third-party identifiers until they are gone forever. While Google’s depreciation delay this year offered a reprieve, there have been some forward-thinking brands that pushed onward and are pioneering the post-cookie landscape.

These brands have already started to test the effectiveness of alternative identity solutions, which enable media buyers to transact based on pseudonymous identifiers rather than cookies. Cookieless campaigns have mostly been experimental to date, but early success that has come in the form of increased reach and click-through rates suggests that they are ready to go mainstream.

Trying to predict what the cookieless future will look like is not easy, as there are competing technologies and visions fighting to shape the ecosystem. Doomsayers believe that alternative IDs will fail to scale and that advertisers will just flock to the walled gardens once the cookie crumbles. This may ultimately end up being true, but brands are not going to give up that easily.

As opposed to walled gardens, an open web backed by universal identifiers can provide the interoperability necessary for cross-screen marketing opportunities. In an effort to preserve this vision, the majority of the top 100 US advertisers will be completely cookieless in their digital campaigns by the end of 2023.

2. Time will run out on the old privacy regime

The era of unrestricted customer tracking is coming to an end. Apple’s rewriting of digital ad tracking rules is just one omen. California, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut and Utah have promulgated their own laws and regulations. Without comprehensive privacy legislation at the federal level, brands have been forced to adapt and comply through ad hoc measures. And because there are new laws and regulations being debated, it has become increasingly difficult to anticipate what the next set of rules will look like.

As stewards of customer data, advertisers cannot afford to continue down this uncertain path. Brands require a safety net so that they can stop worrying about costly violations and instead start focusing on improving the overall customer experience. Fortunately, many of the leading adtech solutions on the market today have built-in privacy controls and data governance capabilities. Privacy and security are no longer a technology problem, but rather a business one, requiring a top-down approach and continuous consensus building.

As a result, some brands will begin to voluntarily take their data governance to the next level by adopting internal data privacy policies and measures that are more stringent than some of the new rules being discussed. That way, marketers will have confidence knowing that their practices are compliant now and in the future.

Feature Image Credit: Adobe Stock

By Kazuki Ohta 

Sourced from The Drum

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Digital Advertising Is Overwhelming. Where to Look Next?

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By Anton Volovyk

The rapid start-up of new businesses has led to oversaturation and excessive competition in media buying and digital traffic. In this overwhelming digital landscape, it seems like only ad empires like Google and Amazon are benefiting. Despite Facebook plateauing, and the worst spring for stocks since 2008, new platforms like TikTok are readily taking up market share and consolidating profits, and the ad industry is booming.

It’s no secret that digital advertising is an attention game. However, time spent on social media and on screens has not only peaked but has generally been plateauing since the pandemic. Unfortunately, the reduction of digital traffic isn’t reducing digital advertising, it is having the opposite effect. The digital ad space is becoming even more saturated.

Even though traffic is down, and saturation is up, there are three universal ways for brands to work with their audience, product, and business models to lead the market.

#1 Growing the community

The cheapest and the most effective way to improve your business performance.

Customer retention and loyalty should be primary areas of focus. Depending on the industry, acquiring a new customer may cost 5-25 times more than retaining an existing one. The solution is to retain current customers by building a community around your brand.

The community represents the core of customers who are most interested in your product, are brand ambassadors, and communicate with each other. Communities help foster repeat purchases, improve retention, fix product bugs in real time using direct feedback, distribute brand messages for free, and can offer even more:

  • Communities produce UGC, which may go viral.
  • New customers are more likely to make decisions based on feedback from other users versus marketing messages directly from a company.
  • Communities help people establish strong social bonds based on common interests.
  • Community makes customers feel good, social interaction produces dopamine.
  • Community members are generally very profitable for a company given that they usually have higher LTV (Lifetime Value).

Harley-Davidson and the British cycling brand Rapha are good examples of building a strong community around a product. Both brands have managed to create a club of dedicated and loyal members with a subscription model and benefits like club memberships, sharing experiences, organizing meetings with cycling and motorcycle enthusiasts using the app, drinking coffee at partner points, and even offering bike rentals from their stores.

#2 Integrating growth loops into your product and business model

Marketing tricks that help businesses grow organically.

Since the late 2000s, many innovative companies have been launched (Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and many others) that soon became leaders in their niches. All of these companies utilized a non-standard marketing approach. They didn’t reject the traditional AARRR Pirate framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue). In addition to this more traditional sales funnel, they incorporated growth loops into their business models.

The logic behind a growth loop is that the contribution of each new user should lead to a particular action that positively affects the likelihood of user acquisition. Thus, without additional marketing efforts, the client’s community constantly grows and each client brings in a new one.

The neo banking company Revolut claims to have acquired 4M users through viral growth loops, and the first 1.5 million users were reportedly acquired without spending on advertising. How? Revolut’s Head of Growth for UK/IE calls it an Offline → Online → Offline acquisition loop. Users receive their Revolut card delivery at home, they share the unboxing experience on social media, complete registration, and get rewarded for signing up new users. It is simple but effective.

#3 Analysing and catching global trends ahead of the competition

It’s hard, but it works all the time.

Do you remember the first ad banner? In 1994, at the dawn of digital advertising a little rectangle purchased by AT&T on HotWired hit a record 44% click through rate. Today, the best banners boast much lower rates, generally from 0.39% in Tech to 1.08% in Real Estate for example.

Social media marketing indicators, which performed actively in the mid-2000s, are not representative today. Despite Apple’s iOS privacy changes, US advertisers are estimated to spend over $58B on Facebook advertising in 2022, up 15.5% from last year. But most web users find digital ads too intrusive and annoying.

To catch user attention, brands are hunting for their audience in places where people spend most of their time. According to State of Mobile 2022 data, people are still spending their time on social media with global time spent on social apps reaching 412 billion hours in 2021 (up to 35% from 2018).

In the last few years, advertisers have been using a mobile-first approach in which companies start product design from the mobile end, which is fitting, as mobile has become the priority.

TikTok remains the most downloaded app in the world, allowing users to scroll through a feed of short videos without tapping any buttons. The company has made a breakthrough in mobile consumption, allowing advertisers to get effective campaign results without taking users out of the app.

Trends run out of steam. What’s next?

Today, the web is becoming more interactive. Many tech experts believe we are smoothly moving into the Web 3 phase — the next Internet generation. In the 90s, we just “read” the Internet in its Web 1 form. With the rise of the first social networks in Web 2, users gained more online opportunities. Web 3 heralds the invention of new tools for interaction, and the Metaverse is one of its upcoming trends. A huge number of companies, big and small are now developing tools and technologies that will accelerate web decentralization and allow the introduction of more sales and distribution channels. The creator economy will reach the next level as soon as users, endowed with rights to content, get to the centre of the new web infrastructure.

Thanks to new technologies, the Internet will change, as will advertising.

The full-scale penetration of Metaverse-like experiences and the massive rollout of AR/VR has not yet happened. Still, many tech companies are already working on creating ad opportunities in virtual environments, launching digital clothing brands, hosting virtual shows and exhibitions, and more. For example, this July, India’s largest Food Delivery presented a hyper-localized video campaign on YouTube. This ad featured an actor mentioning the name of the dish, restaurant, and city, which vary from viewer to viewer based on their phone’s GPS.

If there is one thing we can expect from the digital landscape, it is change. No one knows exactly what the future of the Internet will look like, but it will certainly be more immersive and personalized. The new web will affect the whole of advertising, but brands can continue to thrive if they build community, integrate growth loops and keep an eye on the next emergent trend.

Feature Image Credit: Joe Yates

By Anton Volovyk

Anton Volovyk holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School and a Master in Finance degree from IE Business School. Anton is an expert in app-monetization, business development, and leadership. Before Reface, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group, a global strategy consulting company working with clients across consumer, tech, and media. Prior to BCG, Anton worked in investment banking in the M&A department and Private Equity as a tech and consumer investor.

Sourced from Bm

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Digital Advertising Is Overwhelming. Where to Look Next?

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By Anton Volovyk

The rapid start-up of new businesses has led to oversaturation and excessive competition in media buying and digital traffic. In this overwhelming digital landscape, it seems like only ad empires like Google and Amazon are benefiting. Despite Facebook plateauing, and the worst spring for stocks since 2008, new platforms like TikTok are readily taking up market share and consolidating profits, and the ad industry is booming.

It’s no secret that digital advertising is an attention game. However, time spent on social media and on screens has not only peaked but has generally been plateauing since the pandemic. Unfortunately, the reduction of digital traffic isn’t reducing digital advertising, it is having the opposite effect. The digital ad space is becoming even more saturated.

Even though traffic is down, and saturation is up, there are three universal ways for brands to work with their audience, product, and business models to lead the market.

#1 Growing the community

The cheapest and the most effective way to improve your business performance.

Customer retention and loyalty should be primary areas of focus. Depending on the industry, acquiring a new customer may cost 5-25 times more than retaining an existing one. The solution is to retain current customers by building a community around your brand.

The community represents the core of customers who are most interested in your product, are brand ambassadors, and communicate with each other. Communities help foster repeat purchases, improve retention, fix product bugs in real time using direct feedback, distribute brand messages for free, and can offer even more:

  • Communities produce UGC, which may go viral.
  • New customers are more likely to make decisions based on feedback from other users versus marketing messages directly from a company.
  • Communities help people establish strong social bonds based on common interests.
  • Community makes customers feel good, social interaction produces dopamine.
  • Community members are generally very profitable for a company given that they usually have higher LTV (Lifetime Value).

Harley-Davidson and the British cycling brand Rapha are good examples of building a strong community around a product. Both brands have managed to create a club of dedicated and loyal members with a subscription model and benefits like club memberships, sharing experiences, organizing meetings with cycling and motorcycle enthusiasts using the app, drinking coffee at partner points, and even offering bike rentals from their stores.

#2 Integrating growth loops into your product and business model

Marketing tricks that help businesses grow organically.

Since the late 2000s, many innovative companies have been launched (Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and many others) that soon became leaders in their niches. All of these companies utilized a non-standard marketing approach. They didn’t reject the traditional AARRR Pirate framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue). In addition to this more traditional sales funnel, they incorporated growth loops into their business models.

The logic behind a growth loop is that the contribution of each new user should lead to a particular action that positively affects the likelihood of user acquisition. Thus, without additional marketing efforts, the client’s community constantly grows and each client brings in a new one.

The neo banking company Revolut claims to have acquired 4M users through viral growth loops, and the first 1.5 million users were reportedly acquired without spending on advertising. How? Revolut’s Head of Growth for UK/IE calls it an Offline → Online → Offline acquisition loop. Users receive their Revolut card delivery at home, they share the unboxing experience on social media, complete registration, and get rewarded for signing up new users. It is simple but effective.

#3 Analysing and catching global trends ahead of the competition

It’s hard, but it works all the time.

Do you remember the first ad banner? In 1994, at the dawn of digital advertising a little rectangle purchased by AT&T on HotWired hit a record 44% click through rate. Today, the best banners boast much lower rates, generally from 0.39% in Tech to 1.08% in Real Estate for example.

Social media marketing indicators, which performed actively in the mid-2000s, are not representative today. Despite Apple’s iOS privacy changes, US advertisers are estimated to spend over $58B on Facebook advertising in 2022, up 15.5% from last year. But most web users find digital ads too intrusive and annoying.

To catch user attention, brands are hunting for their audience in places where people spend most of their time. According to State of Mobile 2022 data, people are still spending their time on social media with global time spent on social apps reaching 412 billion hours in 2021 (up to 35% from 2018).

In the last few years, advertisers have been using a mobile-first approach in which companies start product design from the mobile end, which is fitting, as mobile has become the priority.

TikTok remains the most downloaded app in the world, allowing users to scroll through a feed of short videos without tapping any buttons. The company has made a breakthrough in mobile consumption, allowing advertisers to get effective campaign results without taking users out of the app.

Trends run out of steam. What’s next?

Today, the web is becoming more interactive. Many tech experts believe we are smoothly moving into the Web 3 phase — the next Internet generation. In the 90s, we just “read” the Internet in its Web 1 form. With the rise of the first social networks in Web 2, users gained more online opportunities. Web 3 heralds the invention of new tools for interaction, and the Metaverse is one of its upcoming trends. A huge number of companies, big and small are now developing tools and technologies that will accelerate web decentralization and allow the introduction of more sales and distribution channels. The creator economy will reach the next level as soon as users, endowed with rights to content, get to the centre of the new web infrastructure.

Thanks to new technologies, the Internet will change, as will advertising.

The full-scale penetration of Metaverse-like experiences and the massive rollout of AR/VR has not yet happened. Still, many tech companies are already working on creating ad opportunities in virtual environments, launching digital clothing brands, hosting virtual shows and exhibitions, and more. For example, this July, India’s largest Food Delivery presented a hyper-localized video campaign on YouTube. This ad featured an actor mentioning the name of the dish, restaurant, and city, which vary from viewer to viewer based on their phone’s GPS.

If there is one thing we can expect from the digital landscape, it is change. No one knows exactly what the future of the Internet will look like, but it will certainly be more immersive and personalized. The new web will affect the whole of advertising, but brands can continue to thrive if they build community, integrate growth loops and keep an eye on the next emergent trend.

Feature Image Credit: Joe Yates

By Anton Volovyk

Anton Volovyk holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School and a Master in Finance degree from IE Business School. Anton is an expert in app-monetization, business development, and leadership. Before Reface, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group, a global strategy consulting company working with clients across consumer, tech, and media. Prior to BCG, Anton worked in investment banking in the M&A department and Private Equity as a tech and consumer investor.

Sourced from BM

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Forget everything you know about influencer marketing and start from scratch

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By Crystal Duncan

Influencer marketing has evolved and so must your approach. Here’s what you need to do to make this powerful approach work as part of your full-funnel marketing strategy.

Like most nascent marketing channels, influencer marketing began as something of a Wild West. Metrics were thorny, processes were clouded, and many brands got burned working with influencer platforms or individual creators who produced scant measurable results.

The upshot is that, even now that influencer marketing has matured into a more structured discipline, some brands remain skeptical of the entire medium.

We are at the point where brands who have struggled to produce and prove value from working with influencers in the past, must consider starting from scratch. That doesn’t don’t mean scrapping your Influencer program, but effectively taking a beat to re-evaluate your approach and reset it.

Build an influencer marketing strategy from the ground up with the same scrutiny you would apply to any other strategy. That means a rigorous brand analysis and quantitative vetting process should drive discovery of potential influencers. While the process of engaging and partnering with or deploying an influencer should be as automated as possible. And, last, measurement should focus on influencers’ ability to drive sales. Influencers who can move the bottom line are the ones brands should redeploy to optimize over time.

Gone are the days when influencer marketing was purely a brand awareness play. In the right hands, influencer is now a full-funnel, full-service discipline, meaning it covers awareness and bottom-of-funnel activations, discovery upfront, and measurement on the back end. Here are three cores to building an influencer marketing strategy from scratch and turning it into a proven revenue generator.

Understand who you are and what you need to accomplish

Brands need to set clear specifications to select the right creators. Brands should ask themselves: What are your values? Which audiences are you trying to reach? What backgrounds would you like your creators to represent? What messages do you need to send to your audience?

Next comes the quantitative decision-making process that has historically eluded the discipline. What are your key performance indicators? What calls to action will you bake into your influencer campaigns? How will you measure success? Beyond numbers of followers (the conventional metric), what engagement rates do you expect influencers to command, and how do those rates line up with sales goals?

Once brands have figured this out, they can select influencers who meet their criteria. Brands should also implement a repeatable process for creating content briefs to set influencers up for success. These, too, can be optimized over time, allowing advertisers to eliminate ambiguities. Now is when cutting-edge influencer practices come in, transforming the discipline into a full-funnel strategy.

Maximize distribution, measure influencer success and optimize

The fatal flaw in most content marketing strategies is that brands focus all their attention on creating great content, and after they have created it, they simply slap it into a blog or repost it to a couple of social channels. The same failure has historically applied to influencer marketing.

But sophisticated practitioners can turn distribution into a source of value. For example, a video created for Instagram might be amplified by paid social, an OTT campaign, digital out-of-home billboards, or programmatic display.

After brands have transformed what could have been a simple influencer Instagram video into an omnichannel campaign, they can leverage cross-channel data to quantify sales driven collaboration. This is a far cry from the old influencer measurement framework in which advertisers would report on the number of eyeballs a campaign reached or how many comments it spurred.

Once brands understand how much revenue individual influencers are driving, they can optimize campaigns, staffing a bench of key collaborators. Over time, by following this model, they can build an “army” of Influencers who deeply understand the brand and can convert their audience, ultimately making things more efficient and seamless. This process of distribution, measurement, and optimization should ultimately equip brands with a well-oiled machine of creators proven to be worth the investment – and then some.

Raise the bar for influencer marketing

It is understandable that many advertisers are wary of influencer marketing. But forward-thinking brands should not let past failures dictate future strategy for a channel that has evolved.

Influencer marketing should be part of a full-funnel strategy. It builds awareness and trust through powerful, authentic content that resonates with consumers on an emotional level. It also drives sales and lends itself to granular measurement, which allows for optimization so that influencer becomes not only more lucrative but also more efficient over time.

The only thing standing between many brands and a revenue-generating Influencer Marketing strategy is outdated assumptions about the channel. By challenging past wisdom and applying the same structure that governs other performance marketing channels to influencers, brands can unlock fresh revenue-generating opportunities.

By Crystal Duncan

Crystal Duncan is senior vice president, head of partnership marketing, Tinuiti

Sourced from The Drum

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How paid search is evolving: 4 trends to look out for

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By Rebecca Wilkes

Paid search is arguably the most knowledge-rich, mature digital marketing channel. It also moves fast, and can be hard for non-experts to keep track of. For The Drum’s Deep Dive into Digital Advertising, Rebecca Wilkes of performance marketing agency Summit Media looks into four trends for the year ahead and what marketers can do about them.

Paid search is the most mature digital marketing channel. It started back in 1996, with Google AdWords launching in 2000. Since then, we’ve seen the launch of many key initiatives such as product listing ads, seller ratings and expanded text ads.

Right now, paid search is also arguably digital’s most evolving channel. Here are four evolutions to look out for.

1. Changes to responsive search ads as Google focuses on automation

In August 2021, Google announced that automation should be a key focus for marketers, and from June 30 2022 responsive search ads (RSAs) will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited within standard search campaigns. Expanded text ads (ETAs) will no longer be an option for marketers.

RSAs allow marketers to enter multiple headlines and descriptions for ads. Google then uses machine learning (ML) to automatically test different combinations to find the highest-performing ad.

There should be two clear benefits for advertisers using RSAs v ETAs. First, increased engagement from customers due to improved click-through rates; and, second, lower costs due to improved ad copy.

From our testing (albeit at limited volumes), we’ve seen higher click-through rates and lower cost-per-click. You should prepare yourself by ensuring RSAs are in every ad group, and review performance of these ads to ensure they’re of the highest quality in line with Google’s scoring.

2. The start of keyword-less world: Performance Max

After its introduction in November 2021, Google announced that Performance Max will replace Smart Shopping and local campaigns by the end of Q3 2022.

Rather than the usual keyword-based search campaign, Performance Max uses your creative assets alongside business goals and automated bidding, with user signals and data-driven attribution to tailor ads to potential customers across the Google ecosystem (search, display, YouTube, Gmail and Discovery). This goal-based format helps marketers target customers at the right stage of their purchase journey, depending on the goal of the campaign.

Performance Max campaigns will be built from any existing smart shopping and local campaigns. Existing settings will remain, but will be automatically upgraded from July onward. So it’s important to start testing and learning now.

We recommend you create new campaigns and pause any relevant activity (such as Smart Shopping), then start working through the new additional creative assets available. Make sure you’re clear with measures of success – GA4 provides the most detail on performance.

3. The re-introduction of broad match (but not as we know it)

Since 2014, Google has been changing keyword match rules. This always brings unpredictability around budget and performance.

Before, broad match meant that if the search query was contextually similar to the keyword being targeted, your ad could show. This has now had a much-needed overhaul to ensure marketers remain in control of budgets. Modern search is an evolution of broad match and focuses on the meaning of your keyword and the intent behind it; this can include searches that don’t contain the original keyword terms.

Google’s BERT algorithm technology helps interpret queries, language and search intent. It uses this understanding to make keyword matching behaviour more closely aligned. That makes broad matches more relevant.

We’ve seen great results from testing, with incremental traffic and revenue. You should ensure you’re live with automated bidding, as the new broad match needs this to work effectively. Choose campaigns to switch to broad match and run a test (you could start by testing any previous broad match modifier keywords).

Test this on stable campaigns, using robust testing methodologies (such as Google’s built-in testing functions).

4. The removal of third-party cookies and the influence of audience

For years, brands have used cookies to help them target ads to the right audiences. With the removal of third-party cookies, Google is now focusing on the intent of people’s searches rather than audiences, capturing people on the likelihood that they will meet a campaign’s objectives.

Measurement and optimization will be impacted. Review your platform’s initiatives to mitigate this. Understand whether they align with business goals and objectives.

Google recently announced that it will be sunsetting Universal Analytics from July 1 2023. Think about the way you’re tracking to be able to capture and measure effectively moving forward, and what the platform you use is doing to enable continued measurement and reporting.

First-party data also becomes important in targeting an engaged audience. Contextual targeting will again rise to the frontier for display/programmatic activity.

So make sure you’re working closely with your provider and review targeting options for future activity and how to capture your target audience.

The loss of third-party cookies and how to combat this should be a key talking point across all brands to make sure you’re not left behind when the change is made.

By Rebecca Wilkes

Sourced from The Drum

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How brands can stand out in the customer experience economy

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By Morgan Mitchell

Online customer experience is changing like never before. So, brands need to decide: adapt or die, writes BOSCO™’s Morgan Mitchell.

The new customer experience economy is set to be the making or the breaking of not just newer brands but established ones too. Since 2020, the customer experience (CX) online has evolved dramatically. The need for a winning online CX is essential for success and is proving to be one of the most important and fundamental elements of marketing in today’s digital landscape.

With 81% of retailers increasing their investment in CX over the past two years, what does that mean for brands, consumers and the long-term relationship between the two?

The BOSCO™ index measures the online footprint of brands and benchmarks how effective they are with their paid and organic media channels. Using third-party data, BOSCO™ generates a score between 0-1,000 to determine how successful brands are in the digital space.

What is online CX and what does it include?

Online CX refers to the digital customer experience of your brand. It includes every stage of the consumer buying journey, including pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase.

Online CX is a huge part of brand perception as it encompasses every interaction a customer has with you digitally. That could be from first finding your Instagram page to using your online chat function to troubleshoot an order problem. While that may sound overwhelming, online CX is really just about providing a persona to your brand and carrying this through every customer-facing element of the business. And as we’re sure you know, consistency is key.

Why is online CX changing?

Unsurprisingly by now, the online and digital space is changing. Major steps have been brought forward by the Covid-19 pandemic as the world moved solely online as a result of international lockdowns. The need for online customer support skyrocketed and brands that previously didn’t have a digital-first approach scrambled to catch up.

Plus, it’s getting even more difficult for brands to retain consumers. 94% of sales and marketing professionals say that their business is effective at nurturing newer relationships during the ‘interaction’ and ‘awareness’ stage of the buyer journey. But that all changes at the advocacy stage, where professionals feel they are only 77% effective. What that tells us is that it’s harder to sustain long-term consumer relationships. This is where online CX comes into play.

So, how are brands adapting and strategizing to fit this new customer experience economy? What can we learn from these insights and consumer behaviour patterns?

Instant messaging & online chat functions

As the pandemic hit in 2020, consumers moved their lives entirely online in a way that hadn’t been seen before. We couldn’t pop into a shop to see a product, make a return, or just speak to an employee. Phone lines became jammed, so consumers turned instead to online messaging.

Since then, brands and retailers alike have amped-up their online messaging capabilities. Whether that be a live chat function on their site or through their social media, messaging became the go-to way to interact with brands online. In fact, between 2019 and 2020, social messaging rose in popularity by 110% – that’s huge.

Implement an omnichannel CX approach

Businesses fail to form meaningful, positive relationships with consumers when processes become tricky to navigate. For example, support tickets are passed from department to department without proper follow-up.

Let’s put that into context. A consumer messages you on social media with a complaint. The social team pass this on to customer service where the consumer has to explain the issue again. This then gets passed on to a complaints department and once again, the consumer must explain the problem. This could go on and on, meanwhile, the consumer is becoming more and more annoyed at the lack of communication within your business.

Instead, an integrated omnichannel CX system is seamless. Agents can easily transfer customer messages between apps and departments without the need to start from the beginning every time. This creates an easy, problem-free interaction that solves problems quickly, efficiently and, most importantly, leaves the consumer with a positive experience.

It’s not just about problem-solving either. Great online CX is more about being proactive rather than reactive. A great example of omnichannel CX is Zara’s (BOSCO™ score: 731) use of ‘Store Mode’ in its app. This allows users to only see products available in their local Zara store which they can then buy online and pick up in that store on the same day. This real-time shopping perfectly blends both online and offline channels using GPS and QR technology to its advantage.

Be open and responsive to feedback

When it comes to consumer feedback, there tends to be only two options: incredibly positive or incredibly negative. No one bothers to leave feedback or a review for an average experience, but they have plenty to say when everything has either gone right or wrong.

Being open to and receiving feedback is a huge part of uncovering valuable insights into your consumer base. While you may think your online CX is bulletproof, your consumers are the people who can really put that to the test. What they have to say is a massive part of the digital evolution of your brand. Plus, that open-ended communication helps you to build that relationship further and patch up damaged ones. Often, your next clever CX move will be the result of real-time feedback directly from the consumers themselves.

Uber (BOSCO™ score: 738) is a leading example of using customer insights to improve its online CX. The business makes around 22,000 tweaks to its app every month to customize it in every city it operates in. It does this using incident and reliability reports to tailor how the app operates based on where its user is. This eliminates data problems early and lets users know it is listening and adapting.

The key to digital transformation

Standing out in the digital space isn’t easy, and with the rapidly changing online CX expectations of consumers, brands need to fast decide their strategy.

The first step is to stay up to date with changes and developments as they happen. Take note of other brands that are adapting their online CX well and look at how you can implement something similar. With 58% of consumers expecting more from services than they did pre-pandemic, the need for integrated, omnichannel CX with room for personalization is key to digital transformation.

BOSCO™ is an AI learning platform that integrates your cross-channel digital marketing data into one personalized dashboard. The data allows marketers to make better digital marketing spend decisions with the help of data-driven insights, forecasting and mapping tools. Unlock your BOSCO™ score, today.

By Morgan Mitchell

Sourced from The Drum

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Businesses get the message – email is crucial to successful marketing

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By Michael Nutley

Many businesses turned to email to connect with their customers when pandemic measures sent so many people online. Now with increased privacy concerns for marketers and a need for joined up omnichannel marketing, email is about to be catapulted back into the limelight, finds a new report.

Email marketing in 2022 is more important, more integrated and more mature than ever, but email marketing teams still need to be faster, more efficient and better at personalization. Meanwhile the biggest concern marketers face – privacy – is also email’s biggest opportunity.

That is the snapshot of the discipline provided by a new report, Email In 2022 – The Trends, Behaviors & Benchmarks Driving Email Forward, published by email sending and deliverability platform SparkPost.

The report puts email’s growing role in the context of the recovery in business activity. It found almost a third (63%) of marketing leaders globally saying their budgets reflect pre-Covid levels. However, the pandemic has left its mark. Priorities are shifting, says the report, in that advertising and wide-net marketing efforts are too much of a gamble for organizations. Instead, businesses are investing in branding, CRM and email marketing. Content remains as high a priority as it was last year.

Email shines during lockdowns

Businesses certainly turned to email when pandemic measures sent so many people online.

“Email became a critical tool for organizations of all kinds to contact various stakeholder audiences with the combination of flexibility, speed, precision, and low cost not available through other modes of communication,” says George Schlossnagle, email evangelist and founder of SparkPost.

This crucial role continued into 2021. Three-quarters of marketing leaders (76%) say their email marketing program made a positive impact on the business in 2021, compared to 58% in 2020. And email’s increased importance is reflected in a greater maturity in the way it’s measured. Almost three-quarters (70%) of leaders said they changed the way they measure email marketing last year, compared to half (51%) who said the same thing in 2020.

Just as importantly, the pandemic also accelerated the integration of email with other marketing channels. Almost everyone who took part in the 2021 survey (95%) said their email marketing was aligned with other marketing disciplines, compared to half the respondents in 2020.

Intriguingly, this acceleration has happened despite the massive switch to remote working at the same time. Despite the fact that only 10% of the world’s companies are fully back in the office, almost everyone surveyed said collaboration is the same or better (98%) and that communication is the same or better (96%) than they were before remote working became a necessity.

Greater integration also ties in with the growing importance of an omnichannel approach to marketing. This means talking to customers on the channels they prefer and breaking down the silos between channels in order to deliver a coherent, consistent customer experience across every touchpoint. This is ‘absolutely the future of marketing’, the report says, particularly with the impending demise of the third-party cookie and the rise of first-party data.

The future is private

Indeed, privacy and data are the biggest concerns for email marketers in 2022.

“What we’re seeing now is only the beginnings of a paradigm shift that will continue to drive marketers to rethink data collection and usage practices,” adds Schlossnagle. “Changes in privacy regulations and a shift in consumer perception of personal data are big factors in marketing leaders’ commitment to investing in earned and owned marketing channels.”

The report found that the biggest concerns for respondents were the fear of existing digital marketing assets being unusable in the future; the threat of having to overhaul existing systems; and the need to re-do things from scratch.

More specifically, email marketers are most worried about Apple’s iOS 15 changes (a medium to high concern for 81% of respondents), Google’s third-party cookie tracking (77%), and government regulations and the deprecation of app tracking data (both 72%).

Email returns to centre-stage

Despite these concerns, the report predicts another impact of these changes will be to thrust email marketing even further back into the limelight. Companies leaning more heavily on first-party data and on the channels that are closest to their known customers – like email – creates an opportunity to build better profiles. In turn, these will drive longer term loyalty and engagement, leveraging audience behaviour on the company’s own website or app.

Email has the ability to be the glue between consumers and brands.

“The demise of third-party cookies puts a tailwind behind channels that leverage first-party data – email being the most pervasive,” says Schlossnagle. “We should all be gearing up for more investment in email and SMS because owned data is about to be more valuable than ever.”

Budget pressures demand greater efficiency

All this talk of a bright future for email marketing comes with a downside. The resources to support all this extra work haven’t necessarily arrived just yet. Two-thirds (69%) of leaders say their teams are busier than ever, but only 5% of respondents report having higher budgets in 2021 compared to 2020.

The result is even greater pressure for marketers to be more efficient – email marketers included. It’s one reason for the push for closer alignment of channel teams. Another effect is the increase in the proportion of companies bringing email marketing in-house. In 2020, just over half (55%) of leaders said they relied on agencies for their email marketing. Last year that fell to under a third (29%).

In addition, one of the key trends identified in the report is the increasing use of email design systems. These are pre-created and optimized selections of HTML templates. As the report explains, all the coding is done before marketers start creating an email – which means you can crank out high quality emails quickly. But it also notes that ‘there are clear opportunities for faster, more intuitive martech solutions, streamlined email marketing processes, and improved collaboration between stakeholders within the marketing team.’

One thing is clear. Email has long been seen as boring and unfashionable, but the current convergence of such trends as more time being spent online, increased privacy concerns and the need for joined up omnichannel marketing are just about to catapult it back into the limelight.

To explore this and more findings from SparkPost’s Email In 2022 – The Trends, Behaviors & Benchmarks Driving Email Forward report, click here.

By Michael Nutley

Sourced from The Drum

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