Our industry is filthy with doomsday warnings of upcoming changes and updates! I stay away from it. I’m the girl with the loudspeaker (er, equally annoying ads) trying to get your attention over the roar of constant fear-mongering just to tell you to ignore them, because most of it is BS and I don’t want you to waste your time. Albeit not the most genius brand positioning, I’m the social media agency owner encouraging small brands to keep their social media management in-house if possible. I do this because I know firsthand how important it is to allocate your precious resources properly if you want to succeed.
When I start a conversation about how our industry is changing, you can trust I’ve put a lot of thought into it. It’s time to dig in!
A couple weeks back, I was at a mastermind event with 60ish other entrepreneurs (IRL)! We share a coach and a common mindset that puts us at the forefront of what’s happening in digital marketing, especially social media marketing. Here’s a little recap of what we seemed to come back to again and again that week.
Facebook Ads will never be the same
Digital marketing is changing with the “cookieless future” on a fast approach. The iOS14 privacy update is our first collective foray into more of what’s to come, impacting social advertising costs and results in a way that is screwing up short term profitability on social media funnels for a good chunk of businesses.
Look, customer acquisition has been so cheap between Facebook’s tech and crappy consumer privacy. The marketplace has been flooded with D2C consumer brands that are built to scale and sell based on initial growth numbers. This dynamic has been in cahoots with pitiful consumer privacy laws and it’s led to a declining customer experience on these platforms and quite frankly, we all deserve better.
We’re going to see a market cleanse. Your customer is now slightly more protected, making it so that brands have to be a little bit better. Nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.
Don’t freak out, do this:
- Improve your messaging and content. With better storytelling, you’ll still grab your market’s attention, albeit with differentiated targeting methods.
- Focus on customer acquisition right now. Build out your customer journey in a way that doesn’t rely on third party cookies. At the top of the funnel (where you’re warming up your prospects for their first sale) you need to construct a path to purchase that invests in your relationship with them on the app until they’re ready to buy. We recently updated Paid Social Bootcamp with a bunch of different ways to do this.
- Invest in your customer after they purchase. Brands who aren’t invested in their customer beyond the first sale are the only ones that should be concerned. If you’ve been using Facebook Ads under the “give a dollar, get two back, then leave your customers lost out at sea” well then… we’re coming for you. PSA for our Strong Brand Social community: We’ve known this change was coming for a long time and we taught you to think about social advertising accordingly. You are for sure on the right path.
- Build your ecosystem. By ecosystem, I mean customer experience / community-driven approach to what you’re doing. Your customer should have multiple opportunities to come back to you and they should be the ones deciding what you offer next. Treat your customers like your Chief Product Officer and build a future together. Customers want to be a part of what the brands they support are building now more than ever before.
- Stop worrying about keeping up with the algorithm and get yourself a strategy that outlasts it. YES THAT EXISTS. It might cost you a few hundred dollars in ad spend per month, but it’s worth it to recoup hundreds of hours of your time and your ability to stop chasing your tail on every new silver bullet. Get started now with this masterclass.
Who will win in the cookieless future?
Only 11% of users are opting into Facebook’s tracking, and we know that third-party data will continue to diminish as consumer privacy laws advance. Entrepreneurs that truly love the business that they’re building and want to invest in their customer relationships are going to be fine. Listen to your community for product development queues and treat brand building as a long term investment.
If you don’t have one, get yourself a support group.
