Hey there! Namita, back with you 🙂
Firstly, I would like to wish you a very, very happy new year. I know the greetings are a bit late; however, our year started with a bang, swiped with launches and projects. I hope you had an excellent start to the year as well.
Before I proceed, if you feel you are not enjoying my mailers, you can unsubscribe now, if you like. Once you do this, you will not hear from me again ever. However, I urge you to look at this email before unsubscribing from my list.
This newsletter topic came as an inspiration during one of our team meetings during the last week of last year 🙂 when we were doing campaign optimizations for all clients.
So what is working in Digital Marketing as of today?
The best way to find what is working is by knowing what is not working! 🙂
Every client is unique and has their independent scenarios, but there is one common element across clients that we are observing.
And that is: Traffic is getting expensive by the day.
The campaigns need higher ad budgets across all clients to generate the same results.
If you think about it, since 2020, the population using the internet for shopping has gone up by perhaps 1%, but the number of new businesses that have gotten added to the advertising universe is gone up by 1000%.
Running digital Ads on Google and Social channels have become the most essential activity for every business.
This was not the case before Covid.
Print, Newspapers, Magazines, B2B events, and Networking groups still had a significant dependency on lead generation then.
The number of users online is more or less the same, and as people are back to travelling and working from offices, the average time spent online has declined as well.
Social media inventory (the number of users online on a given platform) who are also spenders and online shoppers is thus limited.
This has made the platform raise its cost for showing Ads to 1000 people(CPM= Cost per thousand impressions), which has increased CPC(cost per click) and CPLs (cost per lead).
These are the highest ad costs I have seen in my career managing digital Ads (and Above Digital:)) since 2004.
The only way you can reach the right potential customer and get the desired number of leads /calls/bookings per day will be when you have a better or higher ad spend.
The second thing that has happened across platforms these days is policy changes. This is on both Google and Facebook ad platforms I am talking about.
Both Google and Facebook have become extremely strict in enforcing advertising policies, and you have to ensure your Ads are not rejected and that you are following the rules and regulations of the platforms when writing copy for Ads and creatives.
Facebook now has various courses on advertising policies.
Here are two that I can share:
Meta’s Ad Review Process and Policies
Introduction to the Advertising Standards
You are allowed a certain number of rejections before your account gets restricted from advertising.
Please be very careful when creating Ads for Facebook and Instagram, and make sure you follow the policies.
Google also has new restrictions on the business such as Plastic Surgeons, Medical services, Aesthetic treatments, Financial markets, Crypto, Currencies and online trading.
Another thing that is and will further impact ad campaigns and their performance is IOS updates.
IOS14 is now allowing Apple users to opt out of data sharing every time they download an app. When users opt out of the app tracking, the Facebook pixel can no longer store information about the users. Thus, the new operating system will not allow advertisers to target or exclude these users efficiently.
One way you can combat this issue is by verifying your domain with Meta and prioritising 8 events you would like to track with your pixel.
#If you need help setting up the pixel and tracking events, hit the reply button and email me.
There are still many tracking limitations and data logs for Apple users, and Facebook is finding it very hard to attribute conversions to its ad campaigns.
We look at additional data sources instead of just panel numbers when we optimize the ad campaigns on Facebook.
For instance, we look at the leads on the lead sheet for leads-gen clients and the sales number on Shopify for our E-commerce clients.
The next new thing happening in Digital is that Google announced sun-setting Universal Analytics by June 2023 and has rolled out a new version called GA4 that enables measuring traffic and engagement across websites, social networking sites and apps.
This means we can track what matters to us and not just what Google thinks matters to us.
Google Analytics 4 is the newest version of Google Analytics.
Most of the businesses and marketers are not excited about this switch.
Change is always hard right?
GA4 has a new dashboard; it allows cross-platform tracking and enables in-depth reporting and analytics with predictive metrics like purchase probability, churn probability and revenue prediction.
We have started implementing GA4 across all our clients and recording the data, so we are ready when the actual switch happens.
#If you need help setting this up, email me.
This newsletter is going to get longer… But I urge you to read.
These insights I am sharing with you are real-time of what we are learning on a daily basis while running client campaigns across platforms.
Here is what we @AD believe will work for digital marketing in 2023
- Higher ad spends will be needed to get the desired lead counts/sale numbers
- Creative is king. The message on the creative and the design itself. The more eye catchy and creative your ad image, the better your Ads will perform.
- Short video is the winner. Within 10 seconds videos are going to be trending for digital Ads in 2023
- Micro influencer marketing will gain further momentum. Influencers who have followers from 3000-100,000 are called micro-influencers.
- User-generated content like unboxing videos, beauty reviews, branded hashtags, and photo tags will be incorporated into the marketing strategy to uplift the brand’s authenticity. Buyers trust user-generated content 2.6 times more than brand-created content. We at Above digital will be working closely with our clients to produce this user-generated content.
- Conversational marketing using targeted messaging and AI automation to engage with the people when they are on your website are going to gain momentum. We have already started implementing WhatsApp chatbots for most of our clients. This will enable potential leads to get answers to their questions immediately rather than to wait to receive a call for their inquiry
- Email is the most money-making channel as it helps in cross-sells and upsells. However, the new IOS 15 is going to make it harder for the email platforms to track open and click rates, thus making it challenging to optimize email campaigns.
There is so much more I can talk about but let me not overflood you with the information and keep some for the following newsletter… which will be about AI 🙂 Stay tuned for that one.
If you are looking to grow your business and need help with lead generation or increasing revenue for your commerce website, reply to this email, and I would love to explore how we can help you grow.
Until next time,
N.
PS: Above Digital completed 19 years… can you believe it! Since 19 years, I am running this agency. We are doing a flashback video series on Linkedin wherein I am sharing our journey on video posts right from the year 2004. I am confident you will enjoy my video posts sharing what got us where we are. Click here to watch the video…Don’t forget to follow Above Digital, so you are notified of the new videos we post.
Link to our Linkedin for Video posts
PPS: I have been working on bringing on and accepting Change. From cutting my hair to getting a tattoo (something I would have never done as I thought inking the body is like staining the body), More on this in my future newsletters 🙂