For this webinar we decided to look ahead at digital trends for 2022 and were pleased to welcome Janis Thomas (Ecommerce & Marketing Director at Look Fabulous Forever), as well as Kara Šegedin (Head of Digital Marketing at WildBrain Spark) as our guest speakers today.
The presentations covered social strategy, first-party data, digital video marketing and personalisation so there is plenty of content and actionable insights to kick-start your 2022 digital strategy.
Take a look below for more detailed overviews of the presentations and key take-aways, or watch the full webinar recording above.
In his talk Osh explained that users are demanding greater privacy - including transparency, choice and control over how their data is used. However, 90% of consumers will offer first-party data if it would improve their experience (SmarterHQ 2021).
Osh confirmed that brands need a coordinated plan to guide choosing which data to collect, and how to analyse and activate it - it's an important area that many brands don't consider carefully enough.
He went on to explain the importance to create an obvious value exchange - brands must be constantly asking the question 'Have we made it easy for customers to see the benefits of sharing their data with us?'.
MD, Daydot
- The first step is to audit your data sources to identify what data is being generated and how it’s being measured.
- Cross-reference the audit output with the data requirements of the marketing and analytics use cases you plan to execute and make sure you collect the data that’s important to your objectives.
- Continually evaluate your first-party data capabilities, monitor progress, and integrate what you’ve learned at each step along the way.
Ecommerce & Marketing Director, Look Fabulous Forever
Janis showed her passion for Look Fabulous Forever and social as a channel throughout her presentation. She started by sharing some impressive digital results - how the brand has increased revenue through social by 350% in the last year!
She went on to explain how in response to the pandemic they build a hugely successful Facebook community - 'Tricia's Super Troopers' - to support customers, which then organically grew and generated a lot of conversation and engagement about products. She also talked about the benefit of a full-funnel paid social strategy and how they have elevated their personalisation efforts.
- Social drives revenue in the short and long term.
- Build a highly engaged community that are passionate advocates of your brand.
- Social has infinite potential for continuous improvement.
Senior Optimisation Manager, Daydot
Alex introduced the crawl, walk, run approach for personalisation. First you optimise the base level experience for all users by improving general relevance. Then refine this further by looking at different segments that exhibit different behaviours or needs and how relevance can be improved for these users. And eventually, you might want to move on to 1:1 personalisation if there is a need for this. At this stage, brands would usually adopt an AI solution that can keep up with user behaviour in real-time.
He outlined two options for experimentation with personalisation
- If your site is small or doesn't get much traffic, and you would need to let tests run for months on end, it might be better to 'just do it' - so make the website changes, compare and measure the impact over time.
- If you have strong website traffic and can get a significant result within a few weeks then test your changes. You can then measure the results and use these to create future hypotheses for testing and learn more about your customers.
- Research allows you to make contact with real customers and ask them directly how they use your products or services, what other products they use, etc.
- Customer needs can change at different points in the user journey. Journey mapping can help you understand where and when personalisation, or improved relevance, would provide something meaningful for the customer so they successfully move through the funnel.
- Through research you might find you have some no-brainers, elements where personalisation will only enhance the experience, but for more complex hypotheses you should test to ensure you can measure the impact of the personalisation.
Head of Digital Marketing, WildBrain Spark
WildBrain Spark runs the largest kids and family AVOD (advertising video on demand) network on YouTube in the UK. As Head of Digital Marketing Kara is well placed to share her knowledge of digital video. For her talk she split her presentation into 3 sections and shared her insight and recommendations about how to target - Generation Alpha , Generation Z, Millennials & beyond.
She explained the importance of targeting by demographic as video, streaming technology etc has changed so significantly during each generation that user priorities and expectations are incredibly different. She touched on YouTube legislation, creating quality video, building trust with your audience, plus why brands should consider YouTube Shorts and embrace TikTok.
- Nearly three-quarters (74%) of UK families are co-viewing kids' content together every week, with 36% doing so daily (WildBrain Spark Report).
- YouTube Shorts are a great option to target Generation Z. You can access creators and influencers and easily transfer content to TikTok and Instagram reels.
- Currently being under-utilised by brands there is a lot of opportunity to experiment with TikTok. The platform transcends generations and brings families together to create, have fun, and be entertained.