The lowdown on the future of paid social
While Matt and the team focused on the main attractions of Brighton SEO, I attended the Paid Social Show (a series of fringe events, each focusing on one area of digital marketing). As a paid social marketer, I found these talks super insightful, entertaining and validating (anyone in paid social will know and relate to many of the challenges highlighted below!)
Privacy Proofing
Things kicked off with a talk from Amy Stamper, who spoke about privacy-proofing your brand in a post-iOS14 and cookie-less world. She noted how Governments are increasingly aware of technological innovations and are hot on the heels of anyone trying to gain consumer data without consent, directly impacting how we target through ads. The key takeaway from the talk was that we need to continually test the targeting we have access to and try to understand where our audiences’ interests lie.
Diversify
The next talk was from Cathia Cumming, about diversifying paid social platforms. She explained how over-reliance on one platform can lead to negative results. If one of your ads performs poorly, the algorithm may potentially view your content as weak and therefore think your subsequent ads are ‘bad’, and your results will see a negative trend. It takes, on average, seven touchpoints for a consumer to take necessary action – so if you can diversify your message across multiple platforms, you’re much more likely to see conversions come in.
Protect Your Ad Account
After lunch, we headed back up to the Skyline room for a talk from Abi Carey about protecting yourself and your ad account for Q4 success. She clearly explained that Meta is not obligated to give you any refund if you find yourself hacked. The Business Manager Admin’s role and responsibility is to ensure everyone in the account has 2 Factor Authentication set up. When you don’t, it can lead to hacking, which we’re sure some of you have unfortunately experienced!
Video vs Text
Finally, I attended a talk about social media and content, focusing on TikTok. I was interested to hear that people will likely retain about 90% of a message delivered through video but only 10% through text. We should also refrain from spamming hashtags on TikTok but focus on optimising captions and using the automated subtitle tool to help give the algorithm what it wants! Oh, and make sure your sound quality is top-notch; otherwise, it’s guaranteed that people will scroll straight past!