Are you Ready to PIvot?

The ecosphere of online e-commerce is constantly changing— is your business ready to pivot at a moment's notice? 

Nothing is more important in this day and age than tailoring your marketing strategy to keep up with new trends and stay ahead of your competitors to keep your brand growing successfully through changes that have a massive impact on the world of business.

This has become increasingly evident from a digital marketers perspective this year. One of the most significant impacts on online marketing in recent years has been Apple's release of their latest iOS 14.5, where Apple began letting users opt-out of apps tracking their activity across different platforms.

If you've been a company in charge of your own marketing and have suddenly found yourself with the rug pulled out from underneath yourself, don't feel disheartened! Apple's latest update probably has more to do with it than you think. As of May 2021, around 85% of Apple users have chosen to opt out already.

This has had many effects on the digital marketing digisphere. For example, Facebook has seen a rise in performance fluctuations of campaigns that functioned well before the updates, but this doesn't necessarily mean these campaigns are no longer effective. The way Facebook gathers and reports data has changed, so the data looks different. This creates a greater reliance on multi-platform analysis to understand each campaign's true performance.

We have to be very pragmatic with our approach to this change. We need to look at other sources of analytics when making our media buying decisions.

If you've been doing your own ads and getting a decent return on investment since April, you will most likely now be seeing a decrease in your return on ad spend and an increase in cost per acquisition in your Facebook reporting analytics. 

We’ve been meeting a lot of people lately who are frustrated because they thought their online advertising was performing well, and it doesn't seem to be anymore. But, we often find the reality is that their campaigns are still performing well, they just need to pivot the way they interpret and report their analytics.

Since the release of iOS 14.5, we have to rely more heavily on the bigger picture the whole sphere of marketing paints. We need to understand not just what Facebook is saying but what other sources like Google, Shopify, and WordPress are saying as well.

When in doubt, zoom out. 

(We recently guest-wrote a blog for Circus PPC about how Apple iOS 14.5 is affecting businesses and online growth marketing. CLICK HERE to learn more about the specifics.)

Technical changes are not the only changes that may lead to the need to pivot, though. Changes in different markets are constant and need to be adapted to as well. The past year and a half has been a great example of this due to the dreaded topic everyone is tired of talking about: COVID-19. 

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has had an immense effect on e-commerce markets and businesses in general, and the changes these effects have brought about are here for the long term. 

Of course there has been a noticeable uptake in specific markets that we all saw during the great lockdowns of 2020/ 2021. Board games and other home-based activities saw a massive rise in sales, and if you found hand soap or sanitiser on a store shelf you were one of the lucky few. But the pandemic also drove a massive shift to online shopping over in-person sales.

Many users who were not comfortable shopping online before COVID-19 finally saw the benefits after the world was locked in at home. Since then, these users have experienced the convenience and formed a new habit, meaning they will continue to shop online even as physical retail outlets reopen for good. 

Shopify has recently reported that e-commerce revenue across their partners worldwide has increased by 57% year-on-year in Q2 of 2021, as well as an impressive 67% increase in their partners monthly recurring revenue. There is no doubt that these massive increases are an after-effect of the pandemic.

This is why it's so important to be working with an excellent digital marketing agency. A good marketing agency will understand and keep ahead of the changes and new trends in the marketplace. They will understand these changes and how they will affect your business so you don't have to worry. Instead, you can focus on running your business day-to-day while your marketing agency strategises how to take advantage of industry changes for your unique business.

A digital marketing agency will understand the importance of pivoting in your business because they have to do the same. We ourselves have had to pivot this year thanks to Apple's changes and the pandemic as well. There are always changes in the game that we have to look at to win sales, and we work hard to pass this knowledge and success to all of our partners. 

Thanks to Apple's updates, specialists in Facebook advertising now also need to be specialists in Google analytics. Advertisers constantly are educating themselves so they can understand the whole marketing picture by combining data from all sources. Marketing data is essential because it is used to decide what's effective in marketing campaigns and what isn't. It's what agencies use to decide what to pull back on and what to scale up.

Digital marketing agencies also work with their partners to capture this new uptake in online e-commerce to make sure they're able to capture new audiences that are exploring online shopping for the first time or more often than before COVID-19 by optimising their partners digital assets and tailoring their products and services to new emerging market trends.

It’s vital that you find a marketing partner that can advise, inform, and educate on the processes and the changes, but also ride that wave for you and be the captain through rough storms because you've got other things to worry about running your business day-to-day. Trying to stay ahead of marketing trends is not a great use of your time when you're trying to run your business. If you can find a partner to help you do that, your business will be able to grow in a much more sustainable way. 

If you think we could be that perfect partner for you, CLICK HERE to get your free consultation.