Welcome to the inaugural episode of Marketers of the Universe, a monthly podcast from the Marketing team at Brew Digital. We analyse the latest marketing trends, celebrate the campaigns that made us smile, and capture our learnings for other marketing professionals. 

In this episode we covered:

[00:00] Introductions

[01:35] Threads v. Twitter: is the Instagram upstart a serious contender?

[07:28] Why you should be making use of cross channel tracking

[12:47] “Barbie is the original influencer”

[19:09] Google Analytics 4: it’s really time to make the transition

[24:16] Lead generation

[29:32] Wrap-up

Transcript

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 0:01

I think what's interesting here is there's a lot of weeks going around when Threads was out of marketing, managers and CMOs jumping in and like let them jump into Threads. But I think what Brad needs to remember is you need to have something to say and whatever social channel you are part of, it needs to be authentic to what you sell and who you are and where your audience is. And so if you're just jumping on the bandwagon of Threads, what's the point?

Haydn Woods-Williams: 0:29

Welcome to the Brew Digital Podcast. I'm Hayden. I'll be your host. I'm here with a big chunk of the Brew Digital Marketing team. We have Mark and Freya from the email team, jason from our SEO team, sophie and Debbie from our social team, ross and Nasha from our paid team and our head of digital marketing, rich. I'm Hayden, and this is the Marketers of the Universe podcast. This is a podcast where our experts are going to talk top trends and insights that we've noticed this month across SEO, social, paid and email. Okay, let's see how much knowledge we can cram into five minutes of chit chat. Let's crack on. So, section one we are kicking things off with social, and our topic for today is Threads versus Twitter Timer. Just about ready to go. Countdown has started. I'm going to start by throwing this one over to you, debbie. It feels like most other social media apps are growing organically. Threads has grown out of a sort of Twitter rebellion. Do you see it lasting?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 2:00

Very good question. I feel like it is the tricky part about social media channels. It's the retention. Do we all remember Clubhouse, for instance? It was the biggest thing. Everyone wanted to jump on it. Where is Clubhouse right now? Do I see it growing? I am on a wait and see club at the moment. I did download Threads. I was experimenting on it. But yeah, I'm just a lurker at the moment, trying to experiment. That's what I'd say.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 2:29

Nice. I know, Rich, you've used it a little bit as well. What are your thoughts so far?

Rich Harper: 2:32

I've had an initial play, much like the majority of people that have joined it just to see what all the buzz is about. For me at the moment I think it's too early to tell. Personally, I find the Threads a little messy. I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with another social media network entering a space where I don't really have control over my Threads. I'm seeing lots of stuff that AI is probably telling the algorithm. I want to see, but I really don't want to.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 3:03

I think that brings a big question background to machine learning, and is the content what we want to see? Does it feel a bit forced? Anakines just generally understands people's thoughts around how brands are going to use it, how it exists next to Twitter.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 3:21

I would say, because this is very much driven by Instagram and Meta. I definitely see them using a lot of influencers with this in their business sleds, and at least my meet has already been flooded with that. I've already been seeing a lot of brands and influencers starting to occupy my feed, whether or not I like it or not.

Rich Harper: 3:42

Maybe it's a bit cynical of me to think this, but Mark Zuckerberg announced that they would monetize the platform once they hit the billion user mark, which, based on the growth within a week, may not be that far ahead. And obviously that depends on the EU lifting their bank, because at the moment, I believe there is some data laws, privacy issues around threads being launched in the EU. But fundamentally, I think this is another play from Meta to owning people's data, which, in turn, will drive advertising on the platform. So I don't think it will be too far in the distance before we see it heavily saturated with brands trying to reach their audience in another platform.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 4:27

Now Twitter. I know from when I've used it in the past there's a level of customer service there. Do you think that's something that brands can use Fred's for?

Saufi Mohd Nor: 4:38

I personally think, like for brands who want to jump into threats if they don't have a strong presence on Instagram and Twitter, I would say, just wait it out, because if your Twitter and Instagram are not strong enough in the first place because essentially it's a combination of those two apps and in terms of the customer service aspect of it, I believe because it's like a very much new like if any brands that I've seen on there don't really know what they are doing other than like posting memes, like funny stuff, like like these posts, if you use this Like, you know it's a very basic, general level and that's not even like a DM feature or anything. Yeah, so I think maybe once they improve their UI and so on, maybe it could slowly replace Twitter.

Mark Bundle: 5:21

What service are there about? There's no DM feature yet. So it makes it completely irrelevant as a customer service channel because it means you can't have kind of any private discussion, share any private details and get the updates like that. So it does limit how much you can do. The fact that it asks so much in terms of privacy but then offers so little is also a big concern for my point of view.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 5:39

I think what's interesting here is there's a lot of weeps going around when Fred's was out of, like marketing managers and CMOs jumping in and like let them jump into threats. But I think what brands need to remember is you need to have something to say in whatever social channel you are part of. It needs to be authentic to what you sell and who you are and where your audience is. And so if you're just jumping on the bandwagon of threats like what's the point?

Rich Harper: 6:06

The adoption is huge and I wonder if younger people are on these platforms, are they looking for an escape from brands, in which case we need to be more in tune with what people want to see and, I think, based on what Debbie just said there, think about it in terms of what your overarching strategy is. What is the core message you're trying to promote? Who are you trying to talk to? And then consider which platforms are best. Just because this is a new shiny thing out of the box Doesn't necessarily mean that you have to swarm to it. Really kind of focus in on if that's where your audience are, great, but think about how you're going to talk to them in that particular channel. It doesn't necessarily need to be hey, we're here, we're going to sell to you.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 6:50

Last one what can someone listening go away right now and do when it comes to threats?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 6:56

If you think that threats is something that you should be part of, your brand should be part of. Download it, experience it, see what's up, imagine, like, what type of messaging you'll be there. Experimenting social channels and seeing what's going on and having a feel of it really gives you a lot of intel into what your audience will experience. And if it's not what I want my customers to see and we're beset as then, do not be part of it.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 7:28

Our topic for the next section is going to be looking at cross-channel tracking and why we should be doing more of it by tracking a campaign level. Mark, I'm going to kick things off with you. Can you tell us a little bit more?

Mark Bundle: 7:39

The concept to this was we do an awful lot of tracking at channel level so we can tell you how well you pay media campaign did, how well your email did, how well your social media posts did, but that doesn't necessarily give you a good idea of how your overall campaign is done. So if you want to bring together all of your assets across different channels, properly track your user journey, your customer journey, you need to have to track across the fully campaign level rather than just a channel level. I think that's something we don't do enough of, especially with adaptivists. I've got to give props to Karen and Liliana. They're OKR campaign at the agile space. We've done that and it's kind of been a trial for us using the campaign tool within HubSpot properly. So it's something we actually have on our existing tools to actually kind of make sure we're getting proper attribution across all channels, as opposed to it's going yep, this one's doing well, this one's doing well, etc. But again, a holistic picture. It's something we're not doing enough of yet.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 8:28

I guess the question that's probably on a lot of people's minds is how hard is that actually going to be to do?

Mark Bundle: 8:33

Well, the joy is, especially if you're talking about adaptivists. The joy is we already got everything there in HubSpot so we can already track our emails in there. Our social channels are all linked into it. Yes, our paid media needs a little bit of work to bring it in there properly, but that's not something that's going to be any kind of difficult to do. It's just a little bit how we use the tool differently. It means you've got to get that overview for relatively little setup. I think we did the trial one, that being two ladies of agile myself and Gaynor, who's our CRM admin we sat down between the four of us and had this first trial one set up in about 20, 25 minutes, and a lot of that was discussion. Frankly, it's setting them up really quick and easy, and so it's something that we could do, if we choose to go that way, relatively quickly and easily. It allows you to have reports as well coming out of HubSpot where you can show you the actual attribution of new contacts, deals even if you get any deals out of it, etc. So it's quick and potentially useful.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 9:24

Within Brew, Digital and Adaptivist. We sometimes are guilty of not tying everything together, working with channels in a bit of a silo. What benefit and this is an open question could we have from from connecting those campaigns up?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 9:41

I think that the first thing that I always think about when, when discussion comes up, is, I often see the same piece of concept goes to pay media, social, and we don't talk about it, and nor do we also see the results on the other end, and so I think this attribution is very important, so that we are all in tune and we also know how to improve for the next one. I think that's something that I would personally would love to see on the social media, and also how to work with the other channel.

Rich Harper: 10:13

The multi. There's the multi channel approach that we're just discussing here and there's obviously different attribution models that we can apply to that. It's also thinking about the multi funnel approach. It's not necessarily just picking the right channels and making sure that they are singing together. It's also thinking about where your audience are in that sales cycle or that or that journey. I think it's very easy to run and pains at the bottom of the funnel that are completely focused on conversion and leads. But ultimately, what are we doing to feed that bottom of the funnel? I think is a question that we should be asking as well.

Mark Bundle: 10:56

If you can get things working in tandem, it means you can make a much more consistent experience for your users, and that consistency is always going to provide a better experience and drive more value. So if you're bringing things properly for you, click on an ad for topic X, you go through and you get an email that should then relate to the topic as well, maybe suggest something else, and you also get a nugget on from a social post that served you that you see is on a similar topic. It can really help drive the message. I because you get across the board, because it's consistent, so it's not a diverse message of oh yeah, there's a doctor is doing stuff, it's a doctor is doing Agile transformations you can get that kind of the reinforcement of the message across the board. So as long as the channels are working together, you can both bring things in and nurture them along through all three channels.

Rich Harper: 11:43

B2B land. Sas is very sales driven and I think it's probably about time that we focus a bit more on the customer and the customers at the center of what we do. And I know adapt to this have got a big customer experience project going, but I think we talked about it in brew, we talked about it in our team about how the customers at the center of everything we do and I think there's a lot there I see in marketing world where the customer isn't really the focus. It's it's more about look how great we are, we want you to kind of inquire with us, but we're not really focused on what the customer needs or wants.

Mark Bundle: 12:19

Yeah, that kind of pain point messaging I guess again can work so well because different channels from different ways. You can show Case studies in one format. We can ask questions about things in other format. You show social proof in another format, show how we've helped other people. So cost of a centric approach from really pay dividends and just see wonderfully across channel approach.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 12:46

We are looking in this section in a slightly different direction. We ask the British marketing team over the last month or so what have been their favorite marketing campaigns. That could have been internally with an adaptor best or the adaptor best group. That could have been Some of our external clients. That could have been anyone in the B2B world or anyone in the B2C world by an absolute country mile. The clear winner was Barbie the movie. Lots of fans in here really gonna open the floor and I know Nashia and selfie. This, this initial recommendation, came from both of you. What was it that you loved about that marketing campaign?

Saufi Mohd Nor: 13:25

I think, like the reason why I want to bring it up is just because it's just a very well thought out marketing campaign. So all the agencies worldwide who work on it, I feel like if I could say good job to every one of them, they really did a great job, they really think everything across all channel and it cannot ties down. But I think why I feel like we should discuss it, not necessarily asking a database to change the logo, to ping or anything this month, although that will be funny it just one like seeing, like how they really do it. So, for example, yes, the main thing is they want people to watch the movie, but they also realized a really good opportunity to kind of strengthen the brand as well. So, if you see, it's not just asking people to watch the movie and they have also all this brand partnership which kind of ties in with the Barbie brand, like Barbie, like tiny, like a makeup brand, barbie partnership with an ice cream, barbie partnership with a clothing, like it. I kind of strengthen the brand overall and not just focusing on like, okay, watch the movie. So I think I guess for companies like the adaptive is growing all the business unit within it. I think like what we can learn. Like assume your ebook is your Barbie the movie. So do you just ask people to just kind of like, all right, they hear this downloaded, done, or you can look into? Well, kind of relate to what my rational said earlier about your customer experience. Could there any sub topics in there that you could turn into a video? Could you turn it into a LinkedIn carousel, do something that you could include in your newsletter and all to just kind of really see one piece of content and like really really use it and really plan it very, very well, so you're not just like wasting all this like money, energy and resources to just kind of get it one and then that's it. So I think that's what we can learn. Absolutely love that, but still, if we could change our logo to pink, that will be nice as well. For just this month, did you know that Mattel actually owns that?

Haydn Woods-Williams: 15:08

other Barbie pink. I think one of their early adverts was actually just a pink rectangle with the words coming soon, which was obviously instantly recognizable. So I guess that question from me at this point is how much does brands play into the success of this campaign?

Saufi Mohd Nor: 15:28

I would say like a lot, and I think that's a good thing. They know the branding is strong, they know who their target markets are the brand is strong.

Rich Harper: 15:37

That's obviously a real driver behind it, but also Barbie is the original influencer and the fact that, essentially, mattel have played into the influencer market with the goddess of influencer marketing and I think that's really clever and something to think about, how they've really focused in on tiktok and social channels with the ultimate influencer.

Mark Bundle: 16:01

It's just clever as well how they've managed to have these sort of news new campaigns are going viral on tiktok and stuff but they've managed to like stay true to their roots as well. Like that Margot Robbie doing all the press junkets in vintage Barbie outfits. They've kept for kind of like small details as well, that like truce their fan base while making sure they modernize this really clever.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 16:20

Earlier, when we were kind of chatting and prepping for this conversation, we mentioned Barbie is being released around the same time as Oppenheimer and Mission Impossible. That's obviously going up against massive competition. Any thoughts on on how they've tackled that?

Mark Bundle: 16:36

They've leaned into the competition to an extent, like getting the, the leads of the film, to buy tickets. Stop an. I'm a stand in front of an opener, I'm a poster guy. Look, we've done this by acknowledging there is this competition, that they're coming out on exactly the same day, they're helping each other almost gonna prop each other up and by forcing this competition kind of narrative. It means again get a lot more time to use a generator stuff out of it as well. I'm nothing to spend out to get the attention.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 17:01

It's an anxious day one because there are two narratives. Slowly, obviously, oppenheimer and Barbie are the ones that are taking up more space on the so on social media. What we see is Barbie is coming up with, you know, they basically at one point took up all the paint, paint and there was like a shortage of paint because of the amount of paint that they've used for their set. But at the same time, oppenheimer is now very proudly coming out and saying you know, they did not use any CGI for the scenes of the movie. So it's interesting to see those two narratives playing together. But then there's also the Barber and I were on trend that's going on at the moment. We're in, you see, these two bills, completely different from each other, but essentially like a customer is gonna go see Oppenheimer and then go to watch Barbie afterwards Do have like a very complete, you know, a mix of emotions.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 17:54

So it's an interesting dynamic, I would say there are people who I would have never expected to be excited about a Barbie movie, who are genuinely considering going to see this film.

Rich Harper: 18:06

Think that there was a catchphrase on the Trailer I'm sure I'm sorry on a on a poster and it said if you love Barbie, you'll love this movie. If you hate Barbie, you'll love this movie.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 18:18

They've really nailed it, kind of trying to tie things up. To finish off, what can we think brands can learn from the hype that Barbie has managed to drive in this campaign?

Nasya Nasseira : 18:30

What actually stood out to me about Barbie is they're able to offer some form of emotional response, like what I feel like Barbie did. Right and better is that they're able to invoke emotions in both adults and children. Their target audience is really why and they are actually selling a dream. So like what if we had everyone lives in a Barbie wall and completely proceeded to collaborate with literally every sector? Touchback and see me so. And they did everything right.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 19:09

Jumping into our next section, a bit of a controversial topic at the moment Google Analytics 4. Obviously, google has enforced the migration from universal analytics to GA4 and I'm gonna kick off with a quick question to you, jason Universal analytics has theoretically been turned off. Do we think it's too late for someone to start taking actions if they haven't done anything already?

Jason Morris: 19:33

No, not at all. This has been a big one in the PPC and SEO world where it's changed quite drastically. There's been a lot of chat online about how it's so different. There's quite a few changes. The main one for me, and the problem that I'm seeing mostly, is the interface change. So, basically, if you, if you were, you're into marketing and, yeah, you use it every day, the navigation is quite different. So there's little things like specific sections are in different places. Yeah, another another one has been data lagging and discrepancies. So, for example, a business has seen that they've created some content, it's gone out online, they've shared it and people have viewed it, but it doesn't show up in GA4.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 20:21

I think Google have updated their Google Analytics certification. To really focus on GA4 Ross, you've recently completed that analytics course. How did you find that?

Ross Stratton: 20:33

Well, like most of the Google certifications, they don't actually provide that much insight, unfortunately. So I think the best way to learn the platform and learn the intricacies of the processes is just to dive in and get involved. Use the dashboard, pull some reports, kind of have a play, and that's going to give you a much better idea than kind of the lengthy and confusing questions that Google certifications are bit out. So that would be my advice personally.

Jason Morris: 21:02

Again, there is some training that Google still provide. If you haven't migrated yet. What Ross just mentioned is it can be a bit confusing. It's best just get in there. It depends on your level of understanding as well. So if you're a beginner, intermediate expert on analytics into PPC, e-referred domains, etc. But there are really good courses out there.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 21:25

From a kind of social media and email point of view. How have we seen those Google analytics or changes impact what you're doing, whereas there have not been much impact so far?

Mark Bundle: 21:38

Yeah, the way we're doing it for email. Hubspot and GA don't talk to each other particularly. It's a project we're working on, so the change yet nothing, but hopefully it will make it a bit simpler to join the top in the future.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 21:50

And one for you, Rich. I think people are starting to just bury their heads in the sand a little bit, as opposed to being proactive and getting stuck in. How are you seeing people interacting with the new GA4 experience?

Rich Harper: 22:03

Yeah, similar to what Jason said. The interface is different, but also the metrics that he attracts are slightly different, and there's reasons why Google shifted from universal analytics to GA4. I think it's basically people having to do something new. A big difference is the change in conversion tracking, or goals, to GA4, which is now event tracking. So goals were very specifically kind of targeted to that action that someone would take on the site, Like filling in a form, the destination URL as a thank you page. Google would track that, so they were very kind of linked to revenue drivers on your website, whereas GA4 is now using events and with events you can still set up those conversion points so we can still track form submissions. But it also enables you to do a hell of a lot more. I think the limitations have been lifted. It's easier through analytics to track user behavior, to track what buttons people are using and stuff like that. So actually there is a bit of a resistance and I think that's just to change. But when you actually look at what GA4 can offer don't get me wrong there are some annoyances that it no longer shows certain metrics and certain things that people were tracking before. But when you actually start to look into what you can do now. It will make analysis of your site and performance a lot simpler. Analytics should be able to start to surface some of that data a little bit better. What can someone?

Haydn Woods-Williams: 23:36

listening to this. Go away and do right now when it comes to GA4?.

Jason Morris: 23:41

Yeah, definitely worth understanding what you got out of it before which you don't have now, rather than being annoyed at it. Google have changed it for a reason and then it is a good thing. But, yeah, a lot of people getting annoyed with the change. I think the interface change is the main one, which you can put some time in and learn about and understand.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 24:04

Yeah, I think that reassurance is really what we all need. We just need a cuddle to be quietly told that universal analytics is not coming back. So that leads us on to our final section. This is maybe our most controversial topic today Lead generation. Should you spend money on acquiring downloads for an ebook or webinar if they aren't ready for a sales conversation? I'm going to start the timer now for the last time, and I will pass this one over to the team.

Nasya Nasseira : 24:41

If our prospects aren't sales ready and we know that doesn't matter whether it's an ebook or webinar, we will be spending money on the wrong pool of people, and what we don't want to do is spend an absurd amount of budget to the people who are only researching if our goal is to capture more sales ready leads. So I believe this is where we need to take a step back and reassess the user journey. I would say, coming from my own personal experience in the past, working with other B2B companies, even initially when I first started out in Daptivus, you could see that we prioritized lead gen over brand building. On one hand, this does make sense. Leads and the sales they turn into are the way every company makes money. Filling up that sales pipeline is definitely top priority and I can understand that. But the question is like what if our pipeline is bone dry? What can we do then? Don't come straight to features we offer without a bit of storytelling to captivate our leads. Coming back to the whole point when we had that Barbie conversation. So we need to form some sort of emotional response with our brand.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 26:06

Absolutely. I guess it kind of leads into one you see a lead, as you can pay 50 pound for a prospect who downloads a PDF of your ebook, or you can spend five pounds for a prospect who spends five minutes on page reading that ungated content. I think that comparison answers the question. In my opinion, it's cheaper, people generally have a better user experience. But it also brings up the really difficult question that I know is the one that's thrown back at me how do you build data if you can't get your content?

Mark Bundle: 26:45

I'm going to give a shout to Jess on the script when I think of this one. She shared some research with me last year about ungated content and there's a thing called the reciprocity principle when, basically, if you ungated your content and then at the end of your webinar ebook whatever the content is then ask for details, People are actually much more inclined to give you things because they've already had the value. Being able to gather the data we need to drive these pipelines is to drive the knowledge that we do. I think it is possible. I don't think we've tried it yet. I think it'd be fascinating to test to see if we still do get the numbers through, but possibly better quality data.

Rich Harper: 27:20

The difficulty as well, is the focus. We talked about change and stuff like that, but the focus needs to shift from MQLs leads however you want to classify them and shift more to the revenue side of things. Which brings us back to our earlier point in the email chat about cross-channel attribution and how that's an important thing for us at that to this, to be considering is actually the campaigns we're driving. What is the revenue? Not necessarily KPIing. How many leads are coming off of the back of it?

Haydn Woods-Williams: 27:56

As we're beginning to run out of time, we're going to ask the same question. We've asked for all of these topics. Actually, do you know what I'm going to ask? One more question. First Gated or ungated?

Mark Bundle: 28:06

Ungated, be brave Ungated.

Nasya Nasseira : 28:09

For me, a rule of thumb when you're planning to not gate your content is if your purpose is awareness, or if you have limited ungated content, or your gated content has very low leads or you really don't have any visibility on your user journey For me.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 28:30

I'm going to go ungated, but I'm going to say save those gates and those lead forms for when someone's ready for a conversation or when you can offer value that directly leads into a conversation with a sales prospect who is aware of your brand and who trusts you as a business.

Mark Bundle: 28:47

If you need more data from people, we can add extra fields without needing to ask more questions, If we already know the values for certain things. If you need more data, we can do it in a way that is smarter than just adding fields to forms.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 28:59

Absolutely. I'm going to answer the question of what can someone listening do right now and that's to be brave and ungate your content? Move it away from that PDF, stick it on a landing page, let people read it, reap the benefits of SEO, reap the benefits of cheaper cost per clicks and cheaper engagements, and worry about generating leads when you get to the point of a sales conversation with a customer.

Rich Harper: 29:26

Yeah, if the content is valuable, give it away.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 29:55

Thank you.