How to Shift your Digital Strategy after iOS 14 with Lauren Joyce
Overview
Lauren explains how the data collection updates with iOS 14 will affect Facebook and digital ads strategy and the adjustments to make to offset the missing data.
Guest
After working as a personal trainer, Lauren switched to digital marketing as an affiliate manager. She now works as a digital marketing specialist at 1-800 Contacts, where she oversees the paid social strategy, display strategy, affiliate marketing, and landing pages.
Reference
Transcript
Billy Bateman
All right, everyone. Welcome to Digital Conversations presented by ChatFunnels. I am your host, Billy Bateman. And today I’m joined by Lauren Joyce, digital marketing specialist for 1-800-Contacts. Lauren, thanks for coming on.
Lauren Joyce
Thanks for having me! It’s great to be here.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, I’m excited to have you. Before we get into it, just you know, tell everyone a little bit about yourself. And I think you’ve got a really interesting story of how you made your way into marketing. And just share that with us.
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, so I actually yeah, I went to school at BYU. And my, my degree is in exercise and wellness. So out of college, I actually started as a personal trainer and a wellness coach, actually at 1-800-contacts, so they have an on site gym there. And I was a personal trainer to our associates and their spouses and loved doing that.
But then I just kind of had a quarter life crisis, I guess and decided, you know, what am I going to do with my life? I don’t think personal training is for me. And I had a friend that had an entry level opening marketing position, it was actually an affiliate marketing position open. She said, hey, I think you might like it, check it out. So I definitely had a Google search for what affiliate marketing was, I had no idea.
So I googled it and thought, hey, what the heck, you know, I was thinking of maybe going to law school, but I thought I could put that on hold for like a year, check out marketing and see if I liked it and being a stick.
So I started in affiliate marketing, and moved over into the digital side a couple of years later, where I started with display and video and some native work. And then I made my way back to 1-800-Contacts in marketing. So over here, and now I’m back, and I’m doing affiliate marketing for them as well. And then I’m on the paid social and display side. So doing a lot for him. But it’s awesome. It’s awesome to be back and in a different role. Awesome. Yeah. I love it.
Billy Bateman
And then I mean, I’m sure most people have heard of 1-800-Contacts. But for everyone who hasn’t like what do you guys do?
Lauren Joyce
Yeah. So we, it is actually a phone number. I think people forget, our contacts is a phone number. So we sell contact lenses. But we do have some sister companies that are under the 1-800-contacts umbrella that people might not have heard before. So we have Liingo that’s spelled with two eyes. So a little little play on there for you. But we that’s our eyeglasses company. And then we also have Boomerang, which is our lens replacement. So if you have a pair of glasses that you really love, but your prescriptions change, we can just switch out the lenses for us. So yeah, we do have some other companies under 100. And we’re continuing to grow. So it’s exciting.
Billy Bateman
Awesome, awesome. I’ve used 1-800-contacts forever. And I’ve never called the number of
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, I mean, that’s the way we’re going. So.
Billy Bateman
So I tell us, you’re doing affiliate marketing, and then some social marketing as well. And in paid marketing.
Tell us a little more about your role. What do you guys do, kind of how even how does 1-800-Contacts really go about acquiring a customer online?
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, so you know, we, yeah, it’s not on, man. So with affiliate, you know, where we’re definitely out there on the coupon sites. A lot of those, you know, retail me not rocky 10 kinds of sites with affiliate. But then as far as digital, or paid social, we’re display and we’re just trying to kind of be everywhere. So, you know, on the team, I, you know, I’m born and raised from Salt Lake City.
So I’m a huge, huge jazz fan. So I jokingly refer to myself as the John Stockton of the team. Meaning, you know, our paid search guy is probably the Karl Malone, where he’s getting conversions hammered dunk after hammer dunk, but most of the time, everyone kinda, everyone kind of forgets about John Stockton in the awesome bounce pass that he had to give to Karl Malone before we before we got the slam dunk there.
So that’s kind of the role that I play at 1-800-contacts is kind of being the assistant a lot of the time. So we, you know, through our media mix model, we can see that paid social and display, you know, we pop quite a bit, but that’s always not the conversion channel.
So, you know, I frequently think of, you know, just my own habits of browsing the internet and so many times I don’t click on an ad, I don’t know why it’s like a great divorce you know, not to click on the ad you’re like afraid you’re going to get like a virus or something.
So I think a lot of times you see, like an ad that you’re kind of interested in, but then you immediately go to Google and you search for it. So, you know, you got to kind of while we’re looking through attribution, recognize a paid social still plays a part into, you know, into paid search.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, no, I, I agree. Like you’ve got to get people into that kind of awareness stage and social media is a great way to kind of, you know, people just start scrolling through their feed, and it’s like, okay, what’s this? You know, we’ve all Yeah, we’ve all bought things that I mean, like I had no idea this existed but I’ve got to have it when you see it all right, you know, so it’s kind of creepy how well the Facebook you know, optimization and the behind the scenes personalized ad things can work for you.
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, I, it’s the algorithm is down to a tee you know, like it. It knows if you are great at scrolling through the carousels? You know, I’m a carousel shopper myself. And so I get those all the time where I just kind of browse through the carousel.
And you know, Facebook picks up on that, and I get served with those all the time. So creepy, but awesome. That’s kind of my mantra as a digital marketer. You’re like, man, some of this stuff is so creepy, but it’s so cool at the same time. Yeah, yeah.
Billy Bateman
And I did one Google search for new hunting boots. And I could not get on Facebook or Instagram or anything without seeing an ad from you know, redwings. Dan, or any of those guys just, like bombarded me with them. You know? Yeah, this pair. Yeah, right now, I’m like, Man, I’m like a year out.
I was just starting to think, like, these ads that are like, What in the world from my search history do they think this ad? No, yeah, you get those? You’re like, how did I get this? Yeah, they were smarter than this. Right. So yeah, all right. Well, I so you guys, you know, you’re setting up a lot of the team for success. And everybody on the team is important.
You know, I like Karl Malone, a little more myself than John Stockton, but Carl would not have been what he was without John I anyone, right? That assist, you know, that assist record from John stock and is not going to be touched? It’s going to be returned time ever, ever. So how do you guys, um, how do you guys, you know, attribute where the success is coming from? Are you on a multi touch attribution model? single touch? Like, how do you guys dive into that?
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, so I think first and foremost, you got to have, you know, a CMO and your, you know, both believers around you that paid social and display are actually contributing to the overall funnel. And I think that’s half the battle sometimes is making people get away from that last click View All the time.
And realizing that there’s more than that view through conversion, really, there is something there other than just like this last click all the time. So I’m surrounded by great, you know, I want 100 contacts, our marketing teams, great, really open minded, we realize that paid social and display have a great role in that.
And then second, we’re, you know, exploring a multi touch attribution model. For us, it’s more we know that, you know, paid social and display, you know, we’re contributing to these paid ads, paid search conversions, but we just want to see how many times it takes or people’s conversion ads to get there. And so by implementing an MTA tool, we’re going to be able to start to see how long you know, time to convert is such an unknown thing right now.
And it’s not like contacts, you wake up and you’re like, Man, this is, I’m excited to buy this today. You know, like, it’s not a sexy product by any means. So it’s just whenever you’re out, you’re out. It’s kind of a needed product. So it’s, it’s balancing the awareness of, you know, because people really only buy contacts, maybe twice a year. So you want to be enough in the consideration.
But you also kind of want to be there exactly when they need to buy. And so you know, that, hopefully, by getting an MTA in place, we can kind of see basically how long it takes a purchaser to convert for us.
Billy Bateman
Yeah. So you guys working on putting that in place right now is what it sounds like. We are Yeah, yeah.
Is that something like, homegrown that you’re doing on your own? Whether it’s, you know, like using a BI tool or even Excel? Or is it something you purchased?
Lauren Joyce
I wish we were homegrown, but it’s a little over our head, I think a little bit. So we are exploring a couple different companies to look at that are going to be implementing that for us. But, you know, we have a media mix model that we’ve been able to do internally that, you know, it shows certain things that pop for us really well.
Again, that goes way over my head with all of our data, data, people that do it a lot better than I. But we just do see, you know, paid social pop for us in a really positive channel for us. And so now we just kind of want to see the full full window and the full funnel, funnel view of it.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So I want to circle back to another thing we started talking about, which was, you know, Facebook.
Obviously, if you know you’re advertising on Facebook, with the new iOS that’s coming out, there’s going to be some changes making it not quite as easy for that algorithm to everything you’re interested in?
Lauren Joyce
I mean, I’m not an expert on it. We don’t really go heavy into Facebook advertising.
Billy Bateman
But I would love to hear, you know, what is it? How is that going to impact marketers? And? And how are you guys thinking you’re going to adapt?
Lauren Joyce
For sure. Yeah, it actually dropped this week officially, I think so if you are an iPhone user, which I’m not so, but I guess if you Yeah, it’s starting to drop this week, so you can update. So they are iOS 14, whatever versions next of it. But basically, what it is, is, customers have the opportunity to opt out of personalized marketing if they want.
It’s one of those things where I just don’t know how well customers know, kind of like what they’re getting themselves into by saying yes or no, I just think that sometimes they see the opportunity to not give Facebook more data. And so they’re all for it. Right. So yeah, we got an interesting to see, it’s going to be kind of a rolling thing.
You know, I think the updates just started happening this week. So we’ll start to be, we’ll start to see a bit more in effect in the next couple of weeks.
But basically, what happened is we, you know, it’s going to mostly affect our attribution on Facebook. So we had a 28 day click view and a seven day post view. And that’s getting dwindled down to a one day view through and a seven day click. So basically, it’s going to make it all more important to kind of make your ads a little bit more clickable, so that we can at least have seven days to be able to retarget them, get some sort of cookie from them for the next seven days, and we can at least still show them some ads on Facebook.
Otherwise, we just get kind of that one day view through and then it’s gone. So it’s going to severely just kind of affect the way that our attribution is going to look, our view through conversions are obviously going to come down quite a bit. And that’s half the reason To be honest, why this MTA stuff is just a perfect time, we’re going to need it more than ever to be able to show that hey, socialists still showing that assist view. You even without, you know, that seven day view through or the 28? Post a click So, yeah, yeah, it’s a little it’s a little scary as a marketer, but you know, we’re, we’re adjusting, and we’re, we’re making it work.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, no, I agree it can be, it’s definitely going to change the game for a lot of people.
So what, you know, what are you guys doing, and you don’t, if you can’t share, but what are the strategies you’re going to try to look at, because you’re probably not going to get the conversion that you used to get on Facebook? So right, you’re going to keep filling up the pipeline?
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, so I think more than ever, our first party data is actually going to become even more important. So you know, we’re leveraging our CRM team, more than we ever have, probably with Facebook. So I think, you know, we have an added fun of when to enter contacts, just because we have personal health information. So sometimes using our first party data doesn’t translate well. And we aren’t able to feed that through Facebook.
So we have some, we have our work cut out for us. But I think that first party data is going to become even more important. And then second, we just got to be able to figure out our audiences. So you know, our audience sizes are going to shrink with this.
Lauren Joyce
So we just have to be able to find like those broader interest categories and make sure that we’re still hitting the right people. And then when it comes down to it, we just really got to evaluate our our ads, I think, you know, I kind of joke that display ads are kind of the billboards and the internet, like, it’s got to be enough that it grabs your attention and kind of memorable, maybe click but at least grab some some sort of attention.
And so I think right now we’re having a, you know, a hard reset of one of our ads look like and how can we make them more attractive and pop out a little bit more than the next person and make sure that, you know, it’d be awesome if we can get a click out of it? You know, that’s, that’s just huge. Right now, with the Facebook attribution changes. We got it. We got more clicks. Yeah. And then when you get those clicks, you know, you have to obviously convert those people. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Billy Bateman
So what do you guys, you guys doing anything to, you know, try something new on the conversion, whether it’s landing pages offers, what are you guys doing?
Lauren Joyce
just an easy way of things and just sending everyone to our homepage. And I think sometimes as marketers you get so focused on your ads and your homepage, and you’re so used to your own product, that you kind of need to step back out and forget that, hey, what if I’m looking at this for the first time? Does this make sense? Like, you know, can I get through this whole process and not have any questions kind of thing.
So, yeah, we’ve never done the dynamic landing pages and it’s something that we’re starting to test now. So I think it’s important to see whatever message you saw on the ad, if you click on that as a similar experience, rather than just sending you straight to our homepage, where you might just not even know where to start, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I mean,
landing pages, you know, the more personalized, the better is what we’ve found. And we use the bots a lot on the landing pages. And when we tie up the message, you know, the bot will come up and like the maybe they clicked on an email or an ad, whatever it was, just continue that message like, okay, you know, you were interested in this, like, let me help you
did, as opposed to just the generic, you know, here’s, here’s the same message we give, everybody always goes up. It always goes up unless you get a little too personal.
You know too much about them. And you’re like, Well, I didn’t think they knew all this. And I’m out, you know, exactly that fine line of like, cool and creepy. For sure. You got it, you gotta find where it is where it is, as a marketer.
Billy Bateman
Oh, hey, Lauren. Well, I really appreciate you sharing anything with us. And before I, before I let you go, I’m just going to ask you like, Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t, that you’d like to share?
Lauren Joyce
Not really, I mean, I think we’re No, I think we’re good.
Billy Bateman
Okay, so if people want to reach out to you and continue the conversation, what’s the best way for them to get a hold of you?
Lauren Joyce
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Lauren Joyce, and you’ll be able to find me at work. I know when 100 contacts and happy to connect with anyone continue the conversation and love talking digital marketing with everyone else. So I love to learn. So let’s connect.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for sharing and after you’ve got some information on those landing pages would love to have you back on and recap how it worked out?
For sure. I appreciate that. All right. We’ll talk later.
Hey, thanks, Billy.