#317 How to Navigate iOS Update Changes for the Holiday Season with Maisha Walker
The online world is always changing, and as a small business owner, it can be hard to keep up.
I usually try to keep the content I post here evergreen, but Apple just released iOS 15 on September 20. It included some privacy updates that are making waves in the digital marketing world – and we need to talk about it.
With the holiday sales season just around the corner, it’s important to understand how these changes are going to affect your marketing and sales.
That’s why I brought in the big guns.
Maisha Walker is the president of Message Medium, an award-winning digital marketing agency that helps successful brands implement and maintain cohesive digital strategies that allow them to achieve aggressive growth.
She’s also the go-to digital marketing coach in our Momentum program.
As an industry vet, Maisha’s been using tools like Facebook and Google literally since they were invented.
She sat down with me to talk about iOS 15, what it means for small business owners, and actionable steps you can take to adapt to these changes and optimize your marketing this holiday season.
Click here to download the show notes
What’s Working This Holiday Season to Build Your Audience Online
By the time September rolls around, you’re late in the game to be working on your holiday marketing — but still not too late.
Maisha has been working with her clients on their holiday marketing plans since June, and content creation is pretty much finished by September.
Instead of focusing on creating new content for new audiences, strategic advertising can help you get new eyes on the content you’re already publishing.
For audience building during the holiday season, you should focus on…
- Facebook Page Likes Ads
- Instagram Follower Campaigns
- Email List Building
By delivering these to a highly targeted audience, you’ll get new likes, followers, and email subscribers in time for them to see your holiday marketing campaigns.
How the Latest iOS Privacy Update Will Affect Your Marketing
The core issue with iOS 15 for small business owners centers around how the customer journey is tracked through advertising.
Before the update, you could see the entire customer journey across platforms.
For instance, if a mobile user clicked on one of your Facebook ads and landed on your website, Facebook Ads Manager could still track the actions they took from there. Did they add something to their cart? Did they join your email list? Did they make a purchase? Etc.
With the newest privacy update, Apple no longer allows apps to track anything that happens off the platform. Once that customer leaves Facebook, Facebook can no longer collect data on them.
That’s a lot of data lost. Data that could have been used to optimize your advertising efforts.
How to Adapt Your Sales Tracking to the New iOS Changes
Maisha highlights four ways small business owners can adapt, work around these changes to get a better picture of the customer journey.
- Google Analytics — Monitoring your Google Analytics data will give you a better sense of where website visitors are coming from.
- Shopify – You can look at trends directly in your hosting platform, like Shopify. Don’t just look at the numbers, but also where website visitors are coming from. That can give you insight into how effective your audience targeting is.
- In-App Purchases — Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have in-app purchasing features that might be a good fit for your business. Transactions that take place in the app can still be tracked under the new iOS privacy restrictions.
- Other Platforms — These new privacy updates demonstrate exactly why it’s never safe to put all your eggs in one basket. This is a great opportunity to evaluate how you can diversify your sales channels through platforms like Pinterest, Google, TikTok, etc.
Maisha is an incredible source for all things digital marketing. Email her at [email protected] with the words “sign me up” in the subject line to get expert marketing advice delivered right to your inbox.
Listen to the full episode above for more advice on how to navigate the latest tech changes and optimize your advertising to reach a wider audience.
xo, Tracy
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