 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Philip Preston, and welcome to today's webinar Express. Responding to lockdown shifts and digital behavior hosted by CIM Wales. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last for approximately 30 minutes, followed by a short 5 to 10 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask the Question checkbox in the Q&A panel, which you'll see on the right-hand side of your screen just to click the icon to open up the Q&A panel. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. And if you want to share your thoughts on social media, we are using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar is being recorded and we will share a link to the recording with you over the next few days. You'll also be able to short feedback survey after the event, which we'd love you to complete. It will only take a few minutes. All survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. Okay, I'd now like to hand over to Gareth Morgan from Liberty Marketing, who is our guest speaker today. Thank you, Philip. Hello everyone, good afternoon. There's going to be three parts to this webinar. The first part I'm going to show you some of the things we've observed from across our client list. And look at some of the challenges we've had to adapt to in order to make sure they were okay. And I'm also going to look at data that we've seen from many external sources that grabbed our attention and made us react. Then in part two, we're going to look at what you can do about all of this, how to gather data and then what to do about it. And then part three is some of the longer term trends to be aware of and things to plan going forward post lockdown. Now, a bit of a caveat. This is obviously an enormous subject and it's changing by the day, so I can't cover absolutely everything here, but I have tried to put in examples that are suitable for everyone. My goal for this talk really is to show you some of the main things to have on your radar, how to go about prioritising your efforts and some considerations for future changes we're expecting. At the end of this, there's going to be a link to some research and some tools so you can go away and sort of put this into action yourselves. Now, before I get into that, I'll just give you a very quick intro to Liberty, but don't worry, this is not a sales pitch. This slide basically tells you what we do and who we do it for, but it's also why I can talk with some confidence about my findings. So as an agency, we work with about 50 retained clients. We also have access to the data for dozens more who we consult with. What this means is we've got visibility on millions of pounds a year worth of digital marketing spend. We get to see the behavioural changes of millions of visitors and this is across a wide range of markets and wide range of target customers. So quite a few clients are B2B, a number of them are B2C, a large chunk are in e-commerce, whereas others are in lead gen. We work with a few startups and also a few FTSE 100s. So what this means is we're fortunate enough to have an absolute ton of data at our disposal, which I can now share with you over the next few minutes. So part one, like I said, it's all about the changes we've seen since the start of the UK lockdown back in March. And here's data from Uber Suggest that came out right back at the very start of things and it shows where traffic has grown or declined over the main sectors. And it's very scary to see some of these changes and you can see why marketers in things like the travel sector were right to panic. I promise myself I wouldn't use certain words in this webinar like unprecedented or new normal or any other of the entrance in coronavirus bingo, but unprecedented really is the best word for a situation like this. Where else have you seen a hugely popular growing market like travel lose over 40% of its activity overnight? So as marketers we've had to adapt to the biggest changes of our careers in the shortest time scales. And what we saw was that priority areas for people such as finance, food, news, medicine, they all grew. Some of them grew very nicely, but everything else that wasn't vital to us or wasn't possible anymore thanks to COVID soon fell. And after the initial frenzy, people started adapting quickly. This data is from SEO Monitor and it shows changes in search trends for some of the main categories. And we can see that wine searches, for example, went up 87 times on a year-on-year comparison. But then other areas suffered, such as evening dresses, which had just as big a fall. We saw the interest centered around a smaller group of things that can keep us going and anything that wasn't immediate to our needs went on the back burner. And what this meant is that overnight many previously successful businesses were now desperately trying to find a market, whilst others saw overnight success without even having to try. And businesses on both sides of that now need to start thinking about what this means for them in the medium and the long term. When things do start getting back to normal and how can they prepare for the next crisis? Here's a graph that shows peaks and declines for three keyword sets that are representative of survival, sanity and normality searches. That vertical red line is when lockdown kicked in. We decided to take a look at a whole range of keywords to do with survival. So things like hand sanitizer, tinned food, toilet roll, vitamins, etc. And what we saw was that the panic made all of these jump up really quickly, but they also soon started falling just as quickly. But then the next big jump was sanity type searches. So this is a kind of keywords to do with exercise equipment, food and beer, board games, etc. The things that we look for to keep us going after we started to adjust. The interesting thing if you're in this market is they've remained a lot higher than they were before. And then in mid-May we saw normality coming back with searches like first time by a mortgage, as people are now starting to look much further forward and be less in the moment. But it wasn't just search habits that changed. This is analysis of 5.9 million sessions across a number of our e-commerce clients that we work with. And what we can see here is changes in browsing behaviour over time of day. Some of these are small percentage changes, but they still need to be considered because they often result in tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors. And we saw that browsing dropped during traditional commuting hours. In April people were doing their browsing during the day. And when you've got lots of people on furlough and lots of people working from home, you can see that they're combining their time on their laptops for both work and pleasure. But in May, when you compare it to April, almost an inverse pattern happened as people returned to a more normal browsing behaviour. People were getting used to working from home, starting to contemplate how this will look going forward with some kind of a home-based and office-based hybrid job, while some others are returning to work perhaps. And it shows how within the space of a couple of months, the time when your brand needs to be present can completely u-turn. And as marketers we need to plan for enormous shifts like these. Here's data from Google Ads and it shows how advert impressions also changed and how they shifted to desktop within that first week of lockdown. This data actually comes from one of our larger B2B e-commerce vendors. This was an early observation when we went into lockdown that thankfully our PPC team spotted so we were able to quickly build this into our approach and change the way we spent budgets. You can see here that mobile was down quite significantly and computer usage was up. When you think back on it, it was obvious that this kind of thing was going to happen. If we're all locked down, a lot less people are out and about using their smartphones. But the shift of over a quarter of people going from one device to another is absolutely huge. And here's advert impression data across the entire range of our clients on the same subject to do with devices. Since that huge shift in March, things are again started to come back to normal and the second half of May we were back up to 69% of adverts being seen on mobile devices. The crazy thing about this shift in device usage is it was all the way back in 2016. It was the first time mobile browsing overtook desktop and in just one month our browsing behaviour went back by four years. If you think about how huge a change that is, it's not something that any of us were expecting. And channel usage changed as well. So here's data from a selection of our e-commerce clients in a range of sectors on how social traffic increased to their websites and decreased in a couple of examples. This data is subject to some caveats. I have to point out there's probably a bit of a causation versus correlation argument being made for a couple of them. It may be as a result of increased activity from the brands, but most of the people we've dealt with haven't done that much more social activity. In fact, a couple of the more prolific ones have their marketing teams furloughed. So activity fell and also a lot of the paid social was either reduced or paused for a couple of months. Yet overall, on average, it's been up 85% across all of these brands. This is one of the biggest areas of traffic growth we've seen and it's definitely not something that we were expecting to be this different. And here's some external data to back that up. Everyone is saying they're spending more time on social. It's having a bit of a boom at the moment and this is a huge behavioural change to consider. Should you spend more of your budget on social now and going forward? And then also think about the previous slides to do with device changes and time changes. How does this affect the content you're putting out on social? How does this affect the time you're posting messages? This channel is now more important to businesses than it was and user behaviour has shifted and continues to alter. So we need to build this into our plans. And for the B2B marketers who joined us today, here's some data on the next couple of slides for you. According to a survey by McKinsey, preference for digital is now significantly higher than the more traditional sales interactions. Since the middle of the lockdown, B2B buyers are more than twice as likely to buy products and services digitally and this has shifted from a majority preferring traditional methods just three to four months ago. And on top of that, self-serve digital ordering methods are now preferred. Unfortunately, most of the B2B companies I know are way behind their B2C counterparts when it comes to things like this. So the few that have sorted out the digital journey for their customers are the ones benefitting from the COVID lockdown. And if you can adapt quickly here, it could be very good for you. It's also worth noting on here big increases from search, which is a preferred social and also live chat as places buyers go to research and consider their future business suppliers. So all of these changes that we've seen are enormous. The types of searches we are making and have been making over the last few months are different and they look like they're going to be different going forward. We started off in survival mode. We quickly started making sure our sanity was in check and now we're starting to turn into normal. Again, the time of day we are searching and browsing and the devices we're using has been changing over the past few months as have the channels where we're spending most of our time and visiting websites. And I think the scariest thing for most marketers is the speed of these changes. And that's what startled me the most. And if you take the mobile one, for example, the usage of mobiles fell more in a matter of days than it had grown in half a decade. We've never seen or faced volatility or challenges like this before, but we need to get used to it. Whilst we're returning to normal, there's unfortunately more volatility to come. I'm certainly not here to scare monger, but as marketers we need to get used to big changes happening quickly. We need to consider this as part of our role and it might be depressing, but it's the reality we now face. It's our jobs to be at the forefront of this and guide the brands we work for. The lessons we've learned during this period and the methods that we are refining as the days ticked by are going to be just as valuable when the lockdown ends. So how can we manage this? I mean, it's fair to say there is just way too much information at the moment. We're all getting absolutely bombarded with reports, blogs and insights into markets. So here's a simple approach that you may find useful. When it comes to being informed, find the data that really matters and make sure it is up to date as possible so your decision making is top notch. Be agile, put yourself in the place where you can take advantage of these huge quick changes and prepare things beforehand and be prepared. Don't throw away long-term strategies and plans. Instead, just adapt them. When it comes to staying informed, there's three areas to maybe concentrate your efforts during times like these. Three sources of data to seek out across your marketplace, your website and your competitors. And I'm going to give you three quick examples now of ones that might be relevant to your organization. One good source for marketplace insights are the Trends tools. So you've got Google Trends is one way to do this and it's definitely the most popular, but then there's also SEO Monitor does this as well. And then there's plenty more. At times like these historical searches go out of the window. We need to stay up to date as much as possible on the demand that's happening in our marketplaces. And one thing I'd recommend is to track keywords across the funnel, not just product keywords. If you can see searches that inspire product purchases are increasing or decreasing, then we can expect the same trend for the products themselves. During lockdown, we saw a huge search in dry skin searches and this led to a very closely following surge in moisturizer searches. If you have a good understanding of your bio behavior and you look further than just the keywords you're bidding on or optimizing your websites for, then you can take advantage of this. Monitor the problems that people have and not just the solutions that you offer. And whilst orders will give you an indicator into what consumers are wanting more or less of, site search is also a great place to find insights into the changing needs of the consumer. When people come to your website, it now be for different reasons than what you're used to expecting. And he is an interesting example for a furniture client. During work from home, we saw a rise in desk searches, which is obvious and quite predictable. But if you look at pillows, it's of 754% since the start of lockdown. We just didn't see that one coming. And because we've noticed it, we're able to act on it. If you track and monitor your site search to see what people are looking for, then you can craft your content and your priority products and services around this new demand. And with competitors, we found that PPC auction data has been incredibly useful for giving us insights during the current situation. You can actually see within Google Ads, who's investing more or less in their paid media for the keywords you care about. So you can get a good idea of their priorities and their strategy. You can also see which rivals have chosen to pause their PPC during lockdown. So now may actually be the best time to start building up market share. An example here is the data for one of our larger spenders in the e-commerce space. It shows two competitors dropping in the auction, but one pushing more. What this meant is we could significantly increase the impression shares without having to spend much more money. But those last three slides are just three very quick examples of things you could take a look at, and there are loads more. Like I said, there's an absolute ton of data to dig through right now. So make it easy for yourself, automate it and build a dashboard. And I'd recommend using Google Data Studio if you aren't already. You can use it to import relevant metrics from things like your analytics, your search console, your Google Ads, Facebook, your SEO software and more. You can see all of these hugely volatile areas in one quick place. And there's also other tools to look into like analytics alerts and analytics insights to gain valuable up-to-date knowledge on performance and trends. And then moving on to some suggestions for being agile now. This is the example from earlier, highlighting the shift into desktop from mobile back in mid to late March. Fortunately for us, we didn't find this as much of a problem because we used bid automation a fair bit. The bidding strategy for this client changed automatically to match the change in user behavior. Now, whilst automation still needs to be managed and overseen, and in many cases it isn't perfect, it's the quickest way to adapt to changing user behavior like this. Now really isn't a good time to be relying on manual scheduling. Peak times have changed. What made sense for years is a good time to schedule your social messages or your adverts now probably isn't. If you can ask the machines to monitor this by the second so that you don't have to, then it can allow you to think about the bigger picture stuff. Something we've invested in at Liberty is consumer insights data so that we can see how people feel about brands and how they're engaging with advertising. One of these platforms is called Global Web Index and it gives us loads of lovely data like this to use for clients and for campaigns. Now what this one showed us is that 30% of the general population said no to advertising at the start of the lockdown. They just weren't really up for it. However, by late April that had already halved. The majority of people in the UK are now completely fine for you to advertise as normal, whereas a lot of brands turned off their advertising or they reduced it and are yet to put it back. So if you've got access to data like this, you're able to react before your competitors. I also thought I'd show this because here's people's thoughts on where brands should help them deal with this situation. Originally people wanted this, but now it's dropping. And is this because we're sick of brands trying to guide us through coronavirus? Or is it that we've adapted and we no longer feel that brands can help? These are signals that people are moving back to normal and they're OK for us to sell to them again. This is quite an interesting and important example that I saw because what your site displays is very important for the user experience, especially now that people have disrupted needs and expectations. People are very concerned about product availability and how quickly they can get stuff, which is something I'll talk more about in a minute. I noticed online that one furniture retailer put up a page for immediate delivery items. They changed their site to reflect that people wanted their goods right now in a way when it came to offering decent deals that was actually secondary. So is this something you can adapt and learn from? Could you set up a process to update your pages and change things like page titles and meta descriptions when the situation itself changes? Can you take advantage of what people care about in these moments and quickly improve not only your click-through rate, but also your conversion rate? How about home page call to actions? Could you have some ready to go or even a banner for different scenarios? How can you prepare the assets and pages for different situations to go live when things next change? And also ensure that up-to-date stock information is in place and accurate in your shopping feed and the back end of your website. This is unfortunately a huge problem and it's very common right now. And this is an example of one big retailer showing PPC ads for an item that's out of stock. I used in the earlier examples the increase in exercise bike searches to illustrate changes in demand. These products are actually up from 60,000 searches last year to 673,000 searches this year. That's an 11-fold increase. And even if you've got a really low cost per click, you can still waste a significant amount of money. And when the search volumes are this high by sending visitors to products they can't buy. So just make sure you're only ever advertising for stuff you can actually sell and then deliver. And then in the final bit to do with being prepared. This is quite a famous screenshot in the marketing world, but it proves that you need to make sure you are remembering your long-term goals and fighting for your marketing budget right now. This shows that following a budget cut, a brand will continue to benefit from the marketing investment made over the previous few years. It will mitigate any short-term effects from the crisis and will result in a misleading increase in short-term profitability. However, the long-term harm can be considerable. If your brand goes dark, i.e. you pause your advertising or you stop your communications, it can have a hugely negative impact. This whole be prepared theme is a webinar in itself, but I'd say to gather as much data like this as you can so that when you need to prove the value of marketing during times like these that you're able to. And here's similar for B2B. This is from McGraw Hill Research where they analyzed 600 companies in 16 different sectors. The results showed that B2B companies that increased or maintained advertising spend during a past recession saw higher sales growth throughout the crisis and beyond. The startling thing is that by the end of the research here, which was actually way back in 1985, companies that kept up their advertising saw a sales increase of 256% over rivals that cut their advertising. I think an interesting thing to note now and to think about is this is the first crisis since digital marketing became mainstream. The data we have now we didn't have back in the last recession and McGraw Hill certainly didn't have back in the 80s. So as marketers we should be able to prove more value this time around. Our ability to react to changes is a lot quicker and we can report on things a lot quicker so we should be able to protect our budgets. And on to the final act now. The lessons we've learned during this period are going to be just as valuable when this lockdown ends. Here's a quote from Unilever that backs up all of the data I've seen. Coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown has made us all much more digitally savvy and we're more likely to purchase online. Online retail sales growth was up an astonishing 33% year on year in May. That's the highest annual results since March 2008. The results represent a 14% month on month growth building on the already steep increase in April. Whilst we should expect to see this setting down a bit now that stores are opening and in fact just this week there's been multiple bits of research and multiple reports coming out showing that this is starting to fall back. So we haven't changed our long term habits completely just yet. We are changing them and e-commerce will be bigger post lockdown than it used to be. And post COVID in all markets people are expecting that they will buy more online, spend more time researching online and line up their in-store collections. You've probably heard of the phrase click some mortar before but it's about to go through its next growth phase. The trend seems that people will research upfront and purchase online a lot more. Then they're going to make going to the shop more of an occasion. So they're going to tie it in with visiting friends for a coffee or a cocktail or a meal perhaps pick up the goods whilst they're near the shop. So physical stores are expected to be less of the destination but a part of a bigger event that people value more. And here's data from a survey into the factors that people care about with regard to the future of online shopping. Many of these factors are equally important across all age groups of reliable website, for example, which is fairly obvious. But it's interesting that same or next day delivery and noticeably more important to 16 to 24 year olds and free delivery is less. So is there an opportunity here for retailers to make more money from same day delivery when younger people visit their sites? Consumers expect to prioritize brands that meet their needs and have sufficient product availability. This resonates with the requirements we've already seen around reliable deliveries indicating that there will be few places to hide for online retailers who get the basics wrong. Being cheap is less important than it used to be. And having a loyal following as your USP isn't quite so great now because people are simply less loyal. If you are a retailer with availability and you help people out during the COVID crisis, then you look to be one that will do well going forward. And this is an opportunity to steal customers from rivals. There are big shifts in what people care about and if you can satisfy those, then you're going to grow your market share. One positive outcome from this lockdown is most of us are walking a lot more and cycling more. We're outdoors, we're noticing and enjoying and appreciating nature more than we used to. And this is a good example of a big change that no one was really predicting at the start of the year. Six out of 10 people who wouldn't consider themselves environmentalists want to be better going forward. But it's not just people wanting to better themselves. They expect this from their brands too. If you can show off your eco-friendly credentials and give your customers and your clients some more sustainable experience, then nearly 60% of buyers will thank you for that. This is an example of quite a significant but unexpected change over the past few months. Can you use this to win over people who are now less loyal to your rivals? Is this a way that you can stand out in your market and grow that market share? And one thing we're seeing at the moment that is quite interesting and is good to see is a new style of brand communications and content marketing being born. It's one that's a lot friendlier, it's one that's a lot more helpful. And I think a lot of it's down to the fact that we're less formal these days. We've all been on Zoom calls where there's cats and dogs running around, there's children playing in the background, and people you're used to seeing wearing suits or turning up in t-shirts. And this is starting to filter out into companies not asking so much what can I sell you but more how can I help you. And this is especially good for B2B marketers because traditionally we're the ones who've been stuck creating very safe and often very boring content. But now that the events have all been cancelled, now that sales teams can't go out and meet people, content and the messaging needs to stand out more and the more useful, the more personable your brand, the better. So can you be more open? Can you look for more ways to help customers and even speak to their passions? Because if not, you won't stand out in the current social media bombardment that is looking like it's going to continue for the near future. And we're nearing the end now. One thing I did want to point out is how many brands are already embracing the long-term consumer shift to being digital first. It's going to get a lot busier and a lot more expensive to compete and advertise online. If you want higher Google rankings, be prepared to fight for them. If you want more social followers, you need to make sure you stand out. What we're seeing from brands we speak to as previous digital winners are already figuring out what they need to do to stay ahead going forward. But at the same time, brands that haven't bothered with digital before are now starting to have a taste of how powerful it can be. They're shifting their budget from traditional media into these areas, and that's where a lot of the competition is coming from. And if you look at how much used to be spent in the B2B world on trade shows and then in B2C on billboards and bus ads and how all of that either got paused and is now waiting to be spent elsewhere or has already been put into digital, we can see that it's now going to be a lot more competitive. So it's worth having to think about if you've reviewed your budget allocation since COVID has shut down because the odds are your competitors already have. I was once told that when you put together a very data heavy slide deck is finished on a quote. So here's one from JFK. There's plenty of others that are equally relevant. I believe it was Churchill who said never let a crisis go to waste. If you are monitoring the data better than your rivals, adapting quicker and not taking your eyes off the long term goals of your business then you can make the most out of situations like this lockdown. It can be your brand that's the one to benefit. Right then. That's basically it. And in the last 20 to 30 minutes I've mentioned plenty of things. I fully appreciate there's a ton of data here in this talk and loads of different tools to help you get ahead. I thought it would be easiest to collate all of this into a blog for you so you can see the link on the screen now. If you go to that URL you will find a handy guide for exploring some of this data and figuring out some of these things for your situation. I'll also put this out on LinkedIn very shortly and as Philip mentioned earlier the slides and a recording of this will be available to you all. And thanks for your time. I hope you found some of this useful and that you'll be better prepared for the rest of lockdown and any changes to come. That's great. Thank you very much, Gareth. We're now going to have a short Q&A session. There are some really useful insights within the presentation. The questions that I'm going to read out for Gareth they've actually been coming in throughout the session so they use some of them referred back to some of Gareth's earlier points. I'm going to publish the questions so you can see as they come along. So the first question Gareth is from Justin Willard and he says, as you said, not really unexpected that search increased back to PC but what did your clients and you do to change your activity? Well, I think that was probably asked the first time I talked about device usage because at least I kind of discussed this but basically for the majority of clients where we were managing things like their Google ads there was an automation in place so it was automatically adapting on our behalf and then we would override some of that automation if it wasn't going far enough or if it was overstepping the mark. I mean for a lot of clients this isn't a long-term thing to worry about if it had gone the other way then any clients with a poor mobile experience or with slow loading websites you'd quickly try and rush through fixes in those areas but this was obviously something that by going to desktop most businesses and websites are good on desktop it's mobile where they're worse off. Okay, thank you. So the second question is from Chris Gilpin. We see more and more digital burn out from customers in B2B environment so so much traffic and starting to switch off. Is it time to take off the pedal and slow down on digital campaigns? I suppose it depends on the campaigns. I mean from my own experience just in the agency world it is every single person in my game is now on LinkedIn like crazy. Everyone's doing research, everyone's blogging because everyone wants to stand out in this and quite a few people have got more time so I completely get the fact that people are getting burnt out by it but I think the argument to be made for us as marketers is if we go dark now if we decide we're not going to bother being in the fight then it's going to harm us long term. So I think it's another one of a good example of know exactly what your customers your clients are into what their problems are and really go out of your way to address those things so you're not saying the same things as everyone else you're actually being very useful. So it's a quality versus quantity issue. Thank you. There's quite a few questions coming in there so apologies if I'm not able to cover them all but the next one is from Anonymous Do you anticipate long term changes to organic Google ranking? Yes and short term ones as well. There's hundreds of changes a year with Google. I think in terms of I mean if I answer that from a keyword sort of demand point of view there's certain areas where we're more we're more happy to search than we used to be and looking at those examples sort of the sanity stuff so a lot of things that you may never have considered buying online before because you just go out to the shop and buy them but because those shops are closed so things like exercise equipment I think if you were in the fitness game before lockdown you're going to have a nice bright future going forward. So yeah some of the searches we're doing have changed will continue to change and therefore the Google search results will as well. Okay great. So the next question is from Lisa what would be your key advice for B2B business not having been very active with an e-commerce channel to absolutely put in place to become successful? Oh that's a big question and a lot of it wouldn't actually be in my remit. Oh if we're looking at it from a traffic generation point of view then most of the B2B clients that we deal with do very well from pay-per-click but also via long tail keywords organically so you need to basically have a good old go at your SEO and your PPC and then when it comes to something that works well in B2B or any market where there's a long term decision making process or a peak custom is remarketing so if you're selling goods that they might need a refill or they might be in a position to buy more from you in a month or six months time put together some kind of remarketing strategy to remind them that you exist so you can automate your advertising to act almost as like a sales team and remind your customers who you are. Right. So now we've got Ricardo Webber Gareth do you think a potential second spike of COVID-19 with people finding score will receive more than other changes? I think we will see some of this going through a cycle again and some of it completely different because we kind of know what we're looking at now and also a lot of people have already bought their exercise bikes. I mean some of these things like buying the sheer volume of booze we buy online in this country is quite scary. Not quite as scary for me when I was the last month of the party and all the shops had already sold out but you know some of this will just be part of our nature if there are future lockdowns whereas some of it I think we've already we can see that in March and April there were huge changes that in May had kind of reversed. All right. So question from Adele do you see 24-7 response for B2B rather than the traditional 9-5 working day? No I personally haven't seen any evidence that there's a need for that. What I think in the people in business to business are still used to working B2B hours so I if you have a 24-hour response option then you're going to stand out for it so maybe it will be something to you know a message that's worth showing and a USP for you but I don't see it as a huge area to be spending time and money. Next question is quite topical. What is your thoughts on the current issue with Facebook? Should companies be stopping their heads or not? That's up to the companies themselves. I've I mean a little caveat here I'm the guy that years ago told everyone don't bother buying shares in Facebook the PPC systems crap it'll never be as good as Google and I basically cost a lot of people a lot of money without advice so I will always be very careful when answering Facebook questions going forward. I don't I don't know the problem I've got with a lot of these things we're seeing with your brands at the moment is it doesn't it are quite often this activity doesn't line up to the core brand values and you know that it's kind of jumping on a bit of a bandwagon for me in some instances when you spot that it feels quite false and I think some of these brands may they need to kind of clean up their own their own act before going for going for platforms like Facebook one thing I would say though if you are not inclined to go on said bandwagons then Facebook traffic is cheaper at the moment so break a leg okay so the next question is you mentioned that budgets are likely to have been reviewed including money that might have been spent on billboards do you think that budget should now be spent on digital does it have a place as a complement to digital yes it certainly does have a place to complement digital I mean one of the things we will see for a lot of brands that have done traditional brand advertising whilst they will have saved money in the last few months by not doing out of home ads or not doing TV ads is that their brand searches online will probably have fallen so you know there is a direct correlation there but I mean I have always been of the belief that you should do online and offline advertising I mean most of our clients have some combination of the two it will be what will be interesting to see is because TV advertising at the moment is pretty cheap and I'm seeing plenty of adverts on buses and on outside billboards right now that you can tell will put up in like January February for TV shows and films that have been out for ages so it's how cheap is that stuff right now maybe it could be a case of if you're not reinvesting that money into more digital could you just make your offline advertising go way further Can I ask one more question Gareth I would actually say I think Gareth you offered to if we collate all the questions that have come in including the ones that we haven't asked you know you would actually put together a Q&A sort of handout yeah definitely what me and a couple of the guys at Liberty thought would be good is that any questions people have got if we have them all and then we can start either answering them maybe in a blog post or a series of social messages though I have found out unfortunately one of those members of my little squad has been diagnosed with coronavirus today timing as usual in my life timing is absolutely impeccable but yeah if I can have all the questions we'll work on things anyway and she's absolutely fine by the way okay good we'll compile those I'm just going to ask this last question before we conclude the session lots of smaller companies have set up e-commerce stores for the first time and use digital marketing to keep businesses going through the pandemic many may want to continue doing this but how can they compete online with bigger more established brands these I mean one thing I would say with online is it's quite often a playing field leveler it's like just because you're not one of the households retailers you can still fight with them what I would say is if you're dipping your toe into this then start small learn where you can best compete and probably start off with pay-per-click ads I mean Google shopping is usually the highest ROI any retailer will get online so just do some of that do it for some of your products figure out what messaging works for you figure out what bid amounts work for you figure out what prices work for you things like that and then roll it out into your other marketing so I wouldn't start off by doing things like SEO or your content marketing until you've learnt those lessons but I mean we've something at the start of this presentation showed off some of the big brands because that's what us agencies do we love showing off however a couple of our biggest clients started off as very small brands and over the last few years they drew and we're having a bit of a celebration with one client at the moment because when we started working with them four years ago they were doing just under £30,000 a month digital and now they're doing two and a half million so it's like they're now one of the three biggest retailers in their sector online up against two huge household names so this stuff is very much possible it's never a case of you're too late to join the party Okay Gareth thank you very much for that that is all we've got time for today I'd like to say obviously a big thank you to Gareth for presenting and a thank you to CIM Wales for hosting the event and of course a big thank you to all of you for attending and submitting your questions I hope you found it interesting and worthwhile just finally before we leave you just a little advert our next webinar express is on Wednesday the 15th of July at 1pm the topic is know your customer you'll find it listed on the CIM website on the event section where you can register for the session if you haven't already done so once again as a reminder you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we would really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback so finally on behalf of CIM thank you very much for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day thank you