 In today's webinar, we'll be chatting about module number five, marketing campaigns and joining me to do that. Just that is Oli Shea and Helen Jeremiah. Oli and Helen, welcome. Thank you for taking time out on your Wednesday evenings to chat with us today. Brilliant. Thank you so much for having us. We're really, really thrilled to be in. Very excited to talk to you. Now, we're very lucky to have you and I believe you guys have a presentation. So by all means, take it away and we'll see you at the Q&A afterwards. Amazing. All right, brilliant. I'll just click on to the first slide and hand over to Helen. Thanks, Oli. And thanks so much for having us. We're delighted to be here to share with you a little bit about our world today. For those of you who don't know, we both work for Boots. We're a very well-known retailer, which is over 170 years old. Born from Jesse Boots, who was about democratising health care to the masses. And still today, we push on that ambition, but obviously with his wife, Florence, have ventured into the world of beauty as well. So we cover beauty, pharmacy, health, wellness, opticians, hearing care and much more. And we've continued to innovate over the many years. So, you know, our story has story started, you know, with the invention of ibuprofen. And today we're still looking at how we can modernise people's health care. So, a great brand for us to work for. We're really looking at that we've got over 15 million advantage card holders with the ad card scheme. And this year we're celebrating its 25th year. Welcome and working on it now, which is why I think it's this year, this financial year for us. And we're going to be celebrating that big style. And we are super, super convenient. So most people are within 10 minutes of a Boots store. And of course, everybody's just a click away from Boots.com and all of our social channels. Our dot-com business is huge for us. It's grown over 100% since the start of the pandemic. Obviously, we knew that digital was, you know, really big and important area of the business. But the growth that we've seen and it has continued actually, been phenomenal for us and just really pushes home the importance of convenience and accessibility for customers. We've got an amazing marketing team. We're really lucky to work with around 120 wonderful people all on different elements of marketing, as we're going to talk a little bit about. And we've just recently launched a big campaign called Feel Good Is New, which was really to demonstrate that whilst everybody had been in lockdown, we had Boots and been reinventing ourselves. So we'd introduced 50 new beauty brands, new baby partnerships, new photo partnerships, loads of new healthcare services. And so we wanted to drive a campaign that sort of drove awareness of that. So our most recent campaign Feel Good Is New launched and we've been lucky enough to be named out of the month by marketing week in June for its effectiveness. So thanks to all of the work that Olly's team did on media effectiveness for us too. Our core team is set up as you would expect with marketing and comms, loyalty, media strategy and planning. We also do customer development and the big insight and research function for us as well as our very own in-house creative studio. So loads and loads of opportunity actually for career development to expand and really grow people's skills and loads of development opportunity for people. We work with lots of different agencies, one of the world's leading agency, WPP, Handelar Creative and Media, but also accessible with lots of other smaller agencies too. So again, that's amazing opportunity for us to learn from others and work with lots and lots of different creative teams. I rejoined Boots in marketing in October and Olly joined in May and we're just gonna do a little bit of an intro to ourselves before we kick off onto the topic. All right, so a little bit about me. So I'm Olly Sher, I'm the Omni Media Director of Boots. As Helen said, recently joined Boots, so actually joined in May. I'm actually born and raised in the UK as you can hear and kind of for the last 20 years, I've kind of worked both in the UK and abroad. Kind of my career to date has been a kind of range of companies I've worked across. So I've worked in retail, I worked for about 10 years in FMCG, I moved abroad to Amsterdam, worked for about six years at booking.com, building their media team there. And then I've just returned from Denmark where I spent the last few years at Echo Shoes, working and building that kind of growth and performance marketing teams there as well. I kind of worked across the world. So in Europe, worked on the US, that's Asia, which has been great to have the chance to work across a number of different markets. Always been very passionate about media. That's been my big passion always throughout my career. And also, I love the ability, which has been a really great thing. And one of the things I've enjoyed most about joining Boots is building the kind of mix between long-term brown building and then also short-term performance and marrying those two things together. Kind of things that really excite me are, I think for us and particularly some of the work that we're doing at the moment at Boots is really looking at how we can kind of put together kind of cutting edge marketing and building that towards some of the strategic business goals. So rather than marketing for marketing, it's about marketing and media as a kind of growth driver. And that's something I'm super passionate about is being able to prove and show the value that this work that we do does. And I think we'll talk a little bit about that in social in a minute. Yeah, and as I was saying, since the UK after seven years away in May to come and work for Boots, my role is kind of split as Omni-Media director. So I work on all of our consumer media, so everything from our TV to our PPC. And then the other half of my role is I look after the Boots Media Group, which is our supplier-based media. So it's when we actually sell our internal media to suppliers. So really, really excited to be with you today. Please do ask any questions you would want and I'll hand over to Helen. Thanks, Ollie. My career very, very different to Ollie's. So I've always been in Boots, but I've had loads and loads of different jobs. So I started as a scientist. I did a chemistry degree. So I came into our labs as a chemist, worked on developing products. So I started in skincare, moved into cosmetics, and then led all the work that we did on toiletries and hair care. I worked in contract manufacturing developing products for brands such as P&G, Schwarzkopf, Body Shop, and supermarket. So, British supermarkets like Sainsbury's but also international ones like Carrefour. And then also launched professional hair care market to the masses. So we worked with a lot of the professional hairdressers to take their brands out of the salons and bring them to the masses. And that was just a wonderful element of my career and still one of my most favorite jobs to today. We moved from there to lead a consumer and market insights team which was an amazing role. Richard Baker had come into Boots and was really keen on developing the strategy for Boots around customer focus. So like a really amazing job. And we learned from CVS in the States actually about how to bring that to life. So like a wonderful job and really engaged our executive team actually on what was important to customers. And then from there I was offered three different jobs. I stayed in the head of insights to move into our loyalty team or to come and work in brand marketing. So that's what was quite a nice easy transition having done in science because you understand customers really well. So I led marketing for many years for Boots. And then about four years ago moved into our global brands business which was around taking our brands internationally. Which for me was a perfect role because it was a combination of everything I've done before product development, supply chain manufacturing and marketing along with really understanding the customer from an insight perspective. So came back to Boots last October. And I thought because we were talking about social I thought I'd put on one of my pages on here. So obviously like most people we're all different people on social aren't we? This is my insta, it's for me really just to capture all of the work that we're doing on my very long-term projects on house renovation. Because I suppose my second job is our bond conversion and just making sure that we eventually don't leave a pile of rubble for my two young girls to inherit them rather than a finished project. So I thought I would distinctly that as a nice personal touch. Brilliant. Thanks. Now what Helen and I are going to do is we're just going to talk a little bit through. It's quite difficult to condense down all of the things we'd like to talk about in social down into a few different elements. So what we're going to do now is talk a little bit through some of the paid elements. I'll talk through some of that. And I hand over to Helen to talk about some of the organic elements and to share with you a little bit of some of our thoughts around what we think are some of the interesting and critical things to think about and consider when thinking about how to use social media as a business. So from a paid media side, I kind of thought about what are the kind of key things that I really think about when I think about how to use social media kind of readily from particularly from a paid. And I think what I started is it's been an enormous explosion of what you're able to do from a paid side in all of the social channels that are available now. And so really what probably the start point for everything I do is starting on kind of what platform is it that we want to utilize and kind of what role do I see it is? So when I think about that, I'm thinking about what is the type of opportunity that I want to utilize? What's the audience that I want to reach? Who is it that I want to talk to? But also what is the type of experience that they have? So the experience that someone may have on something like TikTok and the way in which they engage with that channel is very, very different from what they may have on YouTube as it may be different to what they may have on Facebook as they might do on Twitter. And I think when we think carefully about what we're actually trying to communicate to customers and we think about how we want to do that and what's the right thing to do within that channel based on what we're trying to achieve from a business objective perspective. That's why it's really now, there's such a plethora of opportunities. I really start with probably, well, what's the right kind of channel that we want to utilize and what's the role for that channel and how does it fit into the overall kind of construct of the way in which we might form out not only what we do in social, but also what we do in our overall marketing approach. I'd say the other key thing that I'm really always thinking about is really about the audience. So I think as you guys all know, social media is such a broad church now. It's used by pretty much everybody, whether that's people thinking that TikTok was only really for a very much younger audience is much, much broader. It's now across a much wider audience to utilizing it, or whether that's the way in which you can now reach a much broader audience on things like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, whatever it would be. I really think about what's the audience that I want to reach, but the other side of it from a paid side is also about considering where in the funnel they are. So a lot of the times we talk about the funnel, we talk about the way in which we can reach customers at differing points in their journey. So whether that's looking to talk to them when they're really about changing the way in which they perceive a brand or drive awareness of a brand at the upper funnel, whether that's about thinking about what we might do in the mid funnel where you're maybe driving consideration or prospecting for it, or whether that's the lower funnel which is really remarketing when you have signals from customers about the things into which you already know about them that you want to be able to retarget or remarket to. So I think for me, I'm always really thinking about those two things. Firstly, who's the audience I want to talk to and therefore maybe how does that link to the first part which is about what's the right platform for us to use. And then secondly, what is the objective that I'm really looking to do? Is it about using a platform to drive awareness where it might be appropriate to use something like long form video on YouTube? Or is it much more relevant that I might want to use something where it's more about retargeting where I have a signal from a customer and then I can measure, I can actually see how I can reach them a different way where Facebook is absolutely brilliant on that. So those are just kind of the two start points. The other things I really think about quite carefully is about the KPI. That's probably linked to that last bunch is around what am I trying to achieve on the channel. A lot of the time we measure, nowadays we can measure pretty much everything. I think the key thing for us is really about thinking about what's the right measurement for that part of the funnel and for what we're trying to achieve. So I generally think a lot about how we can do that in the right way. So if I want to measure performance then there are many target, there are many KPIs that can do that whether that's return on ad spend, whether that's return investment. But if I'm thinking about things like awareness, there are different KPIs that I might want to think about. Maybe it's the reach of the campaign that I'm trying to get to or maybe it's the recall of the campaign or maybe it's just things like using brand lift studies where I can understand the effect of my advertising on consumers and how that, how what I show them versus not showing them has an effect on what they do. So proving out that it works. So I think linked a little bit to the kind of where what the objective is that you're using it for is really about the KPI that you should be using. And each of these channels is brilliant in being able to be set up in a way that you can effectively measure. So those are just a couple of key things. The other two that I have on here is something I believe in a lot, which is about innovation. And I think something that we really are pushing quite hard at Boots, which is about driving a test and learn agenda. And I think this is really important, particularly in the social channels where you have the ability to learn very, very fast. My old boss at booking used to always say it's better to fail fast and not to fail at all. And I think this is really, really important. So you can very effectively test creative, media strategies, tactics very easily and very quickly on social channels because you have a ready audience that's available. So if you're showing a customer only one creative, it's more difficult to understand whether or not that's the only thing that would work. If you're showing them two, that can allow you to understand whether one works better than the other and allow you to optimize that and improve on that. So my advice on that would be, always look at what you can do from a creative testing, from a format testing, from a performance testing that will really help you to understand. Don't be afraid if it doesn't go right because that's just as much of a good learning as if it's successful. So, and the last point from me just on paid media before I talk a little bit about some of the opportunities with some of the channels is really about, it's an ever-changing landscape. I mean, I think if you look at kind of the social landscape now or if you looked at it, probably over the last kind of five years, it's evolved so enormously and it's constantly evolving and I'm sure there will be many, many more, I think, even if you looked across the kind of pandemic, there were many alleged social meteors that came along. I think there was House Party that sprung up at one point which was like a video-based one and it now disappears. So it's always something new or different coming in and I think constantly being able to look at that, understand if that's the right place you should be for your audience and then also learn in that space and I generally apply a kind of model that looks at what I call the kind of now-new next which is looking at those places where there are now really relevant the likes of the Facebooks, the things that have scale, the next, the channels that are growing and evolving, things like TikTok that's becoming ever increasingly pretty much now moving into the now and then finally the new which is the stuff that's very niche, very edgy that you might wanna look at and see and how you can constantly understand how those things will move between them. So that's just a few kind of considerations. I only had two other slides I wanted to share with you which is a little bit about something that's very important to me which is about the targeting opportunities that you can find through some of these channels and this links a bit also to the kind of funnel that I was talking about just before. So when you're thinking about how you wanna reach your customers, a lot of the time now we talk a lot about first-party data and we talk about the richness and the power of first-party data. But what if you don't have that? What if we have lots of it at Boots? We have tons of it. But what if you don't have data and you're not able to use your own data? Well actually platforms like Facebook as examples of using here they have tons of data that's available which you can use to understand how you can reach your customers in the right way and whether that's things like behaviors and interests. So whether that's about looking at ways into which you can target different forms of information around reaching awareness based on maybe an audience that you want to reach to or whether that's about driving conversion which is just telling the platform that you want to find customers who are most likely to convert. The algorithms within the platform are so strong now that they're able to identify people based on the information that they have already in it. So don't be afraid if you don't have data that exists already or even having first-party information because there is ways into which you can reach that and set your goals. And again, this is also a really critical thing going back to what I was saying really understanding where you sit in the funnel and what you want to deliver will allow you to decide those different signals that you might want to use. So we also look at things like not only the behaviors of a customer but also any forms of intense signals. So is there a signal from them that they might for example, there's tons of data available on things people might be watching on YouTube or things people might already be viewing on Facebook or other channels that you can utilize to really build and design your campaign around. So my advice is don't feel that if you don't have data that you can't reach out and target customers but equally also be very clear about what you want to do, the audience you want to target and the objective that you want because there is such a wealth of information that exists within social media platforms now whether that's everything down to location. So at Boots we think a lot about not only about where the kind of behaviors of customers but also where they are from a location perspective because things like our pharmacy department has a really strong affinity to local customers rather than national. And so being able to understand where customers are and target them in a local level can also be hugely useful. So I suppose my thoughts are there's a plethora of data that's available to you for you to target and to go after. But if you do have first party data which is what we have a lot of how can you use that? So by first party I mean data that's consented by customers for you to use and to market to. And what this is, this allows you to do is to take that data and to work in collaboration with the platforms to look at how you can find those audiences. So enabling you to understand well maybe who are my most valuable customers and how do I reach them and find them? And using, we use that a lot from our ad card data to really understand that type of thing about really understanding how do we then again build campaigns that might drive awareness or consideration based on audiences that we're telling the systems are most relevant to us but that they can then also go out and find similar audiences like that as well. All the other option is things that we do a lot of as you move down the funnel and you get towards more of the sales driving activity which is more around using things called pixel data. So we add a small piece of code to our website that allows us to then tell Facebook and to train the algorithm within it how it's better to find the certain types of audiences that are really important to us whether that's for prospecting so looking at more mid funnel or whether that's a retargeting so if you've looked at a product and we chase you around the internet then that's also another part of what we can do. So that's just a very quick whistle stop tour of some of the things that I kind of think about from a paid perspective and then equally some of the things that I'm always thinking about when I start to think about how we can use targeting and our own data and other data sources. So I'm gonna hand over now to Helen to talk a little bit about how we can manage the organic side of our business. Helen. Thanks Olly. As Ollie said, to achieve our ambitions we really need to understand how customers are using the platforms and this really does change constantly. Someone once said to me, oh I haven't done media for a while I won't know what's going on I was like you have to constantly learn social like it's adapting and changing all the time so anytime's a good time to jump in and start learning honestly and it keeps you fresh and keeps you like close to it how to develop as well because social behaviors change so therefore expectations of consumers and the content that they're showing and where they see it and how they interact with it changes daily so we need to constantly change and adapt to really deliver against those expectations and honestly expectations are different in different channels something that you post on Pinterest might be very different to something that you post on Facebook especially from an organic perspective you really need to understand what it is customers want from you and how best to build engagement. I saw a question just pop up a moment ago which is how often should you post to build engagement but honestly I'd think about it differently like what we find from an engagement perspective is the more that we interact the more that the more engagement we get so for example we just posted one evening on TikTok Boots says hello and we got a few responses back saying well that's not Boots is it they're not there and to each and every single one we responded with something that demonstrated we were listening whether it was their hashtag or whatever it was and our engagement and actually following groove phenomenally that evening so you can really build engagement just by participating in the conversation we call it community management but it's a lovely way of building that engagement if you want my movement on that so and this is because people use social media in all different ways whether that's staying in touch with friends and family I think that was after the early days that's how a lot of people use in Facebook wasn't it just to connect to share photos to see what people across the world were doing I think more and more now people just fill up spare time they're always browsing and scrolling but also reading news stories finding entertainment I know people that weren't video consumers just spent hours now on TikTok because you can't avoid just watching all of that video and content topical stuff learning about things inspiration on how to do things what to buy so loads and loads of reasons for using social media and we need to be really cognizant of that and decide how therefore we want to show up as a brand and when we're doing that we think about three different things so if you want my moving on Ali firstly entertainment but then also relevance and authenticity because I think as a brand you've got to be really authentic to be part of that conversation so I'm just going to talk through a couple of examples on each of these so the first one entertainment what we found is that 84% of users visit social to find funny light content and in order to achieve cook through an engagement we have to be entertaining and I have a call to action that's focused to me the very needs of our two key audiences so we talk about entertainment so how can we be entertaining but also educate because we're obviously a tristed brand people want lots of knowledge from this and therefore if you look to the left hand side we obviously had an amazing partnership with Love Island and what we found was that where we were part of the conversation and it was working really well you know we'd be able to take edits of the show talk about the products that people were using really understand which products were selling the best that worked really really well for us but whereas you just pace a brand ad or just pictures of products with no real reason to find them that doesn't work at all from an entertainment level so definitely more on the left hand side to build engagement then if you think about relevance I think is next obviously with a really cluttered landscape consumers tune out like they really tune out and especially if it's not relevant to them so from an organic perspective we really need to shifting from just blasting out messages to massive people to really holding in on cultural relevance and inspiration so that involves a lot of social listening understanding what's important to people what's trending and how then we can respond whether that's the look of the season whether that's the right products to buy whether that's just a trend so social listening and then being able to respond really really quickly is really important I think for relevance and again responding in a really authentic way rather than just product placement works a lot better for us and then finally authenticity and then oh it's not changed the title on that apologies for that but it's really really important that we feel authentic and again you can't just I don't think you can just post something that says you know you need to buy this because like people really need to understand why so again really really ensuring that the content is relatable and authentic so genuinely people are using it they're genuinely trying it models aren't retouched you can achieve those looks with the boots products that we're providing the mascara really lengthens your eyelashes to that degree the skin pair takes three months to work not overnight you know really really honest authentic stories that people will believe in your brand because we're a trusted brand we need to make sure that our social channels support all of that too people have trusted boots for over 170 years as I said at the start and therefore anything we talk about demonstrate get involved with on social we need to make sure that we're really enhancing the trust and the credibility of our products and that's why anything with the boots logo on you can trust has got amazing quality amazing value has been tested to the highest limits it's extremely safe so you know we've got we've got a really credible brand and we need to make sure that our social elements really support all of that too I think that was it from the presentation perspective I think that's it maybe we can take some questions yes thank you so much Helen and Ollie for that that was fantastic we have had some questions come through let's kick off with the first one so someone has asked what is your top tip for managing social media as a one person business how would you manage the content creation competitor research repurposing content etc etc maybe I'll take a pace I think from my side I think it's be focused on the channels that are most relevant for you don't try and do everything because I think that's what makes it quite tough if you try and do absolutely everything and try and be on all channels at once I think really focus on the the things that matter to you and your audience be in the right place for that and from a paid side make the right investment so don't probably spread yourself really thinly across everything just take some consolidation on that and really focus maybe on the channels that matter for your audience Helen I don't know what your thoughts are on that I'm really sorry can you repeat the question I've just had an urgent request about something we've just launched in social sorry that's fine no the question is what is your top tip for managing social media as a one person business how would you manage the content creation competitor research and content it's definitely tough and I think especially when you need to be agile and responding we try and do a couple of things so the first thing is we build what we call a content calendar for the year or for the week or for the day so really understanding what it is, what conversations we want to be part of so something like I don't know breast cancer awareness or national lipstick day like how do we decide what we want to be part of and then also decide what we want to lead on that then enables us to decide how we'll produce the content so would it be our own produced content or would we borrow collateral from other brands and that then means that we can be organized and plump enough to produce some of that in advance so that's ready to go so then that leaves you a bit of time to do the social listening responding to the trends for a moment so then you can work in a really agile way so we try and do an element of planned because we know what we'll want to be part of to free up some space because we've got just two people in our organic social team for a huge brand like us so it is possible so just off the back of that obviously the social listening and the trends that change it seems like every minute how do you because obviously yes there's an element of planned and then there's the element of on-fly is that meetings every hour is that sending a text like oh I've just seen this how do you both sort of approach the speed of which social media does go there's there's very different ways actually so you tend to find people that work in social or on the trends just because they're naturally scrolling themselves so you know we knew Glow was coming before it before it launched really you know so there's that there's some platforms that do the trends for you so TikTok's a great one where what's trending is a really key thing and we can just be part of that we've also got a trends team so within our insight function we've got a trends team that help us identify really long-term macro trends and then more in the moment even down to you know what will people want to see this Christmas so so loads of different ways that we can tap into that but then also we've got the social listening tools and we've got our customer service centre as well so often we'll get feedback from them and from that you can hear often what people want to know more about from it so for example you know during Covid they wanted advice on wearing masks products to use so we listened to all of that and then we produced video content for YouTube channels so that we were able to provide the advice and inspiration that they needed Oli have you got anything to add? No I completely agree with that and I think it's one of those things where you know preparation is probably the most critical thing and being I think from my side the other side is there's lots of I think sometimes things appear to be spontaneous but in fact they're quite I would say they're a bit more telling us about plans or a bit more anticipated so I think I used to work on alcohol and we used to do a lot of sports sponsorship and realistically there's lots of different outcomes that can happen but realistically there's probably a limited number so you can prepare for that so I think being prepared for it also getting into the trends there's so much that's available there already and a lot of people who work on social media are just in it and I think looking at not what only you're doing, your competitors are doing but also what the industry is doing I think is much much easier now and there's a lot more free tools available as well that will help you with that and even simple things like posting you know you can schedule a lot of it now to make it easier and then on the paid side it's becoming much more automated so you can set targeting goals so it will adjust based on you know when people are online, when they're looking and adjust the pacing for that so yeah I think just in preparation use of tools I think that's obviously just my bills now we've got time for one more question that I'm going to send out to both of you so the last question is being a social media manager slash freelancer a reliable job or is it better to work through a company and what I'll give you my very quick thought on it is I think in all of these industries at the moment there's a huge demand for people and the industry so someone's trying to ring me at the same time you're both very busy my goodness everything's going off we're on the brink of launching a Christmas campaign everyone is it's a really crazy time for both of you so my apologies now I mean what I would say is I think there's a huge demand in the industry at the moment for this type of skill set so I think for you know social media managers for people in that space there is a real demand for this talent so I think my advice would be you know there is a demand out there and when there's demand then there's going to be people who want to get you to work for them so it probably gives you the ability to work in more of a freelance but equally also you know if you want to work for a company there are lots of companies we are one that is obviously investing in the space as well so I think there's a lot of opportunities out there for people if they really want to get behind it Helen I don't know what you think I think either is a good option and I think often it depends on your flexibility and what you want our social media manager she has just left on a career break actually she's got a new baby who's one year old her mother not very well and also she wants to have a go at setting up her own business as an influencer so and I'm sure she'll make an absolute success of it but you know I think both options depends on your own personal situation and I think and also whether you like you know that security of knowing that you've got the income coming in because you know like holidays and all of that or whether you just prefer the flexibility and choosing when you want to work as Ollie says at the minute the market is hot enough to do either I think and I think that is going to bring us to a close for this session so thank you everyone for all of your questions thank you again Ollie and Helen