Countdown to 2025: What Marketers Need to Kick-off

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm here today with Sachin Raja. Sach, welcome back to the pod.

Sachin Rajah: Thanks, James. Good to be back for what, a third time?

James Lawrence: I know, third time, third time lucky. It's, uh, or three strikes and you're out. The pressure is on. The pressure is on. Now you've, um, we've had two very good conversations so far.

So always good to chat with someone who I think is at the coalface, Sach. I think that's the perspective, you bring to the pod, which is so valuable. Being the most senior person in our agency that deals with clients on a day to day basis deals with, our client services team, putting strategies together for clients resetting roadmaps.

Um, so I think you're so across. Changing landscape and hence the topic for today, which is the countdown to 2025. What marketers need to kick off next year to give themselves the best chance of success. We're chatting off air and we've tried to put some structure around the pot, I guess, the six big areas where we see, marketers struggling as we get towards the end of 2024 or the themes, which is just so obviously going to be huge next year into 2025. Um, so I think Sach will start with, , the easy one. I say that laughing.

So AI, what are you seeing? Just in terms of AI as it relates to content creation as it relates to how marketers are using it, how we're using it in the agency, um, where does the hyperbole start to kick in and where does the real part of AI and how you bring it into your marketing plans where does that line sit at the moment?

Sachin Rajah: Yeah, I think, you know, over the past year we've seen the most rapid growth and movement towards leveraging AI within marketing. Um, the two biggest areas that we're seeing AI being leveraged and being leveraged really well is definitely in the content creation space. So whether that's copy, whether that's creative, um, and then Also when it comes to personalisation at scale And I think that's where a lot of the paid media platforms work really well when it comes to personalisation so looking at different tools It's helped bring a lot of efficiency to play Um, but I think it's definitely been a challenge to write find the right balance between Leveraging the automation, but also maintain a certain element of human creativity and emotional connection that really kind of resonate with your audiences.

James Lawrence: Kind of funny isn't, I think when I first started playing around with chat, but the backend of 2022, beginning of 2023, I think I was like, oh, very quickly, like, wow, this is incredible. This will replace so many, so much in, in terms of copywriting and content creation, both worldwide and within the agency.

And like a lot of, people's experiences and you start playing with it and it just. Very quick to mediocre, but then just doesn't create expert content struggles to have a tone or tone of voice or a perspective of great content. I guess it'd be interesting to talk about how we're using it at rocket, how our clients are using it.

Is it as simple as put a great prompt in, put a great brief in and suddenly you've got this awesome white paper, um, or is it an ideation tool or is it a, , A quality control tool at the very back end of the process. Like what do you see it, how do you say it working best for clients?

Sachin Rajah: Yeah, from what I can see, we definitely have tried the full spectrum to see how we can leverage different prompts to put a full article that could be fit for purpose that client can use.

But from what I've seen, what clients have seen is just, it just doesn't kind of hit the mark when it comes to like what you mentioned before, being on brand, considering tone of voice. , so what we have used. when it comes to AI is, is looking at using it for the ideation piece, looking at using it for research, um, which has definitely created a lot of efficiency for us.

Um, but we still find that we definitely are having to write most of the content.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's right. Our copy team within the agency has grown massively since generative AI exploded. Um, there'd be no content being created. Purely using chat GPT Gemini within our agency think it's, , the research coming out early on in 2024 was suggesting that I solely I created content was getting massively outperformed by solely human created content in terms of search engine rankings, I guess, from the rocket perspective, we're not really saying, the transformation of what it takes to create great content.

Content, but I think it's probably the bars moved or it's it'd be very difficult to create great content consistently At scale without using ai at some level I suspect and that'll only get greater in the next 12 months You'd have to think

Sachin Rajah: for sure, you know, even 12 months ago wasn't even Thinking that we wouldn't need to go out grow a copywriting team and here we are today looking at adding an additional copywriter , so AI definitely has its place, um, and copywriters still also have their place too.

James Lawrence: Yeah. In terms of personalisation, that's been the promise of, I guess, HubSpot and AI is very much around if you have - keep your first party data.

Um, if you take it seriously, the technology, the tools will get to a point where it's this promise of kind of hyper personalisation at scale. Are you actually seeing that yet? Or is that kind of still something where, you know, market is a. Looking at when that will happen into the future.

Sachin Rajah: No, I think that's still very much in its infancy.

We're not seeing that happen just yet, but I think we're seeing the foundations of that starting to come into play.

James Lawrence: So I think it's hard for marketers, we, one of the inherent benefits of being in an agency, is that we get to look into, Many, many marketing teams.

We get to run many accounts in similar verticals or lots of accounts in Google or Facebook or whatever it might be. I think, um, for marketers listening, like how do you actually see AI practically benefiting marketers at the moment and into 2025?

Sachin Rajah: From a copywriting perspective, AI has its place in terms of helping understand market demands, trends. , It definitely helps with the ideation piece and the research piece, helps with creating your briefs. Um, and I think as the platforms, as the technology gets smarter and more advanced, we're definitely going to be able to move towards generating content at scale that can look at taking into consideration brand, tone of voice, um, and being more kind of human centric, in a sense.

Um, that's where I sit on the content side. If you look at the paid media side, just to bring it to practical terms, you look at platforms like Google, Google ads, you look at Meta, TikTok, AI is helping when it comes to leveraging. websites. , so I think if you've got a massive, massive resource, , where it could be blog articles, eBooks, white papers, um, and you've got lots of landing pages, AI really helps you target people at scale in a , very hyper personalised way.

James Lawrence: And doing that through the platforms themselves, right? Using their technology. That's correct. Yep. Yeah. And I think that feels, Like, I'm yet to see too many examples of these kind of transformative AI programs or platforms that didn't exist. Before ChatGPT kind of blew up and became so famous, I think better say in our agency, we're probably seeing the benefits of AI within the software stacks that we already use.

I think it should be fair to say within Google, within meta, within HubSpot, within Adobe. Um, within Canva that to me feels where the biggest kind of change and growth is happening and it would be very challenging, I think, for most marketers to be keeping up with the promise of all the AI, um, products that are out in the market and the, you know, the 90 second explainer videos look incredible and you see an output on LinkedIn of something that looks truly incredible that was created using a certain product.

And again, our experience, most of those products that we then start playing with. Kind of don't deliver on the promise pretty quickly, not at all to say that they won't at some point into the future, but they're going to be, um, you could send yourself pretty crazy trying to chase. To try to stay on top of all the explosion of products that are out there at the moment.

Sachin Rajah: That's right. And I just recently had an example with a client of ours where they had a pretty substantial product catalog. So we're talking thousands and thousands of products and you know, it wasn't easy to determine it and forecast which products would be. Trending, which perks would be popular because it was so scattered.

Sachin Rajah: Um, there wasn't a lot of data out there that could help us define , what would kind of blow out one month or the next. But that's where AI really came into play. So we're able to leverage AI to capitalize on those surges in demand for a specific product, for a specific thing, um, rather than take a little bit more of a manual approach.

James Lawrence: Yeah, definitely incredible cutting through large data sets, right? Um, you said research, all those types of activities, highly beneficial. So I guess that's the first one, which is probably adopt a cautious but optimistic mindset as it comes to AI in terms of how it can impact your marketing planning and your actual execution is probably fair coming into the second part, first party data, which I think has kind of been simmering away for a while now for years in terms of it's important.

James Lawrence: It's important. It's important. I think marketers will have varying kind of sentiments towards it. , from those that have been in businesses that have taken it very, very seriously, it's obviously not the sexiest topic. , but I guess if we could talk a little bit about first party data, where you're seeing the shifting tides, I guess, in terms of how clients are approaching it.

James Lawrence: Is it important? Why is it important?

Sachin Rajah: Yeah. Privacy and data. Hey, it's um, it's a very sexy topic, but it's been very topical in 2024. And there's been a lot of change, you know, um, Google is really been kicking us on our toes. Um, the EU has been keeping us on our toes when it comes to GDPR. In late 2023, we saw Google come out and change their policies in relation to So by March 2024, all websites and advertisers that are using Google ads had to have cookies in place.

Sachin Rajah: Um, and if you didn't have it in by March 2024, then you wouldn't be allowed to advertise to websites within the EU market or in California as well., So when it comes to privacy and data, there's been a huge push in 2023 to move towards giving users more choice. Um, and what this meant was we weren't able to collect as much data as what we were able to in previous years.

Sachin Rajah: And that's why first party data is becoming so, so important because now that we're unable to capture as much data, um, when people come through to our website. So as an example, retargeting is not going to be as strong as what it was In previous years by having that first party data, you've got control.

Sachin Rajah: You can email those customers. You can upload those lists into paid media platforms such as Google ads, LinkedIn, uh, and metal and target customers that way. So that's where the importance comes in. It's really having that control , of your data.

James Lawrence: And it just like, Ooh, this isn't, we told you so, but. I would say for four or five years, this has always been one of those lead topics, um, in any webinars that we create for Rocket.

James Lawrence: It's been a recurring theme on the pod. And My observation is the best performing clients that we have. So clients that have the best marketing teams, best digital performance, the best websites, they all take first party data really, really seriously. Um, whether that's a CDP, whether that's a CRM, they have systems and processes in their business, they follow them, they have people responsible to maintain the integrity of data.

James Lawrence: And it just, It doesn't matter from what perspective we view it from, whether you're talking about someone like yourself, whether you're talking about sales teams, if you're talking about an e commerce digital manager within a business, if you're talking about Legion, kind of all roads lead back to Rome with it being great data, you know, SMS to be able to kind of find your best customers and then put, plug that data back into the platforms and allow the AI to find more people like that.

James Lawrence: Remarketing, retargeting. I think if the website used to be the kind of fulcrum for successful digital marketing five years ago, 10 years ago, it feels that kind of a close second now, which is maintaining the integrity of your data, taking it seriously and just so unusual now to find a client who can drive a really successful winning digital marketing strategy that doesn't have first party data.

James Lawrence: Being taken really seriously within that, , I just don't think anyone can attract clients and data cheap enough to then just squander that and just keep going out and finding more people like that. I think you've just got to have that 360 view of your customers and prospective customers.

Sachin Rajah: You have to, otherwise you're going to fall behind.

Sachin Rajah: , it's all about creating those value driven experiences. You know, even things like, you touch on SMS, you've also got loyalty programs, you've got optimising your CRM system so you can manage data more effectively. Um, look at, you know, certain e commerce websites when you're shopping. And you're now starting to see platforms and CRMs that are leveraging AI and customer data to promote to you specific banners on what you previously viewed.

Sachin Rajah: Or, you know, if you viewed a certain theme or topic or a certain product category, you're now seeing customized banners. Based on what your previous purchase history is or what your previous viewing history was. Um, so you definitely need to capitalize on first party data. Otherwise, you're going to just fall behind.

James Lawrence: 100%. And so I think that's definitely a key takeaway, which is if you're not absolutely nailing this area, it has to be a focus in 2025. Um, and the platforms themselves, the moves they're taking. Just show that this is where we're headed. Look at Google put a massive offering to buy HubSpot. Um, you look at the investment of Salesforce into AI.

James Lawrence: This, the trend is going nowhere but deeper into this space. Um, and then you look at all the privacy changes which make it even harder if you don't control your own outcome there. So that's our point number two for the year is take your first party data very, very seriously. Um, next one such is SEO, Okay.

James Lawrence: And organic. Um, I guess what are you seeing out there at the moment and does it still matter? Does SEO matter? Does organic matter? Has ChatGPT and Gemini killed SEO? Has it killed? This is a highly leading question. Satch is laughing, but I mean, I think we hear a lot about this, right? We hear about ChatGPT is the search engine of the future and Google's kind of revenue, , Stream from search ads or dissipated.

James Lawrence: Like how are we feeling

Sachin Rajah: organic is still one of the if not the top performing channel for a lot of our clients, whether you're in the B2B space or the B2C space. It is still one of the top performing channels. What we are saying, though, is. A spike, an increase in the way people are researching, like what I mentioned before, more and more people are turning to chat GPT, turning to Gemini for that research phase.

Sachin Rajah: Um, but when it comes to, the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, organic still has its place. Um, but, but even still, when you look at the research phase, how does chat GPT, how does Gemini source that information? It's through, it's organic results. It's through organic search.

Sachin Rajah: Um, it's how well you structure your website, how well you structure your content, the authority of your website. Those are still all important signals when it comes to, um, being able to set up content within chat, GPT and Gemini.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. I'm quite passionate about it. One of the biggest misnomers I think I come across, which is this kind of concept that Google's the dinosaur now and ChatGVT is kind of, has taken over and SEO doesn't matter anymore.

James Lawrence: And you can mount the argument, but none of the actual facts of what we're seeing kind of stack up with it. It's still, all the data I've seen is that Organix still takes about 53 percent of traffic, every day. In Australia and then you look at social organic paid social direct a whole bunch of other channels kind of fight it out for the rest of it big studies out of America have shown that Google search is still growing in globally and also in markets like Australia, Europe and the states the we haven't seen a huge increase in Um Usage of chat GPT in the last 12 months as it relates to taking search from Google.

James Lawrence: It's, I mean, we've seen through Google's actions around Gemini coming out and saying that will become, I guess, the default search engine for Google. Google is obviously taking the development very, very seriously, but I think the point you made is the most important one, Sach, which is the results for what we know is organic SEO and the results for what we're finding in Gemini, they're kind of coming from , very similar places.

James Lawrence: And, I was playing around with, , with just doing , some kind of commercial type searches in Gemini and ChatGPT recently and I was wanting to see how Rocket would appear and so I was doing things like I'm looking for a digital marketing agency in Sydney, , I only want one, give me one and it would return Rocket, um, then I'd say I want one that is, has a one awards and has X and Y and, , It's pulling the data from the same place.

James Lawrence: It's looking at the fact that we've got opinion pieces around the web, the fact that we've won awards, the fact that we've had PR mentions in B and T and Mumbrella and Marketing Mag and those types of things, which are all the same things that if we're devising an SEO strategy for a client, it's all about to your point, building authority.

James Lawrence: Doing PR, getting links to your website, having great content on your website that speaks to those topics. Um, I really haven't seen too much that, in terms of how you optimize a business to appear prominently in generative AI. They're all kind of the fundamental pillars that you'd also be doing to rank well through organic SEO.

James Lawrence: So yeah, for sure. In five years time, what is the way that consumers are running searches to find the answers to things could be very similar to, , how Google runs now. Probably won't be, we might see a lot more voice search. We might see it much more like an assistant, but I think we're going to find that those engines and bots.

James Lawrence: Still have to work on relevance, right? Which is something that, , we've been working for the last 25 years to have clients ranking well based on relevance in organic search.

Sachin Rajah: Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's all good points. And also something else to consider as well. The other important factors when it comes to SEO is still relevant things like your local SEO, things like ensuring your website has a really good user experience as well.

Sachin Rajah: And really capitalizing on the traffic that is coming through. , Yes, it is a factor of CRO and it plays, you may think it's not important when it comes to SEN rankings, but you know, those are all signals that Google looks at as well, , how much time do people spend on your website? What are your bounce rates?

Sachin Rajah: Like, , , is your website actually fulfilling the search query of what that user typed in?

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I think we're in alignment there, right? I think organic will continue to be the biggest, um, Yeah. Traffic source for clients into 2025, the you will continue to be rewarded for doing high quality work in the space.

James Lawrence: And as we've seen in the last 5, 10 years, you will be punished for doing average quality work in the space.

James Lawrence: Let's move on to the next one. You've touched on it a few times, but I think with privacy, we're nearing the end. We're going to get in towards the back end of 2024. Now we have had that kind of backflip by Google in terms of cookies being taken away.

James Lawrence: Now it's going to be kind of a an option for users within chrome. What strategies. The marketers need to be aware of in terms of privacy to prepare themselves for 2025.

Sachin Rajah: So

Sachin Rajah: First you need to know where your traffic is coming from and what markets you provide products and services in. Those two factors are really crucial because GDPR and the California Privacy Act are the two biggest considerations when it comes to how you should manage privacy.

Sachin Rajah: If you provide products and services within the region of California, you have to comply by those standards, which means you need a consent management platform. There are platforms like CookieBot, CookieUS, and a bunch of other platforms. Which can manage your, your privacy for you. So, so if you visit a website, you may be used to seeing those banners where it says, accept all cookies, that's your cookie management platform.

Sachin Rajah: Um, and so you need to consider having those installed on your website. If you do provide products and services in the EU, if you don't provide products or services in the EU in California, but you get traffic from those regions. Then you don't need to comply with their standards. You don't need to have explicit consent on your website.

Sachin Rajah: However, and this has been a question raised by a lot of our clients Um, should we still go ahead with it? And my answer is it's good to go ahead with it. It is considered best practice because You want to be putting the choice? In the hands of your user. That's why it's , really important to consider consent management platforms in 2025.

James Lawrence: And. In terms of

Sachin Rajah: how much time do people spend on your website? What are your bounce rates?

Sachin Rajah: Like, , um,, is your website actually fulfilling the search query of what that user typed in?

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I think we're in alignment there, right? I think organic will continue to be the biggest, , traffic source for clients into 2025, ,you will continue to be rewarded for doing high quality work in the space.

James Lawrence: And as we've seen in the last 5, 10 years, you will be punished for doing average quality work in the space.

James Lawrence: Let's move on to the next one. You've touched on it a few times, but I think with privacy, we're nearing the end. We're going to get in towards the back end of 2024. Now we have had that kind of backflip by Google in terms of cookies being taken away.

James Lawrence: Now it's going to be kind of a an option for users within chrome. What strategies. The marketers need to be aware of in terms of privacy to prepare themselves for 2025.

Sachin Rajah: So

Sachin Rajah: first you need to know where your traffic is coming from and what markets you provide products and services in. Those two factors are really really crucial because GDPR and the California Privacy Act are the two biggest considerations when it comes to how you should manage privacy.

Sachin Rajah: If you provide products and services within the region of California, you have to comply by those standards, which means you need a consent management platform. There are platforms like CookieBot, CookieUS, and a bunch of other platforms. Which can manage your, your privacy for you. So if you visit a website, you may be used to seeing those banners where it says, accept all cookies, that's your cookie management platform.

Sachin Rajah: And so you need to consider having those installed on your website. If you do provide products and services in the EU, if you don't provide products or services in the EU in California, but you get traffic from those regions. Then you don't need to comply with their standards. You don't need to have explicit consent on your website.

Sachin Rajah: However, and this has been a question raised by a lot of our clients Um, should we still go ahead with it? And my answer is it's good to go ahead with it. It is considered best practice because You want to be putting the choice? In the hands of your user. That's why it's , really important to consider consent management platforms in 2025.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I think that's good advice, Ash. I think if the industry starts moving in a particular direction, you may as well lean into best practice rather than trying to hang on to something that used to exist that you inevitably will have to do anyway.

James Lawrence: let's move on to paid media, what are you seeing there? I know it's a huge topic. We could obviously do a deep dive in and of itself, but best practices, what's working, what's not working, I guess what's changed fundamentally in terms of platforms like insta meta. LinkedIn, Google, what can marketers take away from the pod as it relates to their media strategy for 2025?

Sachin Rajah: think first let's start with the social platforms. So we've seen a lot of shift and a lot of change to the way people have interacted with these platforms. And you've seen new features like LinkedIn product pages, Instagram shops. ,you've got a lot more live streams these days, polls and stories. Uh, along with, you know, even YouTube shorts, which have become really, really popular.

Sachin Rajah: So the advice I can give here when it comes to social media and what to look out for is look at ,where your, where your consumers spend most of their time and how do you best engage with them .So is it in short? So they spending more time in reels, ,What platforms are they spending most of the time in as well?

Sachin Rajah: Is it LinkedIn? Is it Meta? Is it, is it YouTube?

James Lawrence: Have you seen big changes this year in terms of targeting?

Sachin Rajah: We've started to see changes in targeting when it comes to Privacy and the amount of, targeting options that we can use. So because privacy is becoming much more prevalent in the industry, it's becoming harder for platforms like Meta and Google to leverage those interest based audiences.

Sachin Rajah: And so what we're having to do as marketers, but we're now having to. Leverage lookalike audiences, first party data, or we upload it to the platform, um, and then on platforms like Google, you're leveraging things like custom intent audiences. Uh, you're leveraging things like in market audiences as well.

James Lawrence: Do you feel that the kind of slow decline in introspace targeting puts It's always been important, but puts more onto the creative itself, almost just putting great creative out there to a less defined audience and kind of allowing the creative to find the right people as opposed to trying to find the right people and then put a message around it.

Sachin Rajah: Yeah, and that's such a, an important aspect because platforms like Google and Meta, one of the signals that it's looking at is how well people engage with your creative. And engagement rate is such an important factor when it looks at deciding what is the right audience that I should be putting this piece of creative in front of.

Sachin Rajah: And the more and more people that make up a certain segment that are engaging with your creative, it's going to target those people at scale. So you really want to make sure that your creative is speaking to the right types of people, the right audiences and the right segments.

James Lawrence: Um, I guess we hear a lot about TikTok killing Facebook.

James Lawrence: Facebook doesn't work anymore. ,and obviously it's, everything's always a bit grayer than that, but like, are you seeing certain social channels performing better than others? I guess, compared to how they used to perform?

Sachin Rajah: TikTok has been growing, uh, Particularly in the B2C space, it's been growing from a brand awareness perspective as well.

Sachin Rajah: However, we're still seeing that meta has its place. It's still driving really good from top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel traffic, um, as it once was in 2023.

James Lawrence: And then, um, ,cost, what are you seeing there in terms of cost to reach users in these types of platforms?

Sachin Rajah: It's becoming more difficult. It's becoming ,more saturated. And what I can see is CPCs rising. Year on year, I can see CPCs rising for a lot of our clients in a lot of different industries and verticals. And so that puts more emphasis on your targeting and it puts more emphasis on your

James Lawrence: Yeah, cool. Uh, what about the Google stack in terms of Google ads search for that?

James Lawrence: Also YouTube display shopping, et cetera. What are you seeing within Google? Not just, not just cost, but also just general targeting what's working, what's not working.

Sachin Rajah: Yeah. So again, ,cost rising ,in Google, um, in terms of what's working, what's not working, definitely a big move towards AI and machine learning.

Sachin Rajah: Um, you, you're not typically seeing Google shopping campaigns. And you've got PMAX campaigns, we're seeing more PMAX campaigns being leveraged, um, because within PMAX you can actually leverage the AI and machine learning at scale compared to Google Shopping. Um, DSA campaigns, so dynamic search ads. Uh, you've also got responsive display ads as well.

Sachin Rajah: Those are the types of ads that we're seeing being used more and more and getting better results than your traditional ads.

James Lawrence: And how are we feeling about PMAX? I think a lot of marketers out there kind of got burnt early on with PMAX. It was very much campaigns run, set up, running PMAX, incredible results came through, then they realized that the quality of ,the results, the quality of the data was pretty average.

James Lawrence: People then went, we don't want to use PMAX anymore. Obviously we're kind of all being pushed in that direction. What's your resting position now on PMAX?

Sachin Rajah: There has been a correction in the industry when it comes to PMAX. ,We've leveraged PMAX more for Econ businesses when we were going through that period, and we did pull back PMAX when it came to more of our lead generation based clients.

Sachin Rajah: And as of late, since we've seen that correction in the industry, PMAX has started to outperform your traditional search campaigns, even when it comes to lead generation. Test and learn, um, but definitely consider moving towards PMAX if you haven't already.

James Lawrence: And that wouldn't be a blanket kind of rule, is it?

James Lawrence: It's very much about, to your point, testing it, make sure it works, and then kind of slowly ratcheting up.

Sachin Rajah: That's correct, yep.

James Lawrence: Yeah, nice one. And that's ,good search in terms of, um, paid media. It's obviously very difficult to cover. All the paid social, all the paid search, you know, in a small part of a podcast, but I think that's probably helpful to marketers to kind of know, okay, if CPCs are going up, it's probably okay.

James Lawrence: Should we be getting rid of Facebook? Yes, no, those types of considerations. And then the sixth and final area that I thought it'd be nice to talk about is measurement. Um, for those listeners that don't already, it's probably good to sign up to Rand Fishkin from SparkToro. He's kind of, he said he was the founder of Moz many, many years ago, built that into a really successful business, presents excellent content as it relates to digital marketing.

James Lawrence: He's got some very, very, very strong opinions on, um, on measurement and attribution. He basically says attribution is dead, uh, that we can no longer measure. Effectively what's happening online. Not sure if that necessarily is the case, but I think it's a, it's certainly very, um, worthwhile juxtaposition with those that are kind of, I will make every single bit of every single decision based on data.

James Lawrence: What are you saying at this hatch? Like, are we feeling that we can still measure things as effectively as we once could? Um, does it depend on the type of client and what the buyer journey looks like? I think it would just be interesting to just chat more broadly about. Okay. What you're seeing as it relates to data and measurement as we kind of start getting towards 2025.

Sachin Rajah: Yeah, and it's a really good topic attribution. It's evolved so much over the years. It really depends when it comes to your buyer journey. If you have a very long buyer journey, and if you have, um, a lot of creative, a lot of ads, top and middle of the funnel, you've got some at the bottom of the funnel, attribution becomes really, really difficult when you're Top of the funnel heavy.

So if you think about it, if I give you an example, let's say you've got ads, brand awareness ads in Facebook, someone sees your ad, they come through, uh, organically as a second touch point. And then they come through direct as the final touch point with that view on your Facebook ad. GA4 is not going to know that that person had viewed your ad on Facebook.

Facebook may know that if you look in platform. And so that's where it becomes very difficult when it, when you look at attribution, GA4 does make it more difficult because it can only capture data once people hit your website. It doesn't know what happens outside of that. So if you've got YouTube ads, if you've got programmatic, if you've got, um, Display creative on Google, or even if you've got, um, Creatives within in meta, J4 just doesn't know if people are viewing those ads.

James Lawrence: I kind of argue that what you described is quite a simple journey, right? Like, I think if you're, if you're an emergency plumber, it might be even simpler. Simple as emergency, plumber, my suburb, click and add, off you go. But even something which might be three touch points to purchase, that's fairly simple, right?

Compared to if it's a sophisticated B2C or a B2B transaction, you know, retail environments like a car purchase or an airline purchase where you're looking at probably thousands of touch points over years, decades even, probably anything in a B2B context, right? In terms of, you know, there'd be hopefully people listening to the pod who in five years time might come back and speak to a rocket, ,how do you ever measure that through, ,GA4 or in platform LinkedIn or in platform Facebook, right?

Yeah, it is. Um, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be measuring things. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be measuring certain metrics as it relates to running digital campaigns. But I think we're definitely seeing best performing clients that we have are those that have. Effective measurement frameworks that are very much in line with the client journey.

Understand the months or the years that journey might take. Understand that inherent within that is you probably can't measure lots of stuff. Um, but that doesn't mean you can't have a good measurement framework around what your organic, um, strategy looks like, or what running a big campaign in LinkedIn might look like, but it might not necessarily be trying to measure lifetime value of clients off of an SEO campaign or a LinkedIn campaign.

Sachin Rajah: Yeah, it's a bad. You touched on a really good point, your measurement framework, and it's about putting all the pieces of the puzzle together because J4 doesn't capture the full story and that's something that we've been really working towards getting much better at at Rocket is how do we define a measurement framework for each one of our clients?

Cause it's going to be different for every client. How do we incorporate Facebook views? How do we incorporate YouTube views, display views, um, into a buyer journey? And then how do we make decisions off that data? Do we invest more money in those top of funnel channels? Do we invest more in bottom of funnel?

So those are all considerations that you need to consider. To take, um, when you look at the wider buyer journey and your measurement framework.

James Lawrence: That's good. I'd recommend it for anyone that's kind of interested in this space or who gets a lot of pressure from C suite, from MDs, from CFOs, from heads of sales type roles, or even if you're a marketer in a team where you're seeing those kind of pushing it up against this.

I definitely suggest that the long and the short of it by Binet and Fields is. Just to kind of arm yourself with information around, um, long term marketing versus short term marketing and the inherent limitations of each such. I think that's a really good, um, I guess the six big pillars or themes of things that we see playing a huge role into digital success in 2025.

Um, I've asked you this question before. Well, I think I have end every pod with what's the best piece of career advice for marketers. You've already answered it. So I thought I might just ask you, like, what's the one best piece of advice that you'd give to a marketer to set themselves up successfully for 2025.

Sachin Rajah: I think I love this one. It's embracing data driven strategies, particularly with a lot of the change that we've seen over the past year in the past two years when it comes to privacy, when it comes to cookies, when it comes to leveraging first party data, um, really play on that, really play on data driven insights, data driven attribution, data driven strategy.

James Lawrence: And when you say data, meaning first party data or just everything related-

Sachin Rajah: Everything, everything related to data.

James Lawrence: Nice one, Sach. Thanks so much for coming back onto the pod, and I don't think that'll be a case of three strikes and you're out, I think that's, uh, we'll be seeing you on the pod shortly for a fourth one.

Sachin Rajah: No, it was great to be back. Thanks, James.

James Lawrence: Thanks, mate.