Episode 269 / Di Gallo / CIBC / Director, Marketing Modernisation & Innovation
Why Brands Should Converge Social Media & E-Commerce
In the latest episode of the Shiny New Object podcast, we sat down with Di Gallo, Director of Marketing Modernisation and Innovation at CIBC, to discuss her "shiny new object" - the rapidly evolving world of social commerce.
As Di explains, social commerce represents the convergence of social media and e-commerce, where platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming the primary destinations for product discovery, consideration, and even purchase. "It's this merge, or convergence of social media, the best bits of that and e-commerce, if they were to come together.”
This shift in consumer behaviour is fundamentally changing the traditional customer journey. "If a brand does not show up in my process of discovery on a social platform, does that brand really exist?" Di poses. She believes that, for many consumers, the path to purchase is now condensed into one or two touchpoints, rather than the multi-step process we're used to. The implications for brands are significant. As Di explains, "As a marketer, we’ve got to think about, does it change, or do we have to do things differently so that we can drive more people to our website?"
One key area Di believes brands should focus on is leveraging the engaging, visually-driven content they create for social media on their own websites. "Replace your product images with the images that you're probably creating for your social platforms anyway," she suggests. "You're working with creators and your customers to create really good content on and for your social platforms, which is great. How about leveraging that same creative on your website right now?" By breaking down the silos between social media and website teams, brands can create a more cohesive, customer-centric digital experience.
As Di puts it, "The two worlds have to collide because, because customers can see through that, right? So I think if we're all going to benefit, we need to learn from each other." The future of marketing is in social commerce, and Di's insights offer a glimpse into the strategies brands must embrace to stay ahead of the curve. Learn more in the full podcast episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Di Gallo 0:00
Now I'm starting to understand the importance of that 100 million monthly active users, and I would say just keep asking the "So what?"
Speaker 1 0:14
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Tom Ollerton 0:47
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, and this is a regular podcast about the future of data driven marketing. I have the absolute pleasure and privilege of interviewing some really fascinating people from around the industry about their vision for the future of data driven marketing, and this week is absolutely no different. I am on a call with Di Gallo, who is director marketing modernization and Innovation at CIBC. So Di, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a bit of background?
Di Gallo 1:29
For sure. So first, thank you. Thank you for having me here. Tom So a bit about me. I started, sort of my education was really in in sociology and mass communication. I thought I was going to be a criminologist, and instead, I pivoted into the world of digital marketing, where I had the pleasure, and, you know, privilege, of really working with some top tier, sort of brands across film, across retail, across telecommunications, and then kind of pivoted into the startup world to sort of learn a little bit about, sort of like, what that would entail as a marketer. And then COVID happened, and I had the opportunity to teach digital marketing and also shape some of that curriculum, which was quite exciting, sort of to to bring real examples to to students who want to become, sort of our future digital marketers. And then from there, pivoted out out of education, and did a bit of consulting. And then here I am, ending it up in finance. And I never thought that as a digital marketer I would end up in finance, but I'm in one of, sort of, like the top five banks in Canada, and really enjoying, sort of my my sort of just a year and a half there.
Tom Ollerton 2:42
So what advice would you give to a smart, driven student who wanted to follow in your footsteps and really be successful in this industry?
Di Gallo 2:51
Yeah, good question, and I'd say the advice is probably similar to some of the advice that I gave students when I was teaching for for the two years. And it's almost two pronged, sort of this idea of sort of embracing curiosity, and also to be adaptable, I think, with with digital marketing, you know, as we know, or even just marketing in general, right? There's innovation, there's creativity. It's about understanding people, people's behavior. And I always say to students, and what I said to them, and what I would say to sort of future student, or future digital marketers who are students today, is this idea that, you know, ask questions, right? We would encourage students to ask questions, and we'd make sure that we would teach them the right kinds of questions to ask, right? We don't want ones that are just going to have responses of, yes, no. We teach them more of like, how might we as an example, so that it's a more fulsome response. And I'd say, sort of take, take that and bring it into the digital marketing world. So rather than reading about what is Tik Tok, how about embracing sort of that technology, dive in, roll up your sleeves and really understand the algorithm. Understand, sort of, what is the content that people are sort of gravitated to? How easy or complex is it to create that content? And I would say, Do that for all of the platforms, and continue to do that throughout your career. So Stay curious. And then I'd say with that, because it sort of happens in part together, I'd say, is this idea of being adaptable. I mean, if, if the pandemic taught us anything, is a as marketers, we have to be sometimes things happen outside of our control. So you've got sort of a pandemic which is going to get us to sort of think about what we're doing today and how we might have to pivot and do things differently. And then you also have sort of new technologies, like this thing called generative AI that everyone talks about, and I think it sort of brings in these sort of curiosity bits, so play around with it, to learn, ask those questions about what it is. And then also this idea about being adaptable, right? So it is transforming the way that we're creating content, right? So what does that mean for for you as as a future, future marketer? So I think for me, those are the two that I would say for students. So take what you're already doing as a student and bring that to the workforce.
Tom Ollerton 5:23
And what advice would you have for those who are listening to this show, who aren't students? What would be your advice to become a better data driven marketer?
Di Gallo 5:35
Good question. I'd say, I'd say for that one, like, we know data is queen, right, like you, it's sort of like the foundation we we need that. But I'd say that it's not enough to sort of simply collect that data and analyze it, right? So I think, personally, I think the true, the true power of data, comes when we're able to sort of communicate those insights. So let's be the storytellers that we are as marketers when it comes to data, right? So it's about making complex information easier to understand, and even when it's not a difficult data point, if you will. How are we evoking emotion and connecting with our audience? So whether that audience is your executive team, whether it's your peers, whether it is the product team, but how are we conveying that through storytelling? And so we start by knowing our audience, right? So you tailor sort of your story so that it resonates to them. And when you think about it, that is exactly what we do as marketers, when we're thinking about how we're going to tell stories and resonate with our customers and our prospects, so future customers. So a good example of that, if I can sort of keep, keep on the sort of chat GPT bit, is, you know, let's just say you're a digital content app, and your objective is to create increase app downloads. So I'm going to share an insight. And so the Insight is chat GPT reached. I think it was 100 million monthly active users, and I believe they did that after two months of launching. And so I always encourage, you know, marketers to then ask that question about, so what Right? Like, what does that really mean? And so you take it a bit deeper, and it's, you know, by comparison, I think it took Tik Tok nine months after global launch to reach that number, and it took Instagram between two and a half three years to reach that number. So now I'm starting to understand the importance of that 100 million monthly active users. And I would say, just keep asking the so what? Right? So become that storyteller. So your next, your next data point might be, no this. This makes chat GPT the fastest growing consumer app in history. So now you've got my attention, right? So the narrative, you're starting to create a narrative around sort of those data points. So it's like, how do we make data exciting to to your audience, and make it relevant to them. And so for me, it's all about it's about storytelling and then and then applying it to that audience. So if I go back to who I am, and I'm a digital content app, and my objective is to increase app downloads, I might take that insight, that story that I'm building around it, and then say what made it so unique and so important as a data point is how accessible, let's say chatgpt made it to to the audience, right? It took what we all know as like a search bar, right? So if you searched on Google, if you searched on brave, if you searched on safari, whatever sort of platform you're very familiar with, what that looks like. So they took something that's very common, so that ease of entrance, and that's why you had mass adoption. So now we take those learnings and apply it to my brand app, and how do we sort of help increase those downloads, and this is how we do it. So all of that to say, I think storytelling is really important. We do that really great as marketers. When we're trying to tell stories to to our customers, I'd say, let's let's do that internally when we're trying to sort of interpret numbers and then sharing that to our audience, whoever, whether that audience be your executive team, or whether that audience be sort of your peers, or, let's say the product team.
Tom Ollerton 9:24
So moving on now to your shiny new object, which is social commerce. So social commerce is that's quite broad that could cover a lot of different things. We got that long. So I'm really keen to know which tell me what social commerce is to you and why you've chosen it as your shiny new object.
Di Gallo 9:44
Okay, yeah, so, so social commerce is maybe not as new, but I do believe that it's continuing to grow, and it's got it's it's making sort of like a fundamental shift in sort of how consumers are discovering and interacting with brands. And so it's simple definition. It's it's like this merge, or convergence of social media, the best bits of that and E commerce, if they were to come together. So you've got platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok that have now become sort of your prime destination for discovery, consideration, purchase. And all of that is frictionless, right? So everything that we sort of think, traditionally, we do on a website is now most of it happening on one platform, right? And the reason why it excites me, and it's one that I think brands and marketers sort of need to pay attention to, is when we think about sort of our sort of traditional customer journey, we always have this sort of notion that it starts on Google with a search. You click on a link, it takes you to the.com maybe it's a blog post. You read through the blog post, there's another link, you go elsewhere, then you're looking for reviews, you probably end up on Amazon, because it's a good place for a lot of product reviews. By that point, you might have forgotten right the brand that you initially started with, and so you might end up just buying on the platform, right or on Amazon. So you've gone to multiple touch points, and you might have never ended up back to that brand website that wasn't Amazon, whereas when you're thinking about social commerce, I'm doing all of that on one platform. And so I have this sort of running joke with some of my friends who are also marketers, where you know, if if a brand does not show up in my discovery or my process of discovery on a social platform, does that brand really exist? And I don't know, right? So those are, that's sort of what social commerce is. It's why it's important to me. And I think sort of like three things that sort of really come out of that. One, there is the customer journey that we touched upon, where we we have this tendency of thinking of it as sort of a multiple touch points where I'm here to say that it's one, maybe two, potentially for for many consumers, and many of your consumers as a brand, the second part of it is, I'd say I think there's something that E commerce sites can learn from social media. When I think about social media and social commerce, it's the idea of being able to engage with very sort of engaging content, whether it's short form video, long form video, whether it's static images, whether it's from a creator and influencer that I follow, but it's content that resonates with me more than, let's say, just a sealed image on on a.com or an e commerce website. And so how can, how can we learn from social to make either our website better or or think differently about the purpose of our existing website is, is sort of that last point where I think we need to pivot in terms of what what the.com is going to mean to you. Because if we think about a single or maybe a two touch point journey, most of it is happening on social media, with that one exception, where they're going to come to your website to buy, but then they wait for the product and they come back to social media to do the rest of a rest of that journey, if you will. So what does that mean for your website? And so as a marketer, we got to think about, does it change, or do we have to do things differently so that we can drive more people to our website? And this is not me saying that it's the end or the death of the.com or the website, just like it's not the death of the retail space. I think we're at a moment in time, whereas marketers, we just need to pause and start reevaluating sort of, what is the.com mean? What is the role of social media and social commerce within your greater sort of E commerce strategy?
Tom Ollerton 13:56
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So lot of different ways this could go. I think, I think, I think the first thing that may that leaps to mind is it's almost like social media, sorry, e commerce is a sub function of social media now, right? It's like it's with for some Yeah, of course, like you're probably not going to convert on a bottle of Domestos or home and personal care stuff, maybe sampling perhaps. But yeah, so it's almost like it's just e commerce is just sort of bolted on into that experience. So, as you know, new generations come into digital, get their first mobile phone, they'll be like, Oh, this thing looks cool. I'm going to buy it, blablabla it's done, and they're not going to think about e commerce being as a separate thing. It's just a it's a mechanical function of the of social or their entry point, right? Which is, I think what you're getting at, but your provocation, which I love, is brands need to rethink their website. And reading between the lines, I think you're saying the website's quite boring, really. Like, here's a here's a picture of some shoes or a car or, you know, whatever it is, and it's just the static image where one click away on Tiktok, there's some wild influencer doing some really funny thing, making your product looks amazing, or someone else's product looking amazing, even more dangerously. So I'm going to push the question back onto you, right, what should brands be doing with their websites, and which sector needs to do it first?
Di Gallo 15:51
It's a really good question. I'd say that what, what brands, I mean, low hanging fruit is, if you want to keep your sort of like.com sort of like to be this e commerce place where people can buy and discover on that, I'd say, replace your product images with the images that you're probably creating for your social platforms anyway, right? You're working with creators and your customers to create really good content on and for your social platforms, which is great. How about leveraging that same creative on your website right now? What brands do is sometimes you'll see sort of like that Instagram, sort of a brick, sort of at the bottom of the page that sort of shows some user generated content. I think that's a good start, but that's sort of like so yesterday. I think what you need to do is bring that service that up and change those images. And that's like a low hanging fruit. It really is. I'd say. The other thing that I know it seems very obvious, but there are websites that still don't do it well, is make sure that your your website is mobile optimized, because if we think about people, more and more are starting and ending their journey, what, wherever that may be on their mobile device. And so if your website isn't mobile friendly, just like apps are right, all my social apps, they're, they're, they're meant to be mobile first. So you know that it's mobile optimized. I think we've got to take learnings from that and also apply to the.com in terms of which brand should be doing it first. I'd say the low hanging fruit of really beauty brands. I feel like some are doing it better than others. And I'd say your like attire, like, if you're into sort of like fashion, fashion brands. And I say that because when I talked earlier about sort of the post purchase, like that sort of inverted funnel, if you will, if I had to sort of draw it out visually, it happens back on on a platform like Tiktok and Instagram, where people are sort of sharing what the product looks like on them, right? It fits this way. It looks this way. And so how are we taking that content and bringing it onto our website? And that might help solve and maybe not for this conversation, but it might help solve all of the returns that are happening, right? Because I didn't have a chance to try on the product. I see it on your website. It looks good, but the model is like 595 10. I'm only five, six and a half, so I think it's going to look one way, but it doesn't. Versus when I'm on social, I see creators that I know are more like me in terms of size and fit, and so the way that maybe a suit looks on them is probably going to be the way it looks on me. So take that content and also Bring it. Bring it on to your website, in lieu of not being able to try on clothes when I'm buying online. I think are two. Are two, two, sort of easy, easy wins for brands that they can adopt. You know immediately.
Tom Ollerton 18:52
My experience in the last seven years of working at automated creative it those teams don't really talk to each other, generally speaking, the people who do the PDPs or product description pages on their websites or on retailer websites, and the team that does the influencer partnerships, like, like, so unbelievably, not linked at all, because, like, one team is meant to, like, fill the pipe, or, you know, the and then the web team goes, oh, cool, thanks for all this pipeline of traffic. Now we'll try and convert them. So how would you get around that? Because they they're like, yes, they're both digital teams, but the mindsets, the the way the agencies that they work with, the teams, the structures, they're all so different. They're it's almost the difference between above and below the line, but within digital so what's it? What advice would you give to a senior marketer who has to try and pick up some of this low hanging fruit?
Di Gallo 19:42
Yeah, and it's a really good question, and I'd say that. I mean, if, if I were to bring, sort of, when I was in retail, that's where you do have to break down silos, because you're right. We, we are very siloed, even if we're all sort of trying to achieve the same thing, like we're trying to sell product, and we're just. Doing it differently. We don't talk to each other, and we need to. And so for me, when I think about like, to your point, like writing the product descriptions, I get why they sort of write in a certain way, because it's got to be sort of SEO friendly and so forth. But guess what? When you think about social media, and we're writing sort of descriptions and captions on that it has to be sort of optimized for social as well. So the way that I looked at it is, I made sure to insert myself in sort of the SEO sort of conversations, to try to come to a place where we would test and learn. And that's back to that sort of data question is, right? It's really about testing and learning. So we would take some of these social descriptions, bring them on to the website, make sure it's still optimized, but it has a bit of sort of like that flare that has people clicking when they're on social versus when they're on the website, and just doing it on a few of the products, where we can compare apple to apple. So same product on social as on the website, and started learning that way, and if we started seeing more traction, which we did on social we would then that product page would have sort of like updated product description, and we would move on to onto the next product. But as a digital marketer, I had to insert myself in conversations where we normally weren't invited, because we were thought of, well, you're the marketer, and then we're sort of dealing with, sort of the content on the page, or the product page, the product descriptions and the buying the merchandise and all of that. The two worlds shouldn't collide. And I'm here to say, yeah, the two worlds have to collide because, because customers can see through that, right? So I think if we're all going to benefit, we need to learn from each other, and testing and learning is a good way, a good way to do that.
Tom Ollerton 21:46
What's your view on verticals that aren't naturally a great fit for social commerce? So, you know, you talked about beauty. You know, you've got products that are over a certain cost, you know, 20, 30, 40, and upwards and beyond that. And then you can be packaged and, you know, whacked in the post, and it could be there the next day, or, however, soon. Whereas you're not going to do that for a can of Pepsi or a car for actually, maybe you could for a car these days. Sorry, I take it back. I'm sure people transact on cars all the time. But what is the opportunity in social commerce for FMCG, or those businesses that are like, you know, a sub $3 cost.
Di Gallo 22:31
So when I'm thinking about social commerce, and if I think about brand, brands that have products that are like, Pepsi, a can of Pepsi, you know, even mascara, some of it could be $10 so, you know, low, low cost. I think it actually does work on as part of your social commerce, right? Because you're already on that platform. What's going to sell me on that mascara versus, let's say, another mascara or Pepsi versus Coke is sort of the content around it, the story around it that I see on social I don't know that I would go to a.com to buy it, and yes, I might go to the store to buy it, and that's fine, right? But social commerce could still play a role, even if I'm not transacting right on it, because I will discover, learn more about maybe a new flavor of Pepsi that I otherwise wouldn't have known, and then I'll go to my local variety store to pick it up. When I think about mascara. And yes, there's like, three or four different products that are $10 I still I leverage social media for me to sort of learn which one is better based on, sort of my needs. And then maybe I don't transact, because I live in Canada, I can't transact right on social anyway, but I've done most of the legwork on social media. And then the next time I go to a Sephora, whether online or if I pass by Sephora, I'll go and pick up the product. The the the one that I thought would be the most challenging is like, to your point, like automotive, but absolutely, I think like brands like Mercedes and BMW and and sort of Volkswagen have nailed it like they are doing such an incredible job on social media, because they're, they're using it to build that story so that awareness, that consideration, like they're, they're luring you in and wanting you to sort of take action. And that action might not happen on the platform. At that sort of product level. You might end up going to, you know, somewhere to buy, or you might sort of do part of it online, on the respective website. But then when you're talking about it, after you have it, you know, you're coming right back and talking about the the vehicle there. And then the last one, I think that would be one that, in terms of social commerce, is no that would be it. I'd say those are the ones. And then the last one would be, sort of homes. I think homes are ones that people thought couldn't have, sort of like the the social commerce bit of it. And even though it's, it's sort of a longer journey, what we're starting to see is that you're starting to use social media. It to sort of really understand, sort of like neighborhoods, right? Because you can do a lot of sort of local targeting on there. So you might not be leaning in with the house I want to buy, but you might start leaning in with the location I want to live, right? So it's kind of changing the way that we're sort of starting our purchase journey when it comes to homes,
Tom Ollerton 25:21
So unfortunately, we need to leave it there. So if someone wants to get in touch and continue this discussion with you, where is a good place to do that and what makes a message that you will actually reply to?
Di Gallo 25:35
You know, a coffee chat. Because I do, I do love coffee. Start it by that, and any, and pretty much I'm on most social platforms, LinkedIn is probably the best, and it is just Di Gallo. You can find me on on that on LinkedIn is probably the best, or you can find me also on Instagram, and you can send me a DM there, and it's also at Di Gallo.
Tom Ollerton 25:57
Thank you so much for your time.
Di Gallo 25:58
Thank you.
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