E-Commerce Speaks - Episode 3: Social Media Evolution - with Gianni Casagrande

Social Media Evolution - Short Summary

In this episode of E-Commerce Speaks, we talk with Gianni Casagrande, Managing Director of the digital agency FUTCOM Group, about how social media has evolved for e-commerce over the past five years, as well as his work with multiple major e-commerce retailers, including the Frasers Group, Moda in Pelle, Police and more.

We also discuss:

• The industry’s shift toward a profitability focus, and how retailers can optimize their feed and more
• How Meta’s algorithm might promote something unexpected from your inventory
• Advice for e-commerce retailers today

Transcript of the episode

SAM
Today I am joined by Gianni Casagrande, Managing Director of digital agency, FUTCOM Group. Gianni, thanks so much for joining us here today.

GIANNI
Thank you for having me. Really excited.

SAM
Absolutely. I'm excited as well. Let's get into some discussions. First off, tell me a little bit more about yourself and about your company.

GIANNI
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been working in digital for ten years now and both brand and agency side. And then about four years ago, I started freelancing a bit under the FUTCOM name. And about three years ago decided to start my own boutique agency specializing in fashion and footwear. 

But we do have clients in all different verticals, and we have a very good relationship with Meta, Pinterest, TikTok so we do some incredible stuff with them, which I'm sure we'll go into, and we have an amazing partnership network as well.

So a big part of what we do is making sure we can put other clients and retailers and companies in touch with best in class agency software providers that we can do across the world and making sure that we can get the most out of our network and support clients and people in the industry.

SAM
That's great. Tell me, what are some of the really cool clients you've been working with? I mean, obviously, Meta, but yeah, some of the e-commerce people.

GIANNI
Yeah, 100%. So we work really closely with Sara Davies from Dragon’s Den in the UK and her incredible company, Crafter’s Companion. We've been working with those guys now for just over three years. 

We also have the Frasers Group on board, one of their websites, GetTheLabel.com. They are a discount sports and lifestyle brand selling some of the biggest global brands. And we've had an amazing journey with those guys. 

But then also some of the more UK based national brands such as Moda in Pelle, Kit and Kaboodal, and Moshulu, but also some of our more recent clients, we've had Police, one of the iconic British and Italian  fashion and eyewear brands and yeah, a real whole mix of great retailers.

SAM
Nice. Well, you know, one thing that I was wondering about is in your position as Managing Director here, what would you say that you do on a day to day basis there? Could you walk us through a day in the office of Managing Director of a digital agency role?

GIANNI
Yeah, definitely. I don't sound too cliché, but it's a different day every day.

SAM
Many different hats.

GIANNI
Yeah that’s it, But a lot of it is making sure that we're looking after the relationship with the client. We want to make sure that again, very cliché, but we are a part of their journey as well. One reason why I believe a lot of clients do decide to work with us is because we do have that real close relationship with all different levels within the business. 

So a lot of it is understanding their needs, requirements, what's on their roadmap, and if we can support it in any way, alongside making sure performance is great of course, and aligning their business as well with best in class, you know, being at the forefront of paid social and if that can also support any of our other channels as well. 

We do a lot of cross collaboration with other agencies and internal teams. So the majority of the day is catching up, and making sure that we’re, you know, on the ball and supporting in whichever way we can.

SAM
Okay. So putting together the meetings, the plans, making sure everything is rolling and going forward. What are some of the biggest challenges you face when doing that? Like, what's your what's your white whale, the big trouble that might come up?

GIANNI
Yeah, I guess right now it's pivoting the industry in the market, obviously, as everyone knows, we're in a bit of a strange time in terms of e-commerce and commerce in general.

SAM
Yeah.

GIANNI
And it's just how we can basically support that pivot and how we can adaptthe way that we work to accomplish maybe some pressing objectives that they've got business-wide as well. For example, profitability, clearing certain stock that maybe isn't shifting for whatever reason. 

I know that this year one of the biggest challenges for fashion retailers is the way that the weather has really impacted stock and buying. So we've been combining lot of them challenges and trying to, you know, focus on certain categories and land them sites.

SAM
Has weather been more of an affect this year than it has in the past then?

GIANNI
Yeah, definitely. I feel like especially Spring/Summer this year, we had quite a slow start to the year, which puts a lot of hold on the Spring/Summer lines and then at the same time with Autumn/Winter as well. I feel like we had a very short window this year to clear full-priced Autumn/Winter stock, and that was quite a common trend across the board. 

So yeah, we were really supporting clients trying to understand how we can clear those lines without being too distressed and making sure that, you know, we're covering all aspects of the calendar and maintaining competitiveness.

SAM
Interesting. Yeah, well, you know, I hadn't really thought about how you had the influence in the weather here. I just know for my own weather, it comes up because we don't really get much of a much of a Fall or Spring here in Prague. So that's how my perspective on it has gone. But yeah.

GIANNI
Definitely been a factor. And also with the cost-of-living crisis, especially in the UK, that's definitely played a role in how the weather, the cost-of-living crisis just by behavior in general, how that's changed, especially after COVID. People are a lot more considerate with their purchasing. All of those factors together has made it challenging, but I feel like clients overall have had a really strong year. 

SAM
One thing I wanted to talk about, you were working at Moda in Pelle before you started this agency. What was it like doing that change up, going from your work there to making this happen? What inspired all of this?

GIANNI
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, Moda in Pelle, for those who don't know, are a ladies footwear brand in the UK. They have been going since 1975, and specialize in ladies leather footwear and have a real good retail presence across the UK, as well as online. 

Some of the best days in my career were definitely spent in Moda in Pelle, and they’re still a client now, so we still got an incredible relationship with those guys and we've watched them go from strength to strength, especially online. How their web performance looked, three years ago, four years ago compared to now, it’s light years away, they're absolutely killing it and I had a really good time as a Marketing Manager for three years at that company. 

And like I said, now they're a client of ours. The shift came during COVID because I was getting a lot of inquiries from past clients, and people within the industry looking at how I could support their paid social. And it started off as just a bit of advice consultancy, and in the end I ended up taking a few personal projects on within spare time. 

Basically over the next few months something had to give and ultimately it was more of a leap of faith decision just go for it, and decided to set up on my own. And like I said, because of the relationship we had they decided to come work with us as well. And still a client now and we’re still absolutely killing it for them. And it's great just to be still involved in their growth, considering me and the team had such an important role over that three year period to get them to where they are today.

SAM
Yeah, sounds like the leap paid off.

GIANNI
Yeah, absolutely.

SAM
One thing that I thought was interesting when I was looking over the FUTCOM site, was you were talking about how social media is evolving today. I just wanted to get your perspective on what direction you think it's taking. What's changing in the last year or so or. Or five years.

GIANNI
100%. I think especially the five years. So and still today we suffer with this challenge where some companies don't take social media as a channel as seriously as maybe other channels that historically have been the leader such as PPC, email, organic, where social media is a real key player and the last three years have really shown that. 

And I think it's due to how customer behavior has changed as well. People are on social media searching for inspiration they want to be shown what their next purchase is and they're looking to be inspired and that's where social can really benefit them. Not only are we seeing the customer behavior change and how social is complementing that, but also the technology is rapidly increasing. And I don't know any other marketing channel that is changing as fast as social. 

The introduction to AI and how that is influencing ad performance at auctions, personalization, targeting, is next level and it's, well leaps ahead of other channels now in terms of the technology that we can utilize. But then it's also becoming a place of commerce and people are going to social to shop and look and browse.

And that's where I believe their behavior has shifted from more traditional channels, and that's where the benefit is coming from now. We're trying to make social an extension of their website in a sense, and how it’s the community side of where customers can go be inspired, and then also purchase as well.

So yeah, it's been a real shift from a channel that wasn't taken so serious to now being one of the key leaders in someone's marketing mix.

SAM
Now it's the main town square where you go with your brand, so people can discover it. 

GIANNI
That’s it. 

SAM
As somebody like myself who comes  from more of a, well, I say comes from a content background, who is still in a content background. One of the things that interests me the most is how people in a role like yours keep up with the industry. I mean, if it's reading news, podcasts, articles, e-books, because I have found e-books are getting less and less popular, less and less relevant these days.

So I wanted to know, as somebody who's been working in this industry so long, how do you how do you keep up with all of these evolving trends of social media, all of these new tactics you might recommend to your clients?

GIANNI
Yeah, there's a few, to be honest, and obviously  of course there’s a few favorite blogs, there's a few news articles and publications that I follow closely that I believe are real good industry leaders. There's also the fact that we've got  a really good relationship with the platforms itself. And for example, we've been working with Meta over the past 12 months to really help them develop their Advantage+ campaigns, which is the new suite of optimization that Meta have launched.

We've been doing some real good testing with clients being offered beta solutions to support their data science teams on refining these. So we're kind of in the insight by being the test subject in a sense.

SAM
Oh interesting.

GIANNI
Then there's also the network, and I'm a big believer of your network, is your net worth, and it's one thing that I've really preached about for the past ten years within the industry. I surround myself with lots of other social media agencies that some may call competitors.

And we've got a real good mutual respect of sharing, you know, insight into what's working, what's not working, and also basically learning from each other. Same with other partners and not necessarily in paid social. It's not just paid social that we kind of keep up to date with, its e-commerce as a whole. So again, we make sure we network, we get out there and support ourselves with really, really intelligent people who can help us refine how we push forward.

SAM
So a lot of networking involved, a lot of speaking with others and, and some inside tracks with Meta. So then, if you were going to be researching a new topic, like if you wanted to figure out what are the upcoming trends for this season, would you then go to one of these networking groups and speak with the people involved? Or would you go to Meta or would you download something to find it? What would be your preferred route?

GIANNI
A bit of everything. And we also sponsor a lot of testing, we actually fund, as FUTCOM, a lot of testing with clients if there's something that in particular we want to really focus on. We've done a lot of joint collaborations of testing from a funding point of view with Meta as well, where we will sponsor some of the testing that we're running with a client. Clients obviously love that because they’re getting  free ad spend and its performance off the back of it, but it helps us really refine the way that we work.

And if there's something that we want to experiment that we think might be a real good  change for all clients we’ll come up with a hypothesis and a collaboration, maybe directly with one of the platforms to learn and explore and it is again, as cliché as it sounds, it is all about testing and refining. If we don't put it out there, these theories and test these new features, we won't know if it works. 

SAM
We've been talking with a lot of  our clients at ROI Hunter about shifting to a renewed focus on profitability. The last episode that we had with our CEO, we got a lot into how there's been a shift toward profitability in the industry right now, which a lot of it's related to interest rates being so much higher. So companies can't just keep borrowing money to keep the growth flowing.

I was just wondering what your thoughts are on this renewed sense of importance around profitability and what sort of metrics you or the retailers you work with have seen tied to that?

GIANNI
Yeah, it seems to me the key word that everyone's talking about at the moment and rightly so. I think maybe a few years ago we had the luxury of being able to test more in terms of throwing  cash at things we think might stick, where now we don't have that luxury. 

Profitability has been something that a lot of clients are assessing across the board, and we're looking at solutions of how we can support that. And we're doing quite a few things, especially with feed optimization, in order to really support where the cash is going with Meta. 

And there's a few reasons why we're doing this. One thing that we've been doing as well, before I go into some of the feed optimization, is we've been looking at different reporting. So for example, we've been looking at impression and cost per product reporting to see where Meta is distributing the products within dynamic carousels. 

We set up a really good report, called an Impression Insight Report, to make sure that the products that Meta are distributing, we have control over that and we can also manage to make sure that is the right product because sometimes they do go a bit rogue. 

I actually have a funny story with this. I have a client that is a footwear client and they also sell scarves just as an accessory that people can purchase as a kind of sideline. All of a sudden I got an email saying, We're selling lots of scarves. What's going on?

We’re selling hundreds of scarves. And I was like, “hmm, let me have a look.” 

And we basically found that Meta had gone a bit rogue with their product recommendations and some of the ads that we had running and decided that there was a bit of traction behind scarves, So they decided to put all the budget behind it and it kind of… luckily scarves have plenty of margin and it was a great sale, but we had to really pull that back and make sure it was on the footwear and off the back of that. 

We then made sure that impression  share reporting and impression monitoring across products was a real priority to make sure that even though we are optimizing these campaigns with certain product sets, with certain categories, with certain rules, we were also monitoring where the AI does distribute these products as well across the network. So that was a real key learning.

But we're also working on feed optimization as well. So we're pulling through custom metrics like margin of products and fragmentation, especially with products that do have certain size runs to make sure that, yes, it might have high stock, but are they actually the size that are going to sell so we can basically trim away the fat from the product feed also as well, putting rules in place of, even if there is stock left, is this the kind of product that we want to push because it's seasonal or maybe it's not seasonal, and utilizing the data we have availability to. 

And that would be a bit of advice actually to retailers. So much data so that you have availability to that, maybe you’re not aware, that can be plugged into performance marketing channels. And I think that's a real key thing to assess and understand your tech stack and the capabilities of what data you've got externally that can be put into Facebook and all social channels to be honest. Any kind of feed and work.

SAM
I mean, we have so much data right now. We just... the trick isn't  getting enough data, it's using the data that you have. You know, actually, I wanted to jump in on one of the things you were talking about there, about different sizes. Have you played around with, at all, limiting the promotion of products when they have  too few different sizes in stock? 

GIANNI
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we've actually worked in collaboration with ROI Hunter on that with Moda in Pelle. We worked with the tech development team to create a size scoring rule, which basically allows us to put a score in place with the products that have the desirable sizes that we want to sell. The higher the score means the full size run and less fragmentation we have of the more popular sizes.

And that was a game changer for us because it allowed us to eliminate products that maybe had high stock but didn't have the right size that were going to sell, an example of that being if we've got, you know,  a size run of size two, three, four, five, six, seven, we might have plenty of size twos and threes left. But we know that the five, six, and sevens are the ones that sell.

So we might want a rule, that product, I'll label it just different and we can treat it different, versus a product that might have a real good size when across the board. And that was a game changer for us because it allowed us to have more visibility of the stock. But from a performance marketing point of view and allow us to treat the stock differently within different ad sets and campaigns.

SAM
Yeah, because I mean, it's great not just for saving the budget when you're trying to promote the right things, but man, as a consumer, I hate clicking on something and seeing, Oh, I want this, oh, I can't have it. Okay, well. Thanks for showing that.

GIANNI
And it goes back to the value and the reputation and the proposition that you as a retailer are putting in front of the customer right now, like we said, value is everything. And we want to make sure that experience is perfect for every customer that touches the path of the brand. 

SAM
Well, last thing that I wanted to get into, Gianni, you mentioned a little bit of advice in the last one, but is there anything else you wanted to give out to our listeners advice for e-commerce retailers that might be here?

GIANNI
Yeah, of course. The main thing that I'd say right now is listen to your customer. There's a lot of work we're doing at the moment around surveying and understanding their frustrations. Understanding the positives as well, what's working well. 

And recently with some of the work we've been doing, there's issues that we've identified that maybe weren't even on our radar, just from purely listening to their experience on site and as we’re in this journey in this era now of value over maybe traditional reasons why people would shop, it's so important to listen to why the customer actually is shopping in the first place.

And what does set you aside, but also their barriers that you could easily fix and to get that competitive advantage. So yeah, do some surveys with some customers and then translate those positives through advertising the reasons why they should shop and then use the negatives to fix and implement a strategy to combat those barriers and friction points that customers might be having.

SAM
Right. Great. Well, Gianni, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. It's been a real pleasure going through this with you.

GIANNI
And you too, thank you very much.