In September of last year, Apple announced a change in their iOS 14 update unlike any other.
Although iOS updates are nothing new, iOS 14 will have significant implications for anyone who wants to advertise online.
In an attempt to protect consumer privacy, Apple will now show “an app-tracking authorization request to the user [to] provide the tracking authorization status.”
In layman’s terms, Apple will provide iOS 14 users with the ability to deny tracking to all apps on the platform.
Analysts predict that 80-90% of people will opt-out of being tracked, versus the 30% of users who did it before.
This is a huge disparity that will have severe consequences for small and medium-sized business owners.
How Will This Update Impact Business Owners?
Unlike previous iOS updates, the 14th edition will have devastating impacts on Facebook advertising, and by extension, business owners who advertise on Facebook.
If the pandemic has made anything abundantly clear, it is that you need to market online in order to generate leads.
The platform where you can attract the most people to your business online is Facebook, by far.
Facebook is the largest company to be adversely impacted by the update. Almost all of its profit derives from advertising revenue. However, this will affect other online platforms as well.
These graphs showcase how much Facebook relies on ad revenue, especially compared to other tech giants.
Since Facebook is the best platform for martial arts school owners to generate leads, we will focus on it specifically for this blog.
While Facebook has provided some resources for small business owners, they are hard to understand and do not directly address martial arts school owners’ needs specifically.
The only real change to their current Facebook marketing will be the limited use of the pixel (website tracking) for school owners. This change will make it harder to retarget warm prospects and build detailed, qualified audiences.
While you will still be able to use some remarketing within the Facebook platform (video views, lead forms, etc.), the website data was invaluable.
The more detailed your audience targeting is, and the more information you have about your potential audience, the less your advertising will cost per result. Since we will have a less detailed audience to work with, it will cost more money to reach the right people.
Despite these changes having an overall negative impact on online marketing, we recommend several tactics to lessen the adverse effects.
What Steps Can I Take to Prepare my Business?
There are a few steps you can take to help prepare your business:
- Focus on creating quality content
Content equal clicks. Clicks equal leads. Leads equal Sales.
2. Become well known, both on social media and beyond
It doesn’t matter if you’re the greatest Martial Arts Academy in the world – if your community doesn’t know about you, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, “Best Known Beats Best.”
3. Make sure you verified your domain and completed all of the preparation steps Facebook recommends
4. Hire an expert (like Grow Pro 😉) to help you navigate the changes as they come.
Honestly, the iOS update and its impacts on Facebook are technologically challenging at best and utterly baffling at worst.
That is why at Grow Pro, we are here to help.
To learn more about the steps to prepare for this update, we encourage you to tune into our Free webinar on March 23, at 12 p.m. EST.
In the How Facebook is Changing Forever (and what to do about it) webinar, we will discuss:
- The 2 things you can put in place right now to help you prepare for the iOS14 update
- Exactly how this is going to impact your digital marketing (and what to do about it)
- An updated plan based on all of the changes in the online space
It will cover the strategies mentioned in this blog to prepare, going into depth with specific action steps to implement after the webinar to ensure that your school stays ahead of the curve.
You will not want to miss this! You can register by clicking here: https://getstarted.growproagency.com/facebook-2021-update
