yellowCHAT: Social Performance Marketing with Guy Bauer

Guy Bauer has always been passionate about marketing and this has led to a thriving performance marketing career.

As Head of Social Performance at award-winning app developer Lightricks, Guy oversees the company’s paid performance activities across various platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Snap. Lightricks develops creativity apps and is planning to expand creator services to become a one-stop shop for creator resources.

yellowHEAD recently had the opportunity to interview Guy as part of the yellowCHAT Q&A series and, like everyone that meets him, we found his perspectives to be full of great insights. Check out the full interview →

How did you get into the industry? What made you decide to go the route of performance marketing?

I always had a passion for marketing. During my marketing MBA studies at Bar-Ilan University, I realized that there was a shift occurring. Companies were starting to put more emphasis on performance marketing and were understanding the importance of creating long-lasting engagement with potential users. I felt that I could take the knowledge I had, and put it into practice, so I started looking for performance marketing positions.

What are the main components of your marketing mix? What channels are you utilizing?

At Lightricks, we focus on buying media across most of the large global social and search channels, including Facebook, TikTok, Apple Search Ads, Google and more. We strive to utilize both paid and organic channels to ensure we have the most holistic acquisition strategy.

What have you seen work best for you within your social campaigns?

There are many elements for a successful social campaign but I’d say the main focus should be on segmentation, tiers (GEO for global products), and – of course – creative, creative, creative.

Lightricks knows a thing or two about creative. Can you tell us a bit about your approach to producing and testing creative on different social platforms?

Currently, Lightricks has 460 employees and plans to employ 60 more by the beginning of 2022. About 30% of the employees are designers who solely work on optimizing and creating the most imaginative creative ads possible, from a performance perspective.

We have our methodology that mainly focuses on customization, giving enough opportunity to optimize and react quickly to our account lifters, making sure we quickly get new iterations tested and leverage the positive trend.

In your opinion, what do you feel are key ingredients to take into consideration when creating a new social campaign?

A campaign manager has to do their research before they initiate a campaign; they must understand the trends in the relevant market (or markets) and know the personas they are addressing. They need to create an audience plan and structure the campaigns in a way that enables testing at scale. In the post-iOS 14 era, one also needs to learn how to mark creative “winners” based on previous data and run quick iterations when you feel like you’ve been off from day 1 (taking into consideration that you won’t see conversions for around 2 days with iOS campaigns).

How have iOS 14/15’s new privacy rules changed how you do your job? How have you adapted your strategy to the new restrictions?

The new era of ATT has forced advertisers to be more creative about their channel mix. In many cases, you need to redefine your short term KPIs and learn attribution from scratch. What we have learned about performance marketing over the past 8 to 10 years has changed drastically (in the snap of a finger, Thanos-style ;-)), and I must say that it shouldn’t be perceived as a bad thing. It forces all of us to be more creative, pay attention to numbers more than ever before and, most importantly, consolidate and focus (since we have a campaign/ad-set limit).

How do you see Lightricks’ role in a world that’s more and more oriented towards user-generated content?

Lightricks users create over a billion creations per year on our apps, and we want to empower creators to continue to enjoy the creation process. The role of UGC helps Lightricks better engage and understand its creators. Creators then feel that they are an important part of the conversation and operation. Overall, it helps us reach a wider audience and create trust between our users and Lightricks.

On a personal note, when you’re not working on growing Lightricks’ user base, what is your passion?

Amongst my different hobbies, I really like to cook. I believe I’m a decent chef.

Where do you see the industry headed over the next 5 years? Do you have any predictions?

The industry, as we can already tell, is slowly shifting towards privacy-focused mechanisms – if it’s attribution or targeting, we’ll have less information and will need to change and streamline the way we define our short-term goals differently and better in order to support business growth.

What is your golden tip?

Be kind, constantly strive to learn and, most importantly, always be the hardest-working person in the room.