E-COMMERCE
What does the future hold?
Shopify’s Future of Commerce report for 2021 is out, and here are the key predictions:
- Young consumers will change the business landscape as e-commerce charges ahead.
- Physical retail as we know it will transform, giving local businesses new advantages.
- Consumers want to shop independent. Businesses will adapt to make that easier.
- More consumers will vote with their wallets.
- Modern financial solutions will disrupt business and consumer banking, finance, and lending.
Those are some bold predictions. Fortunately, Shopify had the data to back them up. These are two interesting, data-focused highlights:
- 62% of young consumers prefer to shop sustainable and green products (53% overall) and 49% of consumers respond positively to retailers making a donation to a cause. Even if your product doesn’t fit the “green” category, you can support a related cause with a percentage of your revenue. It’s what many stores do!
- Only 29% of consumers have shopped with an independently owned business since the start of the pandemic. Quite a tough stat for small businesses.
Check out the full report here.
YOUTUBE
Get your campaigns running on the ’Tube
If your New Year’s resolution includes trying out other traffic sources (and you’ve never tried YouTube properly), this might be just the thing you need to read. YouTube is basically the second biggest search engine, so why not?
Joe Martinez put together a nice guide on YouTube TrueView Ads.
From explaining what types of TrueView Ads you can run to breaking down the targeting and campaign goals. It’s a great intro if you’re curious.
One big reason to try some TrueView Ads: You can get a lot of free (and consistent) brand awareness, depending on the ad format you choose.
SPONSORED BY ONE VA AWAY CHALLENGE
Hire a rockstar Virtual Assistant on your first try and make your business hands-free right now!
We’d like to introduce you to John Jonas. No, he’s not a VA we’re recommending… He’s the founder of OnlineJobs.ph, the marketplace that helped companies like Google and Uber to hire rockstar virtual assistants, aka VAs.
He’s been helping companies hiring Filipino VAs since 2007. With 15 years of experience under his belt, he created a hiring system that allowed him and other entrepreneurs to hire an efficient and reliable assistant. On the first try. And in a replicable way.
You can do it too! It’s called the 7-Day One VA Away Challenge. It’s a 7 steps system designed to help you find your perfect hire in a single week. From writing the job post, to assigning tasks.
You start today. And the next week you’ll have more time for yourself, your business, your family or your memes collection. Isn’t that just the dream way to start the year?
Here are just some of the insights you will learn in the challenge:
- Red flags you should know when it comes to evaluating a VA candidate’s response and their profiles.
- What’s WRONG with the traditional approach to hiring a VA (And how to do it the right way).
- How to test all your VA candidates the right way.
- How to weed out 50% of candidates before watching their applications.
- Why doing a Skype interview is likely to find you the wrong candidate.
- How to assign the first task, and what your goal should be with the first task.
- What to include and what to NOT include in your job post to quickly spot your rockstar.
Start the One VA Away Challenge and free up your schedule in one week.
CONTENT MARKETING
When should you update content?
How do you decide when to refresh your content?
It’s a question posed by Kevin Indig on LinkedIn, and it fostered a pretty interesting discussion (LinkedIn’s not always terrible, y’all).
Let’s give a look at the main answers Kevin received:
+ Gwendal Mahe – Use statistics to compute the actual contribution of each piece of content to conversions. If there’s a 10% change, they reevaluate the piece.
+ Banks Concepcion – Update content when the intent behind the target keyword changes, and your existing content (headers and supporting content) is no longer as helpful as it once was.
+ Sebastian Rankin – Search for posts with high-value keywords that are stagnating between pages 6-25, and can potentially rank higher by adding additional content.
+ Robert Weller – Update content when:
- The content is incorrect because changes have occurred since the post has been published.
- There’s a decrease in ranking or organic traffic.
- The content doesn’t meet users’ needs in terms of information and entertainment.
+ Georgios Chasiotis – Do a content audit every six months. During this audit, identify pieces that are stagnating and need an update.
+ Max Roslyakov – Track the performance of every piece of content monthly. If your article starts losing traffic and rankings, put it into the next month’s workload for updating.
There are more answers, but the three main points to remember are:
- Watch changes in organic traffic and rankings.
- Make sure your content is still aligned with searcher intent.
- Have a plan in place to monitor these changes.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
APPLE: A “big announcement” was teased by Tim Cook, and it’s not a product. Is this something about iOS 14 and its privacy settings?
FACEBOOK: The “Access Your Information” tool has gotten a revamp. It should be easier for users to navigate but this change certainly pales in comparison to iOS 14’s privacy impact.
MARKETING: Cannes Lions, the famous event on the French Riviera, plans to go forward with an in-person festival on June 21-25. Sounds rather ambitious to us…
AFFILIATE MARKETING: If you were in the affiliate world many years ago, you’ve undoubtedly read Finch’s blog posts or books. Well, the man is back with an update! It’s not industry-related, but if you remember his stuff, it’s worth a read.
BRAIN TEASER
John’s mother has 5 children. Their names are March, April, May, June, and ____?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Razer’s pivot into… N95 masks?!
This is less a pivot and more a flex from Razer (we assume).
They have made what they call “the world’s smartest mask”, a reusable N95 respirator called Project Hazel.
It hasn’t received any official certifications and it looks like something Scorpion from Mortal Kombat would be wearing mid-battle.
Like we said, it’s probably just Razer trying to get some extra press and try out some new tech – we doubt this becomes their next big product.
Maybe if they launched this in March 2020…