META
Meta threatens to shut down Facebook and Instagram in Europe
Is Meta-exit on the horizon? Meta has warned that it may be forced to pull out Facebook and Instagram from the European Union.
The reason: Data transfer. Current European data regulations prevent companies from transferring, processing and storing Europeans’ data on US servers. It is for this reason that an EU court recently declared Google Analytics “illegal” in Europe.
According to Meta, these regulations will prevent it from properly serving targeted ads to its users. As a result, they will be “unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe”.
Will Meta really leave Europe? The Crew’s take: We call it a bluff. Meta leaving a market with 500 million (relatively) wealthy people seems unlikely. If Meta really can’t generate enough ROI from non-targeted ads (which is doubtful), we assume they’ll try switching to a paid subscription model before calling it quits.
The most likely outcome is that this will be resolved the old-fashioned way: negotiation with the government.
Google is experimenting with “Buying Guides” in search results
Google confirmed to Search Engine Land it is testing a new “Buying Guides” mobile search results feature. Brian Freiesleben was the first to notice the feature on Twitter.
More details: Essentially, Google is trying to turn its review search results into a single comprehensive page. This feature collects data from various affiliate and review sites and displays various information, such as product characteristics.
For example, say you’re searching for a baseball bat. Google will display dropdown menus where you can select a price range and view details about various types, brands, baseball bat materials, and so on.
What this means for marketers: Nothing for the time being (this is still a test). However, if this becomes more widely implemented, Google may pull more information from your affiliate site, resulting in lower CTRs and overall traffic for you.
This reminds us of a saying: “Diversify your traffic sources.”
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CONTENT MARKETING
How to create a content engine as a one-person show
Whether you’re a freelancer, run an e-commerce store or a startup, you might find yourself in the challenge of constantly needing to create high-quality content.
It’s not easy, but the right systems and processes can help you.
Like the 5-part Content Engine. It’s a system that Max Bernstein shared last week in our Insights community.
Five steps to fire out high quality content with consistency. Without sacrificing quality. Let’s get into it.
1) Consumption: If there’s no input, there will be no output. This means that before being a content creator, you need to be a content consumer.
Max says that he listens to audio or podcasts whenever he’s having a break, driving, going for a walk, or other down times.
2) Batching: This is about gathering content ideas in advance. Take a few weeks to brainstorm content ideas for the whole year.
This removes the pressure of having to create content, while putting you ahead of the competition.
3) Templates: Max created templates so when he has an idea for an email, Twitter thread, blog, or something else, he clicks that template, and the format and critical items are pre-populated.
4) Plan in advance: Try to have a week’s worth of content in advance. This image represents his content calendar for a week of Twitter content.
5) Repurposing: This is mandatory if you want to be present on different channels.
Take a blog post and break it down into multiple tweets. Take a successful tweet and turn it into an Instagram post.
Share your weekly newsletters on Medium, LinkedIn, or in certain communities.
One more lesson we can learn from this post is to build your own system. Maybe you’ll find these five steps useful. Maybe you’ll need one more step for your own machine. You’ll use different tools, etc.
The point is, make it an objective to create your own working system, because once it’s set up, you just need to keep the engine oiled.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
How to crush your competitors in Google search rankings without writing any blog posts
We recently did a deep dive into Wise for our Insights membership – free preview of the Wise deep dive here – and we found something interesting about Wise’s SEO.
Wise receives more than 9M organic users per month. And a huge chunk of their traffic isn’t branded nor is it going to their blog posts.
Since Wise offers a product with an extremely broad appeal, they can write about nearly any topic. And the most popular are:
- Currency exchange
- Banking FAQs and information
- Lifestyle articles (like how to pay property tax in Spain, for example)
And many of the pages look like these two:
None of these two pages are traditional blog posts. And the same is true for most of Wise’s pages driving huge amounts of organic traffic.
This allows Wise to put a CTA further up on the page. Not at the end of a blog post, so the path to turn a visitor into a lead gets smoother.
The lessons for you?
- Look for SEO opportunities outside of traditional blog posts. It can be a tool like Wise’s currency converter, or whatever is relevant for your business.
- If someone is Googling a simple question, you absolutely can rank a short piece of content on the first page. No need to write a 3000-word article.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
MARKETING: Ever wondered how a BNPL powerhouse does its marketing? They need consumers to request it, and they need businesses to provide the service… How do they solve this chicken and egg problem with marketing? Find out in our deep dive – free preview here.*
GOOGLE: Have you recently noticed a decrease in Google crawling your Shopify site? That problem should be resolved now, according to the search company.
MICROSOFT: If you’re in the auto industry, you might want to pay attention to this. Micorosft has introduced some new search mechanisms when people look for a car.
LINKEDIN: Ring, ring, ring. LinkedIn is experimenting with displaying a bell icon on user profiles. According to Matt Navarra, when you click on the bell, LinkedIn will subscribe you to the profile content.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
What has a head, a tail, is brown, and has no legs?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Pirate Kitty
Meet Ginger Cat, also known around town as the “pirate kitty.”
This adorable fluffy kitty has been “robbing” locals of their toys. Kay McCall recently noticed the kitten’s behavior. The orange visitor left a slew of toys in their yard, including strange socks and a small Peter Rabbit.
Kay eventually posted a picture in a local Facebook group, hoping to find out if any of the toys belonged to them. And, surprise, surprise, many people claimed to have been visited by Pirate Kitty.
On the positive side, at least she didn’t bring drugs.