ADVERTISING
Microsoft, Amazon, Roku, and Twitter announce new ad features
Watch your feet…
Big companies are dropping advertising updates right, left, and center.
Let’s start with the two that announced their features during IAB NewFronts, one of the most important marketing events of the year:
Amazon announced “virtual product placement” which would let brands insert ads and products into hit movies and shows… After they’ve aired.
Roku revealed shoppable ads, which enable viewers to shop while streaming their favorite content. They also announced a partnership with Microsoft to research the impact of TV ads on online searches.
Speaking of Microsoft… They just launched a ton of new features, too, including a new Smart Remarketing feature which uses automation to remarket your product to users most likely to convert.
Finally, Twitter released a new ad placement called “Tweet Replies.”
Right now you can only optimize it for app install campaigns, but Twitter assured users it will “bring this new ad placement to other campaign objectives.”
Don’t fold your chair yet… NewFronts lasts for two more days, which means there will be more ad announcements coming soon. We’ll keep you posted!
MARKETING
Tech giants are now offering marketing certifications
May is the month of Justin Bieber memes, moms, graduations…
And apparently, marketing certifications.
Google just launched a “rigorous” certification program that teaches you the fundamentals of e-commerce digital marketing.
It even gives you hands-on experience in popular tools like Canva and Shopify.
Microsoft relaunched its Learning Lab, which grants “official” certificates and offers badges for LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
And Amazon launched a partner program that includes “learning certifications” for employees, among other features.
So if you want to take your career to the next level, you have plenty of “schools” to choose from.
If only these certifications came with graduation parties…
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ADVERTISING
How to reduce ad spend with “dayparting”
If you’re like most marketers today, you rely almost entirely on algorithms.
But like they say: Timing is everything.
That’s why radio and TV advertisers have served their messages at specific times of the day for years in a practice known as “dayparting.”
In this article, Meg Berry shows you how and when dayparting can save your advertising budget, along with a simple system for optimizing your campaigns based on time ranges.
Three quick caveats:
First, dayparting is not for everybody. E-commerce vendors, for example, might not find dayparting useful because people buy at every time of the day.
But if you’re a B2B company, you might want to target times of the day when your audience is in the office. Especially if you’re trying to generate calls.
Second, you need traffic. Most businesses don’t have enough conversion data per day, or per hour, to run statistically significant tests.
Finally, dayparting can still drive up costs: The more targeted your campaign, the less room for optimization the algorithm has, so your costs go up.
And now, with the caveats out of the way…
Here’s a tactic you can apply to see if dayparting works for you:
- Download performance by the hour of the day (or by day of the week) into a spreadsheet.
- Identify the range of times where most of your campaign conversions seem to happen.
- Put that data in a pivot table.
- Move the high-converting hours into one group; put the other hours into a separate group.
You’ll probably see that one time range drives most of the conversions at a lower cost per acquisition (CPA), while the other time ranges have fewer conversions and a higher CPA.
You know what to do next: Focus on the time frames that generate conversions at a lower CPA, and reduce the ad spend on expensive time blocks.
Meg also shows how to do this in Google or Facebook’s advertising dashboards too.
Try it out and see if dayparting works for your business.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Tips for crafting pricing tiers that boost your sales
How do you select pricing that maximizes the money you make from your products?
It’s surprising how many businesses do it by taking a wild shot in the dark.
We can’t cover all the principles, but here are a few ways to do it:
- Add a free pricing tier. It’s common to sell a product with multiple pricing tiers, with the higher prices expanding on benefits or quantity. If this is you, try adding a free pricing tier to get people through the door. While you may have to eat the costs at first, it often pays off long-term.
- Get rid of any confusing prices. In some of the Deep Dives we’ve written, we noticed brands using confusing pricing and extra fees. To boost your conversions, offer customers a flat-rate price they can understand in seconds. Don’t build complex plans or tack on extra fees at checkout.
- Use a research-backed approach. Run one survey of your target market asking how much they’d pay, and another survey with fixed pricing options. Then, take the price each person in the open-ended survey said they would pay, subtract the average price of the open-ended group, and add the average price of the closed-ended group. You can read more about how this works at Ariyh here.
There are thousands of ways to think about pricing.
But hopefully the tips above help you optimize your pricing strategy so you can maximize revenue in the months to come.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
NEWSLETTERS: The Assist is a free 4x a week email newsletter that focuses on improving your life in manageable ways. Through actionable life tips that range the gamut from professional to personal, it provides the opportunity to learn and grow through digestible, quick reads.*
META: The status of Facebook and e-commerce? It’s complicated—and not only because of iOS updates. Retailers, advertisers, and even Facebook executives are finding online shopping challenging, and tools like Instagram Shop aren’t helping much… Yet.
TIKTOK: It’s hard to name a better duo than TikTok and influencer marketing… And the social media platform knows it. They recently published a guide to collaborating with creators, which could be useful.
META: OpenAI’s GPT-3 language predictor has a new competitor. Meta made their own language AI and they’re giving it away for free so researchers can pick it apart. Seems like a rare move for Big Tech, no?
MICROSOFT: Edge browser continues edging out their competitors when it comes to desktop usage. They now own 10.7% of the entire market share. While that’s tiny compared to Chrome’s 66% share, it’s still impressive…
PODCASTS: Do you remember the name of Facebook’s podcast tool? You probably don’t. So you won’t be surprised to hear that Meta is shutting down the feature… And their entire audio hub.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
What question can you never honestly answer yes to?
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.
Would you like 20th century fries with that?
How long do french fries last before they go bad?
It’s hard to say, but these McDonald’s fries lasted 63 years… And they look kinda good for their age.
A couple in the US discovered the decades-old bag of “well preserved” fries while renovating their home.
They also found two hamburger wrappers covered in old school McDonald’s branding.
And no, they didn’t taste the fries… Would you?