ADVERTISING
These digital advertising channels are exploding
2021 was a cracking year for digital advertising.
IAB’s new Internet Advertising Revenue Report shows a staggering increase of $50 billion in digital ad spend in a single year—three times higher than in 2020.
The report also reveals the fastest growing digital marketing channels:
- Streaming media such as podcasts and live videos grew 50% compared to 2020.
- Paid search is still on top, accounting for 41.4% of digital ad revenue in 2021.
- Social media ads spending went up almost 40% after stalling during the pandemic. Why? According to IAB, 80% of brands started working with content creators and influencers, which fueled the increase.
The Crew’s take: A lot of marketers worried about the future of digital advertising when the pandemic started in 2020. Thankfully, advertising is becoming incredibly diverse and growing exponentially across a variety of platforms.
And based on the new data, these growing channels present a big growth opportunity for brands.
Speaking of data…
E-COMMERCE
Shopping experiences aren’t how customers remember them
Do you remember every thought, action, and influence that led you to purchase your last car?
You probably don’t… and neither do your customers.
Don’t believe everything they say: A new study reveals there’s a disparity between what customers think they do while shopping versus what they actually do.
The difference between a buyer’s memory and their buyer journey is largest in auto shoppers—more than 50%.
Grocery shoppers, for instance, are at 33%, while the gap in travel stands at 28%.
Why we care: Consumer behavior is more accurate than consumer memory. So in addition to listening to your buyers, monitor their behavior using analytics, heatmaps, and other tools.
SPONSORED BY TWEET HUNTER
Make $1 per follower per month from Twitter or pay nothing
Are you wasting hours on Twitter… and getting poor results?
You don’t need to spend the entire weekend planning tweets and engaging with other accounts to grow your business with Twitter.
Thanks to Tweet Hunter, you can make $1 per follower per month working just 10 minutes per day, increase your engagement rate from 0.50% to 6.00%… and get access to a network that could change your life. Remember: it only takes one connection to change everything.
How’s this possible? When you join Tweet Hunter, you get access to:
- A swipe file containing over 2M high-performing tweets.
- 200+ sales-generating tweet templates. One Twitter user made $5000 in 7 days with these.
- An outright unfair AI machine that engineers tweets for the high possibility of going viral.
And you get it for free with a 7 days trial. Ready for Twitter to start working for you?
“Show me how to make $1 per follower per month from Twitter.”
CONTENT MARKETING
How to balance content skills with subject matter expertise in your marketing team
If you’ve ever led a content marketing team, or been tasked with growing one, you’ve probably run into this question:
Is it more effective to get content from a subject matter expert (SME), or to instill subject matter expertise into content creators?
Maybe that gives you chicken-or-egg vibes. Us too.
But as Robert Rose explains, helping skilled content creators become SMEs is usually a better strategy.
However, there are two conditions necessary for this strategy to work:
- Your brand or business is willing to invest time and resources to educate content creators about the topic.
- The content creators want to learn about the topic.
So how do you turn content creators into SMEs? Robert Rose suggests three steps:
- Create an education program so content writers can study the subject.
- Integrate a subject matter expert into your team so they can share ideas and experience with the content writers.
- “Rent” top-level subject experts as you scale. This will help you fill editorial gaps as your content production scales up.
If you’re building a content team, Rose’s post is definitely worth reading in full.
SPONSORED BY AFILIADOS BRASIL
May 26 is your chance to tap into this massive, unsaturated market
Two reasons you should attend Afiliados Brasil, the biggest digital marketing event in Latin America.
First, 422.5 million people live in South America. And considering there’s not as much competition as in the US and Europe, it’s a huge opportunity to expand your business.
Reason number two is the lineup of amazing speakers: Jon Benson, Marcus Moure, and other marketing behemoths will be there.
“Tell me more about Afiliados Brasil!”
Oh, and there’s a third reason: The Crew will be there!
THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Are you writing headlines… or slogans?
Wander the halls of the internet for a few seconds and you’ll run across a group of sites that make the same problem with their landing page headers:
They’re writing slogans, not good header copy.
Here are a few examples of what we mean:
- Finally, a CRM to love
- Make Work Wonderful
- Thrive Everywhere
Headlines like these leave us wondering… What does that even mean? How? Who?
They’re more like campaign slogans than gripping headlines.
When it comes to homepage or landing page headers, customers want information. They need to be hooked. And if they’re not hooked right away, they’ll leave.
What should you write instead? PersistIQ’s original homepage header provides a great example of what good copy looks like:
“The outbound automation tool designed for small teams.”
This is good for two reasons:
- We know exactly what their product does (outbound automation).
- We know what makes their product unique (it’s built for small teams).
We’re hooked. Imagine if the PersistIQ landing page header read,
“Sending emails has never been this pretty.”
This is a flashy line of copy. But it tells you nothing.
In closing, we recommend making it clear who your header copy is for, what it does for them, and how it helps.
Maybe it’s not as fancy or exciting to write, but it’s certainly more effective.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GROWTH: Did you know ads with people drive a 62% higher conversion rate? And did you know someone needs to hear about your brand 5 times on average before they buy? We found this out from Growth Hacks Weekly. Get one free marketing hack every Sunday, for free.*
SEO: Google finished rolling out their anticipated March Product Review update. This latest update favors quality and unique content, so make sure you check yours for ranking changes.
MARKETING: How do you grow and monetize a niche newsletter? It helps to talk to someone who’s done it. And we happen to know just the guy…
MICROSOFT: Head’s up. You can now notify Microsoft Ads about when to expect seasonal fluctuations in ad performance. This should help prepare your ads for unusual performance changes without impacting algorithm learning in the long run—like before big sale days.
META: Meta is making life betta’ for app developers. As of now, 124 apps have passed the $1 million revenue threshold, with 8 reaching the $20 million mark. Even crazier, these apps make up for around 36% of the entire Quest app store revenue.
E-COMMERCE: Shopify busts a move in the creator economy by acquiring Dovetail, an influencer platform for store owners. As if we needed any more proof that influencer marketing is taking over…
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
“I’m white, and used for cutting and grinding. When I’m damaged, humans usually remove me or fill me. For most animals I am a useful tool.
What am I?”
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.
Are the robots afraid of traffic fines?
You thought human drivers were bad. What about robot drivers?
San Francisco police officers had an eerie night time experience with a Cruise car when they stopped it for driving with the headlights off…
The driverless car tried to make a run for it.
And now we’re wondering: how exactly do you hold autonomous vehicles accountable for poor driving?