AMAZON
Amazon can tell you which products are worth advertising
How do you know which of your products are worth the ad dollars?
Well, Amazon’s new feature would like to make some suggestions.
Check your dropdowns: When you set up a Sponsored Products campaign, Amazon has a new setting that can automatically sort listings for you.
How it works: Amazon will use machine learning to predict which of your products are most likely to drive conversions based on parameters like imagery, description, reviews, and more.
Why we care: Sometimes automating advertising campaigns can save you time and money, and Amazon’s latest feature seems like a chance to do both.
Who wants to lose cash betting on the wrong horse?
Google hints at making product review pages redundant
Affiliate marketers can’t catch a break.
What’s going on: Google will now allow users to compare multiple products directly on the search engine results page (SERP).
Good for them, not so good for you: With a rich comparison feature on SERP, users may not bother visiting product review pages to get information about your product.
Which means… Less traffic to your affiliate website.
Become irreplaceable: You know how flight searches, Yelp, and similar search tools are now inseparable from the SERP?
If SEO is your main source of traffic, now’s a good time to start thinking about other ways of driving visitors to your site.
… or Google’s SERP may just replace you.
SPONSORED BY HOPIN
Planning hybrid events can feel overwhelming. This Playbook helps.
Virtual and in-person attendees. Different time zones. Venues. Platforms. Tech issues.
Planning an in-person event is hard enough…
But creating a virtual experience on top of it? That can feel stressful…
Unless you’re prepared. When you know the exact steps for running a successful hybrid event, you can handle the details with the nonchalance of ordering a mojito.
And that’s what Hopin’s Hybrid Events Playbook helps you do. It walks you through everything you need to know, from planning to post-event strategies.
You’ll get:
- The hybrid event checklist: All the essential tasks you need to execute to manage a “free-of-bad-surprises” hybrid event.
- Guidance in the planning stage, plus tips for saving time and budget.
- A promotion strategy for creating sponsorship opportunities.
- Tips for troubleshooting and managing technical issues.
“Show me how to run a successful hybrid event!”
BUSINESS
How to leverage the competition to grow your business
One of the best ways to help your business grow? Study your competitors.
The point is not to imitate them, but to find the gaps and opportunities you can fill with your own marketing and products or services.
And because so few businesses do this well, competitor monitoring can give you a massive advantage.
Ann Smarty wrote an incredibly useful guide to monitoring your competition on social media for BrightLocal.
She covers a lot of ground, so for now, let’s just talk about the Who, What, and How of monitoring your competitors.
Who to monitor: There are three “who’s” you should pay attention to…
- Your obvious local competitors.
- Similar businesses that, while not local, can still offer big learning opportunities.
- Other businesses in your area so you can watch for events and trends.
What to look for: Anne Smarty has a robust list here, but one of our favorites is the suggestion to read customers’ reviews of your competitors, both the positive and negative.
What are your competitors doing that you can improve on?
And even more importantly, where are they falling short… and how can your business pick up the slack?
How to monitor your competitors: Ann Smarty links to several useful tools throughout her article.
In addition to the tools she suggests, you can also follow competitor hashtags or set up Google alerts.
There’s more to it, of course. We recommend reading Ann Smarty’s entire piece to see which ideas work best for you.
SPONSORED BY CONTENTFLY
“I was so stressed trying to find writers and scale content — until I found Contentfly.”
Why Contentfly? Because Contentfly vets the top 1% of writers in the industry and matches them with small and medium businesses, and agencies.
In a matter of days, you can get high-quality content including SEO blog posts, landing page copy, ads, social media posts, and more. The best part of it? It takes less than 5 minutes to request content.
Scale your content production with confidence.
THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Sell your customers more than just outcomes
Pick up any book on marketing, and you’re bound to find a sentence that goes something like this: People don’t buy the product; they buy the outcome.
It’s mostly correct. But it’s not the whole truth.
We also buy things because we believe in the people who make them.
We want to know that the people behind the products are good people, that they respect the environment, that they have good taste, that they give back to their community, and so on.
Smart brands lean into these motivations. Take Rolex, for example:
- Roger Federer sponsorship: Rolex pairs the outcome of their product (peak performance and quality) with the kind of status their customers want (people like Roger Federer wear Rolex).
- Perpetual Planet initiative (and others): Rolex also invests in environmental projects. This signals the brand’s values. They want you to know that, when you buy a Rolex, you’re buying from people who care about the earth as much as you do.
Big brands position their products this way because it works. And as a marketer, this is something you can do, too.
So in addition to promising customers the outcome they desire, promise them the values and aspirations they cherish, too.
It’s hard to say “no” to that!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
INSIGHTS: Want to leverage TikTok for your business, but don’t know where to start or what products sell best? Our latest Deep Dive will show you all that and more… No dancing required. Sneak the preview here.*
PPC: The circle of… customer lifecycle? Turns out Google Audience Signals don’t only springboard your Performance Max campaigns. They also feed analytics with valuable insights throughout the campaign’s lifecycle.
ADVERTISING: Out of home (OOH) advertising revenue jumped almost 17% last year, with Apple, Amazon, and Google among the top 10 OOH advertisers in the US. Who would have thought?
TIKTOK: It seems Gen Z users have a simple buyer’s journey. They see something on TikTok, and they buy it. In fact, more than 50% of buyers see a brand on the platform first. As if you needed another reason to read our TikTok Deep Dive…
E-COMMERCE: Maybe brick and mortar got hurt, but it never died. Retail shopping is making a comeback in the post-pandemic world. Why? Customers still prefer discovering new products in person. And online returns can be such a pain, anyway.
ANALYTICS: The great migration is coming! Soon you’ll be able to import existing goals from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. Check the latest tweet by Charles Farina to see the detailed instructions.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
In London, many Underground tube stations have two escalators going up, but just one going down.
Why?
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.
“The name’s Boat. James Boat.”
If Craigslist taught us anything, it’s that you can find a buyer for… well, almost anything.
Yes, even for a 300-foot, out-of-order cruise ship.
A man from Northern California recently decided to pay the ship a visit and do some “digging.”
And what he found was incredible:
- The ship was built in post-war Germany in 1955.
- It was used as a filming location for a 1963 James Bond movie.
- It inspired the popular TV series “Love Boat”
So he bought the ship, named it “Aurora,” and turned it into a museum.
The best part? You can follow the restoration process on his YouTube channel!