TIKTOK
TikTok just launched a holiday advertising guide
The holiday season is upon us, and TikTok has partnered up with AdAge to create a comprehensive advertising guide for the platform.
Whether you’re just dipping your toes in or you’ve been running campaigns for months, there’s plenty of helpful information to help you navigate the season. Here were the juiciest tidbits:
- Young people (kind of) have purchasing power. TikTok is known for having a young audience, which has caused some marketers to shy away. However, the company claims that 80% of Gen Z users have influenced their parents to buy a product based on something seen on TikTok. That number may increase further during this holiday season!
- Give TikTok’s new templates a try. To make the advertising process easier, TikTok has created BFCM and holiday templates to help you capitalize on the spirit of the season.
- Utilize traditional discovery, consideration, and purchase flows. TikTok has laid out full tables of recommended bids, audiences, and conversion objectives for your campaigns this season.
There is a lot of content to break down, and you can check out the full page from TikTok here. If it seems overwhelming, remember that the key principles of advertising remain the same on TikTok, even if creatives might look different!
CONTENT MARKETING
The five keys to writing content that performs
Rand Fishkin is as close as it gets to an “influencer” in the content marketing space. He co-founded Moz, is currently running SparkToro, and has built a solid following on social media over the years.
But, poor content performance can happen to even the best of us – and it’s what happened to Rand last week. Between November 15th and 21st, Rand published five blog posts on various topics, but he didn’t see much of a lift in traffic for his site.
Here’s what happened, including his five key things to do before you write content:
+ Lack of focus, no keyword targets, and boring titles were a few of the key factors that plagued Rand’s content. The analysis may have been great, but they weren’t in the golden, shareable format that works so well for viral content today.
+ Rand’s five pieces of advice for top-notch content, in his own words:
- Target a single audience and write with one person in mind.
- Write a catchy title, the kind you’d see flying around Twitter.
- Create a shareable visual that encapsulates the post’s message or teases the content within.
- Focus on one snack-sizeable topic at a time. If there’s more than one topic, break it into several single-focus posts.
- Do two minutes of keyword research as you’re writing the title to find a phrase or two that might earn some search clicks.
These tips are just scratching the surface of what Rand suggests in his full article, which you can check out here.
SPONSORED BY PUSHGROUND
Kick-off this black Friday sell-a-thon with some free ad spend!
Ready, Set, Sell!
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To help you make the most of this golden quarter, Pushground is offering any advertiser who deposits $200 before Black Friday a $50 bonus.
Additionally, to get you more prepared for the holiday season they are offering up two push ad guides to two of the hottest verticals this time of year.
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To claim the bonus: Signup here, deposit $200, and use the promo code: “StackedBF”.
E-COMMERCE
£15k/week dropshipping Christmas trees
Mark Rofe is a digital marketer, and this year he decided to quit his safe agency job to start a Christmas trees e-commerce business.
Someone would have said he’s a fool… Christmas trees? Online?
But victory (so far) has been sweet for Mark.
As of November 19th, the store has raked in £30k in total. Plus, 50% of that amount came just in the last week (12th to 19th). With Christmas getting closer, the store is projected to make £100k in its first year of life.
In this interview for Ecommerce Guide, Mark talked about his venture.
It’s a long chat, but we tried to grab the main marketing lessons:
+ The importance of the domain: Mark spent £1600 to buy ChristmasTrees.co.uk. And while it may seem a lot, he says it is an investment that brings benefits on the SEO and PPC side.
“My AdWords quality scores are all 10, it feels authoritative for people coming to the site.”
+ Focus on what you can already do: The biggest source of sales (90%) for the store is Google search campaigns. Mark puts his focus here because he’s already dealt with Google Ads, thus it was the easier route.
His tips for Google Ads? Don’t go straight up for a big volume. Start broad and build on inefficiencies, especially if you want to be profitable from the beginning.
The example Mark makes is that he started bidding very high to be at the very top. But he realized that he could still be above organic search results with a lower bid.
Afterward, he started cutting keywords that weren’t bringing many sales.
+ How to get social proof when you have zero clients? PR. Mark launched three different PR campaigns, but the most successful was a report he created about spending on Christmas lights and decorations in different areas of the UK. Notice how it’s not even about Christmas trees?
PR activities allowed him to get featured in magazines like The Sun, Woman and Home, and The Express.
He then added the logos of these editorials on his website to increase the conversion rate.
But there are more lessons to learn from this interview when it comes to conversion rate optimized for SEO, cross sell, and future plans. Give them a read.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
BUSINESS: Jacqueline Xu just wrote a helpful Twitter thread on the biggest struggles engineers make when they transition to being founders. While she focuses on engineers, these mistakes can be done by everyone.
TWITTER: Fleets is off to a rocky start, but Twitter’s just updated us on the fixes that have been made since launch.
E-COMMERCE: Online sales are forecasted to be booming this year, but that doesn’t mean people are feeling great. A new survey in the UK showed that consumers are nearly as fearful now as they were at the start of the pandemic.
SNAPCHAT: If at first you don’t succeed, buy your way to success… Or is that not how the saying goes? In any case, Snapchat has launched Spotlights and is now paying out $1M a day to various users who share their content in the TikTok-like feature.
FACEBOOK: Drives, a new feature to help collect food and necessities for people in need, has launched on Facebook. Right now, it’s a US-only feature.
BRAIN TEASER
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
We’re not all Robert Frost, and Google knows that.
So, if you’re looking for a little help with your poetry (and you want it to sound a little more like Robert Frost or your favorite poet), check out Google’s AI project, Verse by Verse.
It’s a cool little tool. You set the parameters of the poem you want to write and then pick a couple of poets for Google’s AI to work from. Once you’ve done that, Google will prompt you to write the first line of your poem – yes, you do have to (at least) think of a first line.
After creative genius has struck and you’ve written the first line, the AI will auto-generate inspirations and recommendations based on each poet you chose.
Go activate your inner poet on the site here!