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AGENCY
Setting your agency apart from the competition
Cat Howell makes a comeback in our newsletter as she shares her take on refining your approach as an agency owner.
Does the agency market look saturated to you? If yes, then the obvious answer is to niche it down, right? However, according to Cat, everybody is doing it the wrong way.
What everybody is doing
The most common way agency owners use to define who they want to work with is:
- E-commerce store owners.
- Ecom stores doing $20k/month in revenue.
- Coaches who can’t scale.
What you can do instead
The one above looks like a good starting point, but it’s just too broad.
So, here are the steps:
- Map out exactly where your clients were before they started working with you.
- Write a short story about it.
- Remember that the story has a protagonist facing insurmountable challenges.
- Abbreviate the story into one sentence (and edit it 6-10 times).
- Make sure there isn’t another agency following the same positioning.
An example: “Online coaches who are unable to drive consistent webinar registrations at a decent price point and scale beyond the $5k/month mark.”
The point is not to offer just one service, but instead to cut through the noise.
How much are all the GIFs in the world worth? About $400M, it seems!
It’s the first post-COVID purchase Facebook has made and, in true Facebook fashion, it’s turned quite a few heads.
Giphy, the most popular GIF making and sharing website in the world, will become part of the FB family of products.
Price? Reportedly, $400M. A lot? Not enough? Hard to say…
What we do know is that this gives FB access to even more behavioural data.
Owen Williams explains it very well in this piece.
“What might not be obvious, however, is that each search and GIF you send with Giphy is also a “beacon” that allows the company to track how and where the image is being shared, as well as the sentiment the image expresses.”
Giphy will give FB the ability to gather data from custom keyboards, Twitter and a bunch of other platforms where Giphy is integrated. When you put it into this perspective, the $400M price tag seems like an absolute steal!
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- Install the Admitad extension.
- Find any store marked with an AD icon in the Google, Yandex or Bing search.
- Go to the product page and copy the affiliate link from the extension. You can add SubID tags as well!
- Promote the link.
Yes, you don’t have to go through any affiliate network sign up process or approval. Just look on Google, Yandex or Bing for the brands and products you want to promote, and if you see that icon, you’re good to go!
That’s the power of the Admitad Extension. No wait time, instant access to 30k advertisers and over 60k affiliate programs from established US, European and worldwide brands like Airbnb, Adobe, Walmart, Skyscanner and more. Plus reporting such as traffic source, EPC, CVR, offer name are. at your fingertips.
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PSYCHOLOGY
Do you want to be a puppeteer?
A puppeteer for your customers’ brains, to be more specific.
Okay, that might be a bit extreme… However, here are some psychological principles to include in your marketing.
Four cognitive biases that influence behavior
Our brain has glitches as well, and it’s fairly easy to leverage a few of them:
- Anchoring effect: Since customers tend to attach more weight to the first piece of information in a sequence, after that they subconsciously alter their perception of value.
Example: Start by introducing your most expensive item. After they see that, your cheaper items still look more competitive.
- Social proof: A common one. People tend to “view a behavior as more correct” when others are engaging in the same behavior.
- Loss aversion: People put greater emphasis on a loss rather than a gain of equal value.
Example: Trial of a software. Once people start using software service, when the trial period expires the loss of that software is far more influential than the thought of acquiring something new in that first moment.
- Goal gradient: The effort we put into reaching a goal grows as we get closer to that goal. Or, in other words, “a 10-space coffee card pre-stamped twice will be completed faster than an 8 with no pre-stamps.” This can be useful to shorten the purchasing cycle.
Psychological pricing tactics
Another way to influence buying decisions is by picking the right price.
SocialMediaToday listed 29 pricing tricks, and here are a few of them:
- Choose numbers with fewer syllables: Even though people do not say the price out loud, they actually perceive phonetically short prices as cheaper.
- Use words related to small amounts: Descriptions like “low maintenance” are more appealing than “high performance”. Another example of loss aversion in action.
- Make products seem expensive to manufacture.
- Visual contrast between sales prices is powerful.
Well, all these tricks won’t make or break a business, but they’ll definitely help you get more of that green stuff.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- SEO: Are you using Google Search Console API and batch HTTP and JSON-RPC requests? Google is bidding goodbye to them and so should you.
- FACEBOOK: This article feeds your curiosity on creating newly launched FB Avatars of yourself that can be used in stickers and shares in Stories, comments and more.
- TIKTOK: Take a walk with Savannah Sanchez to get an insider look at the newly launched TikTok Creator Studio.
- ADVERTISING: On Friday we talked about the disappearing low CPMs tale and, according to CommonThreads, CPMs are now higher than they were pre-COVID-19.
- GOOGLE: The giant Gallery ads in Search, which were in beta, are being phased out by Google. Though Image extensions and dynamic image extension betas will continue.
- FACEBOOK: Facebook is starting to roll out advertising credits to its marketing allies. Depending on your budgets, you can apply here. If you’re already a partner, check your eligibility here.
BRAIN TEASER
What is the one thing you cannot imagine?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The latest example of a fake guru has been busted!
Kevin Zhang. Does that name ring a bell? He’s one of the many “gurus” out there. You know the kind… You can never seem to get rid of their ads, which follow you everywhere after you give their FB Page a curiosity-click.
We can’t exactly say we’re shocked that somebody who makes such outrageous claims and can’t actually back them up with any evidence or examples ends up getting busted as a faker. Happens all the time!
Joe Rozsa, aka Jay Rich Veyron, went through a 1hr+ “bustimonial”, looking at all the shady stuff going on behind Kevin’s practices.
If you missed seeing fake gurus get busted, this is well worth a watch.
It’s around this time that we put out our usual reminders:
- If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is.
- Do your own research and quadruple check every claim and every source.
- There’s no magic bullet. It takes work, discipline, persistence, and a bit of luck.
If you’re a full time marketer, you know this… But there are many out there who are new to this space and forget that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.