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Making it easier for you to show off in the holiday season
Kinda…
So FB is bringing some easy to use features to enhance your visuals for the holiday season. They don’t mean just winter holidays, they have it for any time of the year basically – just that they launched it in time for the Q4 fever.
First off, you now have more overlays for dynamic ads. These let you add price and discount… Now they’ve been expanded and you can build templates for things like Black Friday a Summer Sale or whatever else that comes to your mind. Easy peasy!
Secondly, Facebook will be bringing some holiday templates in their video creation kit. Expect plenty of red and green for Christmas.
Last but not least – collection ads.
You will soon be able to direct customers from the ad to what is now called “instant storefront template”. This was the product template in Canvas before. This allows you to organize your product catalogue better, with stuff like “Suggested for You” and “Most Viewed”. To us, it sounds like another move to get you to sell directly on FB and not take people out of the app.
Aside from that, Facebook also automatically generates a video for you, personalized with your products. This is probably not something that will scale your business but it’s useful to make quick tests. Now you won’t have to create your own video, FB does it for you with a few clicks.
E-COMMERCE
Instant payouts for PayPal businesses
With Funds Now, money from your completed sales will be available in your PayPal balance within seconds – even during a dispute – at no extra cost to you.
Sounds great. Who is eligible for Funds Now?
Your PayPal business account needs to have a strong 6+ months sales history and your account information needs to be confirmed.
PayPal mentions that delays may still occur if you’ve received a payment from a fraudulent buyer to protect your account.
GENERAL
Should you outsource marketing?
That sounds a bit far-fetched given that just about everyone reading this is a marketer in one way or the other… So you probably want to BE HIRED by someone else to run their ads.
Whichever side of the business you are on, we think this post by Depesh in the Facebook Ads Experts Academy has some good advice.
First off, you should not have the expectation that you can just have a “plug and play” relationship. Whether you are hiring the agency or you are the agency, you have to learn about each other’s business and work style.
Depesh thinks it takes about 6 weeks to build that relationship. That’s obviously just an approximation.
If you’re the one hired, make sure you have a plan for getting out the information you need from the client. Ask them about their niche, audience, strategy, etc. On the flipside, if you’re hiring an agency, prepare to give them all this information. It will help both of you.
Have a pre-agreed trial period of like 30 days, where both sides can call it quits if things don’t work out as expected.
If you’re hiring an agency, make sure you constantly update them on the changes you make, like creating a new website, adding new apps to your Shopify store, and so on.
One extra lesson that we learned
Explaining this from both sides is a neat way to also offer your own services. In the post, Depesh does mention that his agency is looking for more clients but the call to action is short and subtle, plus it’s after a post that offers some very relevant advice.
So, the lesson is: If you have valuable information to share, your call-to-action will seem much less intrusive!
Thoughts on communities from Paul Jeyapal
In this post, Paul Jeyapal, one of our dinner guests for our giveaway, talks about brand positioning and building a community around your brand.
The cliffs…
Align yourself with a cause you genuinely believe in and position your brand that it can have a meaningful impact for that cause.
Bring like-minded people who care for the cause together and push the community forward, even if your company doesn’t immediately benefit from it.
Check out the full post to see the examples of companies who do a really good job at this!
Two-thirds of people don’t know this, do you?
You search for something on Google and links come up. Pretty normal, right? But do you know which ones are paid? Or do you assume that the first links are “the most relevant”?
Back in 2016, a study done by VARN revealed that out of 1010 UK based respondents, 50% of them couldn’t tell the difference between an ad and an organic search result. Their latest survey was more surprising.
This number rose to 58.9% in 2017, increasing further when we split the results based on age. People older than 65 couldn’t say if the result was an ad or not 67.8% of the time. But why does this happen? Do we become moreoblivious to ads?
What really happened, was Google itself changed some properties of ads, which made them even less distinguishable. Google ads had a yellow “Ad” label and ads were also featured on the right side of the search result screen.
But Google thought it was too obvious, and knew people wouldn’t click on ads. So, changed the yellow label to green, and featured ads were put to sleep. This still wasn’t enough.
The green label is nowadays white, with a green “Ad” text next to the green URL. That’s why ads on Google searches are harder to distinguish than ever before.
VARN also has some advice for everyone interested in building an e-commerce business with Google AdWords:
“The key to a successful AdWords campaign is having the right strategy in place, and this means carrying out keyword research, optimizing ads, maximizing ROI and constantly testing and evaluating the success of your campaigns to see where you should be investing.”
Google surely doesn’t want ads to be easily seen, in fact, they will most probably hide them even better. We can only wait what the big G has in store for us.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Kicking cancer’s butt
This is pretty far from a marketing topic but that’s why we have the Poolside Chat, right?
And the news is pretty darn good – researchers have seen really good promise from a new cancer vaccine. It has shown the ability to ward off and stop the return of aggressive cancer cells in mice. Yep, just mice for now.
And, just a particularly aggressive form of melanoma. In case you didn’t know, cancer is very broad, many types, with different reactions – that’s one reason it’s so difficult to treat. It’s almost never the same.
Anyway, the research comes from Dale Boger and Bruce Beutler.
That’s all we are sharing about it. If you do wanna read the much more science-y version of it, you can check out the news right here.
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