Business Suite has arrived
Facebook just announced an all-in-one business manager named Business Suite, and it’s the feature that many small businesses have been looking for.
Business Suite can do a lot of things – let’s see what it can do for you:
- You can see messages and notifications from Facebook and Instagram in the same place. Business Suite lets you manage your messages between both Facebook and Instagram in one place, which is useful for businesses that have a lot of back-and-forth with customers.
- Draft and schedule posts. You’ll be able to draft, schedule, and publish posts to both Facebook and Instagram from Business Suite.
- Get cross-platform insights. Facebook says that Business Suite will provide access to reach, engagement, and post performance statistics across both Facebook and Instagram.
The Business Suite update wasn’t the only thing we got from Facebook yesterday, though. The company also released a survey of small businesses that provides some insights on how the pandemic is affecting sales. Here were a few of the biggest insights:
- Almost half of small businesses are making more than 25% of their sales through online channels. E-commerce just continues to grow, and the survey from Facebook shows just how integral online sales have become for many small businesses.
- Digital sales are at an all-time high – but you probably knew that. Still, 38% of SMBs surveyed on Facebook made more than 50% of their sales through digital channels in the last 30 days, which is a significant number.
Yesterday, we chatted about why retail isn’t dead yet. That being said, these numbers are strong signals that e-commerce is going to become more integral to our society than ever.
What’s next?
We’re heading into the final stretch of 2020. As humans, we couldn’t be happier – but as marketers, that means there’s a lot of work to be done in the busy season ahead.
Yesterday, Pinterest released some key trends from their platform on current interests. Whether you’re looking for campaign and content ideas or you just want to know what people are interested in, this is a great read.
The whole post is here, but we’ll go ahead and break down the key bits below:
- Positivity and mental health topics continue to gain traction. Interest in mental health and positivity surged at the beginning of most lockdowns, but the data from Pinterest shows that interest is still increasing for these types of topics.
- Bedrooms are being renovated. If you sell anything that could be used as bedroom décor, you’re in luck. Searches for ‘Zen bedroom layout’ are up 500% from normal, and searches for ‘hippie bedroom décor’ has soared 1,900%.
- Men’s interest in home improvement projects is up 78%. Yes, men use Pinterest, and they’re focused on touching up their homes. This is a good piece of information, depending what kind of products you sell or advertise.
The Crew’s take: These statistics from Pinterest confirm one important idea – though (in some ways) the world is trying to get back to normal, the habits and interest that grew over the lockdowns are still gaining traction.
In other words, the changes in customer behavior that we’ve seen lately aren’t going away anytime soon. As Bear Grylls would say: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome.
SEO
If you don’t do it, your competitors will
If you like low hanging fruit (aka easy clicks), then you should consider competitive SEO.
Competitive SEO is all the content you see for “alternative” and “vs” searches.
To make it clear, it’s targeting those keywords like “Stacked Marketer alternatives” (but you’d never betray our trust like that, would you?).
Ranking for such keywords is powerful because you catch prospects in two crucial moments:
- When they’re customers of one of your competitors and they’re looking for an alternative.
- When they’re evaluating your service but they still need more information to decide.
Kevin Indig just broke down three best practices to do competitive SEO executed by three different companies.
Competitive SEO: 3 companies that do it well
1) Wondershare Filmora: This is a video editing software, and its main competitor is Adobe Premiere Pro.
Their strategy here is attacking Adobe Premiere’s documentation, creating several pages illustrating how to use Adobe Premiere.
Adobe ‘s documentation is weak, and Wondershare Filmora is feasting on Adobe’s laziness.
An example is an article that Filmora created called “How to create split-screen in Adobe Pro”.
It has zero backlinks, but ranks for 160 keywords! Zooming out to the bigger picture, Wondershare Filmora’s site ranks for all sorts of keywords that Adobe should be ranking for, too.
In these pages, they not only add CTAs to their own products but even videos on how to do the same thing with Wondershare Filmora – a great way to use their competitor’s popularity to their advantage.
2) ConvertKit: Their strategy is smart. They created a landing page titled “5 Reasons You Should NOT Switch From MailChimp To ConvertKit”.
Weird? We’d say smart… It’s not reverse psychology, but rather highlighting their values in opposition to Mailchimps’ ones. The idea is basically: “ConvertKit is not for everyone, and this is why”.
3) Wistia: The video platform made a “Wistia vs Youtube” article that ranks #1 on Google. Imagine beating Google at their own game…
How to develop a competitive SEO strategy
Here’s an easy process:
- Find your competitors from a searcher’s perspective. So, with queries such as “alternatives” or “vs”.
- Build a landing page for each competitor’s alternative. Show a detailed comparison and don’t forget to add a CTA.
- Identify weak points in the documentation or landing pages of your competitors.
There’s one more step though: Hope that your competitors don’t read this piece by Kevin Indig.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: Word on the street is Google’s recent move to eliminate visibility on a large portion of search terms wasn’t made for privacy reasons. But instead to drive up CPCs for advertisers. If that was the goal, it’s working, as revealed in this tweet.
SOCIAL MEDIA: There was an outage on Facebook and Instagram yesterday, but it only lasted for about 25 minutes. If you advertise on either of these platforms, you probably noticed some big issues with ad delivery during that time frame.
TIKTOK: It’s IPA season. Wait, no, we mean IPO (but an IPA would be great right about now). And, true to form for the news that’s come out lately, it’s rumored that TikTok may be filing within the next year.
SHOPIFY: The CTO of Shopify confirmed yesterday that the company is working on a process to streamline the checkout process with subscriptions and subscription apps.
TIKTOK: Ready for a TikTok update? Here’s what you need to know – Walmart is reportedly going to be included in the Oracle deal, ByteDance will likely retain ownership, and the U.S. government still isn’t sure whether it will approve the deal or not.
YOUTUBE: Mozilla just created an add-on which looks to crowdsource user data about YouTube in hopes of uncovering more about how its algorithm works. Stay tuned!
SEO: Google will start crawling HTTP/2 starting this fall, the company announced yesterday. This is a big update and it should make crawling faster on some sites.
BRAIN TEASER
How would you arrange the letters in the words “new door” to make one word?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
A reality show where space is the prize
We live in a world where people launch themselves into space in metal contraptions at thousands of miles per hour and it’s pretty much a normal thing at this point.
That being said, very few people have actually been able to partake in that crazy-fast rocket trip – but you might get a chance if you get to participate in a new reality show.
The show’s called “Space Hero,” though we don’t know yet what the final product will look like.
What we do know, though, is that we’re probably not the only ones who would love to participate in a competition where space is the prize.
Think you’ve got what it takes?