ADVERTISING
Advertising advice for the holidays
Sure, we’ve had one crazy holiday-focused advertising event this year. But what about a second?
Yeah – it’s almost Christmas. People are shopping and asking for gift ideas and panicking because they still don’t know what to get for their kids. And, advertising spend is starting to rise as last-minute Christmas orders are flooding in.
Here are a couple relevant tips for holiday advertising this year (and beyond) from Twitter’s advertising darlings:
- Mind those CPMs. Cory Dobbin recently noticed a gradual increase in CPMs on a few of his accounts. This is likely due to the last-minute Christmas ad push – so make sure you’re on top of your game this week!
- It’s meme time. Depending on your brand and product, meme-style ads may work. Dan Snow just tweeted out that in a new data set from his campaigns, meme ads outperformed the rest! Holiday-themed memes, anyone?
- Don’t underestimate unlikely demographics. Savannah Sanchez’s current top-performing demographic on TikTok is 45 to 54 year old women. Make sure you’re monitoring campaigns for unlikely wins.
Take these tips into consideration as you’re optimizing campaigns for a final week of holiday sales!
We’ve been here before
Dear Zuck,
We know Facebook has this incessant need to line up every single competitor in its sights and blast them into oblivion. But, we didn’t expect it to happen quite this fast.
Wanna slow down a bit to give us all a rest between copycat apps? Our writers can only handle so much. Yours truly,
The Crew at Stacked Marketer.
So yes, there’s another copycat in town. The tool (or app) is called Super. According to Bloomberg, it’s currently in development and would aim to take on Cameo, an existing app where people can pay celebrities for personalized messages.
Here are a few things worth noting:
- Cameo does offer some features for marketers. There are two types of Cameo videos: Promotional and Personal. If you purchase a Promotional video, you can use it for up to 3 months on your brand’s website and social media accounts. If Facebook’s Super is anything similar, it could offer some streamlined influencer features for marketers.
- Integrations with Facebook Ads are a possibility. This is Facebook we’re talking about – if they can integrate Super into their platform and encourage marketers to run influencer spend through them, they will. So, keep an eye out for that in the future.
That’s about it. We don’t know when Super is launching, if that will even be its final name, or if it’ll be a standalone app or integration with Facebook. But, we know one thing: It doesn’t look like Facebook copycat products will be going away anytime soon.
SPONSORED BY THE CREW
The coolest city in Europe
Hello there! *Obi-Wan Kenobi wave*
If you’ve been keeping up with us over the past couple of months, you’ll know that we love giving away stuff. And even though we don’t have a giveaway running right now, we’re always offering some cool (and ridiculous) prizes through our referral program.
You don’t even have to refer an army of supporters to the newsletter – it doesn’t take much to get you in that sweet, sweet rewards territory. We’re talking about rewards like:
- A personalized, framed, Stacked Marketer magazine cover with your face on it. You won’t see that in other (read: boring) referral programs.
- A Stacked Marketer backpack for when you really feel like flexing on your marketing colleagues.
- A trip to Vienna, the coolest city in Europe* to grab some schnitzel and beers with The Crew. Yeah, you will need to refer an army of supporters for this one (*and Vienna is our HQ, so we might be a little biased).
To get started, just grab your referral link here and it’s bombs away.
MARKETING
5 key steps to a $1M product launch
In June 2019, Chris Jordan had the luck to experience what’s best described as “Marketing Director’s Nirvana.”
It happened when his e-commerce client sold over $400,000 worth of new products in just 40 minutes on Kickstarter. In the following 60 days, the sales amounted to $1M in total.
And in this piece, Chris explains how every business, B2B or B2C, can project and execute similar product launches, and hopefully, make you enter the “marketing nirvana” state.
Ready for an otherworldly product launch?
Step 1 – Planning a product launch
The goal here is to outline the selling ideas, activities, and procedures your brand will use to introduce a product.
The five main points of the plan are:
- Identify your potential customers & competitors.
- Describe your product offering, key differentiators & messaging.
- Assess the viability of the product launch strategy.
- Define resources for the launch.
- Determine the most effective digital marketing channels to employ.
Step 2 – Setting S.M.A.R.T. product launch goals
S.M.A.R.T. stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Chris suggests these steps:
- Define your revenue target. Use historical data to define this number.
- Determine your Average Order Value (AOV).
- Divide your revenue target by your AOV. Now, you’ve got a target number of sales.
- Add deadlines to your KPIs for the “time-bound” element.
Step 3 – Prepare your marketing collateral
This is the collection of creative and copy assets you’ll use during the launch: Video, blog posts, press releases, email sequences, testimonials, etc.
Step 4 – Make a splash on your launch day
The weeks preceding your launch day are as important as the day of the launch. Use this time to build the hype and warm up your audiences.
Put to work all the assets you created in the previous step.
Step 5 – Keep the momentum going
If the launch went well, your goal should be to keep the launch momentum going in the days, weeks, and months. Some of the strategies Chris suggests here are:
- Run contests or giveaways.
- Use video: Host webinars, live social video or make tutorials.
- Give back to a charity your core audiences care about.
- Utilize internal linking: Link to your new product launch landing page from relevant blogs and product pages.
- Partner up on cross-promotions with non-competing brands.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
FACEBOOK: Paul Jey put together a thoughtful writeup about the FTC lawsuit against Facebook, and it fostered some discussion about just how feasible a breakup really is.
SEO: John Mueller’s always got some helpful information for SEOs. And recently, he clarified that keyword-stuffed titles are actually not against Google’s guidelines – and aren’t even considered to be problematic.
TWITTER: It’s official. Periscope is going to shut down in 2021, likely connected to Twitter’s acquisition of Squad. You can read more in a detailed post here.
SEO: Here’s a great analysis of how SEO experts feel about SEO, and what they think is necessary to do if you want to rank.
EMAIL MARKETING: Google’s had some trouble this week. If your email campaigns are having difficulties with Gmail, you’re not alone!
TWITTER: You can subtract $550k from Twitter’s bank account, due to one of Ireland’s first major GDPR decisions. It’s small potatoes for Twitter, but there could be more to come.
SEO: Google just posted an update about their Structured Data Testing Tool, stating that it will be available in an updated form later this spring with new features.
FACEBOOK: United Kingdom users are being transferred into California’s user agreement. However, current UK privacy restrictions (which track GDPR) will still apply.
BRAIN TEASER
Which capital city in the world grows the most wine within its city limits?
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.
The weirdest, coolest thing of the week
The arts and culture department at Google is always coming up with creative ideas.
This week, we got introduced to the Blob Opera. It really doesn’t need much more explanation – you get to control four singing blobs that sound like an opera when they sing all together.
And you won’t even need to understand music to write your very own Blob Opera songs. Google will handle that bit for you.
Go ahead and try it out here!