New items on the menu
The Facebook advertising platform isn’t at its best right now, but the company is still putting in some efforts to come up with new features to help marketers make more moolah.
Shall we?
- You can now feature product tags in your Instagram camps. This means that users can find and shop for products directly from your ads!
- Facebook’s letting you target users based on various types of engagement.
- Knock a couple bucks off that price. With the new update, you now have a variety of discounting options in Facebook Shop. There are plenty of options for creating custom discounts, and they can be as basic or complicated as you want to make them!
Facebook’s full announcement is here if you want to take a deep dive into everything they announced.
CONTENT MARKETING
A quick look at Grammarly’s organic search dominance
If you’ve done much writing, you’ve probably used Grammarly at some point – we sure know we have. But, did you know that the company is a content marketing and SEO giant?
Yeah. The Grammarly site pulls in more than 10M organic visitors a month, and the majority of the traffic isn’t branded. Victor Eduoh just posted a full breakdown on his site, but let’s take a quick glance at how Grammarly’s doing it:
- The Grammarly blog has more than 2,100 articles. That’s a lot of writing, but it’s translating to an exponentially bigger number of traffic for Grammarly.
- What are those articles about? You probably guessed it: Grammarly writes articles about grammar. As it turns out, simple grammar queries – such as ‘their vs. there’ – rack up millions of searches per month, resulting in a gold mine for content.
- It’s a perfect example of the traditional content marketing funnel. Grammarly creates great top-of-funnel content that answers users’ questions, and then presents Grammarly as an easier solution. Game, set, match.
The strategy has worked, too. Grammarly’s grown to 20M daily active users in 10 years, and the company has a $1B valuation. Impressed yet?
SPONSORED BY READY SET
Just in time for Black Friday: $354k worth of direct response videos at a fraction of the price
It’s the time of the year when all brands are running ads left and right, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of ads. You have to stand out! Do you agree?
What kind of ads can make you stand out? Custom-made. Live-action. Social first. Direct response. The best of both branding and performance. That’s what you need, right?
Ready Set is what we recommend. They create video ads with real actors and real stages, based on a subscription model. They’ve worked with brands like DoorDash, Coinbase, Ethos, Lovepop, Coffee Meets Bagel and that list is ever expanding.
No generic, stock-like video ads that get lost in the crowd. Ready Set gives you access to the same level of thumb-stopping video creatives unicorns have!
Whether you’re a private label e-commerce owner, dropshipper, affiliate marketer or even a full-fledged marketing agency, if you’re spending more than $250k/month on paid social you should check out Ready Set:
- Live-action ads (real actors and real studios) that usually cost up to $350k+ made for just a fraction of the cost.
- Social first videos, not just a cut-down TV ad whether that is FB, IG, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn and even TikTok. The right creative for the right platform.
- Coming from Airbnb and Nanigans, they know how to combine brand and growth in every video.
- A variety of long, short and medium videos with different value propositions to hit your target.
Have a look at these awesome examples.
ADVERTISING
Just a waste of budget?
If this newsletter had a comment section, this post would probably ignite some heated debates. But, it doesn’t – so if you’ve got something to say, shoot us a reply to this email with your thoughts!
Savannah Sanchez started the thread, and the idea is:
Stop wasting dollars on Branded Search campaigns. According to Savannah, you should spend just enough so that your ads are covering 90% of the search impression share.
So, the idea isn’t to completely stop spending, but instead, not pouring all your budget to target branded terms.
The Crew’s take? The advertising world is neither black nor white. It’s grey with thousands of shades, and this isn’t a reference to that movie. Every scenario requires different approaches.
What we would suggest doing is testing and measuring the results. Don’t end up like eBay that was burning $20M per year to target the word “eBay” on Google, just to find out later with a test that it was a waste of money.
And this blog post by Ian Barnard tells you how to do it:
- Change your attribution model in Google Ads to last-click
- Pause all your branded search campaigns
- After a day or two have a look at your Search conversions
If the Branded Search conversions have now been transferred to Organic Search, then it means you can pause the Branded Search campaigns.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
TWITTER: There’s a better way to create tweets for ad campaigns now – Twitter’s new update makes the process easier and more intuitive.
FACEBOOK: Rushing to get some creatives approved? Pamela Lund cautions that the creative approval process is very slow right now, so make sure you’re getting everything prepped well in advance.
GOOGLE: As Google continues to make changes – for the better or worse – to the way keywords and phrases are shown in ads, it’s important now more than ever to proactively identify negative keywords.
FACEBOOK: Look out, Nextdoor. Facebook is starting to test a new platform, called Neighbors, that encourages you to interact with your local community – opening the door for plenty of not-so-neighborly debates, but also potential marketing to local communities.
GOOGLE: Trends is a powerful tool to see what people are talking about on Google, but have you thought about using it for YouTube? This guide provides a solid process.
PAYMENTS: PayPal breaks the news announcing it will allow users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies. If you’re a seller, this means you can accept payments in virtual coins.
BRAIN TEASER
If a rooster laid a brown egg and a white egg, what kind of chicks would hatch?
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.
Quibi quickly quits
Yes, it’s over. The short-form mobile-focused streaming service is shutting down.
It had all the ingredients for success: experienced team, plenty of funding and a demand for short-form videos (if we’re to look at social media apps like TikTok).
This was not enough.
Perhaps it was the timing, perhaps it was the idea, perhaps it was the team…
Whichever it was, Quibi will always be remembered… for the wrong reasons.