MARKETING
What’s trending?
The biggest trend right now seems to be releasing reports on what’s trending… But jokes aside, every little extra piece of information on this helps and today is Facebook’s turn (again) with emerging trends in e-commerce and digital.
It’s not just one report, but fifteen! A global edition and a report for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, The Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, UK, US and Vietnam.
What do these reports look at?
User behavior, mostly, with some conclusions and lessons for marketers. Let’s look at some examples from some of our favorite stats in the reports:
- Live shopping (QVC-style) is growing. Saudi Arabia (where 56% of users tried live shopping), Indonesia (38%) and Vietnam (34%) stand out, but this format is expected to grow everywhere. It’s pretty much one of the best types of content an e-commerce store can create, right?
- 90% of people surveyed are looking to “simplify their life”, or in other words, they are seeking more convenience and 86% are willing to pay for it. This is especially strong in The Philippines, Vietnam and Nigeria where it’s 93% who are willing to pay (rather than the average 86% from the global report).
- 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups. This just reinforces the idea that the Groups feature is one of the strongest Facebook provides right now and brands should learn to leverage it.
If you’re looking to dig in deeper, perhaps in one of the specific geos, head over to Facebook’s report right here.
LinkedIn Bluepri… Umm, Marketing Labs!
LinkedIn is not the ad platform that first comes to mind for most media buyers (not for us, either). That doesn’t mean they’re not working at improving it.
Their next step is their launch of Marketing Labs. If you’re familiar with Facebook Ads, you can think of it as LinkedIn’s version of Blueprint. On-demand content tailored for different marketers of all strokes.
Inside, you’ll find lessons on:
- Using LinkedIn’s ad targeting.
- Building a full-funnel content marketing strategy on LinkedIn.
- Using LinkedIn for lead generation.
If your audience is hanging out on LinkedIn, we’d definitely recommend going through at least some of these lessons. Let’s not forget LinkedIn is clearly the biggest business-focused social network out there.
SEO
21 smart SEO tips for 2021
If boosting your organic search traffic made your 2021 goals list, then you’ll want to read this post written by Cyrus Shepard.
He shared 21 SEO tips for 2021, and there’s some great, actionable advice to be taken.
Plus… 2021, 21 tips… We see what you did there, Cyrus.
The tips are split into four main areas: increasing clicks, content and on-page SEO, technical SEO, and link building.
Shall we?
+ Increasing clicks:
- Favicon optimization: Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they’re high contrast and pretty.
- Numbers in titles: According to a recent study, showing dates in the title increased ranking for a particular brand. However, don’t be spammy about it. Add the date only if it makes sense.
- FAQ and how-to schema: FAQ schema gives you a lot of SERP real estate.
+ Content and on-page SEO:
- Relaunch top content: Look into your old top content over the last two to five years, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, keeping it on the same URL.
- Increase internal linking: There are probably some unexplored opportunities for link building on your site!
- Remove unnecessary links: Do you really need a link to your team page on every page of your website? Do you need a link to your contact form on every page of your website? In many cases, you don’t. By removing the unnecessary links, you can pass more link equity through the links that actually count.
+ Technical SEO:
- Core Web Vitals: This is the year of Core Web Vitals, and we discussed more about them here.
- Limit sitemaps to 10,000: You are allowed to use up to 50,000 sitemaps per website URL. But Cyrus suggested limiting it to 10,000.
+ Link building:
- Passive link acquisition: This is about creating content that passively earns links as people discover it in the SERPs.
- Page-level link intersect: Find web pages that link to at least two of your competitors, but not to you. This means they’re generally a resource page, and if they’re linking to your competitors, they’re likely to link to you as well.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
YOUTUBE: An experiment that allows creators to add certain products to their videos launched yesterday. Maybe live shopping is also part of YouTube’s future?
INSTAGRAM: According to Alessandro Paluzzi’s tweet, Instagram might soon allow users to hide likes and view counts for individual posts.
YOUTUBE: The video platform has taken some important steps forward with its Ads Data Hub, a solution meant to provide privacy-centric measurement on YouTube.
FACEBOOK: Is this the answer to all iOS 14 worries? Nana Gilbert-Baffoe tweeted suggesting what the solution for cross site tracking (that still follows Apple’s privacy standards) could be. Worth a read!
BRAIN TEASER
What do a room full of married people and an empty room have in common?
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.
“Oops, wrong phone…”
That’s what Samsung’s social media team must be thinking right about now.
When tweeting about Samsung’s major “Unpacked” event, their social media team used an iPhone.
It’s not the first (and probably not the last) time that this has happened. In fact, the “via Twitter for iPhone” has been a hilariously common mistake.
Usually, though, it’s celebrities promoting non-Apple phones who slip up. Rarely do we see the actual phonemaker falling into the same trap…
This happens so often, though, that we can’t help but wonder if this has turned into one of those regular, intentional “oopsies” that serve to get more media attention.
We know many of you readers out there aren’t afraid to try viral tactics–was this one of you?!