WHATSUP
New features are coming to WhatsApp
We don’t usually get many updates about WhatsApp. It’s normally the quiet child in the Facebook family, but that changed for a moment yesterday when the company announced some significant, marketer-friendly changes to its platform.
This is what’s up with WhatsApp:
- In-app shopping is getting a big upgrade. Though WhatsApp currently isn’t a hotbed for marketing and e-commerce, Facebook might be trying to change that. It’s now easier than ever for customers to view and purchase products from the platform! Here’s a video of what the new process might look like.
- It’ll be easier to manage WhatsApp messages for your business. Facebook’s new hosting infrastructure, which will roll out early next year, aims to offer businesses and marketers an easier way to keep their products up to date – and stay in touch with customers.
But the new features may come with a caveat, as the announcement stated that “we will charge business customers for some of the services we offer.” The update doesn’t clarify exactly what those are, though – only time will tell.
Google’s making it easier to sell stuff this year
We’ve received a flood of holiday marketing updates this year, and Google followed suit yesterday with a group of updates to their ad platform.
Ready to reach more customers this holiday season? See if these new updates from Google will help:
- Promotions are more visible and easier to use. All retailers in the United States can now use promotions, and promotions are going to start showing up on more surfaces across Google’s platforms. This should make it a little easier to reach a broad range of customers with your promotions.
- Optimize for new customers. There’s a new feature out in beta that’ll let you optimize your campaigns for new customers – plus, you’ll get new layout options in Smart Shopping.
- Take a deep dive into more insights. You’ll be getting new metrics on your audience, auction insights, and more with Google’s new update.
Want to pull back the curtain a little further on the new features coming to Google’s ad platform? Check out their official announcement here.
It’s almost time to get your campaigns locked in for the holiday season. Will you find a way to work Google’s updates into your strategy this year?
SPONSORED BY GENUS AI
Scale your content, creatives and storytelling using a Machine Learning and Emotional Intelligence combo
Let’s be honest.
Today, it’s easy to scale the number of interactions: click a button and send millions of emails or impressions. But it’s hard to scale the quality of these interactions.
That’s where Genus AI comes into play.
You just have to click a button to run sophisticated machine learning programs that can improve the performance of your business.
Unique content. Engaging creatives. Compelling storytelling… Sky-high ROAS!
And you just need five steps, as explained by Dr. Tadas Jucikas (Genus AI CEO and Founder):
- Connect your customer data: Connect your business critical data such as lifetime value, number of orders, activity status, channel origin, etc.
- Enrich your customer data: Genus AI will automatically enrich your customer data with thousands of in-depth external data points ranging from demographics, household structure, financial, interests and hobbies to many more.
- Archetype your customers: Score your customers with pre-built predictive models rooted in the most recent advancements in the fields of neuroscience, personality psychology and behavioral economics.
- Model your customers: With a single click of a button, Genus AI’s automated machine learning starts analyzing your historic customer data and builds hundreds of predictive models within minutes choosing the top performing models for your immediate use.
- Deploy emotional intelligence: With the creatives guidelines created by the AI, you can craft emotionally intelligent storytelling that resonates with each customer segment.
Click here to add the power of emotional intelligence to your campaigns.
BUSINESS
Should you hire an agency or a full-time employee?
The rule of thumb in the entrepreneurial world has always been “hire someone to compensate for your weaknesses”.
However, the old-fashioned idea of hiring isn’t always a beneficial move and here Rand Fishkin breaks down the perks and pitfalls of hiring a full-time employee (FTE) versus an agency or consultant.
Agencies and consultants or full-time employees: criteria to consider
+ Time to effective productivity: With agencies, productive work starts immediately. With FTEs, they generally have to go through a training period first.
+ Flexibility of cost: Firing an agency isn’t fun. But, it’s generally easier and less painful than firing an employee.
+ Emotional resources involved: Usually, managing an agency or consultant requires little emotional investment compared to managing your team.
+ Quality of strategic output: For short-term needs, the work done by a consultant can be qualitatively better since they deal with dozens of problems similar to yours every day. Although, for the long-term, hiring FTEs means creating a team of experienced people who have a deep understanding of your business.
+ Quality of tactical output: Agencies will deliver quickly. Employees, instead, will start slow. But, once they gain momentum they can outperform external resources.
Get the best of both worlds
Wanna get the benefits of both worlds?
Here’s how:
- Hire agencies early and often. If your team is used to working with outside contractors, the emotional issues (ownership of projects, trust in the team, and potential jealousy) fade.
- Contract for work that requires little to no maintenance. Content projects, SEO, digital PR, email onboarding setup, and CRO fit this bill flawlessly.
- Bring on full-time employees when you have a consistent, ongoing need for deep work in an area of either singular focus, or when you need a generalist who can regularly task-switch with competence.
- Be willing to change agencies if you’re disappointed with their work.
- Embrace the culture that firing an FTE is not a failure or a negative thing.
These are some great points. However, context is king here. Different businesses, different tasks, and different industries will require different approaches.
Take advantage of this post, but always adapt the knowledge you find to fit your situation.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: Wondering what rendering, signal collection, SEOs, and devs all have in common? Check out the latest Search off the Record Episode from Google.
SNAPCHAT: A new feature on Snapchat’s visual search options will allow you to scan food and drink labels!
FACEBOOK: Bad news travels like wildfire – or, in this case, fake news does. Check out this breakdown of why misinformation spreads so quickly on Facebook.
BIG TECH: The CEOs just can’t seem to catch a break. After a summer (and fall) of intense hearings, U.S. Congress is calling Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to testify on censorship.
FACEBOOK: Love at first like. Facebook has finally released Facebook Dating in Europe, a feature that was set back initially due to data privacy concerns.
SEO: There is a limit to how many links you should be putting on your webpages, but it’s very high – and you probably don’t need to worry about it for your site.
FACEBOOK: The day has finally arrived. Facebook announced that its oversight board will now start to hear cases about potentially mistaken content removal and censorship.
BRAIN TEASER
George, Helen, and Steve are drinking coffee. Bert, Karen, and Dave are drinking soda. Using logic, is Elizabeth drinking coffee or soda?
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 painting that’s been lost for decades was just found…
…and it was hanging on the wall in an Upper West Side apartment in New York!
Ever consider that the painting on your wall might be a rare piece that’s been lost for decades? Just this week in New York, that situation happened for a couple who had, unbeknownst to them, a long-lost painting from renowned painter Jacob Lawrence.
The painting is one of five (now, four!) missing panels from a 30-panel series about the early history of the United States.
The owner had purchased it from an art auction for a low price in 1960, and hadn’t considered that it was a rare piece until her neighbor pointed it out.
This does bring up the fact that there are still four missing panels – check your walls, everyone!