Within the last year, marketers have had to embrace all the new changes with open arms and adapt to all at the same time. With these transformations, our NoGood team was able to tweak and optimize marketing plans, knowing what does and doesn’t work so our campaigns became far more agile, responsive, and targeted. There’s already talk of new and exciting changes in the digital world and how that will impact an organization’s ability to communicate with its audiences. See below our breakdown of 2022’s key growth marketing trends.

1. Leveraging UGC for Growth

We are all aware of the “mobile-first” direction that we keep shifting towards as a society, and as our cellular plans keep getting more sophisticated (hello, 5G!), video streaming is easier than ever on smartphones and tablets. This is also why TikTok continues to grow more and more as time goes on: you can record videos anywhere and watch them at any time. TikTok has shifted the landscape of social media away from status updates and curated photo grids in favor of short video posts – and has been wildly successful in doing so.

Many brands are still operating under the misconception that TikTok is purely an app for frivolous lip-syncing content for tweens. In reality, there are thousands of communities on TikTok and users are flocking to them for everything from entertainment, activism, storytelling, tutorials, how-to guides, and more. It’s a UGC goldmine.

Since the platform relies heavily on different kinds of user-generated trends that involve music, graphics, or lip-syncing, it’s an easy, budget-friendly way for brands to jump on the bandwagon of trending content and incorporate these into promotions for their products or services. The cost of content creation is super low since it thrives on more organic content.

TikTok’s organic reach is unparalleled when compared to other social media platforms. Add to that the fact that 50% of the top brands do not have a presence on TikTok, and what you’re looking at, is a level playing field full of opportunity. And there’s no other content type that’s more authentic than UGC from your customers.

Here are a few tips to prepare for a more video-centric marketing world:

1. Invest time in producing high-quality video content for your brand. You can use a video maker tool to assist you.
2. Get active on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels.
3. Collect user-generated content by encouraging customers to capture their purchases.
4. Allocate more of your budget to video production.

As mentioned above, UGC or User-Generated Content (which can be frequently spotted on TikTok and other social media platforms), is used across all stages of the buyer’s journey to help influence engagement and increase conversions. Nowadays, brands have to fight to be seen online, and competition is fierce for audience attention. As a result, buyers are more selective about the brands they interact with and purchase from, especially the notoriously fickle Gen-Z.

2. Demand for Social Responsibility

Consumers look for brands that practice what they preach and align with their values. If you’re looking for customer loyalty and lasting respect from users, you need to be an authentic brand. Allow all individuals and groups to recognize themselves in your marketing efforts and know they can connect with your business.

With the current socio-political environment, modern-day consumers take into consideration social responsibility, ethics, and transparency.

Sonia Thompson, ​​CEO of Thompson Media Group, explains: “Truly inclusive brands walk the walk at every level. That means building an inclusive culture, building inclusive teams, developing deep degrees of customer intimacy with the diverse customers you serve, and having quality relationships within their communities as well.”
The interest in buying products from socially responsible and inclusive brands grew exponentially during the different global events of 2020 and 2021. Research from McKinsey shows that customers have a higher probability of purchasing from and supporting a brand that demonstrates their care for all customers, employees, and shared causes. When testing out messaging for social responsibility, rapid experimentation is your best friend here – this also allows marketers to be more agile. By testing creativity and messaging in different formats across core audiences and gaining insight and data rather quickly and pivot when needed. However, keep in mind that social responsibility may not sell products immediately, showing a sense of social responsibility is still both thoughtful and effective long-term play.

3. Life After iOS14

iOS14 is now a thing of the past — Apple’s devices have already moved on to iOS15+ (that is if you’ve updated your software!). However, the frenzy of all of the iOS14 impacts on marketers has just begun to settle. Since the majority of marketers weren’t able to track audience behaviors anymore, ads in turn were less personalized, meaning they were less effective. This meant marketers had a much smaller audience pool to target and overall less accurate reporting. But fear not: we have a detailed Post iOS14 Strategy article, as well as a TL;DR version on how to approach targeting post-iOS 14:

• Diversify Spending: shift ad spends that had a previous majority allocation to Facebook to other platforms like Google since there is the remarketing ability to target users based on search intent.
• Report on Facebook success with Google Analytics: since we’re not saying to nix Facebook altogether, just use a different method to report on Facebook conversions. By using UTMs Google Analytics can track some of the activity from Facebook campaigns.
• Use First-Party data for lookalikes and retargeting: strategies using LALs or retargeting an existing customer list have always proven strong results. The new privacy updates across all of big tech will allow for marketers to begin focusing on gathering their data, which is much stronger.
• Use other advertising routes: by diversifying your advertising channels across other established platforms advertisers will not be as reliant on the big ad platforms such as Google and Facebook.

4. Branded Audio Content Is Reshaping Marketing

Brand marketers who include digital audio have a unique opportunity to reach a truly immersed audience—and create a competitive edge. The benefit of using digital audio in your marketing efforts? Digital audio can go wherever the listener takes it. Spotify listeners soundtrack their days with their favorite music and podcasts, spending up to 2.5 hours a day listening across devices. Digital audio content complements, rather than detracts, from people’s activities.

People listen to Spotify almost everywhere—in the car, gym, office, and even in the shower. It is more possible now than ever to understand how people stream across devices throughout their day and deliver the most relevant message at the right moment.

Understanding an audience’s context and taking an audience-first approach to brand marketing strategy will help brands show up in the moments that count—for both the target listener and the product or service. Spotify’s research shows that listeners prefer when an ad recognizes their listening moment, mood, or context. Not only does this make for an uninterrupted listener experience, but contextually relevant ads can make a brand more memorable.

As audio content becomes much more common in the online world, marketers are now also looking to shift their ads towards a more audio-first format to benefit their brands. Although most audio platforms might not have great monetizing features or conversion paths at the moment, they still provide the engagement and brand awareness companies need.

Spotify now offers a paid subscription platform for podcasters that gives them maximized revenue, wide reach, and discoverability.

This feature is available to creators through Anchor and allows podcasters to mark episodes as subscriber-only and publish them to Spotify and other podcast-listening platforms. Through 2022, this program will come at no cost to the creator, meaning that participating creators receive 100% of their subscriber revenues (excluding payment transaction fees). Starting in 2023, Spotify plans to introduce a competitive 5% fee for access to this tool.

Adding audio to your marketing mix will expand your content marketing strategy and even increase your website SEO. Google is now starting to rank podcasts on the search results page (SERP). Hence, having podcasts or videos embedded in your page can help increase your ranking potential. Also, consider transcribing your podcasts into blog posts to help voice searches pick up on the more natural speaking language.

5. Social Commerce

Global eCommerce sales grew 30% in 2021 and we just continue to see new ways emerge to allow content to be “shoppable.” We see this with Instagram offering discounts on in-app purchases and ITV’s shoppable episodes where consumers can purchase items directly through a TV show/episode.

The experience customers have with a company matters, people are looking for a shopping experience that is quick, easy to navigate, and efficient. It all starts with a compelling ad with enticing content, from there it should be as easy as click, shop and pay. If you don’t get the conversion on the first touch, you always have retargeting! Integrating these principles and ensuring that content on social media is shopper-friendly is absolutely essential:

• Website/shop is speedy
• Utilizes a user-friendly UX
• Is 100% mobile-friendly (most customers shop via their smartphones!)
• Has clear purchasing instructions so users won’t leave before buying, thinking “It’s too complicated!”
• Offer immediate and easily accessible customer support

Modern customers aren’t always known for their patience, but brands and organizations like Amazon can now deliver lightning-fast checkout experiences. A simple, fast checkout experience means fewer abandoned carts, a higher sales conversion rate, and happier customers.

For example, Shopify’s partnership with TikTok is likely the first of many integrations with eCommerce platforms. Merchants can connect their TikTok Business account to Shopify to generate in-feed shoppable posts from videos. Once signed up with TikTok for Business, brands can create any of the following:

• In-feed ads: native-looking videos that appear in the user’s feed.
• Pre-roll ads: videos that start when a user opens the app.
• Promoted hashtag challenges: videos encouraging users to submit clips using a custom hashtag. This is best for brand awareness – Pepsi’s #ThatsWhatILike campaign is a perfect example; it resulted in over 13 billion views and reflected the TikTok trends by encouraging silly, fun, and viral videos that included Pepsi.

6. Increased Adaption in Voice Search

We are all familiar with Alexa, Siri, and Google’s virtual assistance. Not only do these digital assistants answer short, informational queries like “Who is our First Lady?” and “What are the fashion trends of 2022?” but these VA’s can now also process more local, conversational, and customized searches such as “Where’s a nearby coffee shop I can work from today?” Voice is also expected to be a $40 billion channel by 2022. Implementing voice search tactics allows marketers to empower users to get the answers they want and need.

The Smart-speaker market has continued to make noise as well. An estimated 55% of American households were expected to own a smart speaker in 2022 (Juniper Research), and that figure should keep climbing as 5G networks come online. By 2022, 70% of consumers are expected to be using voice to shop instead of going to brick-and-mortar stores.

Voice searching isn’t just convenient for consumers; it’s tied to vastly improving revenue across businesses. The outlook for businesses’ adopting voice search in a variety of ways is a continuing trend:

• 71% of executives at companies believe voice search will improve the overall online user experience; 66% say it can help drive conversion rates and boost revenue
• Most (three-quarters) businesses say they’ve already realized quantifiable benefits from voice- or chat-assistant initiatives. Those benefits have included a 20%+ reduction in customer-service costs
• Voice-driven shopping is expected to hit $40 billion (way up from $2 billion) by 2022
• In 2030, the global AI-based and voice recognition market should reach $27.3 billion

Context and conversational search are now essential as voice search continues to evolve. Marketers need to thoughtfully incorporate a voice search strategy into their websites and double down on excellent content, written in a conversational tone.

It is important to understand that people who type a query, and people who ask questions into voice search, are often two different types of people. The “typer” might be OK with doing research, while the “talker” typically wants quick answers and instant results. Both types of people should be considered.

1. Understand Your Type of Customer & Device Behavior

2. Focus on Conversational Keywords

3. Create Compelling Persona-Based Content

4. Provide Context with Schema Markup (And get acquainted with schema markup, if you aren’t already.)

5. Build Pages That Answer FAQs

6. Think Mobile & Think Local

7. The Use and Expansion of Crypto in Marketing

Cryptocurrency has skyrocketed: thanks to everyone from Elon Musk to that kid from high school that won’t stop posting about it on Facebook. While still only used by a niche U.S. audience, accepting cryptocurrency now could help brands attract new customers—but only if the demographic is the right fit, said Andrea Chapman, marketing manager at cannabis site Nature and Bloom.

Here are some thoughts on how crypto could factor into marketing moving forward:

• Payments: Crypto credit cards (like those offered by Coinbase, Crypto.com, BlcokFi…), the ability to pay with crypto on PayPal, buy now, pay later (BNPL) platforms like Klarna integrating Safello (just to name a few). The payments category is ever-changing, and will absolutely have a material impact on how products and services engage customers.
• Analytics: Data analytics is paramount to the digital marketing revolution. The ability for marketers to leverage it shows tremendous potential in a decentralized ecosystem. The use cases for oracles like Chainlink, querying tools such as The Graph and onChain analytics have only scratched the surface of their potential for brand marketers.
• Content creation: Important here as well as in every other aspect of marketing right now. The rights of content creators and publishers have long been a hot button in the marketing ecosystem. Projects like Audius are demonstrating how a decentralized ledger has the potential to be a gamechanger in protecting copyrights, giving consumers more choice in how they pay for and consume content, and how content is stored and distributed.

• Social media: Twitter recently announced an executive role to spearhead its “BlueSky” exploratory for a decentralized standard for social media. Facebook is purportedly piloting a stablecoin-based digital currency of its own, “Diem”. Social media and content marketing have, arguably, been at the forefront of the brand marketing playbook over the past five years, and there isn’t much evidence to suggest that would change with crypto.
• Loyalty: Loyalty/customer relationship management programs, which often struggle with creating a “currency” to deliver as a reward to motivate true behavior change vs. merely defending defection, will find an entirely new avenue to go down in NFTs. Projects like Cryptibles and Enjin are offering them. Also, as experiences outpace “stuff” as a coveted reward for loyalty, the promise of NFTs for “digital tickets” to unique experiences like that offered by Microsoft, collectible trading and auctions, and the ability to connect in-person events with a digital experience is an exciting prospect to consider.

8. Tapping Into Extended Reality

Experiential marketing allows audiences to step into an immersive experience that is often in a physical place.

Brands like TOMS Shoes, TopShop, Oreo, Sephora, and IKEA also already successfully use these technologies for marketing purposes. IKEA, for example, created the app IKEA Place, in which AR technology allows in-store shoppers to virtually place items into actual physical living spaces. AR technology enables consumers to imagine how products look and feel before buying them. As you can imagine, this “hands-on” experience can drastically increase buying consideration and drive sales.

AR provides a unique experience to the customers. Because this technology can be used through mobile, customers can find it easier to adapt and it will be convenient for enterprises to promote their business, products and increase sales.

XR can also have a significant role in engaging customers. For example, a shopper chooses a product, but might not be too sure about whether or not to purchase it. With XR technology, they can have “hands-on” experience with the product beforehand. These technologies ensure they have virtual experiences but are still engaging with the real world.

Additionally, these technologies have opened the door to personalized ad experiences that are unique to every individual – think programmatic advertising, messaging, and marketing at the individual level. Getting in on the ground level with these technologies as they take on a more prominent role in consumers’ lives is an advantage to be considered for the future.

Immersive experiences that involve VR/AR are fun, effective, and highly shareable on social media. And now, with the rapid growth and much easier accessibility of VR/AR, more and more marketers are adding this technology to their marketing strategy. The pros of integrating VR and AR into your marketing are that they provide a drastic competitive advantage. You’ll be interacting with your target audience in a truly unique way. Looking for a fun and simple way to delve into AR? A business card can become interactive by highlighting contact information in creative ways by looking at it through AR technology. For a more immediate start, social media apps like Instagram let anyone create AR filters to share with their audience.
Looking for a fun and simple way to delve into AR? A business card can become interactive by highlighting contact information in creative ways by looking at it through AR technology. For a more immediate start, social media apps like Instagram let anyone create AR filters to share with their audience.

For now, you should be up to speed on some of the incoming growth marketing trends for 2022. However, always keep in mind that growth marketing, especially growth marketing trends, is and are an ever-evolving space and something that became a trend can just as fast become a thing of the past. But if you’re trying to consistently keep up with growth marketing trends, be sure to sign up for our NoGood newsletter where we can send insights and marketing trends directly to your inbox!

The post Growth Marketing Trends to Follow in 2022 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

From the initial set-up and to the initial launch, we will lay out the most impactful processes we apply when working with multi-million dollar eCommerce brands.

1. Create a Buyer Persona

Understanding your audience is by far, and with no competition, the most important part of your launch. The level of knowledge you hold about your ideal customer will make or break the success of your brand.

Buyer Personas are a dynamic layout of who your ideal audience is. They allow us to conceptualize the traits and behaviors your ideal customers express in their lives.

You should use buyer personas to make calculated assumptions about:– Where to market our products first?

• Where to market your products first
• Where your customers consume content
• What sites your customers visit
• What other behaviors your customers exhibit online
• What challenges your customers face, and how you can solve them

Breakdown of a Buyer Persona 

Demographic Information

• Job Status, 
• Marital Status, 
• Gender, Age
• Income Level
• Communication preferences (call, text, email)

Motivational Information

• What keeps them up at night?
• What challenges do they face?
• How can you solve their issues?

Rebuttal Information

• Testimonials describing their problem
• Common objections related to solving the problem

Messaging Information

•  Product benefits to solve their problem
• Elevator pitch to describe how this solves their problem

Every section in our buyer’s persona can be a clue into how we should establish our targeting, and how we should position our product. This ensures we are speaking our audience’s language, so they know we understand them – and can solve the issues they are having with our product or service.

As with every business, there must be a real value proposition for the customer – if there is no value for the customer then you should consider changing your product to meet the demands of the market a.k.a your customers.

Note: Your business may have multiple audiences in which case you will need to create a buyer’s persona around them individually to understand what separates your audiences. This will help align your product benefits and positioning across different audiences.

Tools to help create a buyer persona 

Many resources can help you craft your buyer’s persona, for instance on Facebook. Inside your ads manager, within the Audience Insights tab – you can sort audiences by location, gender, interests, pages they follow, and more.

Audience Insights can contextualize what behaviors your potential customers are making, so you can easily refine your buyer’s personas.

Additionally, for Google marketing – consider researching In-Market Audiences.

Most marketing platforms will provide resources so you can make informed decisions about your ideal audiences so make sure to leverage thorough research before launching!

 Need Help Optimizing Your Ecommerce Business for Conversions?

2. Develop Product Messaging & Positioning

Now that we have a baseline understanding of who our potential customers are; where they may be engaging online, and what problems they face – we can craft our messaging to address and hopefully (if your product is tried and true) solve their problems.

As mentioned before, a value proposition must exist for a business to succeed – otherwise, there won’t be a product-market fit. Product-market fit will dictate whether or not customers care to purchase your product, whether they will repeat purchase – all tying back to the value proportion your business serves to offer them.

The good news is, product messaging and positioning is subjective – so you can test many different ways to illustrate what your product does, what problem it solves, and why customers should buy it. So long as you stay true to your core business offering, do not overhype or oversell your value – customers will experience the business for themselves and make a vivid conclusion as is, so we don’t want to tell them about something we don’t have or offer.

While there may not be a “right way”, there is surely a wrong way. The way you position your brand or products will affect how your customers see you, so it’s crucial to align your messaging with the ethos of your company.

Consumers care about who they purchase from, and the more connected you can make them feel – the better! Focus on balancing your value proportions and your company’s ethos – you want to be tactical in showing consumers your product but you need to leave room to tell them who you are as well.

Note: Don’t just sell, sell, sell! People also want to know why you exist, who you are, why your company started, your charitable causes, etc.

Once we have done enough brainstorming we may begin sorting out the rest of our launch plan – starting with our website.

3. Create your Ecommerce Website

Your customer’s journey starts with your website, the appearance that you show your potential buyer will also translate into how they feel about your brand, and whether or not they will purchase from you.
It’s extremely important to create a website that can scale and adapt to your business.

Unfortunately, websites are not created equally – so it’s vital to understand the differences between a custom-built website, and a CMS website.

Companies like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, and more have created easy-to-use, no-code platforms that give you virtually every tool you will ever need for a website.

These are called CMS (Content Management Systems), such platforms have built the foundation for ecommerce as a whole, providing a centralized platform so people around the world could sell products online without having to hire a team of developers just to manage their websites.

We are proud supporters and users of CMS websites, but we must inform you of the differences!

Custom Websites for Ecommerce

A custom site is not ideal if you are just starting. Simply put, the time you would spend managing and upkeeping your custom-built site would far exceed the time it takes to create and launch a CMS website.

Custom websites may be a promising idea when you consider it an open sandbox which you have full control over – but consider this, you may not be a developer, or have the technical expertise to manage a custom website. Who will you turn to

A custom site requires you to host your own domain, manage your own front-end (what the customers see), manage your back-end (your product information, pricing, etc.), and integrate it all into a cohesive website that users can purchase from. This is not impossible, but much more effort than using a CMS like Shopify.

CMS Websites for Ecommerce 

In theory, a CMS website has the same parts, but a CMS already has these tools built for you. Shopify for example gives you a simple interface to manage all aspects of your store without the need for a single developer. Whether it is the front end, back end, shipping policies, fulfillments, checkout process, or anything else – Shopify has already created the groundwork so we can avoid the pitfalls of managing your own custom-built site. Lastly, CMS companies like Shopify offer support so you always have somewhere to turn if you need additional help.

This is why we wholeheartedly recommend you use a CMS tool just like Shopify. Shopify also includes site hosting and checkout process into their paid plans as standard – which is not something all other CMS platforms offer. For these reasons, we believe a CMS website is the best value.

Now that you have an understanding of custom sites vs. CMS platforms, we will begin diving deeper into strategies we use here at NoGood when we work with direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands.

4. Optimize Your Ecommerce Website

We have too often seen brands disregard SEO as a strategy for growing their revenue, but this could not be further from the truth. If you, too, have disregarded SEO, worry not – there is always a way to grow your ranking across search engines!

The reality is, your customers will search the internet at some point. They may search for the exact product or service you provide, so you need to make sure you have a chance at appearing in front of them when they do. If they see you, they might like you, and they might buy from you.

First things first, here are the foundational things your site needs to have updated at all times to appear in searches:

Page Title: The title that describes your page

Meta Description: The description that describes your page

URL Slugs: The ending of your links that guides users to specific pages

Image Alt Text: A description of an image

In most cases, ecommerce brands follow a similar structure — a homepage, collections pages, and product pages – all of which have their own page title, meta description, anchor link, and image alt texts. The more pages you create, whether as collection pages or individual products, the more signals you may be able to rank for. Just remember, SEO is organic – meaning you do not have to pay for it.

So taking the time to refine your website information could greatly benefit you in new users and new purchases.

Page Title

As simple as it may seem, your page title plays the biggest role in whether or not you will rank. Page titles should be concise and relate to a specific keyword(s), so that Google as well as your potential customer can quickly understand what content your page has. For example: If you sell comic book-themed sneakers, you may want your page title to be “Comic Book-Inspired Sneakers” or “Sneakers Inspired by Comics”.

Although SEO is a matter of whether or not Google will rank you, you also want to be customer-centric – meaning you want to make sure your potential customer has an easy time understanding what your website has to offer.

Tip: Do not stuff keywords in your page title assuming that it will work. Focus on your main keywords and write with your customer in mind.

Meta Description

Your meta description serves alongside your page titles. This section gives you a chance to go more in-depth about what your page offers. Using our previous example, a good meta description would be:

“Shop comic book-inspired sneakers, handmade to order in the USA. Browse a variety of collections from Marvel and Capcom to X-Men and more.”

Meta descriptions are that simple. This is the area where you can provide more context for your users and help guide them into understanding, whether or not they are interested.

In our example, notice that the sentence is conversational while still holding keyword value to our original product offering. This is a balance you want to keep on one hand, you need to include our main keywords like “sneakers” or “comic book” but on the other, you are also giving our users a glimpse into which designs you offer like “Marvel” or “Capcom”.

This way, you have given your potential customer enough information about what you sell without them even having to see your website.

URL Structure

URL slugs are the ending parts of your page links, which also play a vital role in telling Google what you want to rank for.

For example, in this page link “mywebsite.com/collections/comic-book-sneakers” the URL slug is “comic-book-sneakers”.

This portion of your link serves to correlate a specific part of your site, and what kind of content may be found on it. Google sees this link and aligns it with searches that relate to “comic book sneakers”.

As you can picture now, every single collection page and product page on your website has an URL slug – so you want to thoroughly review each page and make sure those URL slugs relate to the product or service you provide so that users can find you. Your slug should ideally be the keyword you want your page to rank for.

Image Alt Text

Now, let’s talk about image alt text, which is arguably the easiest way to rank higher in organic listing mainly because so many other brands are lazy to set them up.

Image alt text is an accessibility feature used across the internet to help visually impaired users understand what contents exist within an image.

Google, among other search engines, uses image alt text as a signal of richer content. Rich content can be a vague term that applies to more than image alt text, so don’t be confused by this – videos are also considered rich content. Either way, the richer your content, the more search engines will favor your pages.

Image alt text should be set to describe the image simply. We want search engines, as well as potential users, to understand what this image is, so we recommend writing short but descriptive alt texts. Take this moment to introduce keywords that relate to your image as well. While this is not the biggest factor in ranking a singular page, it could help you outrank your competition.

Once your website is set up, you’ll need to do regular site audits to help you resolve any technical SEO issues that arise. 

Want to learn how to conduct a technical SEO audit step-by-step?

5. Leverage Conversion Tracking

A conversion could be any action your user performed that you deem valuable. A purchase is a conversion, and an add-to-cart could be a conversion, etc.

Leveraging conversion tracking is the most vital part of any successful ecommerce brand.

We must know what actions our users are taking on our website to increase conversion and/or improve the customer experience.

Conversion tracking serves a dual purpose when utilized correctly. First, it allows us to get performance metrics so we can analyze our bottom line. Second, it gives us a signal into whether or not users on our site are confident in browsing, clicking, or purchasing from us.

The ideal situation for your ecommerce brand is to create conversion events around the actions you deem most important – in doing so, you create a “funnel” that represents where the user was along their journey on your site. Let’s break that down.

For our comic book sneakers store example, you should care about several moments the user may have. First, you want to know if a user has viewed a product. Then, you would like to know if they added that product to their cart. Lastly, you want to see unique purchases.

This funnel goes as follows:

Product view -> Add to cart -> Purchase

So, this is your user’s journey; using this, you can monitor which parts of our site you need to focus on the most. If users do not purchase, it is safe to assume that something along their journey in “product view” and/or “add to cart” went wrong.

Were they not interested in the product after all, why?

Was the price too high?

Did the page load correctly?

Did they have a bad connection?

Once you realize where your users fell off their journey on your website, then you can begin to reverse-engineer what to fix. This is the most fundamental approach towards analyzing and improving ecommerce performance.

So, how do you set up conversions?

First off, you will need to to set up Google Analytics to centralize all your conversion events. Google Analytics would serve to collect all your conversions that occur on your website which we can then use to our benefit.

Additionally, you need to decide on other channels which we will use for marketing. If you believe your ideal customer is using Facebook, Google, and TikTok then these are the other locations where you need to set up conversion events.

Google Analytics will remain the “hub” of all your conversion event data, but you still need to set the same conversions on each channel so you can monitor your conversion performance by specific channel. This is extremely important when trying to decide which platform is more effective for your business.

6. Brand Visual Guidelines

Appearance is everything, and the key to a concise website appearance is a well-thought-out brand guideline. The brand guidelines a company uses can make the difference between higher or lower conversion rates a.k.a purchases.

A brand guideline is made of multiple parts: fonts, color schemes, brand assets, and imagery.

The fonts you use will dictate an emotion for your customers. A font like Comic Sans will create an unprofessional and goofy aesthetic, while a font like Museo Sans provides a clean and modern aesthetic. Consider this when picking which font best fits your brand. Color schemes will also portray a mood or emotion for your customers. Color schemes usually consist of a primary color and a secondary color, which are meant to complement each other across your website.

Decide which colors display the emotions you want your customers to have, and factor in which colors will work best together. The combined use of these colors should also align with the overall vibe you want your customers to feel.

Brand assets relate to your logo and how your logo may be utilized across your website or profiles. This includes your logo in different sizes, such as social media profile image size or social media cover image sizes across platforms. Alongside logo size, brand assets must dictate the color versions of your logo. A full color, a white version logo, and a black version logo are the most common types of logos you would use in a brand visual guideline.

Lastly, imagery within your brand guidelines is meant to serve as inspiration for your brand’s aesthetic. Using our previous example of comic book-themed sneakers, imagery for such a product may be comic bubbles or thick stroked edges that resemble a comic book.

The imagery you decide on must have a connection to your products; it must be used as a guide for future content development to provide a cohesive brand identity.

In closing, creating a brand guideline is crucial for maintaining a concise mood or vibe for your brand.

Consistency is key, so prepare a well-thought-out brand guideline so you can begin cultivating your brand’s identity and make your customers feel it.

Early Stage Economics for Ecommerce Brands

ecommerce is a competitive stage. Since 2006 (when Shopify launched), a rise in the popularity of online stores has led to a vast choice of products in virtually every niche market. This increased competition makes scaling a new ecommerce brand a challenge.

This section is meant to inform you of the long-term strategy required to find economic success for your ecommerce brand.

In the early stages of launching your brand, you may have lots of ideas about what may or may not work.

You consider your cost of goods, the cost of marketing, your available sales margin and you may think: “How will I be profitable?”

As the saying goes, you need to “spend money to make money.” The same is true for ecommerce; you need to spend money on new marketing efforts to establish what makes sense economically.

Similarly, you need to spend money to figure out what does not work.

When you start you may not find the right strategy right away, but as you try more and more, you will begin to understand through trial and tribulation.

Determine your Customer LTV

Thinking long term, your main metric to follow should be LTV, or Lifetime Value. LTV is the total amount of money you’ll receive from a customer throughout their entire lifetime as a customer. The reason why this matters is that a singular purchase is not a good signal of whether you are profitable in the long run.

So we must have enough purchases and data to fuel our decisions on whether or not to turn off our existing marketing.

You may spend $100 a day on marketing and only get a single purchase. It would still be too early to say whether this is a bad marketing strategy or channel because we first need to analyze our economics. Say you have a 50% margin on your products, and that single purchase equaled an $80 purchase.

The cost of marketing has set your profit to negative, yes – but what if this customer now returns for a second purchase and spends $200 because they really love your product? Has this customer’s LTV justified your marketing efforts?

While $100 to acquire a single customer is a far-fetched example, the answer is yes – our marketing strategy is justified for the time being. Simply put, this singular customer led to profitability after their second purchase.

On the first purchase, we would lose about $60 after the cost of marketing, but after their second $200 purchase we would have turned a profit of $40.

This is how you should look at LTV, and what you should consider when launching your ecommerce brand. At first, it may not look like things are working, but sometimes rash decisions are made without a full observation of your business’s economics.

We implore you to have an open mind and do a thorough review before turning off any marketing channels.

The Key to Increasing LTV is Retention 

Retention is the likelihood a customer will come back again, and as long as they come back there is a chance they might buy again – turning your initial marketing dollars into new organic purchases.

Retention can be tricky, but you should consider what keeps your customers coming back. Is it just the products? Maybe it’s your support team’s service? Offering free returns?

You need to conceptualize how you can sweeten your customer’s experience in your store, this will fuel retention and keep them coming back for more.

Marketing your Ecommerce Brand After Launch 

“Hit the ground running” is usually not a term related to building an ecommerce business. There are ups, there are downs, and everything in between. What matters most, in the beginning, is creating demand for your product and getting feedback from customers so you can improve your economics, LTV, and retention.

At the end of the day, no amount of marketing dollars can fix a bad product, so you must launch your brand with the mindset of learning, rather than instant gratification or riches.

That being said, what are the best ways to launch?

We went over creating buyer personas, crafting our product messaging, which kind of website to get started with, how to optimize your site for SEO, how to leverage conversion data, how to craft a brand guideline, and how to understand our early-stage economics.

Now we will tell you some of our best strategies for creating demand around your brand at launch.

Paid Social

Platforms where consumers can connect with other consumers, which allow us to target specific audiences, are the holy grail of all ecommerce.

From mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 companies – everyone can benefit from using paid social media platforms when launching their ecommerce brand.

First off, there is the in-app engagement – when you see an ad you like or a video you enjoyed, how often would you share it with your friend or family? This phenomenon is called network effect, and while network effect can cultivate outside of paid marketing, social media brings a unique advantage by being the location where a potential customer can consume and share the things they may be interested in.

In comparison to Search ads or YouTube ads, for instance, there is no option to share or speak about what consumers are seeing – this creates a closed loop and limits the network effect a.k.a word-of-mouth.

When these dynamics are applied to a well-targeted ad campaign, your ideal audience is extremely likely to engage which then can result in purchases.

Additionally, paid social allows us to be where our customers are. Whether that’s a younger demographic or older, there is always a social app that your brand can join to keep your potential consumers within reach.

Influencer Marketing

Leveraging creators with existing followers is by far the easiest way to put your brand in front of a new audience. People have a greater chance of buying something when they hear about it from a friend or someone they like – like an influencer!

Many believe influencers are a dime a dozen, that their followers are uninterested and not engaged, and that using your marketing dollars on this will be a waste.

It is not.

To succeed in influencer marketing, you must do your research and document creators in your niche that relate to your ideal audience to increase the likelihood of a successful launch or successful influencer partnership.

Tools like socialblade.com can help you understand influencer’s engagement rates, how active their followers are, and whether they will make a good partner for your brand.

If we launched a comic book-inspired sneaker brand, we would reach out to every comic book, anime, or cosplay-related creator asking to barter products for content.

This will vary by the influencer, but if they like our sneakers, they are likely to accept a partnership and give our brand potential new customers.

Creating awareness for your brand is very easy with influencer marketing. We recommend utilizing this strategy – especially at launch.

Paid Search

Platforms like Bing and Google make up almost 95% of total paid search traffic, which means that our ideal customer is already on these platforms searching to their heart’s desire.

Paid search is more straightforward, as paid search channels use keywords for targeting new potential customers.

We recommend going as broad as possible when choosing which kinds of keywords you wish to appear for. Going broader will allow your store to collect more traffic and more data, at a cheaper cost.

Note: In some cases, this will not apply because there is higher competition from brands who already bid for these broad keywords. Look for keywords with high traffic volumes but low CPC (cost per click).

Paid search is a vital part of any ecommerce brand, as users go on Google to search for virtually everything nowadays. You need to make sure our brand is also showing up in ad results like our competitors — otherwise, you could be leaving money on the table.

Alternatively, paid search can provide brand awareness – while that is not its primary function, paid search represents the desire your customers have.

So a frequent buyer of sneakers online may be delighted to see a new comic book-inspired sneaker brand climbing up the paid ads results. Even if they do not buy from you right away, you have shown your new brand to a new potential customer – they might come back to see what it’s all about.

Content Marketing

In the digital world we live in today, content is king. This means that for you to compete with your competitors, you must adopt a content strategy.

Creating content should become a new muscle for you – which gets stronger and stronger over time. This content muscle is the link between you, your brand, and your audience – which will be used as a constant stream of communication.

Content is not exclusive to advertising — it’s a tool you will use to tell your potential customers about your brand, the products you sell, and just about anything else.

While content should definitely be used for advertising as well, content alone is how you refresh your brand’s message and offerings, consistently.

Content lives everywhere – from your product images to your product descriptions, to your social media pages, all the way onto your advertising. The more familiar you become with your content creation strategy, the easier it will be to scale your brand moving forward.

Launching an Ecommerce Brand is a Big Lift 

Launching an ecommerce brand is no easy task – there is much more to learn when it comes to scaling, refining, and developing your ecommerce company, but we hope this gives you instruction into what launching an ecommerce brand is like. 

If you need help launching or scaling an ecommerce brand, our growth experts can help. Feel free to drop us a line. 

The post Ecommerce Launch Guide: Strategies + Examples for Brands appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

In April, Apple first introduced iOS14, which included the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature. The ATT allows users to easily block apps from receiving a unique Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) embedded in their iPhone devices. This fully eliminates user activity tracking across apps. As a result, the next time an iPhone user looks at or interacts with an ad, any activity tracking in place would be lost. Not to mention, the lower match rates and dip in performance for lookalike audiences and overall less information on audience performance across campaigns.

Apple owns about ~47% of the U.S. smartphone market, based on the research conducted by eMarketer. After the launch of ATT in April, only about 9% of iPhone owners initially consented to share their data. Since then, the number has increased to about 15%. But this was just the start of all the iOS 14 effects. In September 2021, iOS 15 was launched with even more privacy features. This time, email campaigns took the biggest hit. The Mail Privacy Protection inhibits senders from learning whether an email has been opened and hides IP addresses so senders can’t learn a user’s location or remember their browsing activities.

For marketers, data is king: the more information you have available to input into your campaigns, the better results you can see. With reduced data, it’s harder to reach a specified and large group of people. If you can’t access demographics and behavior data, how can you know whether somebody fits into a group or not? A quick email blast or Facebook ad that may have converted in the past has now become essentially ineffective. Digital marketers now must re-examine every strategy and tactic that has worked for years and pivot.

Let’s take a more in-depth look into channel-specific considerations and tactics that will help marketers adapt and recover from iOS 14 and on.

Paid Social

Marketing Charts reports that paid social advertising costs have increased about 25% year over year, and with increased competition and decreased targeting data, performance has been the most challenging yet. Some of this is related to advertisers re-entering the auctions post-pandemic, but it is also largely due to iOS 14 and the new limitations we face with it. With this being an issue advertisers face globally, we have some tactics to combat this.

Audience Insight

No longer having insight and breakouts to the audience and conversion demographics means it’s harder for advertisers to narrow down on their exact audiences. Before we were able to see how many more conversions males, 25-34 drove against females 35-44. Now we can only see high-level KPIs such as impressions, reach, and clicks. Luckily, CTR is still a metric we have access to (or can calculate!) — so we can make a soft inference that audiences with a higher CTR also have higher conversion rates.

Lookalikes

Before iOS 14 we could see great success with just a 1% lookalike audience; but now, our most qualified audience has become our worst-performing one. To counteract this we have seen 10% lookalikes perform better, with the 10% allowing the platform algorithms more room to expand, learn, and capture those core audience demographics.

Another option to workaround platform lookalikes is to manually create your own. By taking the demographic information on top customers across accounts and creating personas based on these people based on their available interests to include in targeting you have essentially created a lookalike of your top customer.

Pixel & Event Tracking

Overall, advertisers will see a decrease in conversions reported since iOS14 has launched. However, on platforms like Facebook implementing Conversions API (CAPI) (for e-commerce clients specifically) can help. Importing conversions to Facebook allows the algorithm to determine how to better optimize campaigns. For e-comm, if using Shopify, add Facebook to the Sales Channel, and if using WooCommerce, add the plug-in integration. CAPI has also become a nice workaround across the board to help counteract some of the new iOS updates. However, keep in mind that this will require engineering/development resources.

Facebook also now only allows eight conversions to be tracked across a single domain (also ensure your domain is verified as soon as possible!). If this isn’t set up, Facebook will auto-assign events it believes are the most relevant based on past and current pixel activity. By utilizing the Aggregated Events Measurement, advertisers can finetune the top eight conversion events to track their audiences’ journey. For purchase events, turn on advanced matching — every little bit of information you can capture counts!

Copy & Creative

Attention-grabbing images (we recommend and prefer videos/GIFs) along with copy that stands out (incorporate emojis) perform the best. Video ads are 10% of the cost of carousel or static ads. People also gaze 5X longer at video than at static posts on Facebook, which explains a lower overall cost. The key to using videos/GIFs is the audience pool you then have for retargeting those video viewers (3S VV). Remember to also keep frequencies low. The best practice is to keep it under 3 — if you see an ad that continues to perform but has high frequencies, add an emoji in the copy and change around a few words. Despite all the changes and pivoting going on from iOS14, A/B testing is still a tried-and-true method to understand what resonates best with your audience and to improve CTR, CPA, and ad performance.

Paid Search

It’s easy to assume paid social took the biggest hit when it came to the new iOS 14 updates. Sadly, SEM campaigns also suffered quite a bit. Similar to paid social, paid search platforms can only receive conversion data for those who allow tracking. Advertisers like Google have always relied on the free movement of data in order to narrow down targeting within ad campaigns; however, with the new updates, this has become more limited. Google itself is also preparing its Google Privacy Sandbox which will introduce 5 APIs as substitutes for targeting, remarketing, and conversion attribution functionality. In the meantime, before that, see below for some tactics to navigate around the new privacy updates.

Bid Strategies

Google and its reps have been recommending marketers to switch to tCPA rather than the tROAS starting late Q2 of this year. With this optimization, you should notice more consistent performance across your AdWords account. Additionally, with new accounts, marketers used to have to manually switch from eCPC to Max Conversion then to tCPA/tROAS. Now, with newer accounts marketers can automatically select tCPA and the algorithm will walk your campaigns through the steps we would’ve had to previously manually do.

Performance Max was also recently made available across all advertisers. This new strategy/tactic works in tandem with your existing SEM campaigns to help enhance performance across all of Google’s inventory and placements. Performance Max will also have additional audience segments and insights available to help with upper-funnel prospecting.

Cookies

Because most advertisers rely on third-party data, this is the reason why the iOS 14 update is so problematic. As we know, the industry has shifted away from third-party data and cookies – Google is even removing all cooking tracking from Chrome starting 2023 (the original plan was 2022, but that plan isn’t going too well for the at the moment). The longer that marketers wait to adapt to cookie-less tracking, the harder the consequences will be when all the changes are actually implemented. Gathering as much data and information as possible through websites, social media accounts, apps and all campaigns will allow for an easier transition to the cookie-less world of marketing. As all this information and data is collected, we can start to rely on this to grow lookalikes and customer lists. 

Retargeting

For RLSA campaigns advertisers are definitely going to face some challenges. With FLoC (Federal Learning of Cohorts), audiences being driven from an iOS 14+ device will not be able to be individually identified; instead, they are being grouped by interests. So targeting on RLSA campaigns will be slightly inaccurate for iPhone users. Currently, there is no workaround for the impacts of iOS14 on RLSA campaigns.

Landing Pages

Marketers used to be able to send all traffic and data to one single landing page for both organic and paid, however with the new iOS14 creating dedicated landing pages along with a strong CRM platform can help advertisers follow the data all the way through from click to sale, especially if there is a long click to conversion funnel.

Going Beyond Traditional Ad Platforms

With all the new changes and roadblocks, advertisers have been hitting, diversifying advertising channels is our #1 recommendation. Facebook and Google have ruled the digital ads space for the last 10 years, but we have seen some new faces emerge that are taking the industry in a different direction. While all ad channels are impacted by the new iOS14 updates, by diversifying your advertising channels across other established platforms advertisers will not be as reliant on the big ad platforms such as Google and Facebook. Some great platforms we recommend rotating in and testing are Amazon (for eComm brands), Pinterest, TikTok, and Snapchat. We also love Affiliate and Influencer Marketing – each is a very similar approach but in separate ways, however that is very dependent on budgets and the phase of growth a brand is currently in.

Amazon

Google and Amazon are both pay-per-click platforms; however, the biggest difference between the two is that customers turn to Google for research, but most turn to Amazon when they are ready to make a purchase. In terms of a basic advertising strategy – the key component is building out manual targeting campaigns based on keyword research from automatic campaigns. As long as you have a strong advertising strategy and foundation, a strong ROAS is almost always achievable on Amazon.

Pinterest

Pinterest ads have proven to be extremely effective for upper and middle funnel tactics, and at times boost sales. The user demographic is majority female with the majority of users being under the age of 40. Best for eComm brands, due to the ability to save/pin ads and return back to on a later time – Pinterest users are 47% more likely to be introduced to a new brand or products than users on any other social platform.

TikTok/Snapchat

Like Facebook, Snapchat offers multiple ways to reach their customers, whereas TikTok’s currently only has the main feed as the only placement. Both platforms offer very favorable results hitting a much younger demographic, however with TikTok continuing to grow as a platform, their ad platform will be following shortly. If you don’t have the capacity to build or work with a creator on TikTok content, Snapchat has a lower barrier to entry logistically and monetarily.

Affiliate

Affiliates earn a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products on their platforms, whether that is a blog, content platform, or website. When someone clicks an affiliate link and purchases (within the attribution window, of course), the affiliate earns a commission from sales they make. The sales are tracked by links with very specific URLs and UTM parameters. To learn more about affiliate marketing, we have an excellent guide.

Influencer

With the rise of TikTok influencer marketing has taken a turn for the better – once just a “channel” for just Instagram and YouTube, content creators can now monetize across additional platforms. The trust that an influencer builds between his/her audience is what drives such strong results from an influencer campaign if executed correctly. Read more on the Top Influencer Platforms to utilize to properly execute your campaign.

Conclusion

iOS14 has created a huge ripple effect throughout the industry, but like always it stands to serve as a way for advertisers to be resourceful and find new ways of reaching the right people, with the right message, at the right time. Not only is being reactive essential to the constantly changing environment but being proactive for future and upcoming changes is what will differentiate a strong marketer from a smart marketer. Being able to utilize the strong resources we’ve always had in our back pockets (strong first-party data and strong creatives) will allow us to stay ahead of the curve. With there being more of an incentive to push opt-in permissions across consumers and more people choosing to opt out, if you already have a strong foundation of data you can rely on targeting, and retargeting tactics become slightly easier. It can be argued that having strong ad creative is more important than refining targeting, especially with all the new targeting limitations across paid social. Getting the correct creative shown to the right audience will be a strong indicator of whether or not a campaign is marked successful. With the direction the world is moving towards and privacy with transparency being at the forefront of any activity, it’s important to remember that something that may have worked for the last 10 years may not work for the next 10. A Google Search campaign set up two years ago with multiple expanded text ads to test copy will no longer work starting June 2022 as all expanded text ads will be phased out. By testing new platforms and methodologies, new best practices will be found which just continues to prove the efficacy of paid advertising.

TL;DR

The post How Should Your Digital Ad Strategy Shift Post-iOS 14? appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.