Title: Google Shopping Feed & Campaign Tips to Rule PMax, Shopping Ads, The World…

Description:

With the advent of Performance Max campaigns in the Ecommerce PPC world, one of the most crucial tools in the DTC brand’s toolbox is the… product feed. The product feed?! Yup, the product feed. In this session, Kirk will take a look at crucial optimization ideas within Google Merchant Center AND Google Ads to help give you an edge over your competitor in the land of Google Shopping.

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Title: How to use GPT to do PPC better and faster

Description:

Writing compelling, must-click ads was until recently one of the last things in PPC that couldn’t be automated. But with the introduction of chatGPT and the rise of other LLMs, automation in PPC has been taken to a whole new level.

Join this session and learn several prompts you can use with GPT to streamline PPC management and optimization, from managing search terms and keywords, to writing better RSAs to developing new audiences to use with Performance Max. We’ll even look at how to use GPT to write Google Ads scripts.

After attending this session you will know how to:
– use GPT in a scalable way on your ad campaigns
– how to engineer prompts for cost-effective results
– how to use GPT to speed up keyword and audience development

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Advertising: Amazon Will Eat Google and Facebook’s Lunch
You may be aware that many product searches start on Amazon. Amazon, smart agencies and brands are already well-aware (that includes Anvil of course). What we see changing most in 2020 is Amazon’s ability to improve its advertising options for brands and sellers alike, especially in the voice search realm (we’ve been wrong about this in the past, but we really feel it this year!). Amazon Advertising is one of the few high growth areas of its business lines and will make greater strides in 2020, taking more market share from Google and even Facebook. Make sure you have an Amazon marketing strategy for your product business in 2020 or get left in the dust.

Display Ads: Animated GIFs, Video and Interactivity will Replace Image Ads
Static image ads on social platforms will start to fall away and videos, animated GIFs and interactive ads will supplant the 25-year-old ad format on popular platforms like Google and Facebook. This trend is already starting to occur, with video becoming increasingly prevalent. The reason is obvious: interactive and motion-oriented ad formats are more engaging, memorable and tend to convert better. While static imagery is still a majority of ad format inventory, that will change by the end of 2020. Brands and agencies designing ads in animated, interactive and video formats will take a leadership role and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

SEO: Structured Data Strategy will be More Important than Ever Before
In 2019, “0” or ‘no-click’ searches surpassed regular clicks on organic and paid links in search results. As a result, brands will need to become intimate with structured data, most commonly powered by schema markup. As more searches move to mobile devices, users are not scrolling down the page, as they expect the first result they see to answer their query. Similarly, with voice search, users expect the first search result to be the best answer to their query. Marking up content with multiple types of structured data to secure the featured snippet real estate will be more important than ever. Sites who do not take advantage of structured data will see their site slip down the results page and will ultimately lose traffic to competitors with strong structured markup strategies. Google wants to be able to provide an answer to a user query as fast as possible, and with structured data on a page Google can more easily understand and compartmentalize the information on you site. With that better understanding, Google will be able and more likely to serve your content as a result when it is applicable to a query. Routinely making sure the structured data implemented on your site is error-free and up-to-date should be a required part of every ongoing SEO strategy.

SEO: Google Will Mandate That All Websites Be Voice Search Compliant
Anticipating the continued proliferation of smart speakers and digital voice assistants through 2020, Google will proactively mandate that all websites be voice search compliant by the end of 2020. Currently, over 40 percent of searches are voice-activated and that will continue to increase, likely becoming most searches by 2021. Website copy and content will have to be voice search friendly to rank well in Google searches. Brands will need to utilize structured data (aka schema markup or rich snippets) to power the ‘best answer’ on smart speakers or position 0 on screens. Site structure and content will also need to be altered to better answer questions commonly asked via voice assistants and smart speakers. Websites that lack structured data will be penalized by Google. This prediction expands on the previous structured data trend.

SEO: Augmented Reality Will Play a Bigger Role
Imagine virtually trying out clothes from your favorite brands without leaving your home. Augmented Reality (AR) can make this a reality. AR provides brands an opportunity to overlay information in video, text, or image format onto everyday surroundings, objects and real-world locations. Nearly 80 percent of the information the brain takes in is visual. By providing information in a visual medium, that also has the spatial nature of augmented reality, brands are giving the brain a very intuitive way of accessing and understanding information. ECommerce will benefit the most from AR implementation, as will destinations, automotive and other complex sales. Brands like adidas and Converse have already implemented AR, earning higher conversion rates with fewer product returns.

Email Marketing: The Flywheel Will Displace the Traditional Sales Funnel
More companies will be moving away from the traditional sales/marketing ‘funnel’ to the Flywheel model in 2020 in order to focus on creating experiences that engage and empower customers. Originally created in 1898, the AIDA (Awareness/Interest/Desire/Action) funnel model is a linear approach that focuses on attracting new customers and engaging them in a business or service to turn them into a quantifiable lead. The flywheel approach takes an innovative view of the buyer journey and uses all client-facing roles such as customer service, marketing, and sales to interact with customers at every stage. Attracting, engaging, and delighting customers even past the point of purchase – so companies continue to interact with customers instead of treating them as one-time-only prospects. The customer is the lynchpin, with the flywheel itself divided into three equal segments, each representing stages along the customer journey: attract, engage, and delight. Each area creates energy and passes it along to the next, with the delight phase feeding back into attract. Note: Anvil was not paid by HubSpot to endorse its model, we just agree with the methodology and hope for greater awareness and adoption.

Email Marketing: Push Notifications Will Replace Email
Email is going the way of the dinosaur, maybe not next year, but in the coming years. Starting in 2020, however, there will be a notable shift to push notifications and chatbots as viable replacements, especially for brands targeting Gen Y/Z, consumers and retail environments. Push notifications are alert style messages that can be sent to a user via desktop or mobile web, depending on context. At least twice as many people today sign up for web push notifications, compared to newsletter registrations. Only the top 10 percent of the email marketers can achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that matches the performance of push notifications. The average time that passes before the recipient opens a newsletter is 6.4 hours. With push notifications, the recipient will see the message immediately. The updates to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and stricter filters have dented the potency of email marketing, which will be further compromised by the CCPA legislation. As alluded to earlier, younger, digital-native audiences favor fewer touchpoints and other methods of communication than email, when engaging brands.

Social Media: Performance Metrics Will Replace ‘Likes’
Those following social media closely are likely familiar with Instagram’s recent decision to hide “Likes” from followers. With the proposed change, only account owners and select third-party platforms will have access to that data. While influencers and marketers alike have voiced concerns about the change, it does provide an opportunity for everyone to be smarter about social media strategies, especially evaluating influencer marketing programs. For example, influencers will need to up their game to become more professional about how they represent their potential impact, focusing on reach and engagement rates over Likes. This trend will also push brands to adopt performance models based on transactional goals. The social platforms, especially Instagram and Pinterest, are making buying product easier than ever, so the timing is ripe for change.

Social Media: Consumers will Drive Alignment and Transparency in Influencer Marketing
Moving forward, look for brands and influencers to create better alignment and transparency. According to research, 84 percent of consumers believe authenticity is important when choosing influencers to follow. More compelling: only 11 percent of influencers are CMA and FTC-compliant when disclosing relationships with sponsoring brands. Millennials are increasingly skeptical of businesses’ motives and impact on society, according to Deloitte. As a result, brands looking to target Gens X, Y and Z will need to be more intentional about how they select and engage influencers based on core values and fit vs reach. Another trend that will go together with transparency and alignment is a shift to “always-on” instead of project-based influencer campaigns. The writing is on the wall for brands and agencies, especially for brands targeting younger consumers, to plan accordingly.

Social Media: TikTok Will Lose Momentum – Relegating It to a Snapchat Knockoff
While we’ve seen a good deal of hype and momentum built around TikTok this year, marketers are still trying to figure out how they can use it to their advantage. It is true that TikTok saw incredible growth this year (over 500 million active users in Fall 2019), which earned it the title “social platform of 2019.” But’s also true that signups are coming to a near grinding halt. As a result, parallels can be made with Snapchat’s adoption history – incredible growth, everyone joins, signups slow, users leave/become less engaged. We believe TikTok will figure out how to utilize ads more effectively in 2020, but we don’t think user engagement will sustain and the platform will end up in the same purgatory as Snapchat. It will become an afterthought as brands evaluate platforms on which to target and invest. The one exception to this prediction, is if you’re looking to reach a very, very broad audience within a certain *cough* young demographic (and China as a growth marketplace).

We hope to get good grades when we review our 2020 digital marketing predictions at the end of the year. Let us know what you think of our 2020 digital marketing trends in the comments section or add your own predictions. May your 2020 be full of fulfilled predictions!

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Most startups are looking to make the biggest possible impact within the confines of a restricted marketing budget. Digital marketing is highly measurable and more affordable than traditional media channels. Within digital, search is the most common channel to pursue for a successful launch. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) provides a low cost for targeted reach. Paid search (pay-per-click or PPC) advertising can quickly and effectively connect prospective customers with a new business. In this post, we will examine key factors to consider when deciding how to approach organic and paid search as key components of a go-to-market strategy for startups.

SEO Consideration Factors
Organic search is the single most cost-effective channel for building awareness and generating leads, since you don’t pay for each website visitor. SEO is ideal for cost-conscious startups that have more resources than cash, as organic search success is based primarily on the ability to create compelling content over time. While SEO can be considered highly technical (especially when it comes to optimizing site code), it is still fundamentally focused on creating and optimizing compelling content that generates inbound links and mentions of your brand and website to further increase your visibility in relevant search results. While SEO is a front-loaded marketing strategy, the benefits last as long as the life of the website, which his typically 3–5 years. The downside to SEO is that it takes time. In order to build trust with the search engines, websites need a history and a consistent velocity of fresh content and links. New company websites in emerging industries can take weeks or months to rank initially (vs. hours or days for new content on a trusted site).

PPC Consideration Factors
Paid search, on the other hand, is ideal for relatively well-funded startups that are flush with cash and have a more aggressive sales trajectory. PPC campaigns can be turned on within 24 hours and can generate significant returns, depending on media budget, audience, message and offer. While large-scale PPC programs can be exceedingly complex and require dedicated teams to manage for optimal returns, a basic campaign can be set up quickly by a relative novice and generate instant feedback/results. In fact, a modest media budget (starting at $500) is highly recommended for testing keywords before optimizing for organic search, let alone honing overall corporate messaging. Despite a cost-per-click model of buying website visitors, PPC is still one of the most cost-effective forms of generating high volumes of qualified leads over time, as you have the ability to modify campaigns in real-time for optimal performance. The downside to PPC is that there’s no long-term equity in the ads, as once the budget is depleted or campaigns are turned off, there is no trace of the brand’s presence in search results, unlike SEO.

Mixing it Up
While the ideal traffic mix/investment for a mature business is 80 percent organic and 20 percent paid search, many startups are typically inverse: front-loading paid search budgets until trust is built with search engines and organic rankings begin to drive significant traffic. Regardless of your funding and resources, consider a combination of organic and paid search for your company launch (and beyond). Feel free to check out the blog, articles, cheat sheets and white papers in Anvil’s Resources section for more information.

The post 10 Factors to a Successful Company Launch via Paid and Organic Search Marketing appeared first on SEMpdx.