We know you are just settling into fall and switching from iced coffee to hot… But this digest already talks about Christmas and holiday shopping. Remember to plan in advance for your seasonal campaigns, especially considering retailers in the United States decided to create their own holiday shopping day (and it’s not Black Friday!). Read on for other important September digital updates:
Oracle saves TikTok in the U.S.
Last time, we talked about TikTok suing the U.S. Government for signing an executive order to ban the app in the country unless it was bought by an American company. We also talked about Microsoft being the leader in the purchasing negotiations. Well both of those things didn’t really happen but TikTok is staying after all – California-based technology giant Oracle will now be operating as a “trusted tech partner” of the video-sharing app in the U.S as opposed to outright buying the platform. The news came out this week showing that Walmart will hold a stake in the company, too! That will be huge for Walmart’s e-commerce business.
This news shows us that the Chinese-owned app wants to protect its powerful recommendation algorithm. The app is to set to keep the algorithm itself out of any business deals due to Chinese strict regulatory issues around technology.
Google My Business offers new features
Google My Business has been steadily rolling out new features for business owners to adjust to the new reality of running a business during a pandemic – from COVID-19 updates to whether dine-in or takeout is available. Now, there are even more new ways to customize your listing and attract customers!
The new attributes are for health & safety measures taken by the business and include things like:
- Appointment required
- Mask required
- Staff wear masks
- Staff get temperature checks
- Temperature check required
While our SEO team has not seen these attributes just yet as the feature is rolling out across the United States first, this is a great way to provide more information to your customers and ensure safety precautions.
Google My Business categories
On the topic of GMB, here is a helpful article on how to choose the best category that defines your business to optimize your listing. In this image from Moz, who did a study ranking the importance of different GMB elements, categories, and other most noticeable elements came up first, meaning they impact the local rankings in search results the most.
Choosing a category should be a careful decision because with certain categories you get access to more features such as Google Posts and Products. With some categories, you don’t if Google deems you don’t need them for your business. For example, “hotel” isn’t allowed to make Google Posts and would be penalized for duplicate listings but “car dealership” and “doctor” are allowed to have multiple listings to represent different car manufacturers and multiple doctors. This is a great thorough guide on how to choose the best category for your business.
Click-to-call Facebook ads
While some people nowadays find phone calls unnecessary and scary, others prefer it when getting information from a business, instead of waiting for an email response.
In this new article, we see that while click-to-call Facebook Ads have been around for a long time, they have been used for Reach objective campaigns – which is to show your ad to as many people as possible in a small audience and hope they will call. The news connected to click-and-call is that now these ads can be used for the Website Traffic objective too – ads focused on getting users to take an action. Facebook optimizes Website Traffic campaigns specifically for users who are more likely to engage with the click-to-action which is going to a landing page, your app, or now to call you!
This is a big deal because it could mean ultra-local targeting to your audience and the possibility of driving meaningful social media conversions, which would be a breakthrough in local search marketing.
Our paid ads team has seen much higher conversion rates when using click-to-call for ads with the Reach objective, and are excited to experiment and see a similar impact for Website Traffic campaigns.
RESOURCE: fun SEO visuals
We found a great guide showing some of the more technical aspects of SEO with graphics and easy-to-understand explanations. Use this when trying to understand complex SEO topics, communicating about SEO with people in your company, or explaining new things to your team.
Plan your holiday shopping campaign accordingly
So it’s not news that Thanksgiving and Christmas are going to look different this year. No Walmart wars over the last discounted TV on Boxing Day and way less shopping in malls (and stress). However, pandemic holidays pose new challenges for advertisers who have had quite a year already. According to Bloomberg, retailers in the U.S. are creating their own discount shopping event on October 10th, mirroring November 11th Alibaba’s Singles’ Day in China. Apparently, more than 24 retailers are participating in the event, including Home Depot, Walmart itself, Target, and American Eagle. The purpose of this fall sales event is to ease the stress on supply chains that are usually overwhelmed during the holiday season. Amazon’s Prime Day was also supposed to happen in the summer but is now scheduled for October 26.
That’s all from us today! Happy planning on your seasonal campaigns (or your Christmas shopping) and see you next month for more updates on all things digital marketing. And as always, if you need help with anything from choosing a Google My Business Category to advertising socks as gifts, we are here to help.
