September 2019 Monthly Marketing News Recap

Marketing News Highlights

Focusing solely on bottom-of-funnel tactics, conversions, and last-touch attribution is a recipe for failure. Brand awareness, reach, and engagement are becoming increasingly crucial to brand success throughout the customer’s entire path to purchase.

Aligning your brand’s growth goals with a multi-channel advertising approach at all stages of the buyer’s journey seems like a daunting task – but it doesn’t have to be.

In this executive report, we walk you through a full-funnel approach to Facebook advertising and offer key insights, strategies, & metrics to help you define your success and grow your brand profitably with Facebook.

Download your copy today to learn about:

Nurturing consumers from awareness to a sale
Maximizing the value of each of Facebook’s four platforms
Increasing high-intent traffic with game-changing insights around multi-touch attribution

Amazon Testing Personalized Online “Storefronts”

As social media continues to rise as a way for brands to drive more sales, Amazon is beginning to test ways that content creators can promote products on social media. Receiving a standard fee for each purchase made, select influencers are able to curate a page with products available to shop for through Amazon. Creators will be able to share their own feed content on these pages.

Here’s one example of this type of storefront, complete with custom URLs that guide the influencer’s followers and other shoppers to a product. As an extension of the Amazon Influencer Program, these online personalized storefronts allow influencers to share all of their product recommendations in one centralized place.

Mark Cuban says of the program:

“I love finding amazing products that I can’t live without. Now I finally have a place on Amazon where I can share them! I scour the world for the best of the best and now I have a place to share!”

Of Interest

D2C, Augmented Reality, & Transparency

We’ve learned in previous Monthly Marketing Recaps about the growth of AR and D2C, and we’ve all heard how much consumers (especially younger ones) love transparency from brands. Steve Madden is taking advantage of all of these trends, plus the ever-growing importance of social media, with its sneaker line Greats.

The minimalist D2C sneaker brand recently acquired by Steve Madden created a straight-forward, transparent “This Is an Ad” campaign that delivers an immersive AR mobile experience on Facebook, Instagram, and some over-the-top streaming services.

By taking advantage of all of these trends in one very simple 30-second advertisement, the campaign should feed into Millennials’ and Gen Z’s demand for authenticity from the brands they choose to spend their money with.

Omnichannel Update

As we’ve seen throughout the year, successful marketing efforts need to implement an omnichannel experience. Recent research shows that more than one-third of US mobile app users access apps at least once a week while shopping in-store, highlighting the opportunity for brands to reach consumers so close to the bottom of the funnel.

By providing discounts, loyalty/reward perks, product details, and other special information through their mobile app, retail brands can help guide shoppers to a decision to purchase. Mobile apps can also help reduce friction that’s preventing consumers from buying a product by addressing pain points by providing relevant features.

“The resistance we once saw to downloading retail apps seems to have subsided as retailers better integrated them with the brick-and-mortar shopping experience,” – Andrew Lipsman, Principal Analyst, eMarketer

Snapchat Wants to Help Advertisers Create Mobile-Friendly Content

Techcrunch.com

Snapchat has launched its new Instant Create” feature to automatically generate vertical content for Snapchat advertising. For new or smaller advertisers with limited time and resources, the 9:16 vertical format can be difficult to create. This new feature will use templates and ad detail options to build smartphone-friendly assets.

After setting the campaign objective, URL, and audience targeting, Instant Create will automatically generate content by pulling images directly from a brand’s website or with uploaded assets. No design work is necessary because the social media tool creates ads by leveraging popular templates and simplified ad detail options. The goal is to attract new advertisers and to make Snap Ads more accessible to smaller advertisers.

TikTok Testing the Waters of Ecommerce Advertising

TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps in the world, with 26.5 million monthly active users. While some companies have launched branded content campaigns, ecommerce advertising is poised to become a bigger part of the app.

Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, was able to facilitate almost $30 million in revenue in one day with its more developed shopping capabilities. Hollister is one of the first brands to incorporate a “Shop Now” button on their TikTok content that links to a shopping site inside the app.

While TikTok may just be another app in the long line of digital fads to come and go, for now, it’s a direct line to the youngest generation of consumers.

Wrapping Up

That’s a wrap on this month’s marketing news recap! For more updates from this month, you can check out the blog posts we published in September below: