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Hey y’all and welcome back to EYStudios’ Southern Fried eCommerce podcast episode 32! Cohosts Jay Brimberry and Emily Faulkner are back after a brief hiatus due to Emily going and catching COVID. She’s recovered now and even went to see the premiere of Trading Places the musical (based on the 80s comedy of the same name starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd). She went with her boyfriend Zakk who was happy to watch her be happy which is truly what love is all about. Meanwhile, Jay is getting ready for Father’s Day and looking forward to the day. He said his daughter made an art project at daycare where she was asked questions about her dad and she answered them in her cute, adorable 3-year-old way. She claims her daddy’s favorite things are going to the park, playing video games, and pasta. Jay says she nailed him.
After a long rant about video games — they used to be harder (Emily is playing Jak and Daxter circa 2001, while Jay is playing Skyrim circa 2011) and whether or not you can play Horizon Forbidden West yet, — we moved on to the eCommerce news of the week. (Actually, there was a sidetracked story about OJ Simpson and the white Bronco being a bad car chase, but this is an eCommerce podcast.)
New from EYStudios
First up we talked about the new articles from EYStudios’ own blog:
- Southern Fried eCommerce Episode 31 Recap
- Ways To Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
- New Marketing Trend: Opting Out of Sensitive Holidays
We also want to remind you that we have some upcoming PPC events coming up including a possible contest and giveaway so make sure you’re following along on the podcast or our social media channels to stay up to date.
Amazon Prime Day Coming Up
This week, the first article we jumped into is “Amazon Prime Day 2022 Kicks Off July 12 with 3 Weeks of Early Savings” from eCommerce Bytes. In addition to details about Amazon’s upcoming Prime Day sale, the article details some of Amazon’s small business initiatives. These include playing up their new Small Business Badge and promoting sweepstake-like prizes for customers who purchase through a small business.
Right off the bat, Jay notes that he has been steadily more and more disappointed by Prime Day deals over the years. Emily agrees and says it’s always just another deal on an Amazon Echo or Fire tablet.
Emily then points out a link from the article: www.amazon.com/supportsmall. She says this is a great curated site that allows shoppers to really narrow down who they want to shop from. However, she says, she wishes this was more at the forefront of the Amazon homepage because this is the first time she’s seeing this page.
Jay agrees and encourages small business owners to embrace Amazon but “go in with a strategy.” He says that the ultimate goal is to convert customers to your site and hopefully with more of a push from Amazon shoppers will be able to more easily identify who they’re buying from.
He also points out that even merchants who aren’t on Amazon can take advantage of Prime Day by timing their own sales to match Amazon’s sales event. Jay theorizes that people are shopping everywhere on Prime Day because they already have shopping and deals on the brain. Emily agrees and says that she’ll definitely be going through her inbox looking for other deals from other companies on Prime Day.
A Closer Look At The North Face’s PPC
Next, we jumped into a PPC-related conversation stemming from the article, “4 Things To Learn About Paid Search From The North Face” from Search Engine Land. One of the first things mentioned was keeping your Google Business profile up-to-date for local shoppers. Emily wants to underline and put stars next to this. She says she understands that with the pandemic operating hours may have changed but it’s imperative that you keep this up to date. It’s the first place people look, she says.
EMILY: It drives me bonkers when I drive somewhere — and I spend my very expensive gas — and it’s closed. They closed an hour early; I had no idea.
The next item on the list is slightly more involved with a deeper look into The North Face’s ROI and their approach to non-branded keywords. In short, the article recommends working on a strong organic traffic flow that will offset any lower ROI keywords.
JAY: We see this a lot. There is so much to do in eCommerce. I think a lot of people think they’re gonna plop an item online and they’re just gonna make beaucoups of money — that’s not how this thing works. There’s a lot. So we see this a lot where merchants are concentrated in just one or two areas of marketing. And very rarely are those two areas organic and paid.
He goes on to say that it’s easy to look at this article and dismiss the information because it’s The North Face and “how could that possibly relate to my small outdoor living business?” However, he says, you’ll never get close to them if you just get in a bidding PPC war with them and don’t focus on the organic or ensuring that your site is optimized for organic search. He says the main takeaway here is that you need to be focused on multiple things in order to be successful because they all play into one another.
The next item on the article’s list is: watch the competition. The author of the article points out that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for paid search strategy but it’s important to watch your competition to make sure you’re staying competitive. The article showcases The North Face’s top page results belonging in large part to competition and the author argues this is because they’re not bidding enough on their branded keywords.
Jay gives an example of this type of competitive bidding being confusing for the shopper. He quickly typed his kid’s dentist’s name into Google and then clicked on the first result’s phone number without really looking that closely. He ended up calling a completely different dentist’s office that was bidding on the keywords associated with the actual dentist he was looking for.
Emily says this type of bidding drives her nuts — if she types in branded keywords she wants that brand and not their competition. She’ll even “revenge” click on the ad and open it in many different tabs in order to make the advertiser spend more money because she feels they’re wasting her time. She does admit though, “That’s because I’m a bad person.”
Jay and Emily do have a fundamentally different opinion on the practice though. Emily sees it as “scheme-y” and manipulative whereas Jay sees it as aggressive business and said, “to me, it says this other dentist cares more about my business than my dentist does.”
The last item on the list for this article is getting the website right. The main focus of this point was that all targeted search terms should map to proper landing pages that promote conversion. Jay really thinks this is the key thing to get right: if your website is off, everything is off. He says if you’re spending the money on an ad it should link to a page where the user immediately says “this is what I was looking for.” He says he so often sees paid search ads for a product that links to the homepage which is basically a very expensive way of telling the people clicking on your ads, “good luck, go find it.” (Hint, they’re not going to find it, they’re going to leave.)
Another Big Sales Event Coming Up: Back-to-School Shopping
The third article we tackled during this week’s episode was, “Back-to-School Sales Growth Will Be More In-Store Than Online” from Digital Commerce 360. The article takes a deeper look at the numbers behind back-to-school sales and how they may be future indicators for upcoming shopping events like Black Friday. The numbers show that a return to in-store shopping is on the horizon as pandemic restrictions lift. Emily says she’s not surprised by this and says the numbers they’re using aren’t really all that valuable considering the past few years have not been typical schoolyears for kids at all. She says despite it not being surprising it’s still important that eCommerce merchants pay attention to these trends so they can strategize about where to spend their money. Jay agrees and says that businesses should be trying to be as prepared as possible with as many well-research strategies as possible.
Video Avenues Outpacing Paid Marketing for Small Businesses
We then quickly hit the last article as we hit the one-hour mark, “Hello Alice Examines Why SMBs Are Flocking to TikTok,” from Adweek. This article really highlights the trend of small and midsized businesses (SMBs) turning to platforms like TikTok and Youtube over traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The study was performed by Hello Alice, a multichannel platform aimed at helping SMBs. The three most important factors that they found as to why eCommerce SMBs are choosing new video-centric platforms are affordability, creative storytelling opportunities, and an overall more optimistic perspective towards these platforms.
Emily is a fan of TikTok for many of the reasons the article points out and says that it’s truly one of the last platforms that users have an overall positive opinion of. She says she thinks this is because of the culture within TikTok where it’s not as pushy or advertising-driven yet as other social media platforms have become.
Jay agrees and says that TikTok brings the fun back to marketing. He says a lot of marketers went into the profession thinking it would be interesting and fun but it became running monotonous Facebook ads instead; TikTok allows those marketers an outlet for creativity.
EMILY: A lot of us feel very jaded because it’s not like that anymore, most platforms don’t have that community fostering thing, it’s really just us pushing through that and trying to get people to the front of everyone’s feed. And TikTok is really one of the few platforms that feels like “the good old days.” And it’s just really nice. Especially where we are in the world right now, it’s really nice at the end of the day to just scroll on a platform of like-minded people that just make you laugh or show you a really cool recipe.
With that, we have to say goodbye for now. We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of Southern Fried eCommerce and we’ll hope y’all will join us again next time.