It should come to no surprise that search engines and platforms like Google are constantly evolving and making changes to improve user experience with quality content across the online universe [database]. The technology giant Google released a new algorithm update on May 4th that has affected some industries more than others. Mason Interactive Director of SEO, Jenna Vaccaro, walks us through a high-level overview of what the update means and how your business might be affected.
“Most of Google’s core updates prioritize getting rid of web pages that have poor quality content,” Jenna says. “The first thing their intelligence is scanning through are websites with blurbs of content that are spammy* and not authoritative.”
* spammy: denoting, relating to, or constituting Internet spam.
We are talking about the biggest areas of change, and that means for the better or for worse. Websites focused on fitness, holistic medicine, banking and financial industries were affected the most.
“In this algorithm update, Google is scanning through all of these websites and they’re giving less priority to the ones that are spammy and more priority to the ones that they are deeming as more authoritative and credible from a content standpoint.”
Local content is also being prioritized. “If there’s spammy content on a website that has locations in 50 states and a page built out for each city or state, Google flushed out content that doesn’t offer information to the user.” If you have a physical address or storefront, you might see some drops.
While some industries and verticals have been affected more than others, we are not seeing a huge change in e-commerce, and our direct-to-consumer clients don’t appear to have been impacted.
“If you are experiencing a dip in traffic, and it tailored off at or around May 4th, you should be able to monitor this in [Google] Analytics,” Jenna says. “You can check the dip in traffic and visibility in keywords, and if that happened, there’s a few things you can do to track what to fix.” Thin content is an issue, and Jenna recommends a content audit of pages that don’t get traffic or don’t have much meaning to the users. “It’s always better to get rid of this content and start over, or condense a bunch of content into one authoritative piece.”
Having a blog post just to have a blog post from 10 years ago versus focusing on the pages that actually bring in quality traffic is just one of the ways you can think about your website content going forward.
Top 3 things to consider:
Thin content
Technical related issues
Topics based on user search intent
Contact us for more information about the Google algorithm.
The current e-commerce landscape can be challenging to navigate, to say the least. Logistics challenges, production disruptions, cash flow issues, and changing consumer behavior is creating uncertainty for many businesses.
In our latest e-commerce focused webinar, Mason Interactive Founder, Brook Shepard, and Adrian Padron, Director of Media, weighed in on questions all business stakeholders are facing today: how to stay in the market and on the top of your customer’s mind. We summarized the key takeaways from the webinar, including a case study of our client who successfully pivoted their strategy to drive long term revenue.
The electric vehicle analogy
To illustrate the importance of staying in-market, Brook shared an analogy around EV’s (Electric Vehicles):
Imagine a bucket that could hold all the potential EV buyers in America. It would be’d be a pretty big bucket.
The hard truth for car manufacturers, though, is that EV’s cost $12,000 more to produce than vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines; carmakers often struggle to recoup these costs through pricing alone. As a result, car manufacturers stand to lose money on almost every electronic vehicle sold.
So, in the current economic environment, most manufacturers are shuttering EV production and furloughing staff. “If we’re all going to buy electric vehicles soon, then they should be staying in the market and continuing to improve technology to make these cars more effective.
Now, imagine being the one EV manufacturer who continued advertising and improving their product during these months. Don’t you think they would have a leg-up on brand recognition and product when we come out of this? Honestly, I think that’s half the reason for Elon Musk’s outrageous tweets – he’s staying in front of the consumer, filling a bucket of potential Tesla buyers.”
The theory of customer bucket
One of the simplest and most logical ways to look at the health of your marketing ecosystem is based on the idea of a customer bucket. Think about your website as a bucket filled with water, where your customer base or the traffic you are driving to your site is the water. That bucket is full once you have healthy traffic coming to your website.
“We don’t want high bounce rates, low page view consumption, or low engagement post click,” Adrian says. The quality of your water is crucial to this. “If we’re not constantly filling [the bucket], that bucket will leak”.
Why? Because of pixels and tracking. Google and Facebook have pixels on your website that track users within up to 180 day windows, during which they will be available to you to remarket to. “If you stop the flow of traffic, you will stop the flow of the water, and so your bucket will continue to leak and eventually empties out,” Adrian explains.
Why an empty customer bucket can become a huge risk
Imagine you have let your bucket dry out, with just a handful of customers in it. You might think it will be easy to bounce back, relaunch advertising when the time is right and start generating revenue straightaway.
In this scenario, you will A) cause significant damage to the user experience B) double your future advertising cost and C) possibly lose contact with your most-loyal, high-value customers.
Doesn’t sound right? Let us explain to you why.
1. Increased ad frequency will have negative impact on user experience
If your bucket doesn’t have enough users to serve your ads to, the ad frequency will increase. This will lead to a poor user experience for those in the bucket because they are constantly seeing the same messages and creatives at a higher frequency [because they are the only ones in the bucket].
2. The impact on cost metrics
When you are ready to re-enter the market, after the market surges and your production comes back to full capacity, you will now have to fill the bucket up, and also acquire customers. “Now we’re looking at higher cost per averages than we would have had we kept that bucket full with quality users in the long term,” Adrian says.
If you are experiencing cash flow issues, and your focus is on profitability, we can shift your advertising strategy to brand search and remarketing. However, this strategy can only be applied short term whereas over time, when that bucket continues to drop, remarketing performance will also begin to decline.
The biggest long term risk? As we approach the holiday season in November – December, that is the key shopping time frame when most of our ecommerce clients drive more than 60% of their annual revenue from, you can’t build an efficient strategy if you enter the season with an empty bucket. “At that point, we’re not just talking about volume, but we also need to be as efficient and profitable as possible. And that strategy is only available if you have a healthy flow of customers to begin with” Adrian adds.
3. Losing the market to your competitors
Another negative impact occurs when you stop nurturing your high value customers [the good water in your bucket], and allow your competitors to grab them into their ecosystem. If your customer doesn’t see your brand in the market, your competitor will quickly capture their interest and as a result, you have lost a customer with a really high Lifetime Value (LTV).
How to keep your bucket full (without breaking the bank)
In order to achieve the best possible results in the current environment, change your campaign objectives to drive cost-effective Cost Per Impressions (CPMs). “We know for a fact that within our internal data set, there’s a CPM trend that shows that it is cheaper to be in the market today, Adrian says. “If you implement the strategy correctly, you can get more impressions with less, and therefore more traffic to your website, he ads.
“There’s a CPM trend that shows that it is cheaper to be in the market today”
Adrian shared a real-life example, supported by client data, on how his team pivoted strategy for a client who needed to cut their advertising budget. The new approach was to maintain a consistent level of traffic, while reducing advertising costs.
His team shifted from revenue-centric strategy (driving sales, which is an impossibility given that this client’s factory is closed) to embrace storytelling. The revised messaging, that focused on video assets and authenticity, achieved huge engagement with thousands of likes per post and a record hitting number of video views.
The biggest win of the new strategy was maintaining a flat bounce rate despite the major shifts in the market, and thus continuing to drive not just steady volumes of traffic, but good quality traffic to the client’s website.
Using ad creatives that emphasized social relevance and brand values, enabled the client to build trust on the brand and its products. Once the market returns back to normal, the team will shift to a remarketing strategy to engage with these new and existing customers who have engaged with the content and built a relationship with the brand during the pandemic.
Key takeaways to adapt to your strategy
When looking at your marketing funnel, focus on consideration and awareness strategies to make real impact and drive those brand value bringing interactions to continuously drive traffic, and attract new customers. Pivot your objectives and positioning, while controlling the overall advertising cost, in order to keep your customer bucket full for the future.
Higher Education is undergoing a surge in demand in the midst of ongoing economic uncertainty. If there is a silver lining to this environment, it’s that colleges and universities have an entirely new audience of prospective students. Dynamic schools are thriving.
We interviewed Andrew Womble, the leader of the education media team at Mason Interactive, for expert insights on education trends. Andrew has been working closely with our higher education clients through the pandemic to pivot their advertising strategies, and optimize campaigns for best performance. He shared the tactics his team used to tap into this new market opportunity and help our clients exceed their goals – with reduced budgets.
Andrew, what does the higher education market look like today?
Higher education is in huge demand. We have seen a significant increase in education-related search queries over the past 6 weeks. With a rising number of people left home without a job, whether unemployed or furloughed, the education market has an entirely new audience looking to explore alternative career paths. Historical data supports this trend; we saw a similar education boom during the 2008 market crash.
“Without a doubt, May will bring similar, if not even better, results.”
The best way to demonstrate this upward trend is to look at our client data. Historically, March through June is a quiet period for education, and the search volumes typically drop during these months. This April, however, our clients saw a significant spike in performance and as much as doubled conversions in comparison to April 2019. As an example, our top performing client achieved a 60% YoY increase in impressions. Without a doubt, May will bring similar, if not even better, results.
How has this impacted on our clients campaigns?
Typically, campaigns that focus on brand keywords [keywords around the school name] are the best-performing, most-efficient campaigns for our education clients. When the pandemic first hit the economy in mid March, we saw a significant drop in the impression volume and brand leads.
Around the same time, Cost Per Lead (CPL) for brand campaigns skyrocketed when students and families searched for the school name to get updates on campus closures. Our team reacted immediately to and shifted the focus on top-of-the funnel campaigns.
Why do top of the funnel campaigns perform so well in the current landscape?
Today’s audience is in exploratory mode, which creates a new market. People are searching generic keywords – things like “online degree” – at a massively increased scale. Prospective students who have recently become unemployed and thus decided to pursue higher education, don’t yet know a particular school they want to apply to. They will begin their research by typing in broad search terms such as “cooking degree” or “business school” to get an idea of the degrees and schools available. Top of the funnel campaigns are built around these generic, broad keywords and focus on introducing the school to a new audience for the first time.
Historically a campaign like this is very expensive to run, but because of the increased demand, generic keywords have become more cost effective.
Can you drive results even with a reduced budget?
As a result of the high search volumes and increased demand, you can now achieve more with a smaller budget, as long as you have the right strategy in place. Compared to the data from April 2019, our clients have reached the same, and some even better, results this April, with a significantly smaller budget.
If you are struggling to justify advertising spend at the current time, focus on setting up your strategy to the upcoming peak season, which typically runs from July to October. Letting your sales funnel dry down between now and July, can damage your entire marketing ecosystem and take you back to the square one. As a rule of thumb, it is always more cost (and time) effective to nurture existing prospects in your funnel than it is to attract new ones when your funnel is empty.
You said even a smaller budget can take you further than ever before. Why is that?
Simply put, with so much demand out there, advertising is cheaper. Our education clients have seen a huge increase in impressions, which in turn increases conversions, and therefore the Cost Per Click (CPC) will decrease. This means schools can now generate more conversions at a lower cost.
Naturally, Google algorithm plays part in the entire scenario. Google Ads Auction determines the cost for each keyword based on how many advertisers [schools] are bidding for it – the fewer advertisers there are, the lower the cost. With so many schools pulling back on advertising, there is a huge opportunity to advertise at cheaper cost in a less competitive environment. In addition to this, the high volume of education related search queries, has dropped the Cost Per Impression (CPM). When you combine all these factors with the growing demand, you get an ideal environment to drive success.
What are your recommendations for education marketing professionals?
Most importantly, continue advertising and invest in filling your sales funnel with future students. The biggest mistake would be to pause all advertising because when your school reopens you are going to need those students.
“The biggest mistake would be to pause all advertising”
Work with your agency to pivot your strategy, edit existing campaigns and revise your creatives and ad copy accordingly. My recommendation is to shift to upper funnel advertising tactics in order to introduce your school to new audiences. This approach has delivered great results for our education clients, when combined with highly-personalized remarketing tactics.
Thirdly, expand and invest in your entire online structure. Naturally, online programs are thriving in the current environment. On-campus degrees still get some interest, but it doesn’t mean a school can solely rely on them with so much uncertainty around reopenings. If your school doesn’t offer online programs, but you have a campus in a remote location, consider emphasizing the location as a safe place to study throughout your messaging.
After chatting with Andrew, one thing is clear: low advertising cost and increased demand has created a huge opportunity for higher education institutions. Schedule a call with our experts today to get advice on how you can tap on this new opportunity.
There are many benefits to email marketing that should be implemented at the beginning of your direct to consumer, e-commerce journey. Engaging with subscribers, loyal customers and providing insight into your company lifestyle, launches and community is something that can be done in a creative and effective way.
We sat down (virtually, of course) with Mason Interactive’s Director of Email Marketing, Brian Poole to gather insight into email best practices, the benefits of using platforms like Klaviyo and what brands can do during this time make the most of their email marketing channel.
Open rates are going up right now
“Right now I feel like it’s a really good time for people to work on their deliverability,” Brian says. We know that open rates are going up. People are opening emails because they’re spending more time in front of their phone or computer. “It’s a good time to see who’s worthwhile – if they’re not opening now, and they haven’t in 6 months, they’re not going to,” Brian adds. Now is a good time to parse down your list and focus on getting the most out of it.
Many brands are laser focused on sending emails to the highest number of people possible. However, we should be focusing less on how big the list is and more on how many people are buying from it. “We can send a million emails, if no one’s buying, what difference does it make?” Brian says. “If you send 5 emails and one person buys, that one person is more valuable than a million. If we email everyone, it doesn’t work as well.”
Best ways to capture new emails
The simple answer is incentive. “Offer something like a first order discount or promo code to get people to sign up – keep it clean – use a pop up or some sort of collection front and center,” Brian suggests. “People might think it’s annoying but realistically, they are there to shop, browse and sign up for more information and promos.”
We also understand that some brands are unable to incentivize anything – they can’t offer discounts – so they need to be more creative. Signing up for updates on certain products, being notified about pre-order opportunities, or joining a community is something that brands can offer through their email marketing strategy.
Pop up banner is a great way to capture new emails.
Whether you’re gathering news emails or engaging with your community, it really comes down to getting better traffic to your site, or getting the right people to find your site. “That is more likely to get the right people to sign up and then convert,” Brian says. “For some brands, it requires a cross channel approach – You need to be spending money across different channels in order to drive the right people to your website.”
Do you ever wonder how emails end up in your spam folder?
Spam tracking specifically relates to brands with large lists who are sending emails on a more consistent basis. If someone in your database receives emails from you, Gmail will flag email addresses that haven’t opened an email in a long time and return that data to you. At the same time, they are assigning you a role as a spam trap. “If you continue to email that name, Gmail will deem your domain and emails as spam,” Brian adds. Inactive names can be randomly assigned as spam, so you need to keep lists smaller, and more tailored.
While many brands are constantly trying to engage with their entire list, the data shows that it doesn’t actually result in more opens. When you send to a carefully segmented group that signed up in the past two months or opened in the last six months, you have a better chance of maintaining a quality list and score. “Because the list of inactive emails is constantly being ping’d by Gmail, you’re likely to get more emails going directly to spam,” Brian adds.
Paid Media and Email working hand in hand
Like the chicken and the egg logic, people see an ad, they come to your site, and most of the time they will leave. This is where you serve them a retargeted ad, which will bring them back to your site, and then they will get emails based off of abandoned carts or products that they viewed, and then more ads. It goes around and around. “People who utilize everything tend to do the best,” Brian says.
The reality is that you can’t just focus solely on Search Engine Optimization, for example. Although we can help improve your organic search results and presence, it won’t be as successful as distributing the content across every channel. “Maybe someone found you via SEO, but what if they don’t buy today? They came to your website and left. What do you do now?” Brian asks.
“In a perfect scenario, you would follow them around with an ad, send them an email tomorrow, and then an Instagram ad later that day, and a Facebook ad the next.”
The benefits of using Klaviyo as you r email platform
One of the main benefits of using Klaviyo as an email marketing platform are the integration components available. “The integrations with Shopify, and other cart platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, are pretty straightforward and really great,” Brian says.
If you are moving away from a platform like MailChimp, Klaviyo is really good at transitioning you over. “A lot of people upgrade from MailChimp, and Klaviyo has an integration with MailChimp so that you don’t need to export your lists and move anything over,” Brian adds. Klaviyo gives you the ability to see who opened emails six months ago in Mailchimp, and not just the data that you are seeing in the new platform.
Personally, Brian finds that the ease of use of the platform makes it the most user friendly and controllable, especially compared to some of the more complicated tools like Bronto. They offer a lot of features that other platforms don’t or they are just not as easy to use, like the email builder and predictive analytics.
“Instead of predicting by list, Klaviyo predicts by looking at behaviour, and assigns a value based on how likely a list member is likely to purchase, or go dormant, or buy more, based on their actions.”
Additionally, Klaviyo Integrates really well with Facebook and here at Mason Interactive, we use the data in real-time to create high quality Facebook audiences.
3 things you need to do to get set up
Set Up Collection and Welcome
Collection forms that you know are working, followed with a welcome series email
Set up Abandoned Cart
If someone is in the process of checking out and abandons their cart, you can automatically send them an email reminder
Set up Browse Abandonment
Create action items on what you’re sending out from an email standpoint
Need help getting your email marketing strategy set up?
A luxury shoe brand VEERAH is the latest addition to Mason Interactive’s roster of fashion clients.
VEERAH is a mission-driven luxury shoe company that designs vegan shoes and accessories for the modern woman.
As a trusted digital partner for VEERAH, Mason Interactive will build a customized marketing strategy to drive profitable growth and scale customer acquisition across all platforms. The team will embrace VEERAH’s unique value proposition to place its products at the forefront of the ideal customer across a variety of platforms.
Stacey Chang, Founder and Chief Warrior:
“We know from our loyal clients that more and more of their friends are looking for vegan brands that don’t “look” vegan. At VEERAH, we never thought of it as an either or proposition as we create considering the design, quality and material together and feel in today’s world the modern woman shouldn’t have to sacrifice their style for a sustainable look or lifestyle, it’s just a given that you can have both. And now, we see everywhere how important it is to choose brands with a sustainable ethos so as a company we wanted to partner with the right digital agency to help share our brand with a broader audience.
“We’re super excited to start this partnership with Mason Interactive. From the first virtual meeting (yes our engagement started during the stay-at-home orders) we felt a natural confidence in the team managing our account. We trust their experience and work with other DTC brands we’re familiar with and appreciate the clear process and expert knowledge they bring in guiding our digital marketing strategy and helping us grow our reach.”
It’s a pleasure to work with a brand that is dedicated to their mission and driven by innovation, says Mason CEO Brook Llewellyn Shepard. “ There is a great deal of opportunity to work strategically with VEERAH, enhance the brand’s position in the market and grow the business through online sales.”
We are committed to provide excellent service, and support brands on their digital journeys. Sign up here to schedule a free consultation with our digital experts, and take the first step on your journey.
Here at Mason Interactive, we stress the importance of building up your brand equity. Whether your focus is on the long term benefits of SEO or a robust PR strategy, there are numerous ways brands can build up their authority across channels and within the consumer space.
In our recent e-commerce focused webinar, Thriving in a Crisis, Katie Klencheski, founder of SMAKK Studios, highlights the many ways she has been working on building brands that connect authentically with consumers over the past decade.
Brand development has changed
Five years ago, there was a change in the marketplace, but a shift really came to the forefront two years ago that focused on consumer sensibility. Did you know that on average, we now see 5000+ brand ads and images per day? “In a sea of brands, it takes a lot more to stand out than it used to,” Katie says.
Brands are evolving – we used to be in a place where brands could talk about functional needs, value or quality, and the crop of emerging D2C brands over the past 10 years prove that design and personality were enough to stand out for a little while – but that alone is not enough anymore.
Brands that embrace the idea of a higher purpose are starting to win the day
69% of consumers in the US are “belief driven buyers” who are looking for brands that align with their values and brands that connect with those values are winning. Consumers want the products they choose to have a positive impact on our planet, build communities, drive social change, foster inclusion, and meaningfully enable self expression.
Consumers are showing up for these brands in the marketplace. Katie mentions a recent study where brands marketing sustainability are seeing 5X growth over those conventionally marketing products in their category.
Millennials and GenZ want to work for brands that are trying to make the world a better place. Additionally, many at the top of the food chain believe that the focus on shareholder values is the only thing that should be driving corporations’ decisions. Consumers and investors are looking for brands who are going to restore a sense of community, a sense of humanity and help us heal from this moment.
Building brands for what’s next
“In order to win, we have to take on today’s issues with solutions for the future and create meaningful relationships with consumers,” Katie adds. The success of any brand depends on its ability to own its unique white space and cultural moment.
At SMAKK, Katie emphasizes the importance of looking at the DNA of the brand, competitors, brand audience and cultural landscape.
“Right now, brands have an unprecedented opportunity to connect emotionally with their audiences”
“Because people have a strong sense of memory to things they have an emotional connection with, this is a time when we can do things as brands that are going to build a tremendous amount of brand equity because we are doing things at a time where people will remember us for our actions.”
Brands that lead are going to emerge in a position of power and be able to engage with their audiences afterward. To thrive right now, brands need to speak this moment, and put their values and purpose in service of their audience’s needs.
Not a moment just to sell but to engage and connect
Before your brand can act, you must be clear on your foundational “why”. This is an opportunity for brands to spend time articulating “What is our purpose?”, “What are our values?”, “How does that inform the products that we create?”, and “What does that mean for our position in the market?”.
“If we understand the core of what a brand is, that should inform every action, every interaction and every reaction that that brand has across every channel that they have,” Katie adds.
If you don’t know exactly what your purpose is and what your values are, you won’t be able to act in a way that is authentic with your consumers. Once you have defined these characteristics, only then you can begin to focus on personality, story telling, visual identity and tone of voice, and how it works across your different channels.
Here’s examples on how Mason Interactive client Dagne Dover embraces its values:
Last month’s campaign won’t work today. The core of who you are [as a brand] shouldn’t change, but what you are putting out in the world has to. Therefore, we need to be creative about how we are creating content.
Embrace solo content creators
Reach out to photographers with home studios or influencers to show how they engage with their product – how does your product live at home?
Break the 4th wall and show people what’s behind your company
Letters from the founder, business problems, show employees – we are all in this together. Because we are losing social connections in the real world, we are moving to social media to fill the gap. Brands have just as much real estate in our feeds, if not more, and therefore that’s exactly where brands need to be.
Be real. Now is the time to show up as humans.
“We are going to see a ton of campaigns that focus on real humans and making meaningful content that is authentic to connect and seize this moment,” Katie concludes.
