In honor of the upcoming holiday weekend, we at AIMCLEAR decided to dish up a Thanksgiving dinner-sized portion of marketing news this week. Here’s what you need to know to prepare for this “unprecedented” (sick of that word, yet?) holiday season:
Honestly, it’s Been Black Friday Since October
Now that Amazon has officially taken over the world in 2020, when they say “Prime Day is October 13,” other online big-box retailers say “how high?” Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and others have been offering door-busting product deals to compete since early October (also because, let’s face it, e-commerce revenue predictions for the 2020 holiday season are probably as reliable as the election polls).
More Black Friday trends and predictions here.
Video Killed the…Spotify Star
I am totally guilty of looking up a song on Youtube and listening to the auto-play suggestions for the following two hours. Apparently I’m not the only one, because Youtube just announced an audio-only ad format , featuring a voiceover and a static image placement.
A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Keywords
Instagram just announced that users will now be able to search for content using keywords (#whoa). There’s a lot of ambiguity around what this means for marketers – will an AI-based algorithm be used to determine the type of content featured in a post? Can SEOs learn to hack into the mainframe? Are hashtags dead?
Google’s Page Experience Update is Kind of a Big Deal
In true Google fashion, the company has announced a policy update that has SEOs scrambling. Earlier this year, Google released a set of metrics for websites called “Core Web Vitals,” which rank websites based on their site speed and quality of the user experience.
This week, they announced that these metrics will be used as ranking factors starting in May 2021. TL;DR making sure your website loads quickly just got even more important.
Google may even just outright shame your brand by tagging slow websites with a big, ugly scarlet letter.
Yikes. The good news: our SEO team at AIMCLEAR can help get your website up to snuff.
More details here.
Big Tech is Making Bank in 2020
Despite the shaky economy, ad revenue hit record highs for Amazon, Google and Facebook in Q3 this year. E-commerce is the name of the game in 2020 (surprise, surprise) and Amazon in particular is literally printing advertising revenue.
Hey…it’s Google MY Business!
Beware – internet trolls might be after your Google My Business listings. If you see an email from Google asking if “h4ck3rbr0123@gmail.com” can have access to your GMB listing, think before you click!
More information on how to outsmart the trolls here.
