In this 118th episode of The E-Comm Show, host Andrew Maff discusses a wide range of e-commerce topics, including key tenets of marketing and brand-building across platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google. If you’re curious about which trends to follow in the new year, there’s a lot to dig into here. 

Topics discussed include new influencer marketing tools on Instagram Reels and IGTV (and how to capitalize on their power), what LinkedIn’s new stories feature means for sellers (and why story platforms are so important), and the effectiveness of Google Smart Shopping campaigns. Additionally, Andrew ponders the role of dedicated marketing specialists in 2024.

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Andrew Maff

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

0:00

So number 66 of the marketing interruption, I'm your host, Andrew Maff.

0:03

And today I'm going to tell you about a premonition.

0:05

I had 50 episodes ago.

0:07

Exactly to the day.

0:09

So on episode 16, I had mentioned that Instagram reels had come out and what it meant for ecommerce sellers.

0:16

And I had said that so much was going to happen with it and that ecommerce sellers should hop on board and blah, blah.

0:22

And it turns out I was right and I was even earlier than I thought it was going to be.

0:28

I originally said, I think it was going to take about three months before Instagram reels introduced some kind of ecommerce shopping ability.

0:36

And so recently, if you haven't heard Instagram announced that Instagram reels as well as IG TV, now has the ability for at least they're testing it right now where a lot of influencers now have the ability to tag products in the videos they're in the user can then swipe up and shop whatever it is that they're using in that video.

0:58

So I called it I win.

1:01

You don't have to, to, to brag about it.

1:04

But I'm gonna so check for me.

1:08

So here, here's the thing.

1:10

OK?

1:10

So I think that Ecommerce sellers obviously need to hop on this.

1:14

I mentioned that, you know, a few months ago when we talked about it, it's gonna be big, especially if you can start to leverage influencers.

1:21

I personally am not a fan of trying to do Instagram reels out of house.

1:28

I kind of just given guidance to a lot of people, people that I'm working with on how to do it in house.

1:32

But if you're able to work with influencers and you can reshare that kind of content and you can have them, you know, tagging your products and things like that.

1:41

That's really where this is gonna go right now.

1:43

At least for the foreseeable future IG TV, still hasn't picked up as much as I thought it would.

1:49

I, I never really thought it would be a big influence to YouTube.

1:54

I thought that it would be decent though and I really don't think that it's done much of anything.

1:59

I just know people that are sharing YouTube stuff over at IG TV.

2:03

But I if you can leverage the, the really high engagement right now and the really high reach that's happening with reels and start to use influencers or start to use someone who's, who's willing to do posts and, and can actually get some decent traction on it.

2:17

And then obviously get them to tag your product.

2:18

It's gonna be great for organic growth.

2:20

I think this is gonna take the influencer thing to a new level now that you can kind of open it up to a whole new world of influencers, people that were originally on TikTok that have come over.

2:32

Also people who just have different types of content sometimes on Instagram, you know, posting stuff, posting a picture of you in a pretty outfit isn't enough.

2:41

But posting you going out for the night, getting ready with your friends and then posting I'm sorry, tagging all the products and things like that that you guys are using is is a little bit different.

2:51

You know, these makeup tutorials having them be sweat shop as they're sitting there watching the video, there's a ton of, of ability there for, for sellers to really start to leverage this.

3:01

So obviously, if you haven't gotten on to reels yet, I would suggest it.

3:06

I have yet to find anyone who's been able to successfully outsource it.

3:11

If you want some kind of insight, I'm, I'm obviously more than happy to which I'm sure I'll do on this podcast one day of, of my suggestions of how to do it in house.

3:19

But hop on reels, this episode was basically me just bragging that I was right two months ago.

3:25

So go check out shop reels, you might have it available.

3:29

If not you might have IG TV, shop stuff available as well.

3:34

But that's all I have for this week's podcast.

3:37

So rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and I will talk to you tomorrow.

3:45

So number 67 of the marketing interruption podcast, I'm your host, Andrew Maff.

3:49

And today I'm gonna talk to you about how marketing specialists aren't as necessary as they once were.

3:56

So I wanna give some insight into what it is.

3:59

I mean here.

3:59

So I would say as soon as three or four years ago and then all the way prior to that, all of the channels that you would advertise on or that you would be doing any kind of branding on or any type of marketing really, they were all very separate, right?

4:18

You had, you didn't really have much of an omni channel approach.

4:20

You had Facebook was Facebook, you had Google was Google.

4:23

You didn't really care about anything else around that you had print, you had radio and it was kind of just how is each individual thing doing at a certain time that has severely changed.

4:36

Everything has really become more of like this omni channel experience where you know, Facebook is, is connected into Instagram.

4:43

And now you're worried about attribution because of the people who are seeing it on Facebook, but can easily go to Google and because everything is becoming so much easier, the whole process is becoming a lot more fluid where people can just do whatever they want and they can go wherever they go and they can shop wherever they wanna shop.

4:59

And because of that, it's really causing marketing specialists to become less and less necessary.

5:07

And I, I don't wanna say have to revert to more of a generalist, but you have to have a very strong knowledge in multiple marketing strategies no matter what.

5:18

Like to give an example when I see a let's say someone's looking hiring and they're looking specifically for A P PC person.

5:29

All right, they're looking for some kind of paid advertising manager.

5:32

I hate seeing that kind of stuff when they're asking for, you know, experience of 5 to 10 years of paid advertising and you've managed X budget and you've done it for this type of industry and blah, blah.

5:43

But they don't ask all the other questions like how much experience do you have in you know, conversion optimization on a website?

5:51

How much experience do you have with email marketing or with let's say social media or anything along those lines.

6:00

And the reason I would wanna know that kind of stuff is specifically for paid ads since I'm kind of using that as an example, if you have someone who's a specialist in paid ads and that's all they know.

6:09

And they keep driving a ton of traffic to a website, but they don't know anything about conversions.

6:14

The issue is that they'll drive all this traffic and they'll just sit back and go.

6:18

It's not working.

6:19

I can't figure out why they don't have the ability to go into the website and say, OK, conversion optimization, you know, best practices.

6:28

Tell me that we need to tweak this.

6:29

We need to do this.

6:30

It needs to be mobile friendly.

6:31

We need to do this.

6:32

We need to have some kind of overall content strategy.

6:36

We need to have some kind of a trip wire like something along those lines.

6:42

So having someone who specializes in one specific thing ends up hindering you because they don't have the ability to speak to why, what they're doing may not be doing well enough.

6:53

So sometimes when we see agencies that specialize in specifically email marketing, it's great glad you guys are doing that.

7:00

But if you don't have any kind of knowledge behind why, you know, you're getting conversions or why you may not be and maybe the landing page they're sending them to is not good enough.

7:10

It really ends up hurting, not only the agency but the seller that hires them as well because the other problem is, you know, a seller can end up spending thousands of dollars a month on an agency and even hire sometimes where they're just sitting there going.

7:25

Why aren't you guys getting it done?

7:26

Why aren't you getting it done?

7:27

And the agency is sitting there going, we're spinning our wheels and we can't seem to figure out what the problem is because they don't have the knowledge of what the other marketing strategies are doing.

7:38

Marketing is a completely omni channel approach.

7:41

Now, you have, you know, people who are running ads on Facebook and there's, it's just brand awareness because they know that they're gonna end up going to Google or going to Amazon or Walmart or ebay or Jet or any of those other, I don't even think jets around anymore.

7:53

But it's such a fluid approach in the way that people shop and the way that people are marketed to now that having someone who's such a specialist in one area becomes such a struggle because you really just don't have, they don't seem to have the ability to understand the overall strategy.

8:12

They need to be able to look at an entire marketing plan and understand where they fit in.

8:17

But unfortunately, that's usually not the case unless they're in house and it might be a little bit easier.

8:21

But that's really why I started to see that marketing specialists, although can be useful are becoming less and less relevant if they don't have some kind of other information or are being directed by someone who has kind of a more overarching experience who can kind of guide and tell people like, hey, paid ads guy do this email marketing guy do this and you know, website designer do this just because they're able to kind of manipulate and move those puzzle pieces around.

8:52

But it's just kind of an interesting thing.

8:53

I've started to see a lot with ecommerce sellers who are like, OK, the first thing we want to hire is, you know, a Amazon ads guy, which is great.

9:02

But then they have no idea how to do you know, listing optimization or they have no idea how to optimize a storefront or they really know where traffic is coming from, but they're getting a ton of branded traffic and they don't realize that it's coming from social, like having someone who's so specific in one thing is really starting to hurt sellers.

9:21

So I'm, I'm really starting to advocate for having more of not a generalist but a specialist with a generalist kind of touch to it.

9:32

It's kind of all I wanted to talk about today.

9:34

It's a very interesting topic.

9:36

I'll, I'll bet I have some people who disagree with me.

9:38

So if you, wherever you're listening, feel free to shoot me an email, marking interruption at Blue tusker.com or comment on YouTube or on our website or wherever you're listening to this.

9:47

But if not rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and I'll see you all tomorrow.

9:53

Andrew Maff and today I'm going to talk to you about how I think that every platform should have stories.

10:00

So LinkedIn released stories and I'm going to kind of get my insight on if I think it's relevant for Ecommerce sellers or, or Ecommerce store owners specifically.

10:14

And plus side note, if you haven't heard Slack is coming out with their own version of stories or whatever it is they're doing.

10:21

But so LinkedIn stories comes out and the first thing that happens is it gets bombarded with a ton of crap.

10:28

It's like you, it's like the people who posted on there had never used Instagram stories before.

10:32

It was interesting.

10:34

But it was a ton of garbage was posted on there.

10:37

But so I I think it was like two months ago where we did a podcast about how there's a bunch of like B to B strategies that regular B to C type ecommerce sellers can use for B to B ecommerce sellers.

10:52

That stuff's easy.

10:53

That one's pretty obvious, there's definitely a reason that you can use that there specifically just because of the audience that's on, on LinkedIn.

11:00

But even on A B to C side, it still kind of has its ways.

11:04

So you think about the people that are on, on LinkedIn, they are usually professionals in their industry, growing professionals in their industry, freelancers looking for work and trying to showcase some of their work.

11:20

And then you have the average person who comes on to LinkedIn, like once or twice a year.

11:25

Maybe because they're looking for a new job or they're just like maybe I should update my thing just for the hell of it kind of stuff.

11:31

So there are several different types of people who are on there.

11:33

But if you can get LinkedIn stories as a, as a B to C seller, there's certain times where you basically still have the ability to advertise on, on LinkedIn.

11:44

And I, I talked about this in the other podcast, but it kind of depends on your product line.

11:49

So if you're selling obviously something as basic as like office equipment or office supplies of, of any kind, that one's pretty simple.

11:57

You could be B to B for that, but you could even do it for B to C if you're doing more like home office stuff because even right now, no matter who it is, you're selling to everyone's pretty much home office.

12:07

So there's definitely an area for home office supplies to do well there.

12:12

And then there's what, what was the other one we talked about?

12:17

, apparel for companies who might have more of a formal attire that something you would kind of wear to an interview or something like that or if they wanted to do things that you could wear for a virtual interview or, or anything along those lines.

12:30

I know a lot of people when they, you know, first start looking for a job, they go shopping for an interview outfit and that could work on there as well.

12:37

Things like microphones or, or, you know, phone stands or something that, that maybe influencers would use and things like that.

12:45

Those are all still very relevant.

12:47

So it's gonna kind of come down to, if your LinkedIn page has a lot of followers, I would do your stories there because they do have the ability to do it on, on your actual company page or if you specifically have more connections, then I would do it on your own personal profile.

13:06

There's a couple different ways to do that.

13:08

Obviously, if you're an ecommerce seller, but you're also selling like coaching on how to do ecommerce stuff.

13:15

That one's kind of self explanatory, that's still kind of B to B but I wouldn't, I wouldn't exactly say it's not useful, I would say on a case by case basis, it can be done very well.

13:26

It could even be done where you're interviewing, you know, influencers or, or, or other owners who are similar in your industry just to kind of build that, that report.

13:36

I would say go try it, give it a, give it a do some research first.

13:42

Look at some right now.

13:43

They're all crap.

13:44

So it's pretty easy to stand out.

13:45

But look at some, see what other companies are doing, see what other owners are doing, kind of get some ideas and give it a real good try for about 30 to 60 days and see what it does see if it can bring in anything for you.

13:59

See if you can get some traffic from it.

14:01

You know, see,, if you can get some conversions out of it, there is definitely some cases where it will work very well.

14:06

There are some cases where it may not work, but I would definitely say it's worth testing.

14:10

, if you want some ideas or anything like that, I send me,, shoot me an email marketing interruption at Blue tusker.com.

14:17

Let me know what it is you're selling and I'll give you some ideas on, on what you could try on Instagram.

14:21

I'm sorry, I have it on LinkedIn stories, but if not, that's all I want to go over today.

14:27

So rate review, subscribe and I will talk to y'all tomorrow, the number 69 of the marketing interruption podcast.

14:32

I'm your host, Andrew Maff to today I wanted to talk to you about if Google smart shopping campaigns actually work.

14:38

So I've had so much experience with this.

14:43

We have a ton of paid advertising people we work with and I've done it a lot in the past.

14:49

When they first came out, I was like, great.

14:51

This is, you know, gonna completely save us a ton of time and just like I've said in most of the podcast, I'm gonna say it's a case by case basis.

15:01

So the biggest benefit that we used to have from doing regular shopping campaigns was, you know, you would have a high priority, then you would negate it, drop it down to a medium, negate it and eat the key word again, drop it down to a low priority and then just bid the shit out of it.

15:17

And you know, that's how you would kind of win.

15:19

And the benefit we had out of that was those keywords that eventually got down to that low priority.

15:24

We know those were winners.

15:25

We know those were doing well.

15:26

So we would then take those same keywords and make a search campaign out of it.

15:30

And it was just kind of like this circular process of, of like mining keywords and bidding just as high as I can to knock out competition.

15:38

And the nice thing about smart shopping campaigns is that, you know, they can work pretty well.

15:44

But the biggest issue I've always had with them is you get zero data.

15:47

To me, it's almost like working with Amazon where you just don't, you almost don't own the customer.

15:51

You have no idea what they searched.

15:53

You have no idea really anything, any of that kind of data that you can leverage in any of the other campaigns.

15:59

But I've had sellers, we've done them, we've set them up a few different ways.

16:04

So your first thought, which this is how we did it a few years ago when they first came out was I said, OK, just like regular campaigns I'm gonna want to group all of the products together.

16:16

So, you know, we would take a, a product category from a certain seller and make a smart shopping campaign on an app and take another category and do it that way and so on.

16:24

And my logic was, it's gonna learn from all those keywords and it's gonna sell that product line as best as it can.

16:31

The problem was, it actually doesn't really work that way.

16:34

It kind of works more of it.

16:36

It needs as much data as it can possibly get.

16:39

And just like if you were to do, you know, maximize conversions or if you were to try to do, you know, target row as or something like that, you need to get like 25 conversions within like a good week or two to get a minimal amount of, of data.

16:53

And so for smart shopping campaigns, if you break them down where they're that small and you're not getting that much traffic for a couple of those categories, they can actually bleed out because what will happen is they'll start to increase bids on ridiculous keywords just to try to get a conversion somewhere.

17:07

So we've actually found that the way that they work the best is to just trust the process and shove every single product into that category and just hit go.

17:16

It sounds ridiculous, but it actually has sort of worked and we've done stuff like that for other sellers and it doesn't work as well.

17:23

And to be honest, I can't really tell you why it works for some and why it doesn't work for others.

17:28

There are some glaringly obvious things.

17:30

Like, maybe they didn't have enough conversions in a certain time frame.

17:33

Maybe there's just not enough search volume.

17:36

Maybe there's a wildly competitive space and now you're just bidding like ridiculous numbers on things.

17:42

There's a lot of different reasons on, on why it may not work.

17:45

But I would say the, the easiest thing to do is a two week test, right?

17:51

Take all of your shopping campaigns.

17:53

When you, when you do a smart shopping campaign, by the way, it's going to cater to the that campaign.

17:59

Google is gonna cater to that campaign over all of your regular ones.

18:02

So if you do a smart shopping campaign with all of your products, be prepared for all of your other shopping campaigns to turn off.

18:08

So I would look at what it is you're spending on a daily basis for all of your shopping campaigns.

18:15

Make that your daily budget for a smart shopping campaign.

18:19

Turn off all the other ones, just pause them and let the smart shopping campaign run for two weeks at the end of two weeks.

18:26

If you're not hitting your Nroy that you're happy with, I would say revert back, go back to the way things were, you didn't lose that much in, in two weeks and it it was worth the, try to see if it was worth it because a lot of people think like, oh the ro I is the same or, you know, or it's not that big of a difference or maybe it's a little bit less, but what you're not taking into account also is the amount of hours that you may have spent on it.

18:48

So I'm, I'm not sitting here saying I'm an advocate for smart shopping campaigns, but I am going to say that it's definitely worth testing.

18:55

Everything is worth testing.

18:57

You know, some people kind of get stuck doing the same thing over and over, which is basically the definition of insanity or whatever they say.

19:04

But, you know, there's nothing wrong with trying something new because if you don't innovate, you're gonna die.

19:10

So I would definitely suggest giving smart shopping campaigns a try, leave it to a two week test, set a reminder for you to check where it's at every week or whatever.

19:18

And after two weeks decide if you want to keep it or not, but I would suggest giving it a try.

19:22

I would also make sure that if you have a very small product line, I probably wouldn't suggest it.

19:27

I think it's better for larger product lines.

19:29

, but that's kind of just based off experience of stuff that I've seen work in the past, but that's all I want to go over today.

19:35

If you have any questions something you want me to review on the show.

19:38

Feel free to shoot me an email marketing interruption at Bluetusker.com.

19:41

If not rate, review, subscribe and I will see you all tomorrow.