Social Media Strategies That Boost Awareness and ROI

/in , , , , /by

Social media marketing is absolutely necessary for brands and businesses in order for them to stay relevant. By having a social media strategy in place, it helps businesses engage and influence their target audience. 

There are so many campaigns across social media that have gone viral by simply having a strategy in place.

The average amount of time that people spend on social media is 2.27 hours. Considering the increase in popularity with apps like TikTok it has people spending more time scrolling throughout the day. Here’s a look at the benefits of having a social media strategy in place that can drive both brand awareness and ROI.

Benefits of Having A Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them and metrics tracked to measure performance. A strategy doesn’t need to be over-thought and difficult. The best way you can go about creating a strategy is by having a simple yet specific plan with meaningful measurable. 

This will help you clearly identify whether or not the tactics you’re implementing are successful or not. Ultimately, your social media strategy should drive brand awareness and engagement across social media channels for your target audience/s. 

One of the hardest things about social media marketing is consistency. It can be tough to try and recreate a campaign and hope for the same results. By having a social media strategy you can provide your business with the following benefits:

  • Increase Your Brand Awareness
  • Increase Your Web Traffic
  • Generate Quality Leads
  • Quality Data you can analyze and measure

There are so many benefits to social media and having a strategy in place will only strengthen your ability to achieve your business goals.

Steps to Building a Successful Social Media Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of a social media strategy, let’s get into a couple specific steps you can take to create one. Here’s a couple tips on how you can implement a successful social media strategy:

Set Goals for Your Business

Spending some time in this step will help you understand and define what your social media goals are. This will ultimately determine the rest of your strategy.

Think about what your business wants to achieve from social media and understand that marketing and business goals are different. For example, are you trying to draw brand awareness in the marketplace, or expand your following or generate more leads? You may want to achieve these goals, but it’s crucial to note each one of them as they will involve different tactics on social media.

When you set your goals, define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand which social media metrics are important. To be successful on social media, set metrics for each channel you use. Over and above basic metrics you can dig deeper and track audience growth rate. There are many metrics you can use to track success, so narrow them down to what matters to your business.

Research Your Audience & Your Competitors 

Your audience and your competitors go hand in hand. In order to create personalized messaging and content, you need to understand who your audience is and what they want. The best way to achieve that is to do market research. You can do this through online surveys, interviews with your customers or by setting up a focus group.

Once you’ve done this, you will get a better look at your buyer personas which in turn help you create a better understanding of what your ideal customer is. Then you can begin catering to that demographic.

Competitor research helps you understand what your competitors are doing online such as what platforms they use and campaigns they run. You can also see what their messaging is like, as well as their content and how frequently they post. By understanding how they engage with customers and the success of that engagement you can either emulate it or take another direction to capture customers’ attention.

Social Media Platforms

Choosing the best channels for your business can be confusing at the beginning. There are a lot of platforms out there to choose from. Depending on the type of business you are, you may be making a mistake by not being present on all of the platforms. 

Facebook: Is one of the biggest social media platforms and the oldest around. Facebook offers a targeted way to engage with prospects and customers. 

Instagram: Is a great visual platform. Instagram continues to be one of the most popular amongst younger audiences and has seen huge growth over the past few years. It’s a great platform to showcase products and connect with influencers to grow your customer base. Plus with in-app shopping coming to Instagram soon through shoppable posts, customers will be able to purchase on the platform. 

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B businesses and provides opportunities for B2C too. It provides businesses with a way to connect in the B2B space both organically and through paid advertising. Content that works well on this platform are blogs, white-papers, eBooks, and industry-related content. 

Twitter: Twitter is a real-time platform which means your content should be timely and relevant. It can be a great customer service channel for brands as it allows quick replies and its hashtags help discover new and trending content. 

TikTok: As one of the fastest-growing social media channels, TikTok is a great place for video content. Known for its short-form and quirky videos, it’s developing rapidly as a platform and can be used effectively for marketing. TikTok is a great place for influencer collaborations. 

Planning Your Content

When you plan your content, you’re creating a tone for your pages. It’s a way for you to figure out if you engage with your audience in a formal or informal voice. It’s how you showcase your brand’s personality. The best way to plan your content is by creating a content calendar. That way you can create posts and schedule them regularly on social networks.

You can measure your posts by monitoring their performance, tracking your KPIs, and lastly, testing out new content to see which keywords resonate with your audience.

Final Thoughts

Doing content marketing without a content strategy is a disaster waiting to happen.

The more you know about how social media works, the better your strategy will be. It’s important to understand the fundamentals of social media marketing along with the intricacies of each platform so you can target the right audience.  

At Onimod Global, our data-driven content strategies align your content marketing efforts to real business results. Our content strategy services make it easy to understand your audience’s needs, where your competition is winning, and areas where you have an opportunity to lead your industry.

As a Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, we are your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. 

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Ukrainian Digital Vacancies at Onimod Global

/in , , , , /by

Some 3 million-plus Ukrainian citizens have been displaced in recent weeks, with some of them possessing in-demand technical skills. Onimod Global is in search of a Digital Marketing expert for two current positions. Read on to learn more and apply. 

Hiring Ukrainian Talent

We’ve all been watching the horrible events unfold since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One thing that you can count on in our industry and country is how we come together in times of trouble to help one another.

SEO entrepreneur Olesia Korobka and Val Voshchevska, Ukrainian strategic communications experts, are helping bridge the gaps beween talent and job vacancies from across the globe. And Onimod Global is onboard. 

Marketers and digital marketing companies alike have been added to these sheets with information on specializations and skills as well as contact info and details about their companies.

Val Voshchevska was able to launch Jobs for Ukraine, a site that pulled together all job openings they manually found online. With already more than 2,000 vacancies for roles ranging from graphic design to tattoo artists and more.

Ukrainian Job Vacancies at Onimod Global

At Onimod Global, we’re always looking for unique talent in our ever-evolving field. That’s why we’re looking to fill two positions for a Digital Marketer at our firm, extending the applications to Ukrainian citizens.

  • Role 1: Digital Marketing Account Manager
  • Role 2: Paid Digital Marketing Internship

If you are Ukrainian, please submit for one of our two current roles here.

While can’t promise that you will be qualified to join us, we can promise that we’ll let you know right away, either way (within a working week).

Looking to Hire? 

Throughout times of war, the necessity for us to help those in need increases. Many of us are looking for ways to get involved with the current situation unfolding in Ukraine.

In this case, we are sharing this with our digital marketing community, in the hopes that it may help someone from Ukraine get a much-needed job opportunity. If you are short-staffed and are willing to hire a Ukrainian for SEO or PPC projects, consider contacting or going through the job list above. 

Why Onimod Global

Providing custom tailored digital marketing solutions to clients worldwide, we are a Chicago-based Digital Marketing & Consulting firm offering an eclectic mix of dedicated professionals working to create, implement and manage your digital marketing efforts. Your in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and serving as our clients’ consultative marketing team.

For more information on career opportunities and more, contact us today.

SEO Performance & Moving Your Website Host

/in , , , , /by

Here’s a little known secret: many people are afraid to switch their web hosts. But eventually your once state-of-the-art website will begin to lag in performance and speed. However, it is important to be aware of the value of updating your web host and the difference it makes for your site. Read on to find out why. 

When you’re in the process of optimizing your web pages your goal is to have your content rank high on a search engine, like Google. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or services.

Changing the location of your website hosting can impact its performance in search results. It may sound a little scary at first when your website hosts are slow but don’t panic – the rankings will come back!

Here’s what you should know about changing your website host location.

Google Slowing Down Your Website

The first thing you will notice when you move your host location is that your website is slow, perhaps extremely slow. Rest assured, this isn’t something that will stay that way for long. Google makes your website slow when they notice a change in host. They do this so Google won’t cause any problems in the future.

Whether you’re moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site. Over time, once Google’s systems can tell that going faster doesn’t cause any issues, they’ll speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Impact on Website Loading Times

There are a couple of different scenarios that are at play if you’re thinking about moving your website. If you’re thinking about moving your website hosting to a new location, this can have an impact on how fast your website will load for your users. If a majority of users live far away from where the website is hosted, it could lead to a slower user experience. 

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

Hosting Your Website in Multiple Locations

To avoid the likelihood of your website loading time being affected, you could host your website on servers in multiple locations. Content delivery networks, also known as (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you’re using your site may be on multiple servers already.

If you’re using a hosting platform the chances of them already doing this for you is high. With SEO, the server’s location is unfortunately not used for geo-targeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

A country-code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. The appropriate setting in the Google Search Console can be found in the international targeting report in your settings. 

  • Use the International Targeting report to monitor your hreflang errors, or to choose a country that should be prioritized for your search results. This report has the following sections:
  • The Language section: Monitor the usage and errors of hreflang tags on your site. 
  • The Country section: Set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if desired.

Final Thoughts

Overall, changing the location of your website host will temporarily impact crawling on your website, and has the potential to impact loading time. It’s important to remember that this type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geo-targeting.

At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. We have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing.

We have a preferred hosting vendor that boosts SEO performance. If you’d like to learn more about our hosting vendor and our services contact us today! 

The Importance of Digital Marketing in 2022

/in , , , , /by

Digital marketing is more important now than ever. You can utilize digital marketing to target specialized markets, allowing you to reach out to customers who may not have previously considered your company. But this industry is fast-growing, which also means ever changing and evolving. Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? Right here. 

As marketers think about building brands in the coming years post-COVID, how is digital marketing being leveraged to help companies bounce back? More importantly, how should you redefine your strategy for 2022?

According to a CISCO report, 90% of North Americans use the internet, and usage is expected to reach 92% by next year. Customers are now spending more time and resources on owned-media channels such as websites, mobile apps, and customer-service channels. There is also a noticeable increase in customer-conversion rates, with social and digital video channels driving the highest ROIs.

Having a digital marketing strategy in place allows you to reach millions of people cost-effectively. If your business doesn’t have a strategic digital marketing plan aligned with your business plan your business can suffer and you could lose out to competitors who are more digitally savvy.

Reasons To Use Digital Marketing

1. Reach a Specific Audience. 

With media like TV, billboards and radio, you are reaching out to a broad audience, and the chances of targeting a specific group of customers is low. Whereas in digital marketing, you can use the features of a marketing platform to specifically target an audience based on age, interests or behavior. 

Your chances of reaching the right audience are significantly higher, and you can pick and choose these metrics as your needs change. It also allows you to identify subgroups within your clientele. If you have more than one type of product, you can tailor a campaign to this more specific group of customers.

2. Access Metrics of your Digital Marketing Strategy ─ All in One Place.

Digital marketing metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the success of a business’s marketing efforts online. The goal of using digital marketing metrics is to track and decipher the way consumers interact with your brand online through websites and social media platforms. While there are many benefits of using metrics, the main use of metrics are used to drive improvements and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important. Overall, metrics reflect and support the various strategies for all aspects of the organization, including marketing, competition, standards, or customer requirements and expectations. 

Metrics indicate the priorities of the company and provide a window on performance, ethos and ambition. This allows you to determine your return on investment. You know exactly how profitable your digital marketing campaign was, as you can see the results of each aspect of your efforts.

3. Becoming Visible Within the Industry.

Some of the largest corporations have millions of dollars to spend on traditional advertising. If you don’t have that kind of ammunition, digital strategies allow you to outrank big corporations on a smaller budget. 

Here’s what visibility in business can do for you:

  • Helps you get exposure to a larger audience.
  • Build your brand awareness, so that people know who you are and how you help. 
  • Establishes your credibility and expertise.
  • Allows you to reach and sign more ideal clients.
  • Connects you to opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. 

It’s also a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with prospects, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field. More traffic means more potential clients becoming aware of your brand and services.

SEO is composed of three parts:

  • On-page SEO focuses on the content on your website’s pages. You can research keywords that resonate with your buyer persona or keywords that potential clients might ask. The task is to create quality content when answering those questions, so your pages rank higher.
  • Off-page SEO relates to all activity that happens away from your website. It involves external optimization practices that happen away from your site rather than on it. The main technique used for off-page SEO is backlink building since quality backlinks to your site from external sites tell search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality which helps to build authority.
  • Technical SEO is the back end of your website. Things like coding, image compression and cascading style sheets, also known as CSS. These are important aspects of your website that determine how quickly your pages load. Search engines like Google use it as an important ranking factor.

Social Media Marketing

Social media networks are open to all, giving businesses a chance to follow their consumers’ activities or potential buyers. This helps marketers become more informed about their target audience, likes, dislikes, and interests so that they can create a better marketing strategy to attract customers. The opportunities are endless when it comes to social media marketing. A big plus in  using this type of marketing tool is that most of the basic services are free. 

The end goal is to create more traffic and generate leads for your business. The social media channels you can use for this purpose are:

  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
  • LinkedIn.
  • Instagram.
  • Snapchat.
  • YouTube.
  • TikTok
  • Pinterest

In an increasingly connected world, your approach to marketing must be just as integrated.

Last Thoughts

In this day and age where just about everyone is connected to the internet, it is crucial for any business to have a strong online presence. As we continue to move forward within the digital age, younger generations are likely to be centered on using the internet to access different services. Having a strong digital marketing strategy is a must if you want to succeed in the increasingly competitive industries across the globe.

Could your digital marketing strategy use a boost? Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing trends. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Google Now Shares What Factors Impact Specific Rankings

/in , /by

Google now shows why it ranked a specific search result. The new ‘About This Result’ feature shows searchers information about some of these most important factors used by Google Search to connect results to their queries. Read more

Top 5 Must Use Digital Marketing Tools

/in /by

Fortunately in 2021, there are thousands of tools to utilize for your digital marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this oversaturated market has made it overwhelming for many to choose the right platforms for their marketing needs. 

With Americans spending over 11 hours daily on their electronic devices, there’s not much space left for traditional marketing. And while digital marketing tools help you execute a proper marketing strategy, they don’t do the work for you, and some work better than others – depending on your marketing goals.

With such a large selection of digital marketing tool available, it is important to know how each one will benefit you to help drive results. We’ve compiled a list of the all-around best tools that everyone can use and benefit from.

SEMRush 

When it comes to SEO, SEMRush is one of the most effective tools out there. This platform provides:

  • Keyword performance research 
  • Position tracking 
  • Backlink identification 
  • Technical SEO auditing abilities

SEMRush also just rolled out a few new features that include marketing, advertising and social media tools. If you’re looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one tool, this platform is the way to go. There are both free and paid subscriptions offered. But with a free account, your data pulling abilities are limited. You also won’t get access to all the additional tools they offer. 

Google Analytics

If you’re in the digital marketing space, you should be taking advantage of Google Analytics. This tool delivers vast amounts of insight on your campaign performance and how users engage with your website. It’s extremely beneficial when running A/B tests, keyword performance research and more. One of the best parts is Google Analytics is free to use. They also provide great educational tools to help increase your understanding in Google Analytics Academy. 

HubSpot 

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales software that assists you in attracting, engaging and nurturing your customers at every step of the sales journey. This CRM comes with a wide variety of tools that allow you to: 

  • Host web and landing pages 
  • Create blogs and email sequences
  • Track interactions with leads and customers
  • Analyze campaign success and user behavior

Canva

Canva allows users to create graphic designs and content simply and economically. It’s great because it helps you make professional graphics, even if you have no design experience. With the premium version you get access to over 50,000 templates, stock images, video, backgrounds, clip art and more. It’s the perfect solution for someone who doesn’t have the time to use InDesign or Photoshop, but still get high-quality designs to use for your business. 

Sprout Social

While there are endless social media management tools online that all provide similar features, the best overall is Sprout Social. It’s simple to use but also provides many tools to make publishing content and analyzing data easy. They offer dashboards let allow you to manage your pages all in one place, reports to help you manage your user engagement and ROI and scheduling tools. They currently support all platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Sprout has three different tier levels for their plans, but they’re fairly reasonable. 

Final Thoughts

When there’s so many tools out there, it’s important to know how each will benefit you and drive results. If you’re not using them correctly, or missing a few key ones you’re likely wasting time, effort and energy better put into other aspects of perfecting your marketing. That’s why sometimes, your best tool is a marketing partner. Someone who knows which tools are the best for your business, will help improve your marketing and drive success. 

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to digital marketing tools. Meaning it’s simple for use to identify which are right for you. Got questions about marketing tools or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today. 

How To Advertise On Clubhouse

/in , /by

Have you heard of Clubhouse yet? It’s the newest social media app to take the world by storm. The invite-only drop-in audio platform currently has over 2 million people users interacting with the platform each week. The new platform is currently valued at over $1 billion US dollars.

After a tweet recently sent out by Elon Musk, the platform received a huge push after he tweeted that he would be hosting an event on Clubhouse. It just so happened that he was joined by the Robinhood CEO, Vlad Tenev, gaining even more traction.

To sum up the platform in a few words, Clubhouse offers people a loose collection of drop-in clubs and events, where you can not only listen to people discuss topics ranging from startups and technology through to philosophy and comedy, but also contribute your own questions and thoughts. It’s kind of like a spontaneous podcast that anyone can listen to live, and several hundred to several thousand attendees dropping in from all over the world.

The platform has completely exploded in popularity and is growing rapidly by the day (the app had just 600,000 weekly users in December of 2020). The caliber of users is increasing since the Elon Musk tweet, and all are at least experimenting with the new platform. The obvious question for creators, brands, and contributors, however, becomes ‘how do we monetize this?’.

Currently, Clubhouse does not offer any in-app advertising functionality, as the company doubles down on the growth and user experience of its platform. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t advertise on Clubhouse. Let’s take a look at both podcasts and meetups (during normal non-COVID times) to discover how marketers can jump ahead of the curve and make money advertising on Clubhouse.

1. Branded Events and Clubs

It can be as simple as a branded event. Brand events and clubs always have an extra flare by adding something to the effect of ‘Presented by Company X’ in the title of an event. This is no different to many a local tech or startup meetup that might be presented either online or an in-person type of event. Not only that, but larger more traditional organizations — think IBM, Microsoft, and financial services organizations — are always more than delighted to align themselves with the latest trends and up-and-coming segments.

2. Guest/Celebrity Appearances

Both brands and personalities might want to access the spotlight at high-quality events that draw a large crowd and place them alongside influential figures.

As such, you might be able to offer pay-to-play for speakers/moderators at your events. This gives them an opportunity to get in front of their audience, build their own Clubhouse following, and develop or further solidify their brand and association with a particular demographic.

3. Product Placement

If you’re running an event on, say, beauty, and you have a club that regularly draws thousands of people to its events, then you will no doubt find brands that will want to get in front of your audience. Common in podcasts and events alike, product placement can be huge for an app such as Clubhouse. For example, it could be a conversation centered entirely around reviewing a certain product live, or discussing the features with a trusted influencer.

It might be as simple as name-dropping products, and if you have any reservations about this, limit product placements to products that you’re personally using and give out affiliate links for certain products and/or services that you would personally vouch for.

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global is looking forward to the future and helping your business reach your full digital potential. Interested in growing your digital presence for your company? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Why Ecommerce Personalization Is Important

/in , /by

The most successful brands are ones that discover how to engage their customers and keep their attention so they come back, and one of the most effective ways to accomplish both is ecommerce personalization. Onimod Global experts are here to break down some of the best Ecommerce personalization tips to ensure your customer retention and conversion rates are optimized to the fullest potential.

1. Incorporate intelligent product-detail page recommendations

Product-detail page (PDP) recommendations show your customers similar or products that are complementary to the ones they’re already interested in. This simple yet complex feature increases the shopping cart values of customers in significant amounts. Here you can leverage dynamic up-selling by recommending items that are higher in price but similar in style or by brand. These products are the ones with higher margins and are also proven to have the best conversion rates.

2. Show continuous shopping for returning customers

POV: It’s a lazy Sunday, and your netflix has asked 3 times now if you’re still watching. This has been such a powerful tool in terms of customer retention and keeping customers on the Netflix app. The same type of tactic can also be applied to the Ecommerce experience. With Netflix, instead of manually searching and scanning through hundreds of shows and movies, you can pick up right where you left off with a simple shortcut on your screen.

Similarly, this approach remembers your visitor’s selected items and preferences through previous sessions and makes it easier for them to pick up right where they left off. Fair to admit that this isn’t a very complex algorithm, however it’s valuable because the buying process is made that much more simple for the customer encouraging conversion behavior.

3. Create customized bestseller lists to drive click-throughs

People are automatically drawn to popular products whether it be music, clothing, books, food trends, the list goes on. One of the best tools to take advantage of here is showing the bestsellers with a twist—by adding in the dimension of time. You can show the bestselling products over the last 24 hours, or dial in the past one hour, depending on how much traffic you have.

This is the best tip that definitely allows for you to get creative with this approach. For example, instead of ranking products by sales, try displaying the most reviewed or segment by location. Showing best sellers by location is particularly powerful if you sell fashion in multiple climates. It’s also a huge advantage if your store specializes in a specific type of niche product like prom dresses or sports gear. Your customers from Los Angeles probably aren’t shopping for the same clothing in winter as your shoppers from New York City are. It’s all about discovering what works best for your unique products and customers.

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global is looking forward to the future and helping your business reach your full Ecommerce potential. Interested in growing your Ecommerce business? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Google To Provide Free Shopping Listings

/in , , , /by

Google Shopping is responding to the coronavirus crisis by taking steps to make it easier for more merchants to sell via the platform free-of-charge. The Google Shopping tab results “will consist primarily of free product listings” starting next week, the company announced Tuesday.

This major shift, after 8 years of Google’s shopping results platform, comes after many brick and mortar retailers have had to close their doors due to the coronavirus pandemic. E-commerce has inevitably boomed, and everyone is quickly catching up to speed on how to best service store owners. This change, while COVID-19 was the motivation, was a planned initiative and will be permanent. Free shopping listings fits into the longer-term vision for the company’s role in digital commerce.

Bill Ready said in a blog post that he expects the change to take effect in the U.S. by the end of April, with the aim of expanding it worldwide by year-end. Ready clarified the win-win of the shopping listings free-of-charge: Retailers gain free exposure to millions of people who search via Google Shopping every day, while shoppers discover more products from more stories. While Google is packaging the change as a gesture to help retailers during an economic crisis, there’s no doubt Google is also seizing the strategic opportunity to expand its role in e-commerce in the midst of this worldwide uncertainty.

Millions of people are stuck at home with almost no options for shopping in brick and mortar stores. Online and e-commerce has and will continue to see a huge rise. So what does this mean for retailers and advertisers?

“For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings.”

Why does this matter? This is actually where Google first began, then named Froogle. It became an entirely paid platform in 2012, and in those 8 years 2 things have drastically changed the e-commerce game: data quality and Amazon. Google’s ability to ensure that the information in a product feed matches the data on the site has advanced significantly since this time. In addition to limiting the products available on Google shopping results to retailers willing to pay, their search power was at a major disadvantage.

Another exciting development to the platform is a recent partnership with PayPal. Merchants using PayPal will be able to link those accounts to Google Merchant Center, which will allow Google to pull in seller details faster and to verify trusted merchants. Google also partners with e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce to make it easier for merchants to manage inventory and products.

As Ready concluded, “Solutions during this crisis will not be fast or easy, but we hope to provide a measure of relief for businesses and lay the groundwork for a healthier retail ecosystem in the future.”

More From Onimod Global

To catch up on the latest digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

 

How to Optimize Your Dark Social Usage

/in , , /by

Private messaging apps such as WhatsApp, direct messaging via social media, emails, etc. are all referred to as “Dark Social” by marketers because content shared through these platforms are particularly difficult to track and analyze. This is becoming an increasingly popular way for users to do their social sharing. Read more