CANADIAN E-COMMERCE: The Canadian Federation of Independent Business released research that illustrates the importance of digital marketing and e-commerce for small businesses during the pandemic. It was great to see that 48% of small businesses will stick with e-commerce even after the pandemic ends as a way to boost growth and competitiveness. This mirrors recent Canadian customer research that shows how increased online shopping adoption is here to stay. As I tell my kids, that toothpaste is not going back into that tube!
EXPERIMENTATION & TESTING: For those interested in A/B testing, here is a really interesting post that dissects how the New York Times tests its headlines. The article shows the different variations of headlines used, and the results that illustrate that more headline testing correlates with higher article engagement rates. In a similar vein, here is a fantastic time-laps video that shows how often Walmart changes its ‘digital shelf’ for dog food over a 24-hour period. A great example of how retailers can influence customer choice.
STATE OF AGILE MARKETING: Speero / CXL recently surveyed marketers on the state of experimentation. Some interesting findings, particularly around barriers to adoption and maturity. Only 7% of respondents strongly agreed that teams are trained on how to run experiments, and only 14% consistently share experimentation learnings across the company. Agile Sherpas released research from a similar survey on Agile Marketing. Again, the lack of training is highlighted as the largest barrier to adoption. For those that attended my Agile Marketing webinar, you might find it interesting to see the breakdown of the most popular practices used by marketing departments to become agile in their own ways.
AUDIO & CLUBHOUSE: While Clubhouse continues to dominate the marketing technology zeitgeist, I still can’t find a Room to hold my interest for more than 5-minutes. Regardless, audio-based social networking & content is hot and all of the major platforms are incorporating their own audio features including Facebook and LinkedIn. I’m personally more interested to see how Spotify will incorporate these features, as it feels like a more natural extension to its audio content - particularly given how more people now use Spotify for Podcasts vs. Apple for the first time.
GOOGLE & ZERO-CLICK SEARCHES: Google is under some fire from some marketing circles due to a study that showed that 65% of searches in 2020 resulted in no clicks. The implication being that more people are using the results that Google shows within the results pages to address questions or tasks – such as finding a location within a Google map or finding an answer within a Featured Snippet. Many markers are responding by creating more SEO-optimized content that answers specific, relevant questions. Speaking of maps, I love what Google is doing here to use AI to help people map more environmentally friendly routes. As someone who is 'navigationally-challenged', I can’t wait for the new augmented reality way-finding features to be released.
