The Daily Carnage

The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.

Today’s Issue

Flip-Flops 🩴

Why people switch brands.

Issues

View All

Top 5 Internal Site Search Practices

JULY 25, 2022

Is your site searchable? That can be a great thing for users, SEO, and site behavior data. This is especially true for eCommerce sites, because who doesn’t love to window shop online nowadays? 🙋

But not all site search features are created equally. When you are setting up your internal site search, or requesting it from developers, you better have the best practices in mind for UX and your own analytics.

Here are five best practices to implement on your internal site search:

Prioritize Attractiveness over Relevance: Relvancy is just one factor for a good UX in search. A balanced combination of relevance, attractiveness, and personalized attractiveness ensures that customers get what they actually want.
Personalize Site Search Results for Individuals: This is especially true for stores. Once you have enough data about a specific user’s preferences, you can begin ranking products specifically for that user to give you the best chance of converting them.
Effective and Transparent AI Tools: If you are using AI to manage your search capabilities, you may run into a lot of “zero results” pages. When choosing these tools, be sure they are adaptable to overlapping and synonymous terms as well as hands-on adjustments when needed.
Enable Robust Merchant Tooling: Ever heard the term “searchandising” before? This is where your search tools can understand how to combine the most relevant results with your high-value products and offerings. This can include promoting newest arrivals or current campaign focuses.
Improve Autocomplete: We’re saving the best for last here. Autocomplete is your biggest UX helper for search. This includes strong AI capabilities to correct misspellings, rank words by importance in a string, and preview search results when applicable.

Check out the full post by Constructor.io for more tips on search functions and boosting eCommerce.

9 Marketing Channels + How to Use Them

JULY 24, 2022

We’ve all heard of marketing channels by now. We want to cover the most common channels to keep an eye on and how to use them for marketing.

Let’s start from the top with the top 9 marketing channels:

Content Marketing
Video Marketing
Social Media
SEO
SEM
Mobile Marketing
Email Marketing
Display Ads
Affiliate Marketing

How to choose the best marketing channels:

Marketing channels can be used in different combinations to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, increase sales, generate leads, or other goals depending on the business model. How do you find the right combination?

Define goals on a smaller scale. First, have your brand’s goals in mind. Then, define goals for each marketing channel you could be marketing on. That way you can fine-tune more effectively as you revisit channels.
Understand your audience. You’ll never reach your goals if your audience isn’t using a channel in the first place. Identify at least three marketing channels that your target audience prefers to use more frequently than others. Then study the channels used by your main competitors to see if that’s where your target audience is hiding.
Budget for long-term. Bidding on keywords and buying social ads can feel like real-time budgeting. You must think about big-picture video production, content writing, and tool investments. Check out today’s Tool for content help!
Run a marketing campaign. Test out all of your channels with a full-fledged campaign, not just branded tidbits in each. That way you can test consistent messaging on all channels to get a better idea of performance.
Analyze the results and repeat. Regularly test and optimize your campaigns. Repeat on channels where you see ROI, and retry on channels where you don’t see it yet.

Check out the full post by Awware to get tips for marketing on each channel.

5 Signs You Need to Hire a Marketing Agency

JULY 20, 2022

Spinning your wheels constantly and spending your budget wisley is hard to do. Is it time for a little outside perspective or experts on deck?

Here are some signs that it’s time to get agency assistance:

You don’t have enough time: Marketing takes up a lot of time and energy. Plus, things move so fast that right when you think you’ve gotten somewhere, algorithms and trends may have moved on without you. You may need an agency to help you hone in on the big picture and implement plans, while staying on top of changes and reporting.
You don’t have any leads: Marketing and sales are part of a “chicken and egg” cycle where you can’t have one without the other. Sales needs marketing for leads, and marketing needs sales to close leads. Otherwise, no one gets results. An agency can align your sales team with your marketing campaigns, supplying them with more effective leads.
You don’t have an in-house budget: Hiring an in-house, full-time, fully staffed marketing team can be very expensive. Not only does that include compensation and benefits, that includes their tech needs and a space to put them (if not fully remote). A strong marketing agency has your entire knowledgeable team on deck.
You don’t have the skill set: Maybe you’re an amazing brand manager but need help with design, or writing, or campaigns, or SEO rankings, etc. Supplement your skills with an agency’s specialities to build your brand.
You don’t have a plan: That is A-OK to say, in this crazy industry, that you don’t have a concrete plan. There are rarely set blueprints for anything in marketing anymore. Agencies can be your compass to get you started in the right direction or even take you from planning to execution.

So how many of these signs apply to you? Maybe it’s time to hire an agency for a boost! Check out the full post by The Talented Ladies Club for more details on the benefits of agency consulting.

3 Ingredients to Your Secret Sauce [Podcast]

JULY 19, 2022

One of the biggest pieces of advice brands get is to show off what makes them unique. This is true for both companies and individuals. So how do you find your own secret sauce, bottle it up, and sell it to the world? Check out this podcast by Scotty Russell. He speaks often about freelance coaching and how to market your creative work, but this applies to anyone trying to find their angle.

Here’s how to find the ingredients to your secret sauce:

Start with Experiences: Your story is your most powerful asset. And consumers love storytelling. Don’t think you have a story to tell? Well, that’s still a story. You may be trying to make it like everyone else, but still, no one can replicate your story. Start jotting down your story or past experiences and see what that looks like.
Skills & Strengths: Outside of your journey, what can you offer that others can’t (or can’t offer nearly as well)? List of any type of skills, credentials, strengths you have. Then try and understand any overlap or outlying skills that are competitive.
Your Identity: What is at your core as a brand or person? Narrow down what matters to you and why you do what you do. If you end up with too many things, they can conflict. Russell suggests picking up to five “buckets” of these categories: interests, passions, beliefs, or values. Jot them down and see where you overlap on topics to understand more about what makes you tick.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and your brand won’t be either. Your sauce is going to take some cooking and tasting to perfect. Check out the full podcast and post by Scotty Russell for tips on getting there.

10 Tips for Creating More Powerful Content

JULY 18, 2022

What’s your niche? What’s your industry? No matter what it is, the experts over at Semrush have definitely researched it in one way or another. They put together a collection of findings for market research and trends through keywords and content.

With the data to back it, they put together actionable tips on how to improve your content marketing strategy, even in niche industries.

Perform Keyword Research and Gap Analysis – Dominate the super specific keywords out there, first.
Create Content Based on Related Topics – Take advantage of possible subtopics that your brand could be the expert on.
Repurpose Existing Content – Do you have a great blog post? Make it into an impactful video, infographic, guide, and social post as well.
Invest in Niche Industry Publications – When you invest in publication placements, you get seen by industry peers and gain credibility.
Amplify Your Content with Influencers – Speaking of industry peers, partner with them or who they follow.
Focus on Customer Insights – Everything should start with this in mind. Use it as your content compass as you go.
Work with Great Storytellers – The best stories come from sales, operations, designers, a.k.a. the people who work directly with your product or service.
Keep Your Big Ideas but Drill Down – Start with a centralized content marketing strategy, consider broad topics, and then double down on local trends.
Be an Educational Resource – The most searchable, rankable content is going to be the content that answers questions or lists solutions.
Give SMEs the Byline – Thought leadership starts with the leaders of those thoughts. The best content comes directly from the mouth of subject matter experts (SMEs).

Want to see all the stats, graphics, and deets? You’re gonna have to check out the rest of this Semrush content research.

Finding weird stuff (FWS) for the sake of SEO

JULY 17, 2022

Lookin’ for SEO love in all the wrong places? Search Engine Land has a new, creative way to go about SEO projects, research, and search audits.

Sometimes you just have to find weird stuff (FWS) to unlock SEO success.

Ways to FWS for SEO Research:

The site: query: In Google, type “site:” followed by the domain that you want to review.
Look into .pdf traffic: Review your analytics. You might be surprised about the amount of traffic coming to .pdf pages hosted on your website because they lack analytics tracking. Converting these .pdfs into HTML pages might be a good solution to making a high-ranking page.
Do a little time travel: If there are dips in organic traffic after a redesign, you may need to better understand what was working in the old layout. Use the Wayback Machine to see how things used to be.
Check robots.txt and XML sitemaps: You’ll often find pages that shouldn’t be on the site publicly, orphaned pages, or essential pages that have fewer internal links than they deserve.
Google Search Console: Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Stats – Check this out for signs of previous hacks or unknown content.
Page Speed Insights: You might find things like JS, CSS, or images being served multiple times or tracking pixels that are no longer in use.

There are so many off-page and on-page influences for a brand’s SEO that you are bound to find new insights when you shake up your research checklist and start turning over weird rocks.

Check out the full post by Search Engine Land for more research possibilities.

Strategically Pinning Instagram Posts and Reels

JULY 13, 2022

Got something good? Put a pin in it. 📌 Instagram has a new feature for pinning posts and reels at the top of a profile’s grid. Great! Now, how do you do it? What should you pin?

Let’s Start with the Basics:

You get three pinned posts at a time.
You have to remove pinned posts manually or replace them with another pinned post.
Posts are pinned in the order you pin them, not the age of the post.

How to Pin Posts:

Make sure you have the latest version of the Instagram app.
Find the post you want to pin and open it. Tap the three-dot menu in the upper-right corner. Select the “Pin to Your Profile” option.
Follow the exact same process for Reels***
To unpin, use the same process and choose the option that should have changed to “Unpin from Profile.”

***Note: ❌ You CANNOT pin Reels that are not posted to your profile grid. If you’ve published a Reel to the Reels tab only and opted not to add it to your profile grid, you won’t have the option to pin it.

What to Pin:

Like we said, you only get three posts. You don’t have to use all three, but you do have to make sure these posts are aligning with your current marketing plan and decide how often you want to rotate them. Content that is good to pin:

Promotions and limited-time offers.
Timely spotlights on content, products, or people.
Introductory content explaining something about your company.
Your favorite UGC.

Check out the full post by Social Media Examiner for more pinned post ideas!

Google’s Title and Meta Description Tips

JULY 12, 2022

It’s all in the details. The details this time being SERP-friendly desciptions and titles.

The Meta Measurements:

TITLES: Under or approximately 60 characters.
DESCRIPTIONS: Between 150 and 160 characters.

Best Practices For A Good Headline or Title Tag in 2022:

Describe the page’s content accurately. Google knows when you’re just keyword cramming.
Create unique titles for each page. This helps Google know how the page is different from the other pages.
Keep it brief but descriptive.
Use high-value keywords when possible.

Best Practices For A Good Meta Description Length in 2022:

Second verse, same as the first. You pretty much wanna follow the same course of action as titles but with some slight details in mind.

Accurately summarize the page content. Google recommends longer over shorter.
NOTE: Users may see different sized snippets as Google tests out pulling content from pages depending on how and what a user searches.
Use unique descriptions for each page. This is especially user-friendly for searches that could result in multiple pages from your domain in the SERP.
Don’t forcefully include your primary keyword and related keywords. It all has to read naturally.

Check out the full post by SEOPressor for the latest Google Search updates and more meta data deets.

How People Read

JULY 11, 2022

Our minds work in amazing ways – especially in how we make sense of visuals. The way we communicate through text isn’t as simple as presenting a paragraph of content. We are visual creatures who require a little stimulation and interest to gain our full reading attention.

Chris Do put together a helpful guide on how we digest typography. Here are some interesting tips on text treatments and how we read content:

ALL CAPS is great for emphasis, but caps do require a little extra effort to read them. It’s rarely advised to use it for body copy.
Humans will recognize the shape of words before actually reading letters.
You can reduce the amount of letters to represent a word to make words easier to read (with the right context around it).

This guide is a preview of Chris Do’s full Typography 01 course. We wanted to share the conversation continued about the guide that Chris shared on LinkedIn.

Some conversation around typography:

We need better typography with writers who understand how important it is to have a designer or production designer involved with establishing type that is legible, depending on color and placement for users.
When you find yourself in a “chicken or egg” situation with copy or design first – start with copy.
When you emphasize everything, nothing is emphasized. So keep that in mind for your font weights, as well as capitalization.

Visuals do it best! Check out the full post by Chris Do that includes the full pocket guide with text examples.