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Can you believe it, October is finally upon us! Like any creative marketing person, who loves any good excuse to come up with ideas, throw an event and sell weird and wonderfully themed things and concepts – October also gives us an opportunity to revisit our inner-child and enjoy the ‘sweeter’ things in life. Yes, that’s right, it’s Halloween time. Whether you celebrate this spook-tacular time of year or think it’s “just an American thing,” October has certainly delivered some interesting industry news which in turn, has given us a few compelling marketing treats and tricks to keep in mind.

Social media for the first time will overtake print ad spend

Scary news in the world of print marketing. It looks like social media will finally, for the first time, overtake print when it comes to global ad spending. In a recent forecast report published by Publicis-owned media agency, Zenith. Ad spending on social media is expected to heat up, with a 20% jump in growth this year. On the other hand, the forecast for newspaper and magazine spending is looking to be more grey and gloomy, steadily falling at a rate of 6% per year. This growth is expected to lift social media to being the third-biggest ad channel, sitting behind Television and Paid Search. While we all still clearly love a good TV ad, don’t let these positions fool you… The future prediction or “television” for this dominating platform, is looking unsurprisingly ‘static’. As ratings continue to shrink in key markets, with the rise of streaming services and use of alternative digital entertainment platforms; reciprocal ad spend on the platform is expected to decrease.

advertisers can now use Facebook Stories’ ad traffic to start conversations in Messenger

On the topic of social growth, Facebook is again beefing up its business-user capabilities – now allowing advertisers to use Stories’ ad traffic to start conversations in Messenger. What this means is that users can now follow a swipe-up “Send Message” call to action on both Instagram and Facebook stories, so that they can easily start a conversation with a relevant business within that same application, wherever the story is being viewed from. Considering that more than half of Australians use messenger to engage with businesses, this integration is certainly positive for advertisers using social media. Particularly for businesses that generally require longer conversion cycles in selling their products and/or services!

How to market smarter this Christmas Season

Although I may think this is a time for ghouls and treats, it appears that most Australians believe this is the time to rediscover their festive spirit and get their Christmas affairs in order… 56% of Australian consumers begin their holiday shopping in September! Before you get excited and start getting your Christmas campaigns in order, according to Niche Media, 73% Aussies will be pulling the ‘sleigh reigns’ on Christmas splurging this year – choosing to not increase their holiday spending this year. What does this mean? It means that we need to get smart about our seasonal marketing this year and choose the smartest possible channels, to ensure we all don’t “drop the bauble” on your sales for the remainder of this year. As a perfect starting tip for mobilising your Christmas business, ensure you move to mobile! When compared to the rest of the world, Aussie shoppers are most likely to use mobile devices for holiday shopping – browsing online, reading products reviews and making purchases. Mobile campaigns also see the gain the most traction among holiday shoppers in October-November!

Instagram’s first Australian Brand Campaign

If you’ve been at the movies, watching television or even just using Instagram recently, you may have come across their latest and very first, Australian based brand campaign. In the words of Instagram APAC’s Head of Marketing, Noelle Kim, “Australia is an important market for Instagram, and we wanted to launch one of the first Instagram campaigns here to highlight our rapidly growing local community”. Noelle certainly isn’t wrong either, we love Instagram down-under, with over 9 million Aussies reportedly using the platform as of May this year. What is so interesting about these ads though, is the fact that they have chosen to leverage the “Like” or love function of the platform to inform the central creative idea of the campaign… Which, if you’ve been following TMIM in previous months, you’ll know that Instagram has recently been testing hiding it’s like counts across various markets – including, you guessed it, Australia. From our perspective, this is either a good idea, by harnessing an aspect of the application that we all know and love… On another hand, it could also go the other way by bringing attention back to this controversial experiment. Which let’s be honest, hasn’t been romanticised by all users to date… What do you think, is it too soon? See more about the ‘Get into what you ♥’ campaign here.

Why does my marketing need to be green friendly?

Now moving from insta-love to enviro-love, if you haven’t heard the name Greta Thunberg over recent months… You must’ve been living under a large hunk of earth rock. Things have certainly been heating up in the global warming and earth-sustainability debate, and a large proportion of earthlings have been demonstrating some icy sentiment towards global leaders about not doing enough to stop the world’s icebergs from melting. As with any good global social trend, brands and organisations around the globe have also been jumping on the green-coloured bandwagon – doing everything from sharing Greta memes to consciously speaking up about their own views on the issue. Whether you care about the environment or not, showing Corporate Social Responsibility in this area is now becoming more important for the state of our brands and planet alike. A huge 9 in 10 Australian’s care about sustainability and carry this attitude over to the purchasing choices that they make. Basically, while “it ain’t easy being green” all the time, if you aren’t, you will likely lose business, consumers loyalty and sales in the long-run.

Move out of the way Alexa and Siri – Google Assistant is EXPANDING

Mrs Google, (i.e. the Google Assistant lady, who holds a very important place in our hearts and office at Threesides) is looking to expand its capabilities yet again, with the Assistant’s transaction-handling abilities taking another step forward. As you may know, Google is already testing ads in Assistant but this next step seems to be a key move-up in driving it’s modernisation and e-commerce strategies forward. Google will be testing the ability to book movie tickets, and presumably moving onto other things such as hotel bookings or car rentals in future. In an attempt to get people to engage with Assistant and influence more users to dive into this aspect of the Google ecosystem.

When it comes to the Threesides ecosystem… Did you know we have Google Ads specialist in-house? Yep – his name is Sam and he can help you learn, optimise and grow anything business marketing related within the Google realm. For advice on Google marketing – contact us today, or learn more about Sam here.

Finally, like the answer to the bad Halloween pun “what was the mummy’s favourite music style?” … That’s a “wrap”! Be sure to keep watching this space as we head into future months, to stay up to date with the latest marketing insights.