There are many reasons why companies and businesses would want to spend a lot of time and resources on their branding. More than just a logo, your brand is helping people in identifying and recognizing your company. Furthermore, your branding is what will help you in connecting with your clients and target audience. A lot of huge companies spend millions and millions of dollars on their branding, but you don’t have to spend a similar amount.

Partnering with a reliable and experienced company (like us, Jacob Tyler) should be on top of your list. At JT, we deliver creative experiences and marketing strategies that amplify your brand’s reach, breed customer loyalty – and drive business growth. We offer services such as brand strategy through design and development.

What we love about working with our clients are the relationships we forge and the feedback we receive. Their reviews help us in shaping our company and making sure that we continually grow in order to deliver high-quality and up-to-date services for our customers. That’s why we love ratings and reviews platforms like Clutch.

Clutch is an established platform in the heart of Washington, DC, committed to helping small, mid-market, and enterprise businesses identify and connect with the service providers they need to achieve their goals. They even provide blog post content for specific client testimonials (like the one you’re reading now) in order to help highlight some of your company’s greatest achievements.

Okay, now for the toast.. Today, we are very proud to share our 55th review on their platform! This review is from an organic products manufacturing company called Greenerways Organics. They hired our team to help design their logo and branding. To add to the plethora of content that we’re working on, we are finalizing their packaging design and the development of their website. We are also looking to handle their digital marketing efforts in the near future.

 

Here is what Lauren Rodolitz, the acting CMO of Greeneryways Organic, has to say about their experience in working with us:

“Jacob Tyler is incredible at making a bespoke dynamic. They recognize that not all small brands and clients are the same, so they adjust to what works best for each company. They don’t make clients follow a strict format or regimen, and they adapt very well to their needs.”

We are also featured on this year’s top branding agencies list on Top Design Firms. Top Design Firms is a top resource for buyers looking to find top designers, marketing companies, and developers that specialize in various industries. 

Are you interested in working with us? Reach out to our team today! We can’t wait to collaborate with you.

“Accessibility” is much in the zeitgeist these days. The term encompasses such a broad range of fields that we won’t attempt to map out all its applications or trace its history in this blog, except to point out that it’s rooted in the disability rights movement. The landmark legislation that this movement achieved—in the US, at least—was the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which codified policies that protected people with disabilities against discrimination in employment, transportation, public accommodations, and telecommunications. 

That was in 1990. You gotta remember, metropolitan types on The Today Show were still asking, “What is the internet, anyway?” in 1994. As the decades went on, ADA guidelines established around telecommunications turned into legislation pertaining to web accessibility, web design, and screen readers—in part because, by 2016, the UN “declared internet access a human right.” Most web design companies today understand that they need to abide by ADA compliance standards. What they may not realize is that the Department of Justice is suing corporations, such as Rite-Aid and Hy-Vee, whose sites aren’t accessible. 

These lawsuits seem to presage a digital future that we may already be living in—one in which web accessibility is mandatory. At Jacob Tyler, we embrace accessibility in all its forms. Allow us to explain some basics of ADA compliance, the DOJ’s recent decisions to litigate, and how our digital accessibility services can help your business thrive.

 

Some Basics of Web Accessibility

At first glance, the meaning of “accessible” may seem, well, hard to access. But a word that feels technical and opaque actually refers to a sterling concept—the idea that everyone in a society deserves equal opportunity to (for example) ride a bus, move through a building, or locate information online. 

When we raise the topic of accessibility, we sometimes encounter pushback that might be summed up like this: “Why should the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many?” That pushback seems to be premised on the supposition that people with disabilities make up a slim percentage of the population … which is not correct. 

A whopping 26% of adults in the United States have some type of disability. They’re the third largest market in the country. Most own their homes. Of the households surveyed in one study, 35% had at least one member who identified as having one of the major limitations or difficulties—physical, vision, hearing, independent living, learning, or intellectual.

Designing sites for people with and without disabilities is not only the right thing to do—and the decision that your legal department is most likely to support—but also a sound business goal. The global disability market is valued at $13 trillion in disposable annual income. Heads up to all companies who want to stay relevant: Ignore this market at your peril.

 

The Department of Justice is Mandating ADA Compliance

Web accessibility is shaping into such a fundamental right in our time—after all, over 90% of US society “accessed the internet from anywhere via any device” in 2021—that even the Feds have stepped in. Let’s go over the Rite-Aid and Hy-Vee cases that we mentioned above and unthread some of the concerns that they raised.

• Rite Aid: In November 2021, the DOJ announced that it had reached a settlement with Rite Aid Corporation. The issue? People with disabilities couldn’t navigate Rite Aid’s COVID vaccination registration portal. One problem, the DOJ found, was that “the calendar on Rite Aid’s website used for scheduling vaccine appointments did not show screen reader users any available appointment times.” For web users who are blind, screen readers describe images they’re unable to see, translate online text into speech, and, in sites that adhere to ADA guidelines, process dates and times on calendars that have been clearly displayed.
• Hy-Vee: A month after the Rite Aid settlement, the DOJ released another installment of “Justice News,” this time about how Hy-Vee’s COVID vaccination portal wasn’t up to spec. Same basic issues as Rite Aid—“people who used screen readers would not hear the questions on the medical screening forms,” the DOJ wrote, “and people who used the tab key instead of a mouse could not select available appointment times.” Web users with motor impairments like quadriplegia may rely on keyboard navigation (such as the tab key) rather than a mouse to click around the web. So when they land on sites that aren’t integrated with keyboard navigation functionality, to quote one user, “it’s a complex, frustrating nightmare.”

 

How Jacob Tyler Can Help

The cases that the DOJ brought against Rite Aid and Hy-Vee are high-profile for a couple of reasons—both web accessibility and the capacity to sign up to get your COVID shot are of immediate national concern. Plus, Rite Aid and Hy-Vee are multistate businesses, so these lawsuits might have been intended to do exactly what they’ve done: Let scads of smaller businesses know that it’s time to take accessibility seriously. Which it is—it’s long overdue.

At Jacob Tyler, we ensure that all the digital collateral we make adheres to W3C and ADA guidelines so that our clients don’t get sued—but most importantly, so that their products and services are accessible to everyone. We want everyone we partner with to understand the importance of ADA compliance for their businesses, and we strive to educate them on how difficult it can be for those who are disabled to navigate websites that haven’t been coded and designed properly. Put it this way: Don’t you want to attract 20% more traffic to your site?

Repeat after us: Your SEO strategy will always be partially outdated—but it’s not your fault. Google, still the world’s most dominant search engine, is constantly updating its algorithm (it implemented around 4,500 changes just in 2020). A single change to that algorithm has the power to send shockwaves through the digital marketing landscape, since SEO content and a savvy keyword strategy are integral to customers finding businesses online. 

Just as important as launching a SEO campaign, then, is preparing for these ongoing search refinements that Google hands down to us from on high. So let’s go over why Google tinkers with its algorithm, and how you can shape your organic SEO initiatives in 2022 to dovetail with Google’s most recent updates.

 

What’s With All the Updates?

Good question. Here’s our answer in two words: “Relevant information.” 

Google understands that users are online primarily to find information, and it’s in Google’s best interests to sell off their data to advertisers—but Google can only do that if their users are happy with the SEO content that they’re finding. (Otherwise, they’d hop out and use the lesser likes of Bing and Baidu.) 

Hence all the marketing chatter about “authoritative organic SEO,” which mostly means content that doesn’t feel spammy or keyword-stuffed. Google wants to route you to the answers you’re looking for, and it optimizes its searches to strip out clutter and make your experience seamless. So results that load quickly, run on mobile, and aren’t clogged up with intrusive interstitials all tend to float toward the top of the SERPs.

 

Core vs. Targeted Updates

The type of algorithm changes that we mentioned above are referred to as “core updates,” since they affect a broad swath of indexed pages. (Google tends to trot these out once every two or three months.) Targeted updates, meanwhile, often focus on an industry or a single SERP feature (such as AdWords, review stars, image results, or knowledge panels).

A contemporary example of a targeted update might be pages pertaining to COVID tests. Google appears to have thinned out commercial results for COVID-related searches and, instead, has promoted maps and data from governmental and medical authorities. That Google wields the power to alter which categories of information the world sees is unsettling, if you think about it too deeply. (Don’t think about it too deeply.) Yet it also indicates how the oceans of information online are always in flux, and Google has to retool its algorithm to keep pace with which “relevant information” is still relevant year by year, day by day, hour by hour.

 

SEO Updates for 2022

So how should you evolve your SEO strategy this year to align with Google’s updates? Consider a few suggestions:

 

• Page loading time has been a ranking factor since at least May 2020, so make sure your site’s speed is up to speed. Google doesn’t want its users letting out shrieks of impatience waiting for pages to load. Google even let webmasters know about this update—which doesn’t happen often, and may benefit mobile users the most.
• Passage content is a fancy term for snippets of long-form SEO content that answer users’ search queries. Imagine that you want to know how tall Mount Everest is (29,032 feet), but you don’t want to read someone’s memoir-length blog about scaling Everest. Google will show you the passage from that blog with the data you’re looking for. How do you tailor your SEO to cater to this update? Keep your content high-quality, add in long-tail keywords, and write for humans rather than search bots.
• “BERT” and “MUM” may sound like the British counterparts to Bert and Ernie, but they’re really AI-based tech that stand for—are you ready for this?—“Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” and “Multitask Unified Model” (respectively). Whew. What does that mean? Well, they’re digital tools designed to deliver esoteric answers when there’s no clear answer. What does that mean? Well, they’re part of Google’s pitch to become a “conversational partner” with their users. 

 

So take Mt. Everest again. You can find out how tall it is fairly easily. But what if you want to know how the hiking experience differs on Mount Everest versus, say, Mount Kilimanjaro? With BERT and MUM—the idea goes—Google can give you an answer with the same nuance that a pro hiker might convey if you were chatting with said hiker at a bar. Again, there’s not much you can do to optimize your site for BERT and MUM, other than write quality content that chats with users in a conversational style. Speaking of which … 

 

• Voice search is becoming more relevant each year, especially with the prevalence of home voice assistants. Typing in a Google search may even go the way of analog clocks sooner or later—people are asking questions straight into their phones, which drives the need for tech like BERT and MUM. No, Google hasn’t announced a voice search update for 2022, but we’re betting that it’s vital to design your site so that the content is readable, conversational, and filled with long-tail and question keywords.

 

Futureproof Your Site

The topic of how to adjust your SEO strategy to harmonize with technical changes always seems to take on a curious duality. On one hand, there’s so much jargon to wade through—AI modeling, search entities, “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.” On the other hand, this whole discussion can be distilled into a few pithy points:

• Only publish high-quality content on your site.
• Master the basics of technical SEO strategy. (Backlinks, alt tags, meta descriptions.)
• Make peace with the fact that Google’s algorithm is ever-changing, so your SEO must change along with it.

But this above all else: Be useful to your users. Anticipate why they’re coming to your site and supply them with the info they’re looking for, and they’ll be more likely to venture back again and again.

In the first two parts of our series on brand strategy, we gave some tips on how we tend to create the messaging guidelines and visual identity systems involved in brand development. Those steps typically result in internal documents that inform product positioning—or defining where your business fits in the market and how to communicate your worth to your audience. The higher the perception of that worth, the greater your brand value. So how do you ladder those aesthetic guidelines up into brand collateral that feels unified yet agile enough to work across a range of formats, from logos to banner ads to business cards? Read on to find out.

Defining a Brand Strategy

The phase of distributing collateral should only arise after you’ve built the brand—finding your why, tightening your positioning statement, concepting your logomark suite, and agreeing on your imagery and graphical elements. A lot of that work is in the bailiwick of the creative department, but you’ll also need to tap the expertise of the strategists and the metrics people, the professionals who make it their job to have a bird’s-eye view of the market and know where these assets should be placed in the world. Brilliant as your copy and design may be, if no one sees them—or if people who aren’t your customers see them—then they’re effectively worthless. (From a numbers perspective, at least.)

Think of those internal documents that we said were the end-result of the first two stages of the brand development process—pinpointing the words and the visuals—as something akin to an instruction booklet. They provide the marketing teams with a set of directions on how to communicate, which comes in handy when twenty writers and designers and brand managers are working across a bevy of channels. Someone’s on social, someone’s in PR, someone’s doing paid ads, someone else is handling a print brochure. These people need to understand the larger purpose of the strategy, which each piece of collateral should support. Without that sense of continuity threaded throughout all of the creative assets, your brand may slip away from you, and you’ll end up babbling at the market in twenty voices—generating clatter and cacophony that’ll probably confuse customers and lose business.

Mastering Product Positioning

When people hear the phrase “brand collateral,” they often think of traditional media like one-sheeters and white papers. But brand collateral could refer to anything. Videos, websites, landing pages, Twitter posts, sponsored bike races—it’s all brand collateral, which is just the advertising vehicle to reach your audience. Once you know your brand communication strategy, the step that lies before you is to position your product or service through external messaging that conveys a cohesive brand personality.

“Cohesive,” by the way, is not the same as “inflexible.” Personalities change, even though, as the truism goes, people stay the same. Apply that adage to a brand like KFC. Colonel Harland Sanders opened his first restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, in 1930. Today, KFC operates over 24,000 outlets in 145 countries; in that time, its brand image has changed substantially. The logo has shuffled around, true, but the collateral is even more versatile than that. Actors from Norm Macdonald to Rob Lowe to Jason Alexander have played the Colonel. He’s also been portrayed in a soap-opera mini-movie (A Recipe for Seduction). And he’s even shown up as the heartthrob in the KFC-commissioned dating simulator, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! 

Yet it could be argued that KFC’s core graphical elements have stayed consistent throughout these iterations. Whether he’s in a Lifetime movie or a Super Bowl ad, the Colonel is still silver-haired and donning a cravat and a red apron—remaining the instantly recognizable icon no matter how the brand evolves.

Increasing Brand Value

Here’s one more reason why brand strategy—including messaging, visual identity, and brand collateral—are so important: They boost your brand value. Before the Big Bang of mid-century advertising, the worth of any given company was usually staked on the value of the products and services that it provided. But now we live in the era of brands, which can command huge asking-prices but still often remain nebulous concepts, since gauging their equity can involve marketing abstractions like customer loyalty and perception. Perhaps the most straightforward way to measure brand value is to ask other businesses what they’d pay for your brand. Suss through the figures, arrive at an average, and that may be close to its fair market value.

But the point here is that all the pieces of collateral that you create—the headlines and the color palettes and the types of photography, even the abstruse effect that a brand has on our subconscious—they all add up. They expand brand awareness, establish a positive customer experience, even turn your company from a niche or small-scale operation into a cultural icon (whether he’s a kindly Bluegrass cook or a salt-and-pepper-haired cad). Sales are vital. Market caps are paramount. The bottom line is the bottom line. But a messaging and visual identity that consolidates into a relatable brand will do immeasurable behind-the-scenes work for you—one piece of collateral at a time.

You’ve reached the terminus of our three-part blog series on brand strategy. We love talking about brands, so reach out today if you want to talk about yours.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. That quote—often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, although a Campari ad from 2000 may have put those words in his mouth—is an excellent distillation of Jacob Taylor’s approach to the design projects that we take on. In the first installment of our three-part blog series on how to craft a brand strategy, we talked about how to create brand messages—those mellifluous, honey-tongued words that consumers fall in love with. But no matter what type of company you are, at some point you’ll also need to define the elements of a brand visual identity or a brand corporate identity. So let’s touch on an equally vital step in the branding process: Lifting a cohesive visual branding strategy out of the primordial creative mud. Read on for an overview of how we typically handle that task.

 

What Makes a New Visual Identity System?

We batted the term “branding” around a lot in the previous section, but it’s worth noting the distinction between “branding” and “visual identity.” Branding is the public’s perception of a company or a product, while a visual identity consists of the brand’s visual elements that can help support its marketing goals.

“Branding” as of late sprawled into a catchall phrase that businesses seem to plug into all their statements and announcements. “We’re doing a rebranding initiative”—you hear that a lot. Yet what it often means is that a company is revising its color palette, its typefaces, maybe its photo and image approach. All those visual elements of an identity refresh can impact how customers view a brand, but they don’t make up the branding itself, per se. (As we’ve argued before, a brand is way deeper than just stylescapes and headlines.)

So when we first talk to clients about their expectations for their branding, we separate the visual identity component from the brand messaging aspect or the brand collateral pieces that we might create later (which we’ll discuss in our next blog). Depending on what parts of their brand system they want updated, and which design styles they’re drawn to, we present initial sketches that may adumbrate an overarching brand visual identity.

How to Define Your Visual Identity

The next steps in this process usually involve designing a logomark suite, a color palette, the typography, and imagery and graphical elements. Let’s go over each step.

• Logomark Suite

Depending on the account, our designers may build out initial concepts in solid black and white—the thinking being that if a logo mark isn’t working in black and white, then it definitely won’t work once we apply the brand colors to it. We try to make it simple enough that it’s recognizable in any format, from a lapel pin to a billboard. If the client likes the concept, we may build out a logomark suite to include an icon and a wordmark in vertical or horizontal formats, and all in various formats for production (Pantone, CMYK, RGB, and HEX for web).

• Color Palette

After the logomark suite, we define the color palette, which needs to be rich and expansive—a reflection of the company and its products. The goal of this stage is to own the color palette (so to speak) in the industry that you’re in. Take UPS. When you think of UPS, what colors come to mind? Brown, right? But not just any brown—a certain but definite UPS-brown. Or try Tiffany & Co. Their blue is a trademarked and copyrighted Pantone color created just for them. No one else is allowed to use their blue in their industry. (Well, they can use it, but they’ll face legal consequences if they do.) That’s the caliber of design ownership that we try to give our clients—an iconic color palette that gives them instant recognition in their field.

• Typography

Selecting the typography is perhaps the hardest step involved in constructing a brand visual identity. You want your typography to be modern, but not so modern that your design will feel dated within a few years. Depending on the brand, we often suggest clean and crisp geometric or humanist sans-serif typefaces for body copy items such as paragraphs and bullet points, and we try to select typefaces with multiple weights and widths.

• Imagery and Graphical Elements

Next up are the imagery and graphical elements, which set the tone of the branding for years to come. We create lifestyle images that are rich and dynamic in lighting and composition, and we apply graphical elements like patterns and textures sparingly and within context to drive the visuals of a marketing piece. (One excellent use of graphical elements is Saks Fifth Avenue’s handling of their logomark—cropped in various stages, rotated, and applied as a pattern on their trademark black shopping bags.)

 

How to Refresh Your Visual Identity

Creating a visual identity is one (herculean) task. Refreshing a visual identity is an entirely separate endeavor. Generally, companies go through a visual identity refresh when they’re looking to reinvent themselves or their product scope has grown beyond what their original brand or design can communicate. Over the last few decades, Dunkin’ Donuts’ products have expanded from donuts and black coffee to gourmet breakfast sandwiches and iced and hot coffee drinks. Now they resemble more prominent international brands like Starbucks. So in 2018, they did a brand refresh—scaling their name down to just Dunkin’.

Dunkin’ mostly kept the same colors and typefaces that it had when it was Dunkin’ Donuts. But other companies’ visual identity rebrands can be more dramatic. Century 21 brought the aspiration of buying a home into the 22nd century with a bold and modern identity refresh—a “gold standard” look that includes new logo marks, real estate signage, and social media graphics. One question for companies looking to refresh their visual identity, then, is whether it makes more sense to rebrand in name alone, or to embrace a dramatic redesign of their entire market positioning.

 

Design is Deeper

When people discuss the talents of designers, they sometimes ask whether a designer is more of an artist or more of a designer? This question could make for endless bull-session fodder, but it’s effectively drawing a distinction between art, which can be aesthetically gorgeous but not immediately utilitarian, and design, which is both visually appealing and (in marketing, at least) helps to accomplish a company’s goals. 

Here’s our point: Design is way deeper than just pretty colors. Paired with smart copywriting and strategy, a confident visual identity can help your brand stand out among the competition in your field. Just be sure it’s striking yet simple.

So concludes the second installment of our three-part blog series on brand strategy. Look for Part III next week, where we discuss how to fuse visuals and messaging into brand collateral.

A room without books may be like a body without a soul, but a business without a brand is dead on arrival. Brand messaging distinguishes your company from the competition, tells your story, focuses your culture, and establishes trust with your audience. Without the components of brand messaging—brand messaging guidelines, brand key message examples, or insights from a brand messaging agency—companies often struggle to express why they matter, which renders them invisible to many potential customers. 

Given the importance of brand messaging, we’re dedicating a three-part blog series to our ruminations on how to craft an overarching brand strategy—including brand messaging, visual identities, and brand collateral. So without further ado, here’s our first installment in this series: Our approach to executing brand messaging.

How to Craft Brand Messaging Guidelines

At first glance, brand messaging guidelines may seem like a superfluous exercise. Don’t the people who’ve created a brand know what their brand is? Therein lies a paradox that many an agency has encountered: Companies might know everything about themselves—their revenue stream, their market cap, their competitive landscape—but they often don’t know how to talk about themselves. Brand messaging guidelines help define a company’s personality in a single document that marketers, salespeople, newbie hires, and soul-searching executive types who feel like their brand needs a refresh can all refer to for their sundry purposes. Consider digging into some of these topics as you build out your brand messaging guidelines:

• Who are you?

You may think this an obvious query, but as you answer it, you may also discover that it’s one of the most complex snafus your company will ever untangle. After all, how do you sum up the skill sets, personalities, outlooks, aspirations, and talents that populate your workplace? With difficulty. Concentrate on this question. Sit with it. Let it marinate. Because only after you explore the motivations and values of your team can you delve into the nuances of how your business differs from everyone else’s.

• What do you do?

We tend to find that the insights that this question unearths are more pragmatic than a summation of a team’s identity—touching on everything from market sectors to how the flange fittings you make are superior to your rival’s flange fittings. Venture down from the cloudy realm of your entrepreneurial vision and specify what it is you do day in and day out.

• Why do you do it?

Once you float down from the ether in the “What do you do?” phase, take the elevator back up to the ol’ buttermilk sky again, because you’re about to wax big and poetic as you define your company’s raison d’etre. Well, let’s slip in one caveat: You have to mean what you say. If you tell people that you got into fracking to save the polar bears—your customers and employees alike are gonna see through that. But if you’re doing it to make service dogs more available to people or advance oncology research, say that. Find your why, and craft that why into a statement that your company can rally behind. 

 

A Few Key Brand Message Examples

Each brand messaging agency develops brand key messages in its own way. At Jacob Tyler, we tend to segment out the top-level brand language with a positioning statement, a section on voice and tone, and a brand personality—which specifies which characteristics your brand would have if, indeed, you could consolidate your brand into a single human being. (Is your brand the goofy Burger King or a sophisticate like Rolex?)

Another element of brand messaging that seems intuitive yet hard to pinpoint are USPs—or “unique selling propositions.” USPs often look like letdowns. They can be as pithy as a single word, but they need to encompass who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Our advice? Sell the benefits, not the features. 

Do you know whether your Mac has an 8- or 32-core GPU? Neither does anybody else. Later on in the sales process, customers need to parse through the pros and cons of the features. But as you’re establishing your brand, your marketing verbiage should tell people that their metaphorical Mac will turbocharge their business or organize their digital life—not how many terabytes your product has or how many inches the liquid retina XDR display is. Those details are important, sure. Save them for your customers who are further down your funnel.

 

The Value of Working With a Brand Messaging Agency

These days, people don’t engage with your brand through a salesperson who courts them on the golf course. Catchy creative and bold-billboard approaches aren’t enough to wow them into buying from brands anymore. People chiefly encounter brands online now. They cancel brands, brand ambassadors, celebrity and influencer brands. Sometimes those cancellations are merited; sometimes business leaders are brilliant operators who, like many of us, don’t know how to engage the public or express what drives them. So while you’re developing your brand, consider partnering with a brand messaging agency that can deepen your relationships with your audience and help you find more customers. All it takes is a pitch-perfect message.

You’ve reached the end of the first installment of our three-part blog series on brand strategy. Keep an eye out for Part II next week, where we delve into the world of brand design.

See something you want on your favorite ecommerce site, click “Buy Now,” and—presto!—it’s on your doorstep. That’s how we lived for years, ever since the rise of ecommerce services, ecommerce marketing, and ecommerce fulfillment that digital megacorp retailers like Amazon and Alibaba have pioneered and perfected. But now the bicycle store is empty, your new rug won’t arrive for months, the junker that is your used car is appreciating in value yet replacing the fob on your keychain costs $1,000+. What gives? The great supply chain disruption.

Between 2019–2020, online shopping surged by 20%. Which only makes sense: Those of us in well-off countries with disposable income were stuck at home during the pandemic. Out of boredom, we spent money—lots of it—not on services, but on stuff. All those products we ordered clogged up the global supply chains. Transit points like ports are now jammed. Ships are idling in harbors. Freight prices keep going up. Fears of inflation nip at the edge of our anxiety. And if you’re an ecommerce merchant mollifying customers who are demanding the product that you promised them—the product stuck in the supply chain—the news that these disruptions will persist into next year must land like a sucker-punch to the eternal optimism that sustains most entrepreneurs. So here are a few tips on how ecommerce brands can still be effective and efficient even when their merchandise is hovering in perpetual limbo. 

Communicate with Customers

Let’s say your customers are upset because the toys they ordered for their kids this Christmas months ago haven’t arrived. If you know that those toys are marooned in the hull of a cargo ship sitting off Long Beach harbor, tell that to your customers. That notification may not speed up the delivery process, but it will provide a measure of transparency that may assuage some of the ire of fruitlessly checking your proverbial mailbox every evening to no avail. 

Explain to them that so many of the items that people in the US use every day—microchips, cars, jeans, Lincoln Logs, Gerber baby food, Ray Bans—are made in other countries. They’re packed in ships the size of skyscrapers that offload into ports all across the world, where fleets of trucks and railcars convoy supplies to warehouses and distribution centers, and from there to the homes of concerned parents who are just trying to prop up the legend of Santa for one more year.

You don’t want to shift responsibility for delays onto a shipping system that’s so vast that it’s nearly abstract, but it’s a good idea to communicate the real-world reason for limited stock or logistics snarls. Speak with one voice as an ecommerce company, and post accurate updates on your site and across your social media so that your suppliers, customers, employees, and shareholders all know what’s going on, why it’s happening, and what you’re doing about it.

Assess and Address the Damage

If you’ve got logistics snarls, that means you need to work with a logistics expert to unthread those snarls. Hire or promote an ecommerce fulfillment or supply chain guru who can lead your disaster recovery team in developing a crisis management plan, which might include some of these action points:

• Analyze your financial vulnerabilities now and in the future.
• Strategize how to minimize mounting fees and surcharges.
• Identify other ways to transport your product to your customers. 
• Estimate how much you’re able to sell so you don’t over-purchase.
• Centralize the information you can gather about your supply holdups in one place.

That list could go on and on. But the point is to have people in the room who can audit all the data on the pain that the supply chain disruption is wreaking on your bottom line and develop tools that prevent workflow inefficiencies from leeching any more money out of you.

Identify Backup Suppliers

Depending on the complexity of your supply chain, it may be worth investigating all the tiers of suppliers in your network. Ask yourself these questions: What do your suppliers’ plants make? Where are their plants located? What are their current inventory and staffing levels? Which ones are delivering products late—or delivering products that are damaged and degraded? 

Gauge which of your suppliers are bleeding cash or close to shuttering, and run the numbers on whether extending their credit can shore up profitability for everyone over the long term. At the same time, diversify your supply base so that whenever a disruption on this scale occurs again, you can at least receive some goods while others are lingering in transit.

Keep Calm and eCommerce On

For many ecommerce merchants, the supply chain disruption is a crisis—but a crisis that can be put to good use. Your first order of business is to make sure that business is still coming in. Reassure your customers. Coordinate with your suppliers. Forecast your cash flow impact. But also take this time to network with new carriers, fix weak points in your operation, and figure out if you can reduce product packaging so that you have fewer costs and more robust delivery options when the global supply chain, mercifully, resets to normal.

Overnight, the bags of candy on the shelves disappear, and the mannequins in Santa hats pose atop mounds of tinsel in the window displays. Starbucks busts out their jolly red cups. The sere, yellow leaf drifts to the ground—in weather that still feels like it’s early September, because, let’s face it, none of the climate summits are gonna accomplish much, anyway. Oh, yes, the holidays are here, and ecommerce merchants everywhere are fine-tuning their stores to suction up any sales that may be floating around them over the next few months.

Shopify and WooCommerce are two of the most widely used ecommerce platforms today, but they differ in scalability, ease of use, SEO options, and customization tools, among other features. Let’s dissect WooCommerce vs. Shopify pricing models—and WooCommerce vs. Shopify alternative platforms—to give you a bird’s-eye view of the pros and cons of each store so you can complete your ecommerce fulfillment requests more efficiently over the holidays.

What is Shopify?

Fifteen years after it launched in 2006, Shopify now commands 11% of the total ecommerce market share, and supports over 1.7 million businesses in 175 countries. We’ve suggested before that Shopify is best suited for companies earning under $50 million a year, in part because it’s not as customizable as WooCommerce. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here are some of the benefits and downsides that you’ll likely encounter with Shopify:

• Pro: Easier to use.

Talk about user-friendly! One of the draws of Shopify is that it’s so easy to set up. Create an account, purchase a domain—or sync with an existing domain—choose a theme from among thousands of options, and you can accept credit card payments starting your first day. Shopify is also a hosted service, so it has a support team ready 24/7 to handle any technical difficulties associated with, say, your storage sprawling out of control or your web traffic mounting to unsustainable levels. They’re also strong on security: They give bounties to anyone who can hack their system and identify core vulnerabilities (with the goal of continuously fortifying their defenses). Shopify may not be the best platform to sell complex products and services through, but they do take care of a sizable portion of the ongoing gruntwork for you.

• Pro: Strong mobile apps offering.

Shopify’s app gives its users a mountaintop view of their sales, orders, abandoned checkouts, product lists, gift cards, and so on, all consolidated in one place. The reports also track a bevy of metrics—including payment methods, sessions over time, which countries your orders are coming from, among others.

• Pro: Quick page loading time.

With every second it takes for a website to load, the probability of visitors bouncing out goes up. For that reason, Google penalizes sites with interminable load times—and for that reason, Shopify values speediness. They’ve set up a content delivery network (or CDN) to help your images load quickly, and they stay up-to-date on the latest code and SEO techniques to make sure your ecommerce platform pops up for your customers without delay.

• Con: You really never control your site.

Having a team of developers on call who manage any snafus that may arise in your store is convenient. Keep in mind, though, they’re so helpful because you operate by their rules. They let you add different currencies and up to five languages to your site, but you have to buy an app to show translated content, and the more you scale up, the more expensive your plan becomes. They also limit you to a storefront, a blog, and a few simple pages. And while Shopify gives you access to your data, that data lives on Shopify’s servers, so it’s never entirely yours. Food for thought.

• Con: You may have to learn Liquid.

The themes that Shopify lets you pick are equivalent to your online shop window. Some of those themes cost $150–$300, but many other themes are free, they’re mobile-responsive, and Premium themes are more customizable. The issue, though, is that if you want to tinker with your themes, you’ll have to master Shopify’s programming language, Liquid—or hire someone else to master it for you.

• Con: Some SEO drawbacks.

To incorporate rich snippets—metadata that help you rank higher in the SERPs—you’ll need to download an app or toggle with some of the code on your site. Shopify also doesn’t let you rewrite your URLs. That doesn’t mean those URLs will be so cluttered that search bots can’t read them. But it does mean it’s more difficult to optimize them the way you want them to read.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce appeared five years after Shopify, but the latest reports indicate that it owns roughly twice as much of the ecommerce market share as its more senior rival. Here are the specs on WooCommerce: Open-source, free to set up, and a plugin for WordPress. (No WordPress, no WooCommerce.) Details to follow.

• Pro: Easier to customize.

Practically limitless themes and product variations. Flexible checkout options and pricing models. Riding atop a CMS that currently powers about 42% of all websites. Whereas with Shopify you’re at the mercy of its own decisions about its platform, WooCommerce’s chief selling-point is the control that it gives its users. Plus, new extensions and themes are always getting rolled out, so you can expand and fine-tune on your terms and timeline.

• Pro: Cheaper than Shopify.

Remember how Shopify hosts its own platform? With WooCommerce, you have to pick your host, but a comparison of costs between Shopify and WooCommerce on a provider like BlueHost shows that WooCommerce can be anywhere from half to 10% of the cost of Shopify, depending on how advanced your plan is.

• Con: Not exactly beginner-friendly.

Inexpensive, unbounded customization options? What could be wrong with that? By itself, nothing—if you’re a developer. But if you’re a non-specialist, non-programmer type sans the budget or connections to configure WooCommerce on your lonesome, you may find the maintenance involved in this ecommerce platform to be overwhelming.

• Con: It’s all on you.

Shopify effectively controls your site, but they do all the behind-the-scenes work for you. WooCommerce gives you full proprietorship of your online store, but, like a lot of store owners, you’re the one flipping the chairs and turning off the lights at night. Finding a hosting provider, buying an SSL certificate, updating your plugins—you gotta figure all that out. You do recall how Shopify dares hackers to breach their system so they can patch cracks in their stronghold, don’t you? Yeah, WooCommerce doesn’t provide that service. You are your own night watch.

WooCommerce and Shopify Pricing

We touched on some costs of these platforms, but let’s delve into the particulars:

• Shopify

With five payment plans ranging from $9 per month to $2,000 per month, Shopify’s pricing structure is pretty straightforward. Where the calculations become complex is when you factor in transaction fees, as well as online and in-person credit card rates—which, depending on your plan, vary down to the tenth of a percentage. Features like apps, plugins, and premium themes add to the expense.

• WooCommerce

In certain ways, WooCommerce’s costs are more difficult to tab up than Shopify’s, since WooCommerce doesn’t have a tiered pricing framework. Instead, its payments are more a la carte. They include plugins, themes, hosting, security, custom coding, a domain name—and they, too, vary depending on what you want. (One difference is that WordPress plugins are usually one-time fees, while Shopify apps are often charged monthly.) So, fair warning: Your spending can sprawl. At the same time, you can refer to pricing tables that give you cost estimates for basic, mid-range, and advanced sites.

• Payment Gateways

Shopify and WooCommerce each support a suite of payment gateways, including many you’ve surely heard of—PayPal, Stripe, Square, among others. Shopify accepts regional funds from Suriname to the Seychelles, while WooCommerce accesses a lot of niche payment gateways, such as Postgiro (which is Swedish) and Przelewy24 (Polish). That functionality is equally impressive, but since WooCommerce merchants have to run their store on their own, if they don’t have the acumen to fix glitches, install updates, or smooth over technical fiascos, their payment gateway may fall down or close up, which could result in lost sales.

WooCommerce and Shopify Alternatives

WooCommerce and Shopify are two popular ecommerce fulfillment services on the market, but they’re not the only ones out there. Here are a few other platforms worth checking out:

• Magento

If you think WooCommerce is complex, wait till you open up Magento. Global brands will be thrilled with this platform’s customization options—but that’s because those brands likely have development departments that can play around with Magento’s demos, layouts, virtual shopping carts, and library of over 5,000 extensions. Magento does, however, court small businesses with its Magento Open Source offering, while Magento Commerce is its premier version that comes with a subscription fee.

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud

In 2016, Salesforce bought a company named Demandware, a hosted ecommerce service that launched in 2005, and turned it into Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a cloud-based platform tailored to B2B and B2C clients. Since Salesforce Commerce Cloud is part of the Salesforce product ecosystem, it’s integrated into other CRM and marketing solutions. Intricate, pricey, robust, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is positioned almost exclusively for large and international businesses.

• Squarespace

Time was, “Squarespace” was a byword for a bush-league sitebuilding tool that no self-respecting brand would use. That time has passed. The designs on Squarespace are getting sleeker every year, and its drag-and-drop feature tends to be intuitive for non-designers. Low prices are a plus, and it’s easy to set up. Squarespace is nearly the opposite of Salesforce Commerce Cloud—it’s best for small vendors with simple products that don’t require a lot of features, integrations, or payments gateways.

So Which One Should You Use?

Shopify or WooCommerce, WooCommerce or Shopify—which one will serve you best as your ecommerce platform of choice over the holidays? Allow us to be vague: It all depends on you.

Use Shopify if … 

• You’re risk-averse.
• You’re not terribly tech-savvy.
• You need an ecommerce store right now.
• Your products and services are fairly simple—and you have the funds to scale up if your business becomes more complex.

Use WooCommerce if … 

• Your products and services are relatively complicated.
• You’re on a budget—but you know how to control your costs.
• Your customers speak different languages and pay with a range of currencies.
• You’re well-versed in WordPress and its plugins—or you have a team on staff who are WordPress aficionados.

Since the holidays are nigh, poke around on the Shopify and WooCommerce sites to see which is best for you. After all, the right online store can help you check at least one item off your wishlist: Blockbuster Q4 sales.

Here’s one of the paradoxes about the holidays that, if you’re an ecommerce agency, works in your favor: People love to shop during the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s retail extravaganza, but they don’t always love venturing out of their homes to do their shopping. They’re happy to drop a projected $1 trillion+ in the US holiday bazaar. Yet they aren’t thrilled about battling traffic or jostling amid crowds on sidewalks pelted with sleet and rain. Now that the season of the Headless Horseman has passed us by like a midnight blast, brands need to make sure their headless commerce tactics and ecommerce website design can handle the onslaught of digital demand that may wallop them during the happiest time of this year.

With that said, we don’t want to make it seem like no one’s headed out to stores this winter. A lot of us are still pent up during this neverending pandemic—so who isn’t looking forward to sipping a peppermint mocha and strolling round the mall? But COVID-related fears continue to drive ecommerce sales, and COVID-related supply chain disruptions mean that prices will climb and consumers will need more options regarding where to buy gifts and how those gifts can be delivered. Read on for a few strategies that can help you identify new customers and channels, optimize your site for conversions, launch social media campaigns, and entice your audience with promos and (profitable) giveaways over the next few months.

Identify Your Customers and Channels

So many channels exist now that the task before you in the holiday run-up is to figure out which ones you want to advertise on—or whose advertising you want to align with—because you can’t dominate them all. The first step, then, is to analyze the digital traffic that came to your site over the last few holiday seasons so that you can identify your customer groups. Delve into the data until answers to some of these questions bubble up:

• Who’s your primary audience?
• What are the channels where you can grab their attention? (Social media, search engines, email marketing, billboard ads?)
• What do these people want? (Are they looking to spend their end-of-year bonus, or save on discounts? Do personalized offers woo and wow them, or is delivering a heap of presents on their doorstep on time the only thing that matters to them?)

If the answers to any of those questions still elude you, send an email survey to your existing customers and—depending on their feedback—adjust your strategy accordingly. Let’s say that Pinterest was your top-performing channel last year, but your customers are telling you that they can’t wait to buy stuff on Mercado Libre. That switch is probably unlikely, but if it happens, make sure the ecommerce platform you’re using can connect into new marketplaces so you can meet customers where they prefer to shop online.

Get Your Site into Holiday Mode

You know how brick and mortars deck their halls for the holidays—hanging cascades of silver lights from the ceiling, festooning the balustrades with red ribbons, placing a Christmas tree or a turkey in a pilgrim’s hat on a dais in the middle of the floor? Do the same with your web design. Maybe don’t make so many changes that users can’t find their way through all that digital red ribbon, but update the vibe of your site so they feel like they’ve fallen into some cheery online department store. Here are some ideas that can help you achieve that effect:

• Holiday-ify your landing pages.

Landing pages usually promote campaign-specific offers, making them the perfect lead capture tactic for the holidays. As you’re building your landing pages, keep your copy concise, make your CTAs easy to find, and spruce up your logo so that it feels like you’re gliding through a grove of Santa’s snowy spruce trees. We say “gliding” because that’s your objective here: Clear the clutter. Your users should be able to find your top sales and gift lists with a quick scan of the page. (And, please, no popups or overlays, ever.)

• Integrate on-site navigation.

Guess what happens when you walk into a store and the shelves runneth over and you can’t find the register and no one’s interested in helping you? You bounce out. Websites work the same way. Without accessible navigation elements, your users may struggle to locate what they want—which is an excellent way of ushering them to the exits. Solution: Build search engine functionality into your site. Enable features that fix misspellings or suggest phrases that your audience might be noodling on as they’re typing. The easier it is for them to find what they’re looking for, the closer you are to finalizing a sale.

• Make your shipping and billing forms immaculate.

If you thought that landing pages should be uncluttered, you haven’t read our advice on how to make the checkout process easy. This last step, in many ways, is all that matters. Which means that one error—a button that’s grayed out of existence, an autocheck that can’t locate a shipping address, a service message about a delay that gets the month wrong—might freak out your shoppers so much that they jump over to some other ecommerce vendor who offers a cleaner checkout experience. Get your code and copy right, and get out of your customers’ way. You want to make them feel like they can tread the primrose path through your payment gateway whenever they please.

Go Headless

Headless commerce is a way of separating the backend, code-heavy environment of your site from the frontend display that your users see. In traditional ecommerce platforms—and, yes, we are living in a world where “traditional” refers to developments from the bygone era of 2006–2011—the major functionality of a site (subscription features, CMS, checkout cart) are tied together to some extent, so updates to one part of the store can impact all the other parts.

Setting up the products or payment portals in a traditional, monolithic ecommerce platform is fairly easy. But as an out-of-the-box solution, it can also be bulky—causing you headaches in the form of slow load times, visual themes that feel somewhat canned, a diminished ability to scale up with more content. With headless commerce, you can customize the frontend without having to make technical changes to the backend. That design precision comes in handy in the post-Halloween shopping spree, when you need to process all your sales without your site crashing or stalling. To that end, here are two immediate benefits of headless commerce:

• A faster experience.

One of the goals of headless commerce is to speed up loading times. Yet some businesses also opt to integrate progressive web apps (or PWAs) into their headless commerce platforms to make them run even faster. PWAs—which are web software that behave like a native app—can pull the same volume of information as a regular web page, but when a user clicks a link, the PWA only swaps out the parts of the page that need to change (rather than reload the whole page). The result is speed: The site’s backend isn’t strained with processing a gazillion requests, and the content reloads are more surgical, whisking along the click-click-pay ease with which customers buy from you.

• Mobile optimization.

Site speed is especially important on mobile, a device where people tend to have even less patience (if that’s possible) than desktop or tablet. Mobile is also becoming our own pocket-sized checkout kiosks, given that analysts predict that mobile commerce will account for 54% of global digital sales in 2021. The rapidity of headless commerce can help you become a mobile-first business—and build a site that’s so intuitive that visitors find it more convenient to click-click-pay with you rather than stand in a line at Macy’s that seems to wind on for miles.

Be More Social

Earlier we suggested identifying your customers and pinpointing which channels they’re on. All those channels are useful, but social media may be especially ecommerce-friendly, since social commerce has become one of the most profitable storefronts on the world wide web.

A few months before the holidays, A/B test different social posts to generate buzz for your store and gauge which ad formats enthrall your customers the most. To build earned media, ask those customers to share photos or videos of them using your products or recommending your services. (And maybe reward them with a discount or rebate for promoting your brand.) But to really slay on social, determine which platform will serve you best:

• Facebook

Oh, sorry—you probably know this company better as “Meta,” the visionaries who are about to usher all of us into the next phase of human existence. But for this blog, we’ll refer to the Network Formerly Known as Facebook as Facebook, and we mention it in the first place because it gives ecommerce brands a plethora of subchannels through which they can talk to their audiences. Facebook Ads, Stories, Groups, Messenger, Marketplace, Business Page—any of these can command huge reach. To strengthen your own network, post on Facebook consistently, and share or comment on other ecommerce merchants’ posts.

• Google Ads

Research which terms related to your product and service your audience is likely to be searching for. (If you’re a clothing store: “Best ugly sweaters for the ugly sweater office party.” If you’re a grocery store: “OMG is there a turkey shortage this year?”) Bid on those terms. Target those keywords. Link your ads to the landing pages we’ve talked about and set up conversion tracking so you can pull the numbers on which ads are working well and which, you know … aren’t.

• Instagram

Especially if you’re a skilled shutterbug, Instagram can be a beautiful outlet for an assortment of product displays across your reels, posts, stories, and so on. Engagement rates are also higher on Instagram than other platforms, and finding ways to collaborate with other influencers is a skill you’ll pick up in no time in the Instaworld.

Promote, Entice, Give

All the strategies that we’ve listed out so far are useful, but any ecommerce brand can do them. What’ll attract a larger clientele to your store, as opposed to someone else’s? In many cases, it’s the cold, hard, Grinchlike numbers that sway people. Even though the holidays are a kind, forgiving, charitable time, shoppers are mostly interested in how much things cost and if you’ve got any deals going on. So tell them. Come correct with promos, discounts, buy-now-pay-later options, and other numbers-based incentives that can apply a balm to the sore wound where they’ll hurt most this season: Their pocketbook.

• Promotions

With all the ecommerce competition out there, is it any surprise that 49% of customers expect businesses to send them personalized offers or discounts? Cozy people up with freebies—free shipping, free products (with purchases of larger products), or free gift cards in exchange for a certain dollar amount that they spend at your store. Keep in mind, too, that seven in 10 US Americans report that they usually go over budget during the holidays. Letting them choose from a variety of payment options—monthly installments, 0% APR offers, a split-pay setup—may convey a spirit of leniency that could lead to repeat purchases.

• Enticements

As much as deals lure people in, customers abandon close to 70% of online shopping carts. How do you get them back? Try automated emails that—with some humor—remind them about whatever ’twas they left at the e-register. Also consider starting a loyalty program, creating bundles of products to cross-sell and up-sell for customers who don’t abandon their carts, and marketing to them after New Year’s comes and goes—so they know where to do their shopping for the next holiday binge.

• Gift Guides

Use your product catalog to put together gift guides for the people who your customers are likely shopping for—“20 Gift Ideas for Your Wife / Boyfriend / Neighbor / Colleague / Manager Who Doesn’t Seem Super-Thrilled With Your Work These Days.” Tier your offerings according to the buyer’s budget. Get specific with demographics. Draw on keyword research. And highlight your inventory—including your clearance section. (Who doesn’t love a bargain?)

Solve Problems

End-of-year festivities bring the promise of new beginnings, slumber and still nights and some time off from school and work. But that sense of calm usually only settles in after it’s all over. In the midst of the spending expeditions, these months can be hectic—for customers and companies alike. If you’re an ecommerce brand, partner with an ecommerce agency to optimize your site for the user’s convenience. Create self-help pages. Staff up your customer service team to handle the inundation of queries and requests and complaints that are gonna roll in (trust us). No amount of fancy design or development can equal the value of de-stressing your buyers over the holidays. Solve their problems, save them a trip through wind and weather, and they’ll be back next year for more.

In the first installment of our three-part blog series on Apple’s iOS marketing updates, we likened the impact of Apple’s new privacy controls to a sucker punch that may hobble its fellow monopoly, Facebook. To appreciate the force of that punch, consider Facebook’s longstanding prominence in the digital climate. Since 2007, Facebook has been the go-to advertising platform for ecommerce brands, from small entrepreneurs to larger companies selling through Shopify or Magento, who preferred placing ads on Facebook rather than, say, Google Shopping because it was cheaper—and because of the billions of potential customers they could reach. In turn, those merchants rewarded Facebook with profits: In 2009, its ad revenue was $764 million. By 2020, that number had soared to $84 billion.

Facebook has been so successful, in part, because it’s so efficient at collecting user data and letting businesses serve customers ads that are hyper-personalized. But now that 96% of Apple users are opting out of sharing their data, the archetypal social advertising channel may no longer be the machine of money it once was. All that data it used to aggregate—a lot of it is now effectively useless. Apple has reined in Facebook from sharing email lists and device locations with data brokers, or using a third-party SDK that combines the data of the apps that you’re on, or giving advertising networks user ID information for retargeting campaigns. No, Facebook. Bad Facebook.

On and on the stipulations went, until Facebook came up with a retaliatory strategy: Sell more products and services through its own apps, so that it’s not as reliant on cross-site user tracking. Hence its PR blitz promoting Facebook Marketplace—its ecommerce generator that boasts over one billion monthly users—as well as announcing Facebook Shops, expanding the Shop tab on Instagram, and rolling out monetization features for “creators” on Instagram.

So is that the play—ecommerce? Kinda. Facebook is smart enough to know that it can’t land its own sucker punch against today’s ecommerce behemoths, like Amazon and Walmart. Instead, it seems to be trying to make money on ads that companies could run on influencer social feeds that link off to ecommerce storefronts that Facebook owns. A lot of the pressure of that pivot falls back on you, the online businesses caught between two brawling tech gods. To that end, let us drop a few tips on how to adjust your ecommerce approach so that you can wend your way through this kerfuffle—navigating the shifts in iOS marketing while also capitalizing on Facebook’s shop-centric initiatives.

Don’t Attract—Align

Even though Facebook has been among the most important channels in digital advertising for years, it’s not the only channel out there. Yes, marketers will have to scramble to keep up with Apple’s announcements, but, in certain ways, the larger problem that they encountered before these updates was an excess of channels to choose from, which can make finding audiences more difficult. Unless you’re Coca-Cola or, well, Apple, you can’t grab people’s attention because you don’t have the money to run ads on every channel. Instead, you have to align with the attention-grabbers on the right channels. So pick your platform wisely:

 

• Facebook

Apple downsized many tracking capabilities that platforms like Facebook could offer, but a lot of the analytics remain intact. Platforms still own their first-party data. They can still study the behavior of their users (even if those users have opted out of tracking). And they can still serve them ads. In a previous blog, we pooh-poohed the efficacy of Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement solution, so watch us backtrack here and admit that those eight conversions can tell you a lot about your audience. Our advice? Make one of those events “purchase conversions” (that insight’s gonna be real handy), verify your business domain, and adjust your strategy to the attribution click-windows of seven days. That window used to stretch to 28 days. C’est la guerre.

 

• Google Shopping

Shopify and Google have recently partnered up in a deal that gives Shopify merchants ample opportunities to place their products on Google searches, which will process payments through Shop Pay (Shopify’s payment app). Google has expressed no interest in becoming a retailer, but only the more credulous among us would think that they don’t have their eye fixed on the $4.2 trillion that global ecommerce sales are expected to hit this year. If you’re looking for a different digital billboard than Facebook, open a Shopify account and try Google Shopping—especially since Shopping ads and free product listings now comprise the bulk of most ecommerce vendors’ attempts to connect with their audiences online. Speaking of Google: All those limitations that Apple’s putting into place? They don’t apply to Android (whose operating system Google developed). So while you’re figuring out your new marketing tactics, consider reallocating your ad budget to users on Android devices, which currently clocks in at 2.5 billion people worldwide.

 

• Snapchat

Apple’s pro-privacy pivot, as it happens, is making Snapchat look like it’s always been ahead of its time. Back in 2018, in a post titled “Privacy by Design,” Team Snap wrote: “Protecting privacy is a very important part of accomplishing our mission … That’s why we introduced the idea of ephemeral media with Snapchat—to set the assumption, just like in real life, that you’re not always on the record.” Mmm, maybe. Snapchat is also overprotective of its own data and has long been associated with poor mental health in its teenage users. Still, as a realpolitik channel for marketers to place ads somewhere other than Facebook, Team Snap offers a Facebooklike experience, with dynamic ad formats and product catalogs. Plus, it caters to the Millennial and Gen Z age cohort, so if that’s your core audience, Snapchat is an investment worth investigating.

Get Technical

Let’s say that you read through that list above and concluded that Facebook is, indeed, one of the platforms where you want to advertise. To perform your best on that platform, pay attention to some of the niche marketing mechanics at your disposal:

 

• Leverage On-Social Signals

Create campaigns based on user interactions with top-of-the-funnel content. Those insights can help you develop precise retargeting tactics without having to rely on data of how users behave outside of Facebook—or other platforms, for that matter—since third-party visibility is now limited.

 

• Use Properly Hashed First-Party Data

Remember how we said that platforms still own their first-party data? Well, that data’s valuable—maybe more valuable than cookie data. If you’ve already dedicated time to earning your customers’ trust, or building email lists of qualified leads, or providing products and services that people enjoy so much that they’ve given you permission to market to them directly, all your past efforts are about to sustain you in the future.

 

• Consolidate Account Structures

Just as there are too many channels to count anymore, there are too many metrics to help you count them. Analytics have become so rarefied that, in some ways, they result in marketers speaking to each other, rather than speaking to their customers. Consider lumping all those granular audience segments that you’ve delineated into one remarketing bucket, especially if your audience pool is somewhat small.

Revisit Marketing 101

Our master thesis in this blog series, if you haven’t noticed, is to get back to the fundamentals of marketing that made us sharp before we started thinking of customers as aggregations of their own micro-digital decisions. Use analytics to connect with your audience—rather than stalk them online—and harness some of these strategies to engage with them:

 

• Email Marketing

We’ve said all we need to about email marketing in the SMS versus email marketing blog in this series, but we’ll say it again: Email marketing is one of the most useful tools available to digital advertisers, app developers, and ecommerce businesses. Avoid purchase email lists, because they’ll end up routing your newsletters to spam. Instead, personalize your outreach efforts. Shape your messaging according to where people are in the sales process. Offer discounts. And make your copy and design feel human instead of automated. (We’ll elaborate on this point later.)

 

• Referral Marketing

Perhaps the most effective form of advertising is positive word-of-mouth. People trust online reviews, so wow your users, and then encourage them to leave reviews on Google, Yelp!, or anywhere else that people go to for recommendations. Promote the content that your users are generating themselves about your services and products. And expand your brand awareness through your customers’ existing networks, offering free storage or cash incentives when they get their friends and family to sign up for what you’re offering.

 

• Affiliate Marketing

If you didn’t know, affiliate marketing works like this: You display an ad on your site for a separate store that’s affiliated with your operation. If one of your customers clicks on that ad, it’ll link them off to the affiliate’s site. And if that customer buys something from the affiliated store, you get a commission off the purchase. You can track sales, join affiliate networks, and automate payouts. Just make sure you partner with the right people. (In affiliate marketing, as in life.)

 

• Influencer Marketing

The ad world has, of late, been raving about the ROI from influencer marketing. So if you’ve got some influencers in your network, reach out to them. Don’t  feel like you have to collab with internet personalities who boast followings of 20 million+. Social media accounts in the 50,000–500,000-followers range can also help you promote your brand through reviews, reels, and how-demonstrations.

 

• Extending Your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)

No matter how trendy your TikToking, how appealing your emailing, how Instafamous you are to your following, extending your CLV is the stalwart defense that will always obliterate fancy offense in the championship game. Respect your customers. Personalize your offerings. Upsell and cross-sell to your audience depending on where they are in your funnel, so that they leave your ecommerce shop feeling like they have exactly what they came looking for.

Bring Back the Humanities

Just to reiterate: We’re not anti-analytics. Imagining that some perfect ad exists that, by itself, can stun your audience into acting on a sale and zoom through the right channels at the right times—that’s crazy talk. You need to know who your customers are, what they want, how they behave. But the recasting of consumers as participants in iOS marketing who choose whether to share their data indicates that the way forward for marketers is to remember the business value of good creative. 

• Write strong ad copy. 
• Create designs that surprise, challenge, charm people. 
• Make them laugh. 
• Be irreverent.
• Take sly swipes at current issues. 
• Cut stock footage out of your arsenal and produce videos that are crisp and compelling—because one-third of all online activity is now spent watching videos. 

Once upon a time, the internet was cool. Now, with every year that passes, it looks more like a mall. We are so used to robots tracking us through that mall and talking to us as if we, too, were robots. To stand out as an ecommerce brand, fuse your analytics with your creative so that you know which channels your audience frequents, but once you find them there, meet them on equal terms and speak to them like the humans they are.

The End of an Era

And so concludes our three-part blog series—just as the story of the Wild West era of user tracking comes to a close. Well, to be candid, no one knows what’ll happen from here. Facebook might be playing possum right now, acting as if it’s floundering under the pitiless storm of bad press but actually poised to slip out from the ropes and drive its own uppercut into Apple’s gullet, landing them on the mat. Maybe users have wrested control of their data from the platforms for good. Or maybe the platforms’ attention to privacy could morph into a Big Brotheresque ability to scan all encrypted data. Time will tell. In the meantime, stay calm.

Don’t pull your marketing budget out of Facebook if you see fewer conversions over the next quarter. Don’t rethink all your user personas or reroute all your sales journeys in a frantic pitch to stay ahead of the changes. If anything, these developments have forced the ad world to adopt more diversified marketing and ecommerce approaches, investing in a broader range of channels, and appreciating their loyal customer base. Make amends with these people. The disyllabic birdsongs of the social platforms, the first families of tech, the apps and the widgets and the OS updates—they all come and go. But the admiration of the person you’re selling to, the esteem of the clients who value you for what you alone can deliver to them, can keep your digital shingle waving in the wind for years to come.