Elizabeth Marsten is a highly accomplished digital marketing expert, currently serving as the Senior Director of Marketplace Strategic Services at Tinuiti. With an extensive background in the industry, she has demonstrated exceptional proficiency in navigating the complexities of e-commerce and online marketplaces.
As a prominent figure in the field, Elizabeth has successfully led numerous digital advertising campaigns for a diverse portfolio of clients, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Her strategic approach is underpinned by a deep understanding of data analysis and market research, enabling her to deliver data-driven insights and tailored solutions to clients.
Beyond her role at Tinuiti, Elizabeth is also recognized for her expertise as a speaker and author, having imparted her knowledge at prominent industry conferences and events. Her written contributions have been featured in reputable publications.
Elizabeth’s unwavering commitment to empowering businesses in the digital landscape has earned her a reputation as a trusted advisor and industry thought leader. Through her exceptional skills and dedication, she continues to make a profound impact on the digital marketing sphere.
Elizabeth can be reached on Twitter @ebkendo or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Elizabeth Marsten
648 | The 3rd Wave of Digital Advertising w/Elizabeth MarstenInterview / podcastMarketing In A Digital Commerce Setting
A four-time guest of the EDGE and VP of Commerce Strategic Services at Tinuiti, Elizabeth Marsten, joins the show this week to explore the profound landscape of retail media network marketing. Elizabeth stands out as a distinguished Digital Marketing expert with extensive experience in e-commerce and online marketplaces.
Discover the essence of Retail Media Networks and explore how the retail industry giants leverage strategies for optimized results. Elizabeth describes the extreme levels of personalization retail media generates, outlining how personalization is expected to skyrocket. Grasp the vast scale of Retail Media Networks, and learn how data-driven positioning has become a centerpiece of digital marketing this week on The EDGE of The Web!
Key Segments:
Introducing Elizabeth Marsten
How Elizabeth Got Into Retail Marketing
How has the Digital Marketing Industry Evolved in Recent Years?
What Are Retail Media Networks?
Digital Commerce Category Leading All Others
How Personalized is Retail Media?
Fully Immersive Virtual Shopping
Bringing the Real-World Connection to Marketing
How Does a Small Business Leverage Retail Media? [...]
December 18, 2023- EDGE Bonus Episode: Interview with Elizabeth Marsten at SMX WestBonus / podcastWe had a great time at SMX West in San Jose this year and were able to sit down with some thought leaders in our digital marketing space. Huge thanks to Third Door Media, who opened the door for EDGE of the Web to be part of the conference. We were able to catch up to Elizabeth Marsten, a friend of the show and presenter at SMX. We covered the digital marketplace of Amazon, Walmart, and Google Shopping.
Give it a watch and listen! You can also read through the interview transcript on our website at https://edgeofthewebradio.com/interview-transcripts/edge-at-smx-west-with-elizabeth-marsten/. [...]
June 25, 2020
- EDGE at SMX West with Elizabeth MarstenTranscripts
Announcer: Edge of the Web, on the road at SMX.
Erin Sparks: We had a great time at SMX West in San Jose this year, and we were able sit down with some thought leaders in the digital marketing space. Big, big thanks to uh, Third Door Meeting who opened the door for Edge of the Web to be there at the conference. We had a chance to sit and talk with Elizabeth Marston, uh, friend of the show and presenter at SMX covering the digital marketplace of Amazon, Walmart and Google Shopping. So give it a watch and listen.
Announcer: Your weekly digital marketing trends, with industry trend setting guests. You’re listening and watching Edge of the Web, winners of best podcast from the Content Marketing Institute for 2017. Here at See More and Edgeofthewebradio.com.
Now, here’s your host, Erin Sparks.
Erin Sparks: We’re here at SMX West, 2020, wrapping up the day with Elizabeth Marston from Tinuiti. How about that? Uh, what’s your title over there?
Elizabeth Marsten: Senior Director, Strategic Marketplace Services.
Erin Sparks: What’s that mean?
Elizabeth Marst…: It means that I do a lot with all of the different marketplaces, mostly developing and working with some of our enterprise clients on Amazon.
Erin Sparks: All right. So I wanted to … I, I appreciate your, your spending time with us, because it’s been a long day and I also know you have a workshop, a long workshop tomorrow focused on the, the digital marketplace. Right?
Elizabeth Marst…: Uh, Amazon in particular. So it’s going to be one of the first Amazon focused workshops that’s not just entry level.
Erin Sparks: Got it. So, um, I wanted to bring around a con-, a bit of conversation that, that uh, I’ve had recently about the, the challenge of, of um, SEOs in particular. The SEO discipline and skillset, uh, I’m not jumping into the digital space, the advertising space, the marketplace. Um, it’s something that you just had a, you just talked about in your last presentation regarding um, uh, wherever you are in your career path, at whatever particular salary band you’re trying to pursue, you need to start acclimating yourself to these additional skills, these additional, these additional spaces and, and those, those higher salaries are not part of that multi-, multi-tool or sw-, or, or Swiss army knife approach. You’ve got to get specialized in these.
So, my question to you is, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of kind of silo-ing in the SEO community. That they don’t jump into these additional practices. Why do you think that is?
Elizabeth Marst…: I think part of it has to do with, it’s depending on the size of the company.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: And depending on how they’re structured. There’s those swim lanes right?
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: And it also has to, you know, I mean, there’s already a team established there. They’re not supposed to, you know, step on toes, that kind of thing.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: But also, it’s how people are comped. So if you’re not compensated to, to cross-channel at all, or cross-team, that doesn’t usually happen so much. It depends on who’s the more ambitious I guess, of the two, that is willing to kind of cross the bridge and, and make uh, in-, involve the different teams. And then there’s just intellectual curiosity.
So, if the fir-, person isn’t even that interested, or again, if they’re not comped, like they don’t get a promotion or a raise or anything that kind of comes with that …
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Then, you know, they’re going to, they’re going to stick to what they know.
Erin Sparks: We’re in, in a space, we’re in a market, we’re in an industry that is constantly changing. We, we see it all around us as digital marketers. There’s so much happening, all the time. Literally daily, there’s announcements and changes in, in the different platforms that we work in. Um, to not have a, a mindset of, of, of just, just trying to ch-, change something or understand something more, it, I mean, is that a self imposed impediment to some, some people in, in their mindset.
Elizabeth Marst…: Yeah, absolutely. And so, at some of the larger, you know, like, super mega companies like holding companies or whatever, like they are, that’s what they do. They’re not incentivized really to cross-channel. They’re not incentivized to think, think that way. They do the thing that they’re supposed to do.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: Um, and that does make it hard, but at the same time, they’re supposed to scale.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: So, when they have these accounts, these are multimillion page websites that these SEOs are working with.
Erin Sparks: Correct.
Elizabeth Marst…: So, maybe they don’t have the capacity to get that into say advertising.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: They should.
Erin Sparks: Yeah.
Elizabeth Marst…: They’d want to, but it is, I do understand um, that hesitation. Uh, smaller agencies, and again it comes back to, what do you want to do next?
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Do you want to get promoted as an SEO? Do you want to move into something like uh, a VP of Search or a Senior Director of something a little like, more marketing focused, or more technical focused.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: That’s where you have to start branching out, and that’s also where you know, again, it’s a job at the end of the day, so that salary band does tend to play a large part in where you might want to go next.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: So, if you’re not thinking about your next two steps ahead, and if are you doing the things today to either make that transition over of move up, then you’re going to stay where you’re going to stay.
Erin Sparks: Going to stay where you stay, a, a, at the same time, it is, there’s something uh, that, that the company sh-, if they were paying attention, should be able to incentivize uh, th-, those, those sharp people in that SEO swim lane to be able to look at these different digital, digital marketplace channels. Right? So it is kind of, there’s a part of responsibility on the corporations, the organizations, the enterprises, to be able to, to, to, to lift them up.
But at the same time, is there also a big of a purist mentality inside of SEO?
Elizabeth Marst…: Yeah, so, it comes from … So, Google, right? We know that the algorithms for organic and paid search are different.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: They don’t even talk to each other tech-, tech-, as far as we know. They don’t talk to each other.
Erin Sparks: Right. That’s a company I like.
Elizabeth Marst…: However, we do know that on some of these other uh, emerging marketplaces, so Amazon. So Amazon SEO is closely tied to performance and so is advertising.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: So you can pay in a sense, to play to increase your sales, and increase that velocity. That flywheel is what it does.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Sales and orders and volume, like demand, equals they’re going to keep showing you. That’s how you win things like choice badges and ta-, a, ta-, first level uh, organic p-, pages. Walmart has come right out and said, “Your organic ranking is influenced by your advertising.”
Erin Sparks: Hm.
Elizabeth Marst…: It just is what it is. So.
Erin Sparks: Yup.
Elizabeth Marst…: We are as, as an SEO reaches out beyond the Google and the Bing universe, and starts looking at what’s uh, relevant on Amazon, what’s relevant on Walmart, Target, wherever it is.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: They’re going to have to start paying attention to advertising too.
Erin Sparks: So, eh, eh, you know, to further that, is that um, you know, there’s a particular principle that, oh no, I don’t want to have to s-, sully myself in the, and no offense whatsoever so …
Elizabeth Marst…: Yeah, yeah.
Erin Sparks: But I mean it’s, it’s in the, you know, I have to pay for it? I, I should be able to earn it on my own merit and that’s not that big leap, that big jump. But here’s the core of it. Is that SEO is analysis. It’s not a, it’s almost like, it’s almost like you, you know a different script language.
Elizabeth Marst…: Yeah.
Erin Sparks: It, it’s the concepts of analysis and measurement and, and, and experimentation. They all play in the same fields in all these different disciplines. Right?
Elizabeth Marst…: And I also look at, why, why this is … So Google’s business is search.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: Like, it’s to provide answers. Amazon’s is to sell you something.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: They don’t really care like, with the, like there’s not going to be a knowledge panel or like all these other things.
Erin Sparks:
Elizabeth Marst…: Is this the thing you wanted? Will you buy the thing?
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Can I sell it to you? Great. Next.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: And so, that, that cycle is, that’s not going to stop. And so, SEOs a-, as they start to work with these retailers, understanding the different inputs, that is important to the engine.
Erin Sparks: Hm.
Elizabeth Marst…: Which is there’s, and their sophistication is going be different as well. Their inputs are different. Um, Walmart’s we know is, as a search tool, their search is onsite search functionality.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: Just isn’t as good as Amazon and Google’s. And they’ve had more time to, to, to hone those inputs. But, the other question I have is, you know, is Walmart that incentivized if, to make more improvements? If they can just sell you the advertising to move it forward?
So, it kind of goes. And then, each one of them is going to be different, as we go forward.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: So, you can argue a-, in the future, like, what is search? Um, one of the things that I struggle with a Tinuiti is we have search, which you, to you and means paid search.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Or SEO. But then on the Amazon team, they have search, which also search on Amazon. So, it’s very diff-, so depending on who you’re talking to, you have to clarify search on what.
Erin Sparks: Right, right, right. And you have to be, you, you, you can’t be dogmatic. You can’t just stay in one lane. You ha-, your, you’re going to have to know those particular intents and it all does get back to consumer intent. Amazon, all the marketplaces are very, very transactional, and intent. We all understand that search and, and, and question search and entity searches. Right? Are a whole different beast, and if you want to be able to serve your company well, you have to be able to embrace and understand the, the other side of the fence then.
Elizabeth Marst…: And then the search behavior is different too. Right? So what, how you, how, you know, Google will have longer queries. Amazon may have shorter. Walmart is kind of interesting because you will see um, use cases.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: Like they’ll, they’ll not just be like, dog food. It’ll be dog food for small dogs. Like, there’s a very specific problem that they’re, or solution that they’re trying to find. Um, and that’s why sites like Walmart and Target, if you look at their site nav on the left side?
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: It is more browse behavioral, and that is what Google Shopping, or Shopping Access Goo-, Google, whichever you want to call it, what, whatever point in time it was.
Erin Sparks:
Elizabeth Marst…: I, you know, I worked with them to launch that in a previous role, and that, I asked, “What, what’s up with these categories? Why are … this is weird.” And they, they were saying it’s, they wanted it to be more akin to like when you’re in a store, and you look at the aisles, the lists above the aisles.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: They wanted to uh, uh, encourage browsing and to keep going and to keep clicking and to keep adding things to your cart.
Erin Sparks: Right, right, right. So, there’s another area of all this that has to do with customer sentiment, um, as, as it applies to part of the algorithm’s flywheel, and on top of that search. Uh, just, just entity search uh, Google search, not the paid search. There has to be an embracement of understanding how to improve customer sentiment and also goes into customer service and all of the other ramifications of that.
But, there is a connective tissue between the, the, the digital marketplace and the consumer review and the SEO and the consumer review. Is that a potential bridge for SEOs to understand that, it’s, it’s in both spaces. They should be truly embracing the entire area.
Elizabeth Marst…: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Especially around shared, shared metrics or shared pieces of information, that can influence both. So, customer views, product reviews, um, popularity, uh, prod-, certain product pages. Whether or not, you know, one of the things with uh, Walmart that’s unfortunate is because of some of the way the product pages are laid out, they’re not as indexed I’ve noticed and crawled as Google.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: Or as uh, Amazon. Amazon product detail pages are constant. You can find them always in a Google index.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Um, Target’s starting to sneak in there as well. So, as you go to update product content, understanding how, how many other places it can permeate.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: It becomes actually quite relevant to an SEO.
Erin Sparks: Absolutely. And those associated, all those affiliated or customer views at each and every one of those different spaces.
Elizabeth Marst…: Yeah, and if you’re a brand, and you put the brand name in, are you competing with yourself? So, you’ve got your e-comm site, you’ve got your Target page, your Amazon page, your Walmart page, your Wikipedia page, whatever it is. Like, how do you want that to lay out for the customer?
Erin Sparks: So, I guess they just can’t spa-, stay, stay in, in code. They can’t stay in, in content. They have to be looking at uh, all of these additional marketplace relevancies because it does effect their performance as well.
Elizabeth Marst…: Eventually, their site traffic may go down.
Erin Sparks: Absolutely.
Elizabeth Marst…: Uh, that is one thing that we notice competitive, competitively speaking was you know, uh, I talked to somebody that you know, their .com traffic is dropping. It was like, “Well, but are your sales?” Like, did they just move essentially.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: And so, we did find that there were some that were moving. And, Amazon actually has a new tool called Amazon Attribution, which does make it so that you can generate a tag in Amazon.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: And let’s say that you don’t have a e-comm site. Like, you have a site, but it’s not e-comm ready.
Erin Sparks: Okay.
Elizabeth Marst…: And you want to direct traffic to your Amazon detail product pages.
Erin Sparks: Right, right, right.
Elizabeth Marst…: You can tag, and then you can start to see what you’re in a sense, or eh, a Google search, you can see what your leak is, essentially from when someone started to Google search to when they completed it on Amazon. So it in beta now.
Erin Sparks: Hm.
Elizabeth Marst…: It was primarily for first party and vendors. They are letting some third parties in.
Erin Sparks: Are we going to be seeing uh, all, all of these e-comm uh, leave the domain, and actually plant it, plant itself in, in the marketplace?
Elizabeth Marst…: No.
Erin Sparks: No?
Elizabeth Marst…: Nah, there’s just, there’s just too much … It’s, we’re, we’re so far away from that. People just want to buy when they’re ready and you know, just being in the six places.
Erin Sparks: all right.
Elizabeth Marst…: It’s exhausting, but yeah.
Erin Sparks: I appreciate, I appreciate your thoughts there. I mean, it, it has been a concern, and I’ve had a number of conversations. I, we want to be able to see SEOs use their well honed disciplines, well honed analysis and be able to benefit the digital marketplace.
Elizabeth Marst…: I still f-, I still find that there’s a very real benefit and need for a .com. I mean, that’s your space. That’s your, that’s your brand voice. That’s where you get to put unique things, content, launches, any kind of celebrity endorse-, whatever it is.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: Like, that’s your space, and you should own and that is how you should connect to your customers. And that way if they buy it, it doesn’t matter where they buy it from.
Erin Sparks: Absolutely. Just own the brand there. Don’t just be on the shelf. Right? Last all, last thoughts for, for the uh, the digital advertiser that’s uh, uh, out there and wants to jump into the digital marketplace. Guidance, what would you, what would you give them as a first steps?
Elizabeth Marst…: So like as from an SEO or just in general?
Erin Sparks: Oh, just a digital, digital advertiser collectively.
Elizabeth Marst…: Well, I would say that obviously, if you’re not familiar with Google Shopping, you should take the certification part of that. There is a Shoppings certification that you can go through and get a pretty good idea of how it works. Like, nuts and bolts. Um, I recommend that or like the Amazon accreditation as well.
Erin Sparks: Sure.
Elizabeth Marst…: Because then at least you’ll learn the names of the things. Um, which they change, I swear every two, two quarters.
Erin Sparks:
Elizabeth Marst…: However, the most relevant is in there. Um, there’s also like subscriptions. Like I like to look at some very high level uh, subscriptions at like, Digiday or uh, Wire’s always a good one.
Erin Sparks: Mm-hmm
Elizabeth Marst…: And um, Marketplace Pulse, because then you’re at least at the very highest level, getting company movements.
Erin Sparks: Right.
Elizabeth Marst…: And so you understand like, the health of the company and what new initiatives are coming out that year. So, then you can think about how that affects your life.
Erin Sparks: Hm. All right. Thank you so much. Good luck in your uh, your workshop tomorrow.
Elizabeth Marst…: Thank you.
Erin Sparks: That is a gauntlet. An eight hour workshop.
Elizabeth Marst…: So many slides.
Erin Sparks:
Elizabeth Marst…: We made so many slides.
Erin Sparks: Thanks for always giving us great information and taking the time with, with us. We really do appreciate it.
Elizabeth Marst…: Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
Erin Sparks: More than wel-, more than welcome. Hopefully we’ll get you back on the show here soon.
Elizabeth Marst…: Great. [...]
June 25, 2020
- EP 335 Transcript | Amazon/Walmart eCommerce Tactics with Elizabeth MarstenTranscriptsAnnouncer: 00:01 On this episode of Edge of the Web.
Elizabeth Marsten: 00:05 But it’s come so far since then, in terms of capabilities of types of targeting, ad types, the sophistication of the platform overall, reporting. You know, granted there’s always going to be what you know, you call your complaint list, right? Or your wishlist. That’s always, search marketers, that’s all we do, I think is we’re a-type personalities that make lists of things that we want or don’t have yet.
Announcer: 00:29 Your weekly digital marketing trends with industry trendsetting guests. You’re listening and watching Edge of the Web. Winners of best podcast from the Content Marketing Institute for 2017. Hear and see more at Edgeofthewebradio.com. Now here’s your host, Aaron Sparks.
Erin Sparks: 00:50 Hey, welcome back to Edge of the Web radio episode 335. I’m your host, Aaron Sparks. Every week we bring you all the latest trending topics in digital marketing as well as talking to influencers, fantastic guests, influencers in the digital marketing space from around the planet. Be sure to check out all of the recent shows over at edgeofhtewebradio.com. That’s edgeofthewebradio.com. We’re pushing through podcast video casts and much more, so if there’s something that you missed from the show and I know we go through a lot, jump over to edgeofthewebradio.com.
So if you are new to the show, welcome. Here’s the ropes, we’ll kind of walk you through some of the things. Each week, we actually start our show live cast on YouTube. youtube.com/edgeoftheweb. You can find all of our podcasts over at iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spreaker, iHeartmedia, Spotify, TuneIn, a mess of others, but you can also find all the show material over at the site edgeofthewebradio.com. You have the show notes, all the links on the show, all the news items of the show, as well as all the transcripts of the show.
It’s a cornucopia of content. So you want to jump over there, make sure that you find out everything that we are talking about in the previous show. So the show is actually brought to you by the title sponsor of the show, Site Strategics. They are the pioneers in agile digital marketing. Their core specialties are SEO, SEM, social media marketing and management, conversion rate optimization, as well as omni-channel media marketing. So if you’re interested in what they can do for you, we certainly have a free hour consultation on Skype, Zoom, whatever. We’ll unpack some digital tactics that you can bring take to the bank immediately. So give us a call at SEO for web or (877)736-4932. In the booth, I’m going to introduce Jacob as well as Allie. She’s not even going to jump in there is she?
Jacob Mann: 02:41 I don’t know, come on over.
Allie Coons: 02:43 Hi.
Erin Sparks: 02:45 I told you, I told him I’ll throw you a curve ball.
Jacob Mann: 02:48 There you go.
Erin Sparks: 02:49 Got to get another mic in there.
Jacob Mann: 02:50 Yeah, well, we can do that.
Erin Sparks: 02:52 No. So happy Cyber Monday to.
Jacob Mann: 02:53 I know, I managed to buy anything yet,
Erin Sparks: 02:56 Oh yeah?
Jacob Mann: 02:56 I’m very proud of myself for that.
Erin Sparks: 02:58 The day’s not over.
Jacob Mann: 02:59 Well, I know, but I’ve got too much to do tonight. I’m going to get through it, not buy a thing today.
Erin Sparks: 03:05 Oh my gosh. How can you do that? I mean, it’s now a cultural thing to buy something on Cyber Monday. Come on.
Jacob Mann: 03:09 I know, I know, but I think there’s enough other things out there, I don’t know. The deals I’m seeing just aren’t where I want them to be. I’ve seen a few, there are things that I was looking forward to today and they just weren’t, I don’t know.
Erin Sparks: 03:20 I’m sorry.
Jacob Mann: 03:21 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 03:22 Thanksgiving okay for you.
Jacob Mann: 03:23 Yeah. Doing well. Just you know, long weekend.
Erin Sparks: 03:26 Oh my gosh. You better believe it. And the tryptophan has not worn off yet.
Jacob Mann: 03:30 Right?
Erin Sparks: 03:30 I’m still in that Turkey fugue.
Jacob Mann: 03:32 Yes, exactly.
Erin Sparks: 03:33 Oh, well, you know what? What’s not in a fugue as it finally did happen, folks, we had a live SEO audit with Andy Drinkwater right before the holidays. We picked a site, a particularly juicy site, and we had at it. We carved it up into piles of canonicalization issues with a helping of duplicate content and served it up on a tray of site structure problems that would make an org chart cringe. So we had fun doing it. We certainly appreciate Andy’s participation and hey, you know what? We geeked out and we certainly would like you to jump over to that show and check it out, especially the live broad… Well the video side of the things because we did do a lot of screen-share during that, so you can go over to youtube.com/edgeoftheweb and check that out.
Hey, who knows, we may actually do another one in the upcoming months. Some edge notes, some housekeeping of the upcoming guests this year. Talia Wolf will be on the show December 9th. Robert Rose is going to be on the 16th. Hopefully we got Kim Scott on the 23rd but I think we’re doing a little prerecord on that one. Hopefully we got that locked in. If not, then we’ll bring you a special surprise guest. Set all your reminders on YouTube so that you can get notifications of when we go live and we usually are dropping our podcast the day after our live events. So hey, let us know what you think of how we’re doing on the show. And you can also join our newsletter if you want to. You can just text with number 22828 the word edgetalk and to be able to sign up right there. Let us know and follow along with our shows on a regular basis.
All right, ahrefs makes competitive analysis very very easy. Their tools show you how competitors are getting traffic from Google and why you can see the pages, the content and the keywords that they’re ranking for and then put together the strategy to go push them out of the way. So if you’re not getting significant traffic, you know, ahrefs will also help you find topics worth creating pages and content on. So it’s a very useful tool all the way through. If you want to jump in, you can get a free trial today. Just go over to ahrefs.com. You’ll swim in great data just like we do over at Site.
So that’s a wrap for the news today. We certainly again wish you a great Cyber Monday. We’re going to meet now this week’s industry’s guest.
Announcer: 05:49 Know it’s time for it Edge of the Web featured interview with Elizabeth Marston, senior director of strategic marketplace services at Tinuiti.
Erin Sparks: 06:00 We got the cool speaker effect on the beat boy stereo guy. Well we certainly want to introduce again Elizabeth, for those of you who are just joining our podcast, welcome back. Yeah, we’ve actually had you on the show back in August, Elizabeth and you are the senior director of strategic marketplace services through… See I did it, Tinuiti. Oh my gosh, there it is, so easy.
Elizabeth Marsten: 06:26 My first two weeks I spelt it wrong. It took me a little while.
Erin Sparks: 06:30 The trick is continuity. .
Elizabeth Marsten: 06:31 Continuity, ingenuity and acuity.
Erin Sparks: 06:35 All the -ituities. All right, so if you haven’t seen or listened to Elizabeth, shame on you. She’s been a speaker at Moz Conf, SMS advanced East and West, PPC Hero conf, a marketing profs, University B2B, PPC Masters, all the PPC stuff. And she was on the show a year and some change ago talking. So we did some deep diving in PPC as well as Google express ads and Google shopping if memory recalls or if I recall. But you know what? You’ve shifted and you’ve gone deep into marketplace advertising.
Elizabeth Marsten: 07:14 Yep. So it was kind of sneaking around in the background for the last three or four years of my career. But it’s made obviously as I joined Tinuity come to the forefront.
Erin Sparks: 07:26 Well that’s fantastic. And this is the, I don’t want to say the new gold rush, but this is a huge evolving environment. You specialize in Amazon and Walmart advertising. So how’s your day going today? Is it pretty busy?
Elizabeth Marsten: 07:41 Yeah, it’s insane. But you know, the thing is particularly with like Amazon, the big thing is a lot of prep has already happened. So you know, we’re talking four and five weeks out where things of budgets are set, assortment is set. Like, how that’s going to go. And these are folks that have been selling entire, you know, these are folks that have already been selling on the marketplace so that retail readiness is there.
Erin Sparks: 08:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 08:02 The one that’s a little bit test, I would say still in the test phases is Walmart.
Erin Sparks: 08:06 Oh really?
Elizabeth Marsten: 08:08 Yeah. I mean the product was… I mean you can go to Walmart advertising if you’re a current to a third party, you know, you can, it can apply for it, it’s there. They, you know, it’s publicly known that Triad Media managed Walmart’s advertising for about 13 years.
Erin Sparks: 08:23 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 08:24 And then you know, last summer, they said, “Thanks. We’re done.” Walmart’s taken it all in house and they’ve been building an entire service line from that.
Erin Sparks: 08:32 Wow. Now you know, we certainly want to unpack that. But first and foremost we want to, for the listeners who don’t know you, tell us your backstory. How you got all the way through the PPC to the marketplace advertising. And in two minutes. Go.
Elizabeth Marsten: 08:50 Go, so it was really weird. As I started out interviewing as an office manager in 2006 I thought I was interviewing for Paperclip Marketing after I didn’t get that office manager position. That is a true story. I had to Google it, I did not know what it was. But goes to show you that anybody can learn this. So I came in, learned paid search at Porton, which is a small internet marketing agency in Seattle. We did all the things. So I picked up paid search, SEO, content analytics, WebDev and I want to say SEO. Went up to the VP Search. Then I went over to Commerce Hub where we were doing product catalog feed management. That is also where we did retail, drop ship. And that is where I got started on the marketplace’s side cause we had a marketplaces team and division kind of falling along with what they were doing. I was running as Director of Paid Search.
My EDP at the time said “You should learn marketplaces.” And I said “Fine, I will.” I would say I don’t have that depth of expertise in the accounts and in that management level that I used to have. So like for paid search, you know when you first start out.
Erin Sparks: 09:53 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 09:54 You’re literally in there smashing around. I haven’t had to do as much of that, which I’m okay with. But as a result, I understand pretty broadly on how Amazon works.
Erin Sparks: 09:54 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 10:05 How it doesn’t work, how it works with other channels. Understanding what is important and what isn’t. And then in this last year started working on Google Express. So I watched the business lines for Google Express Facebook Marketplace. And then this year at Tinuity, I’m working on the Walmart advertising offering and starting to poke into retailor advertising.
Erin Sparks: 10:25 Oh very cool. Very cool.
Elizabeth Marsten: 10:27 Going everywhere.
Erin Sparks: 10:28 You are, but I mean in that space, you’re really conquering a land mass after land mass.
Elizabeth Marsten: 10:36 Well it’s all e-comm and I think that’s one of the biggest things that folks need to keep in mind.
Erin Sparks: 10:39 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 10:40 Is think about it less about channels and platforms and thinking about it like “Where’s the person?” And you want to sell them the thing, right? So why make it hard?
Erin Sparks: 10:47 And that’s the core difference here is that instead of outreach and pursuit, you’re positioning based on those needs that are already being expressed and they’re trusting that environment more and more. We talked about it in the news, but that digital native has truly grown to trust so much that, I mean we’ve got some stats here that are going to blow your mind. Let’s go through them a bit here. Just on the concept of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, year over year. Black Friday, the U S spent 7.4 billion on online retail for Black Friday in 2019, raising the year on year digital growth for the period to 43%.
That number doesn’t exist in economics regularly, does it?
Elizabeth Marsten: 11:34 No. You know, what’s interesting though is there’s a downside to it, is that we look at those big, big, big numbers and we think that it’s replicatable. So that’s one of the challenges that I’m having now with getting Walmart advertising going is folks just think they can just take what they’re doing on Amazon and flip it over and it’s going to work and it’s going to work on any marketplace, and that’s not how that works. There is a pretty definitive overlap though between the two core customers. So I work a lot with Cleveland research and I asked them, you know, “Tell me more. Tell me more about who uses Walmart versus who uses Amazon.” So what they did find is that in one of their surveys, 57% of respondents that shop at Amazon also shop on Walmart and 91% that also shop on Walmart, also shop on Amazon. So there is definitely, that Venn diagram is larger than what you might think.
Erin Sparks: 12:29 Yeah, absolutely. Are you anticipating that that’s going to even out a bit as you are witnessing the Walmart evolution?
Elizabeth Marsten: 12:39 Yeah, and part of it has to do with the way that Walmart is approaching the convenience to that buy online pickup in store. The number one thing that people forget when they compare Amazon and Walmart is Walmart has stores.
Erin Sparks: 12:39 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 12:49 They have so many stores.
Erin Sparks: 12:49 Absolutely.
Elizabeth Marsten: 12:50 Like 4,000 and I think it’s 90% or something like that of people in the U.S. live within five miles of a Walmart.
Erin Sparks: 12:57 Yup.
Elizabeth Marsten: 12:58 That reach alone and that should be their differentiator. That should be something that they concentrate on. And that billion dollar investment that Mark Laurie talked about earlier this year, that Walmart has made an eCommerce, eventually that comes out somewhere. You know, the market was like, “Oh he lost 1 billion dollars.” And I was like, “I don’t think he lost it. I know where it went. I think he knows exactly where it went.” The question will be, “Will we see it back in and when will we say it back?”
Erin Sparks: 13:23 Oh there’s an investment in infrastructure there that is certainly going to show up.
Elizabeth Marsten: 13:28 And it takes a while. You know, so we also forget that Target’s first web store was actually on Amazon. So in 2010 is when they left the platforms. I think it was like 2001 or something, they started on Amazon having an assortment there and target in 2010 said, “You know what, we’re going to have our own website.” You know, and the market laughed at them for it and the stock went down and it was hard.
Erin Sparks: 13:49 Yup.
Elizabeth Marsten: 13:50 They lost probably a literal billion dollars in that transition. But when you look at them now, I think it was the right call. It just takes a while.
Erin Sparks: 14:00 Well if you fast forward, cause I remember the .com days and you lose that type of money and you just don’t come back.
Elizabeth Marsten: 14:09 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 14:09 So that just demonstrates the maturity of the environment and the acceptance from the consumer that they’ll even forgive some bobbles here or there because they know where you’re going. And again, that new media, that digital native now is getting younger and younger and older and older. So there’s a much larger acceptance of transactions. Conversion rates, I don’t even have a stat on conversion rates for this year, but I know there’s a huge trajectory of the mobile devices that are. I mean we’ve said before, the show we’ve been in mobile get in for like six years now and it keeps on going. It’s that commerce level at that personal private device, right, is unbeatable from a level of intimacy as well as knowledge that you can put all your lists together. And it’s almost that concierge around that Amazon’s been able to conquer. So Walmart’s got to catch up to that game.
Elizabeth Marsten: 15:06 And they, it’s interesting too is they also have a brand I think image to work with. So I’ve noticed that in their e-com advertisements in particular around the public, there’s a different kind of demographic they’re appealing to. Their buy online pickup in store is huge. And not even pickup in store, you can pick it up in the parking lot. You don’t even have to go in the store. Talk about fighting brand perception. Like you don’t even have to go on the store. We’ll just bring it.
Erin Sparks: 15:35 But wait a minute, then we can’t go people watch at Walmart if we’re picking it up in the parking lot. Come on.
Elizabeth Marsten: 15:41 I think they want to go away with. I think they want to get away from that. Just a little,
Erin Sparks: 15:45 Just a little bit, all right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 15:48 And then I think about Target. Right?
Erin Sparks: 15:48 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 15:49 So think about their brand perception and how like, you know, it helps a lot. Let’s put it that way. As far as like you know, when that retailer says, “Hey trust us, we totally know what we’re doing.”
Erin Sparks: 15:58 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 15:58 You look at the historical context and you go, “Yeah, all right.”
Erin Sparks: 16:01 I’ll give you a little bit of time there. So Cyber Monday, specifically online shopping, it has actually just exploded. Last year, Cyber Monday broke online sales records with a total of 7.9 billion in sales making it the biggest online shopping day of all time in the U.S. Spending increased 19% on the previous year. The stats are actually coming in very, very quickly. We’re seeing even higher numbers of growth right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 16:29 And it makes total sense. I mean when you think about the innovations just even in the last year too.
Erin Sparks: 16:34 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 16:34 So when we were talking about Google Shopping in the last August and back then Google Express, you know, why did they do that? Why did they exist? Why the rebrand? You know, and it’s confusing cause it’s called Google Shopping. But we kind of already had Google Shopping.
Erin Sparks: 16:34 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 16:47 But did we really? So what I try to liken it to is strip away just all the crap and think about it this way. They’re just trying to make it easy for you to buy the thing. So if you can just buy the thing within your phone, within your desktop or whatever, you know, stored wallet, three clicks, you don’t have to fill in a bunch of forms. I mean, that’s it. And it makes total sense in terms of like Cyber Monday. They’re encouraging you to buy online, so the more friction that gets removed, the more likely you are to do those impulse buys.
Erin Sparks: 17:20 That’s right. All right. For our audience, give us, illustrate a little bit deeper of a removing friction. Give me an idea of some examples that would play out in the regular online marketplace or the regular online transaction compared to the marketplace.
Elizabeth Marsten: 17:36 So regular line transaction, right? You’ve got these websites, you know, I’ve had customers that have come and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve got this site. We’re totally replatforming but it’s going to take two years.” And then you ask them what is that they’re currently using and it takes them six weeks to get a single product live. Or, you know, in the SEO world, that mobile friendly, right?
Erin Sparks: 17:36 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 17:58 Site speed, what does it look like when it pops up the phone? Checkout, you know, all that kind of friction that’s been created from sites, you know, that were built in like 2008, 2009 and the level of effort and investment it takes to replatform and to redesign and all that. It’s huge, especially from e-comm. And then add in all the privacy, you know, how do they handle personal information? GDPR, the list gets longer and the investment gets deeper. So what I dothink about when I think of all this is what Google created in 2015 with the buy button.
Erin Sparks: 18:32 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 18:33 And I know they didn’t like calling it that back then, but that’s what it was. It was a buy button. It was a mobile only product listing ads enhancement as they called it. And it only appeared on, I think it was like less than 12% of searchers or something. It was very small.
Erin Sparks: 18:48 I think they were only out for droid only first. Right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 18:51 Exactly. And it was only for certain customers or certain brands that had partnered with Google. And so it was very hard to catch a picture of it in the wild. And I even knew, you know, eight of the customers that were in the program and I had a hard time getting a trip and part of that had to do with the personalization aspect. So whether or not I had shown affinity for certain brands or behaviors or willingness to buy online. Did I have a Google wallet set up? All that kind of stuff.
Erin Sparks: 19:13 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 19:13 So you know, fast forward it’s 2015 okay, here we are, four to five years later. Now we’ve got Google Shopping. Well all that information, all that research, all that gathering is now starting to come to a head. So now we have your loyalty programs stored. We know whether or not you have an open cart on something.
Erin Sparks: 19:29 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 19:29 We know whether or not you’re on your device, you’re signing in. Like all of it and then that convenience, there it is kicks right in. Here it is, and then they’ll send you an email like “Don’t forget to check out.” Basket building is a huge thing with Google Shopping right now. If you, let’s say when you put something in your cart and you didn’t quite have enough for free shipping, but today is Cyber Monday and something has changed, like they dropped the free shipping threshold or something.
Erin Sparks: 19:53 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 19:53 They’ll let you know and there’s that notification, two clicks later.
Erin Sparks: 19:58 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 19:58 You’re done.
Erin Sparks: 19:59 Absolutely. And then combine that with what we just reported. 63% of people are looking at email as the driving motivator. You had, again this, intimate relationship you’re having with your own market. So you have the personalization of the marketplace. You’re not having to walk through aisles. The aisles are coming up to you and personalizing based on your need, based on your shopping behavior and they’re letting you know how things are changing to your betterment. So all of this is, again that frictionless environment that still exists in e-com and disparate websites, but it’s just being removed like layers right, in the marketplace.
Elizabeth Marsten: 20:41 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 20:41 So let’s talk about that because we talked on the show a lot about SEO, SEM, social media marketing in the spaces. Huge play out there for the online retailer too. And they still actually fear to tread is the marketplace advertising. So tell us about marketplace advertising and the realm that we need to step into.
Elizabeth Marsten: 21:03 So mostly what we look at when we look at marketplace advertising, and it depends on what platform you’re talking about. Obviously the big one, Amazon, you know, huge, huge growth year over year, double digits actually did the math. I think it was last year. Even if they continued at their current growth rate.
Erin Sparks: 21:03 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 21:19 You know, cycle year after year it would take them almost 10 years to catch up with Google to get to that 80 billion.
Erin Sparks: 21:19 Wow.
Elizabeth Marsten: 21:24 So they’re predicted right now I believe it is like 3 billion and that’s something to keep in mind as far as like context goes. So a marketplace’s advertising is not its primary function the same way like say Google. They say they’re searched but we all know it’s an advertising platform with a search engine.
Erin Sparks: 21:40 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 21:40 But when it comes to Amazon, the primary driver of traffic and why people are there to buy things from the marketplace.
So either independent sellers, third party sellers or through brands that have contracted with Amazon to do first party, first and foremost that’s why they exist.
Erin Sparks: 21:57 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 21:57 Advertising is like fourth or fifth on the list of things that they do, which is why when it gets reported in the market, it doesn’t get reported as a separate item. It gets lumped into other income. Technically speaking, you know, 3 billion.
Erin Sparks: 22:13 That’s a lot of other income right there.
Elizabeth Marsten: 22:16 I know it’s probably just in his couch cushions. But it is something to keep in mind when you think about marketplace advertising and so as a result, in comparison to Google or Facebook, when you think about some of the features or functionalities or capabilities or reliability, in some cases they’re way behind. But I hate to use that word because it’s not right to compare them that way. I would say if this was 2014 and when I first saw the Amazon advertising product, it was absolutely a rip off of Google ads 2010 I mean it was literally like getting in a time machine. But it’s come so far since then.
In terms of capabilities of types of targeting, ad types of the sophistication of the platform, overall, reporting, you know granted there’s always going to be what you call your complaint list, right? Or your wishlist.
Erin Sparks: 23:06 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 23:07 That’s always, search marketers, Tthat’s all we do, I think is we’re a type personalities that make lists of things that we want or don’t have yet.
Erin Sparks: 23:13 This would be great if.
Elizabeth Marsten: 23:16 Yeah, can I have the thing? Google,make me the thing. You know every year somebody puts out, you know, a post with 12 things on it that I don’t have that I want kind of thing. And you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the end of the day I look at it and I go, for Amazon in particular for advertising, the money goes in and a lot of it comes back out.
Erin Sparks: 23:33 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 23:33 So, the sponsored product ad unit by far has been the best performing. Makes tons of sense.
Erin Sparks: 23:33 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 23:39 Amazon has picked up where they put those on the Amazon platform. I mean the inventory is expanded as well. They are everywhere. I swore, I see a new screenshot every day of a new placement and the one to watch in the next year is their expansion into Programmatic. So Amazon’s DSP, so that is Amazon owned and operated, but they’ve also partnered with additional… .
Erin Sparks: 24:01 Networks.
Elizabeth Marsten: 24:01 What do we call them? Yeah, networks index, so like a trade desk, index exchange, that kind of stuff.
Erin Sparks: 24:01 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 24:07 So they do have some inventory there. They have partnered to have, you know, you would load into the Amazon console. Your creative can show up in other sites. Yeah technically speaking there is some overlap in terms of which exchanges are serving who.
Erin Sparks: 24:25 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 24:26 I haven’t seen that yet. They’ve done a pretty good job of deduping so you’re not going to like Business Insider and have four of your ads sitting there on a page.
Erin Sparks: 24:33 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 24:33 All served by a different index. But the power of the owned and operated Amazon DSP is amazing. We have a benchmark report that our director of research, Andy Taylor did, and in it he does dive into our inventory on DSP and can give some pretty high level stats on what we’re seeing as far as on and operated. Primarily that’s where a lot of the traffic is coming from. But it’s also a lot of conversions. The conversion rate is outstanding. .
Erin Sparks: 25:10 And you’re going to be exploiting the multi-touch conversion points as well, I’m assuming.
Elizabeth Marsten: 25:15 Well the nice thing with Amazon DSP is there’s that close loop piece, right? So the way we kind of look at it from a strategic standpoint is we think of it more in the marketing funnel.
So we have a lot of folks that are just like “Get ROI.” And I was like, “We all know that that’s not a good way to look at programmatic. Right?” So trying to build that upper funnel awareness to drive down and then use other Amazon advertising capabilities like sponsored products to capture that last half.
Erin Sparks: 25:38 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 25:38 So we are working on… The hard part right now is a lot of the customers or a lot of companies aren’t, they’re not engineered or they’re not currently set up in a way to talk to each other in that way either. Right? So if you have Amazon DSP who manages it? Is it your Amazon team? Is it your programmatic team?
Erin Sparks: 25:38 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 25:56 Is it like, you know, and so we have some brands that are still trying to figure out, “How do we do that? Who owns that? Where does the money come from?”
Erin Sparks: 26:04 It’s got to be a hybrid, doesn’t it?
Elizabeth Marsten: 26:07 Yeah. And it depends entirely how you’re setup. So if you’re a mega legacy corporation, you’ve been around from 120 years and you know, you don’t have… digital is new. One of the things that we’ve, I’ve noted is we have a couple of customers that are very, very large. And one of the things that I’ve pointed out to my team as far as marketplace is “Sure Amazon’s 3 billion, but in a way we only represent less than 1% of their worldwide revenue.” It’s technically nothing, but it’s technically something, right? So it’s lots of space to grow, but at the same time, that’s why you may have a harder time getting the structure around proper alignment on what to do or how to execute against it. You have to explain it.
Erin Sparks: 26:51 You do and things are moving so quickly that you explain something and the game’s going to change here, but that’s great to be able to see that level of coverage because that’s going to make that conversion cut in half as well. If you can actually bring them in on the awareness on the programmatic and then deliver your programmatic sponsored ad.
Elizabeth Marsten: 27:08 Yup.
Erin Sparks: 27:08 Boy that’s a heck of a lot of savings right there as opposed to first touch connection to that consumer. Right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 27:15 And you can also do non-endemics. So on the OTT or over the top, the Amazon fire, you can, let’s say your Geico insurance company or something.
Erin Sparks: 27:15 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 27:23 You don’t sell on Amazon. You can do that. Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 27:28 That’s a beautiful thing.
Elizabeth Marsten: 27:30 It’s a real programmatic offering and it’s interesting because , you know, it’s only a couple of years old. So versus some of the older exchanges which are working off of like an older stack. This is all new stuff.
Erin Sparks: 27:41 Oh, all right. So we’re going to pull back. This is the panels of market and let’s pull back over to how to prepare that retailer business. Development retailer to go into the marketplace. You just had a recent article in November, the rise of advertising on E-commerce marketplace’s is five tips to get ahead. I certainly love the perspective of seeing how far Amazon’s going. And we also know that there’s also expediency, there’s an exponential execution now that the Walmart’s going to execute based on the trail that’s been blazed with Amazon. So we’re going to see what Amazon did in 10 years, done potentially in three to four years by Walmart, just because of the nature of, of the environment.
But that retailer still has to be ready to deliver. Right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 27:41 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 28:36 So what’s first thing? I mean, you do again reference the key concept that these marketplaces aren’t in it to actually get your money, but literally for the revenue of the transaction. And that is a complete paradigm shift that the retailer needs to be prepared for. But what are the key factors that maybe a retailer, get that one out, should be ready for?
Elizabeth Marsten: 29:02 So a couple of things, depends on the retailer, but some of them aren’t allowed on the marketplaces. So they’re considered a competition.
Erin Sparks: 29:10 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 29:11 So sometimes it’s got to be a brand. So what I would say is, depending on the retailer and how they’re set up, maybe they have an advertising option that they’re doing themselves. But for brands in particular being ready, we always just call it retail readiness. So what is your assortment? Where does it live? How fast? Really, it comes down to where is it, how fast can they get it and how much is it? And so if you can answer those three questions consistently across your different platforms, then you’re in good shape.
Erin Sparks: 29:37 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 29:38 Cause you want to make sure that you’re providing a consistent consumer experience more than anything else. And then you know, when it comes to some of the, the grittier details on that, so delivery, so you know that you’re up against Amazon and that two day expectation and in some cases one day expectation that they’ve set, which is ridiculous. And no one’s going to beat that. It’s insane honestly.
Erin Sparks: 30:01 Same day, same day. Everything’s going to be here the same bloody day.
Elizabeth Marsten: 30:06 Price is a big one. So as long as you’re competitive, you don’t have to be beating anything in particular. You just got to be close enough.
Erin Sparks: 30:13 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 30:13 And then assortment. So that’s been a big one is you don’t want to sell necessarily the exact same assortment through every channel all of the time right? So there’s no real reason to buy one for another. Why are you on the platform? The one thing that I encourage folks to examine is are you simply on four different platforms bcause you’re just trying to be all of the places to where all the people are? Okay.
Erin Sparks: 30:39 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 30:40 But they have to have a reason to buy from you from that platform. Or you have to have a model that says you don’t care which platform it is. In the end, you’re going to have some sort of blend in return that says, “Yeah, this worked, this netted out.”
Erin Sparks: 30:51 Got it.
Elizabeth Marsten: 30:52 Otherwise how will you know what to do? That’s why you’ll see a lot more exclusives with like Target or Walmart even. So sometimes they even put it on the packaging.
Erin Sparks: 31:04 Oh wow.
Elizabeth Marsten: 31:05 And it makes total sense from a branding perspective. Otherwise that brand has to, you know, again, re-examine whether… I actually saw a major brand in the last couple of years fail at selling at marketplaces and there’s no reason they should have, but their distribution network was so screwy and they couldn’t get, they didn’t know where the products were.
Erin Sparks: 31:25 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 31:26 And then they couldn’t connect them fast enough in order to get them to the buyer that D to C just didn’t make sense for them. And that may be it too, is being able to say as a seller, you know what you’re actually capable of both at the C level.
Erin Sparks: 31:41 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 31:42 And in your warehouses.
Erin Sparks: 31:45 Well I guess the question is the consumer forgiving enough in that space because they are getting trained by the big beast to be able to expect something at their door. In fact, I’m expecting it at my door today.
Elizabeth Marsten: 32:00 Right.
Erin Sparks: 32:00 But at the same time, I mean we’re not in the space where we were a decade ago. You know, there’s certain levels of acceptance and don’t we have a little bit of a pass there as these businesses get into the marketplace?
Elizabeth Marsten: 32:16 We do. I mean brand, right?
Erin Sparks: 32:18 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 32:19 Hopefully there’s a reason that your brand exists and hopefully you know, you’re sticking to it or following it and amplifying that.
Erin Sparks: 32:19 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 32:27 One company that I always think of that really sticks out to me is a brand that I love and I’ve seen even beat Amazon and consumer satisfaction surveys is LOB. When you think about them and you think about their brand history and their corporate history, why buy from them? Well first of all, they don’t sell on Amazon, but secondly they give you a reason to buy from them. And they’re history of customer support and service above all else. I mean they just recently had to pull back on their return at any time policy because people were taking things from thrift stores and trying to return them for full credit.
It’s always somebody ruins it for everyone else. But the bean boot, the very first shoe that they ever sold or the very first item, you know, 90 of the 100 pairs came apart. And so L.L. Bean himself took them back and fixed them and made it right. And if you go oddly, this is so weird. Freeport, Main, you have to really want it to go up there. No one just happens to like cross through Maine. There’s intention that goes there, but their stores, this is crazy, their store is open 24/7.
Erin Sparks: 33:37 Huh.
Elizabeth Marsten: 33:38 You can go to an L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine at three in the morning. You just can, and that was just above all else. Customers, they’re there for the customers.
Erin Sparks: 33:48 That is amazing.
Elizabeth Marsten: 33:48 So, that kind of strengthened brand story that is what’s going to make the difference between, you know, again that platform agnosticnes, right?
Erin Sparks: 33:57 Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Jake, have you had something?
Jacob Mann: 34:00 I said “Time for a road trip.”
Erin Sparks: 34:02 A road trip.
Elizabeth Marsten: 34:02 Be careful.
Erin Sparks: 34:03 Well, I mean you mentioned in the retail readiness that it’s not only about the structure of the products and how you actually move that, but also your response. How do you process returns, customer complaints, reviews and how do you get the orders to the door? All that is that additional factor that you can capitalize on the consumer acceptance of a delivery delay as long as you’re investing in that brand point, right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 34:33 Yep. I mean, there’s been a couple of things I bought recently. I think of setting the expectation more than anything else. Right? So if you buy something from Etsy, which is a marketplace.
Erin Sparks: 34:33 Sure.
Elizabeth Marsten: 34:44 You know you’re buying from individual sellers, so is your expectation that they’re going to get at you in one to two days?
Erin Sparks: 34:50 Hell no.
Elizabeth Marsten: 34:51 No, that’s not a reasonable. A lot of folks, some of them, yeah, sure. That’s what they do for a living and a lot of them it’s not. So if you really want the thing, then you have to have a little patience. And so as long as that expectation and that understanding is built within that, whatever your community is there, then it makes a lot of… Folks are more patient I think, than you think.
Erin Sparks: 35:13 Yeah. And that’s also something, to that point is, that each of these platforms have a niche. Right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 35:18 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 35:18 So you know that prime is going to get something to you, but you know you’ll order a box of tide from Amazon just so it’s going to be there that very same day. But if you’re looking for a quilt right, you’re going to go to Etsy and you’re going to wait possibly three weeks and you’ll be willing to do it because of that handmade craftsmanship. So there’s a place for everybody and there’s literally a marketplace for everybody and they all have kind of accepted patterns of transaction. You also mentioned in your article content and creative, taking advantage of the features and functionality that each platform has unique to themselves as well as common. Can you open that up a little bit more?
Elizabeth Marsten: 35:59 Sure. So Amazon has done some cool things recently in terms of adding content capability. So you can add videos, there are additional images you can product details, bullets out like crazy, cultivate reviews, that kind of thing. So using either content that you have or creating content for the platform. I do recommend that in doing multiple marketplaces or multiple platforms that you do create unique content for those platforms. One of the bigger things than anything else. I was actually talking to an ad week reporter a couple of weeks ago, Lisa Lacey about this, which is what Google indexes. So from an SEO perspective, you could Google your brand name and find a product page on Amazon for whatever that is. It could be on Target, it could be your own website, could be Wikipedia. And so the question is at what point are you competing with yourself or which point, where are you harmonizing with yourself?
Erin Sparks: 36:56 Hmm.
Elizabeth Marsten: 36:57 So having that unique content obviously avoids what we all know in the SEO world is duplicate content. Like why would you do that to yourself? It’s not your own .com but when you think about that top level domain authority, of like an Amazon or Target, why wouldn’t you supply them with better information? And, say your brand from a manufacturer’s standpoint, like Google manufacturer center, that exists to help in a sense, I feel like, correct the information that’s on the web. We know that the knowledge panel pulls from what, four to five different sources at least?
Erin Sparks: 37:28 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 37:29 Know Google shopping feeds. We know Google market manufacturer centers in there, so why not give them the right information and have that, you know, live correctly in the universe cause you just don’t know how it’s going to get used or where it’s going to get used next.
Erin Sparks: 37:41 No, and you’re talking about a digital brand, asset management at that point in time.
Elizabeth Marsten: 37:46 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 37:46 It’s not just a transaction, it’s making sure you’ve got continuity across all these platforms that you own that, that, that top 10 with all of these different, these different key points and even, yeah, go ahead.
Elizabeth Marsten: 37:58 Oh, I was going to say, I had the honor of interviewing the senior manager of, or sorry, senior director of content and production of ConAgra foods a couple of weeks ago at Brand Innovators. She has a hundred brands. It’s like how do you keep track of all those? Huge content asset management and it doesn’t come easy. I mean we’re talking a year and a half long project through Salesforce essentially in order to make sure that each piece of content is tagged where it got used for what it was for.
Erin Sparks: 38:27 Wow.
Elizabeth Marsten: 38:27 And then their eventual hope is to close the loop and be able to attach performance across channels to that content.
Erin Sparks: 38:35 And you could go so far as to actually make manipulation of content based on those channels from the key optimization of those as well. So that’s that next level. Once you grab ahold of it, then you have to be consistent and make sure that you’ve got good flow through on the funnels. But then you can actually really move the chess pieces on the board. That’s fun.
Elizabeth Marsten: 38:55 Exactly, and she was doing it scale. I was like, “Do you even name all 100 brands that you’re in charge of?” And she said, “I cannot name all my children, no.” She said, “I don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation of a human.” But she certainly has built the infrastructure to enable it.
Erin Sparks: 39:10 No, that’s earth shattering right there. Now the key point in your article, you’re talking about internal organization. So instead of just focusing on the structure of the platform, making sure that the products there and it can be delivered, you’re pointing inward. Are those companies ready to be able to engage? So, what’s the internal organization focus all about?
Elizabeth Marsten: 39:34 So some companies are more ready than others to be on a marketplace or to be expanding into additional channels. I mean, it could be anything from administrative stuff like Tax Nexus. So being on a marketplace, you do have to remit sales tax depending on, you know, sometimes Amazon does it for you, right? eBay, I believe still does not. I know Google Express, that was a challenge that we came up with originally. So you have to keep track of tax laws, that kind of stuff.
Erin Sparks: 40:01 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 40:03 Who reports to who? How do you reward the individuals that are in charge of these channels? So I was literally talking to a brand about three months ago. That’s not very literal then. We were talking about are the folks that are in charge of the stuff, how are they gold? You know, what’s their goal? What is their bonus based off of? And if it’s only, you know, the box of social media and two to one return, well then that’s all they’re going to focus on.
So how do you get those groups talking to one another to break down the silos in which to even begin to understand the true holistic digital picture. And so that’s kind of in the article when I was alluding to more than anything else was, you know, what gets rewarded is what gets done.
Erin Sparks: 40:51 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Elizabeth Marsten: 40:52 If you want something different, you’ve got to reward them different and potentially even structure them different. You know, does your digital marketing team, where does it sit versus your traditional marketing team? So that’s one thing that we’ve been seeing in the industry a little bit is some of these D to C brands that started as digital only moving into store spaces. So look at purple mattress. They now have stores like a Warby Parker. If you look in the New York subway now, and I actually took a whole bunch of pictures cause I was there about three weeks ago, there is a company called Outfront Media that sells the subway ads and now you’re starting to see D to C brands that originally only been digital.
Erin Sparks: 41:35 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 41:35 Now, advertising in the subway.
Erin Sparks: 41:37 Yeah. They’re finding their way to airports as well. So they got the small footprints of real estate and they’re capitalize on the brand that they’ve created into all these new conventional or traditional display properties.
Elizabeth Marsten: 41:52 And then I ask you, who brokers that buy? The traditional buy, how do they, if they’re truly digital company now and they decided they want to go to traditional, you know, how do they, how do you start that process? Maybe you just say, “Oh we’re just going to do a test.” You know, cause you have a small five person digital marketing team, you’re like, “Oh we’re just going to do a test.” And then you look at the five people and you go, “All right, so who’s most qualified to test?” So I never want to discourage that kind of thing, like the testing. But it is in the article what I was alluding to was, “Is your org set up to execute? On whatever it is, whether or not you need to be super agile and you know, you guys have just one big goal or do you have like a huge legacy company infrastructure that you know, is going to take you five years to get through?
Erin Sparks: 42:41 Nope. And to finalize your story there, you’re absolutely right. And the final points that you were talking about were literally, do you have the agility from the product standpoint as well? So you’re really kind of going through the entire thing. Are you ready for the platform? Do you have the creative? Can you take advantage of the platform? Are you ready internally to incentivize the teams and then ultimately game on and then you’ve got to actually work the game and work the pricing. Work, all the different factors to be competitive. Otherwise you’re out of the race internally because the consumer is in their comfort zone. The competition is one click away and they can do a double click very, very quickly to be able to see up. You’re out of the race, vote you off the Island.
Elizabeth Marsten: 43:27 Exactly. I would say a lot of the legacy retailers took too long probably to get going on that. And there’s some brands I think that wish that they had moved a little faster on adopting digital.
Erin Sparks: 43:40 Right.
Elizabeth Marsten: 43:40 You think of like some of our more struggling retailers, like the Barnes and Noble, Macy’s keeps trying to redo things. But the question is you know like JC Penny. Kohl’s partnered with Amazon to take returns.
Erin Sparks: 43:54 Right, oh yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 43:55 We know that it increased store traffic, like foot traffic, but not necessarily, I don’t remember what it was saying about sales. It wasn’t anything that stuck out in my mind and went, “That was a great decision.” It was more like “That’s interesting.”
Erin Sparks: 44:06 Well you certainly know if you go in there that the sales associates don’t like that whatsoever. .
Elizabeth Marsten: 44:06 I’m sure.
Erin Sparks: 44:10 But they are giving a 20% discount for that next purchase off of that Amazon return. So I mean they’re trying to capitalize the heck out of it, but sometimes things don’t fit together. That may very well be one of those. So if everybody’s ready for the race, right, you’re certainly a proponent for the marketplace’s advertising environment and it’s going to to know nothing but growing. So what you give in that article’s really how to evaluate yourself before jumping in there. But it’s some fine waters isn’t it?
Elizabeth Marsten: 44:52 It is. And what’s nice about the Amazon advertising piece more than anything else is the advancements that have come in the last few years in terms of capabilities, functionalities and volume.
Erin Sparks: 45:03 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 45:03 So one thing I will say for the Amazon advertising is “Boy, Oh boy is the volume there.” So if you’re a seller, you should be doing it.
Erin Sparks: 45:12 Absolutely. Absolutely. So getting back to the digital marketer. What should that marketer be asking for from the sales team, from production? What kind of data can they use now as we are dealing with a holistic environment, from product manipulation all the way through the agile bidding process and in price reductions, you know, what can the ad advertiser actually benefit from?
Elizabeth Marsten: 45:43 So it’s hard because when you think about, it’s one person in a list of 10 or 15 stakeholders when you think about the holistic picture. So really it has to come from the top in terms of organizational structure and or permissions. Because, depending on the company, I have seen, you know, folks, they hesitate because they don’t want to step on toes. And so things that they could do, anything that they can pull around cross attribution. So if they have like say Google Analytics and they’re able to prove, you know, multitouch obviously… you’d think, I wouldn’t have to say that now, And you know, basically 2020 but yeah, Last Click is dead for the 17th you know, this is the year of mobile, Last Click is dead. Like just get a bumper sticker, but like that kind of ability. .
Erin Sparks: 46:36 Like a durge.
Elizabeth Marsten: 46:37 So Amazon has now an attribution tool. It is a beta, but there are brands that can sign up for it so they can understand how much of their sales starts as a search on Google or maybe a Facebook post and then converting on Amazon. So kind of thinking a little bit broader in terms of different tools that might help pull that information together. So we’re talking about with Salesforce and what ConAgra does in terms of asset management, ability to analyze that. You know, it’s funny as one of the things I always recommend that folks laugh but it’s so true. Get an analytics intern. I’m serious. So there are so many kids that are doing data sciences and I hate to say analytics cause it’s like saying cars, but they’re doing all these different degrees in school right now and internships are hard to come by and when you get one though, I mean they really, really need it because they can then go get real jobs and then they may come back and work for you. But for the right now they are dying for that hands on experience and real data management.
Erin Sparks: 47:44 Absolutely.
Elizabeth Marsten: 47:45 And they are priced to move. So if you can handle it, that would be my number one thing. Analytics intern and then give them all your craziest theories that you want them to disprove her or proove. I always just tell my interns “Either make my dreams come true or shatter them so I can make a new dream.”
Erin Sparks: 48:03 Got to be able to attribute everything, you’ve got to be able to tag and be able to mess your campaign data with analytics and yeah, go ahead.
Elizabeth Marsten: 48:11 Well and they have the brain space, right?
Erin Sparks: 48:13 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 48:13 You have your day job also and so if you’re trying to make significant change or significant improvement, you know, for the overall, cause really it’s a holistic thing as a digital marketers, it’s what you’re being asked to do, then either you got to get somebody to do your day job or you got to get somebody to start digging ditches.
Erin Sparks: 48:33 Oh there you go. Well I think that’s the best recommendation I’ve heard all bloody year is get yourself an analytics intern and test your hypothesis. Right?
Elizabeth Marsten: 48:42 Yeah.
Erin Sparks: 48:42 All right, well Elizabeth it’s always a pleasure and the hour roll dye here, I really do appreciate your time. It’s fantastic what you’re doing there. Please be that lightning rod of just information when it comes down to th marketing platforms.I mean, retailers should be frothing at the mouth to be able to get in there on a regular basis. So we want to break that fear down and compartmentalize it and get that education going. Hey, we always round up with a couple of questions real quick. What bugs you about the industry that you’re in right now? Because it sounds really cool.
Elizabeth Marsten: 49:21 You know what bugs me more than anything else is that assumption that everything can be replicated to the other thing and that the results will be the same. It’s the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the same result. Like different results, right? So they’re like, “I’m going to do the same thing on Amazon that I do at Walmart that I did on Google than I did on Facebook and it’s going to work out the same, right?” That’s the thing that bugs me more than anything else when folks think like that.
Erin Sparks: 49:44 All right. Well yeah, exactly. And that just shows a lack of maturity of understanding environment that you’re advertising in.
Elizabeth Marsten: 49:53 I get it. They need it, they want it now. There’s a need. There’s like, “Oh, I got to get the thing. I’m getting pressured for this.” And then you look at it and you go, but that’s not, those aren’t the same things.
Erin Sparks: 50:02 The audience doesn’t mean what you think it means. All right. Conversely, what excites you about your industry right now? I think we already covered it this hour, but go ahead.
Elizabeth Marsten: 50:11 No, I’m super excited about retail. What’s going to happen in retail in terms of advertising options. I think the retailers have a lot to offer in terms of first party data.
Erin Sparks: 50:21 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 50:21 And I want to see them do something with it without giving away or sacrificing what they’ve already built. So in a lot of ways they have, you know, in terms of brand or assortment or stores or whatever, but I feel like there’s something sitting there. It’s not going to be as big as Facebook or Amazon, but it’s going to make a dent still. No one ever says, “No, I don’t want 10% more. That’s cool. You keep it.” Right?
Erin Sparks: 50:46 Yeah.
Elizabeth Marsten: 50:47 This next year, I feel like there’s going to be significant movement there.
Erin Sparks: 50:51 Well, we’re going to keep on growing on the retail side of things and the cyber seasons. I don’t think we’re going to be plateauing anytime soon. I’m sure you’d agree maybe to a particular degree if you made a face, everybody.
Elizabeth Marsten: 51:06 No, it’s less. I see Google starting to slow down just because there’s only a finite amount of searches that people do, so unless a thing happens, which explains what they’re doing now, Amazon, I want to say that eventually they should plateau, but I am, I don’t know. If 50% is still only half, I guess, right?
Erin Sparks: 51:26 No. Eventually they’re just going, exactly. They’re going to conquer it. They’re literally going to pipe vents or tunnels into each and every one of our homes and then just deliver it that way. So they’ve got drones, they’vee got carrier pigeons, everything. All right. Hey.
Jacob Mann: 51:42 Are you talking at the bank like that?
Erin Sparks: 51:43 Yeah, absolutely.
Jacob Mann: 51:45 I mean.
Erin Sparks: 51:48 Can you imagine that? Have it not in the same day, have it in the same hour.
Jacob Mann: 51:52 I’m in.
Elizabeth Marsten: 51:53 Oh man.
Erin Sparks: 51:55 Dude. I can have that in 10 minutes. All right. Well, you know what, you can’t have in 10 minutes is a sixth degree black belt in Kendo, and we certainly want to reference that. You’re awesome in that space. Tell us a little bit about Kendo before we get off here.
Elizabeth Marsten: 52:09 So that’s my random fact. So Kendo is a Japanese martial art. It was built off of an old samurai. So back in the feudal system, after they abolished the need for samurai, they had all these skills that they didn’t want to lose and they weren’t supposed to, you know, kill each other anymore. So it kind of evolved into Kendo, which is Japanese swordsmanship or fencing. So I was on the U.S. team to the world championships in 2000 and 2003. I was the captain for our regional team for a while and now I am the first female head coach for our regional Federation.
Erin Sparks: 52:40 Oh, that’s fantastic. I’ve always wanted to jump into Kendo. I just, I’ll tell you what, the wife was actually scared of me going in there. We did TaeKwonDo for 10 years, the family did. And I’ve always been eyeballing Kendo because it was so damn cool.
Elizabeth Marsten: 52:55 You know what? You hit someone with a stick for like two hours, your stress levels are really low. You’re good, you’re good.
Erin Sparks: 53:05 It’s all good on the mat, right? Oh, okay. Well we certainly appreciate your time today. We certainly want to recommend everybody jump in too. You’ve got a webinar coming up the 12th of December, Walmart advertising and you want to go over to tinuity.com. We’ve got the URL, we’ll throw it in the show notes as well. tinuity.com/content/webinars/growing-Walmart-marketplace. That is a short URL.
Elizabeth Marsten: 53:33 It’s a short URL yeah.
Erin Sparks: 53:35 You’re also going to be at SMX West in February, 2020 in San Jose. You’re going to be leading the Amazon advertising workshop, the first one ever and that’s awesome. We hope to see you out there. We’re talking a little bit and hopefully we can actually get the show out there.
Elizabeth Marsten: 53:51 That would be great.
Erin Sparks: 53:53 I think we’re going to have a good time out there. So if you’re also a regular contributor in search engine journal, so please go over there and check out what Elizabeth writing about on a regular basis. Any final thoughts for that marketplace advertiser that’s right there at the pool side?
Elizabeth Marsten: 54:09 No, just you know there’s going to be some good webinars. Like I said, the one that’s coming up on the 12th there’s some content that gets kind of smashed in at the end of the year for prep for 2020 and I know everybody’s kind of tired, but if you still sign up and get the recording, you can watch it later.
Erin Sparks: 54:23 Well there you go. Absolutely. Jump in there guys, get in and make your plans for 2020s marketing advertising in the marketplace because it’s going to be huge, even bigger than this year. So we wish you best of luck in Cyber Monday and it’s still not over. So I’m sure you have some people to talk to. Thanks for spending your Cyber Monday hour with us. I really appreciate it. Want to make sure that we reference our bonus podcast that we had, went through our news items on with Elizabeth, so you want to check that out if you hadn’t heard it off this podcast. Also, we want to make sure that you track Elizabeth down on her Twitter, Ebkendo, which is pretty cool. And she’s also on LinkedIn and you can just find her Elizabethmarston.com. You should actually register that. You probably registered that name already, haven’t you?
Elizabeth Marsten: 55:14 No, somebody is going to go get it now. Thanks. I keep meaning to and then I just don’t.
Erin Sparks: 55:21 I’ll tell you what I went through and registered all the kids’ names as soon as they were born.
Elizabeth Marsten: 55:25 You know, I’ve heard one other person do that. He said he did it like in the hallway after she, I mean I think the baby was maybe two months, two hours old. Should probably do that. Especially with Magnus, right?
Erin Sparks: 55:37 Yeah, absolutely. I mean
Elizabeth Marsten: 55:38 He’s going to need that someday.
Erin Sparks: 55:40 Yeah, he will willed it like a Kendo blade. All right. Thanks so much for your time today. I really do appreciate it and good luck in your career.
Elizabeth Marsten: 55:48 Thank you so much for having me.
Erin Sparks: 55:49 More than welcome, more than welcome. Well, don’t forget to like and subscribe to Edge of the Web Radio on YouTube so you can be alerted whenever we go live as well. Hey, if you’re feeling like it today, I think we had a really good show with Elizabeth. Drop over and give us a quick review over on iTunes. We’d appreciate it greatly. Check out all the must see videos over at edgeofthewebradio.com as well as the show notes and the news items and transcripts, edgeofthewebradio.com. We’ll talk to you next week. We’re going to be talking to Talia Wolf, so check in. I think we’re actually going a little bit earlier, so watch that. I think we’re going at noon or one? Noon on next Monday the ninth so, all right. Don’t be a piece of cyber driftwood. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye bye.
[...]
December 4, 2019
- Digital Marketing News Roundup with Elizabeth MarstenNewsThe news roundup segment in each episode of the EDGE is how we stay on top of the latest digital marketing news headlines with insightful analysis from experts all over the world. The latest features host Erin Sparks and Creative Studio Producer Jacob Mann along with special guest Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Strategic Marketplace Services at Tinuiti. Here’s the news roundup from episode 335 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast:
00:00:11
Google Lets Businesses Add a Custom List of Services to GMB Listings
From Matt Southern on Search Engine Journal we learn that Google Lets Businesses Add a Custom List of Services to GMB Listings. Google My Business will provide a selection of suggested types of services to choose from, for example, plumbers may see “Install faucet” or “Repair toilet” as services to add.
Erin Sparks: The Google My Business real estate just keeps getting more valuable, and it’s great to get additional control in there to make sure the right services are listed.
Elizabeth Marsten: It’s sad when you see businesses that have been around for a while and their websites are in bad shape. In some cases they can’t get transitioned out because some vendor locked them in for lifetime and kept their content. So this is fantastic that they’re able to go in there and say, “There’s certain things we just don’t do anymore.” Can you imagine if you were a computer repair place and you had, I don’t know, CD-ROM repairs listed and you couldn’t get rid of it? After all, these tend to be small businesses with people who are good at their profession and not web marketing or development.
00:03:02
Millions of SMS messages exposed in database security lapse
According to Zack Whittaker on TechCrunch, Millions of SMS messages exposed in database security lapse. A massive database storing tens of millions of SMS text messages, most of which were sent by businesses to potential customers, has been found online.
Erin Sparks: In today’s privacy challenges, my gosh, how in the world can you let this happen? The database stored years of sent and received text messages from its customers that were processed by TrueDialog, but because the database was left unprotected on the internet without a password, none of the data was encrypted and anyone could look at it.
Elizabeth Marsten: My response is, “Really?!” I mean, you couldn’t even put a password up that’s “password?” I saw this and the number one thing that concerned me more than anything else is the lack of response from the company on what they’re doing about it and how they’re going to fix it, because folks need to know if their stuff was in there. They just need to be advised essentially that it’s out there.
Erin Sparks: Privacy is the essential coin of the realm for your consumers, and if something like that just falls out of the back of the truck and nobody’s even paying attention to it, that’s going to spell doom for the brand there…
00:04:22
15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Online Shopping In 2019
On CMO by Adobe, Giselle Abramovich reports 15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Online Shopping In 2019. More shoppers, more sales, larger orders: The numbers keep growing for online shopping – as does the piece of the pie for retailers that keep customers at the center of their strategies all year long.
Erin Sparks: What did you see in these stats that kind of parallels with some of the strategies that you provide?
Elizabeth Marsten: We’re talking about mobile. We’ve seen in the last few years traffic pick up on Thanksgiving but also Black Friday. But hey, no surprise. No one wants to go stand in line at 6:00 AM in a Wal-Mart with 300 other people when they could just order it online on their phone. And then same with Thanksgiving, we’ve seen traffic start to increase over the years as folks wind down. If you have dinner at 3:00 and it’s 6:00 and you’re kind of done talking to Aunt Martha, then you’re going to start shopping and or declining eye contact with some folks, depending on how things have degraded. It makes total sense. And of course one of the biggest stats is how Amazon has 50% of eCommerce. Why? Because they made it easy. Store traffic is down, and that makes total sense. Personally, I did go to one store. It was nothing like it’s been in previous years. The primary driver for why you would go at 7:00 AM for me was because I have two kids under the age of four. That is the only time I can go! They’re still asleep, and I can get something done. And they’ve extended the sale times. A lot of these stores have stopped saying you have to get there before 10:00 AM or 11:00 AM. It’s all day or until stock runs out. So the only real urgency is because they’re going to run out of whatever thing you want that they only have four of. And now “buy online, pickup in store” is becoming huge. It’s growing really fast.
Erin Sparks: I was surprised to see 63% of consumers say email is the most effective tool to get them to shop at a particular retailer. The more traditional channels are also important: traditional broadcast media at 46%, direct mail at 38%, and print ads at 32%.
Elizabeth Marsten: Email done right is extremely powerful, especially if you curate good lists year over year. For example, I buy a lot of the same things over and over again. There’s a case of dog jerky I buy every year, and every year they email me and remind me and I go, yes, I need that again. And three clicks later I’m done. That personalization piece plus that curation of content like this is new, these are things that you’ve shown interest in before, unsubscribes, how you re-engage those folks…Tinuiti has an entire email division for this and they speak a lot about the quality and reach you can do.
Connect with Elizabeth Marsten and Tinuiti
Twitter: @abkendo (https://twitter.com/ebkendo)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethmarsten
Tinuiti Website: https://tinuiti.com
Tinuiti Twitter: @Tinuiti (https://twitter.com/tinuiti)
Tinuiti Facebook: @tinuiti1 (https://www.facebook.com/tinuiti1/)
Special Delivery: Digital Marketing News in the EDGE Newsletter
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December 4, 2019
- EP 335: Amazon/Walmart eCommerce Tactics – Interview with Elizabeth MarstenpodcastIn honor of Cyber Monday, we wanted to focus on the eCommerce market for this week’s EDGE of the Web show! When you want to sell your products through Amazon and Walmart, you’ve got to get a handle on the right advertising techniques and tactics. In today’s highly competitive eCommerce markets, you can’t ignore Amazon as a channel for selling your products, and who better to talk to about strategies and tactics than someone from a company that knows more about the Amazon Marketplace platform than anyone else? We have Elizabeth Marsten from Tinuiti, which was one of the first digital marketing agencies to roll out strategic and tactical programs to help the seller make the most of participating in the Amazon Marketplace. If you’re involved in selling through Amazon, you’ll love hearing from this week’s featured guest, Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Strategic Marketplace Services at Tinuiti! [...]
December 4, 2019
- EP 281: What You Need To Know About Google Sponsored Units w/Elizabeth MarstenpodcastChances are you’ve seen (or clicked!) a Google Sponsored Unit and you had no idea what it was. Not a lot is known about Google Sponsored Units as they are new to the shopping environment.
Elizabeth Marsten, the e-Commerce Growth Services Senior Director at Commerce Hub, recently wrote an in-depth article on Search Engine Journal about Google Sponsored Units and is on the show this week to talk about its features and how users can use it in their ad campaigns.
Plus we talk about automation in the PPC world – is it a good thing or a bad thing? And, Facebook is seeing a decline in ad spend but what social network has been booming? All this and more, today on the EDGE!
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Download our show today or subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, or Stitcher! And now we’re on Spotify! [...]
August 28, 2018
