Welcome to the Week #18

Welcome to the week!

It’s May and springtime is well and truly here.

May means different things to different people. If you’re in the United States then it’s National Burger Month. If a Big Mac is not your style, it is also National Golf Month, National Bike Month, National Moving Month, and National Water Safety Month. Could you celebrate all of this simultaneously by chowing down on a burger while riding a bike into a golf course water hazard…and then moving on, fast?

Perhaps.

But while you’re planning your burger-fueled escapade, why not catch up with what’s going on in the world of marketing this week. You’ve got a full day of work to get though before your weekend arrives – so let’s get into it, shall we?

Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

Growing up in Australia I ate peanut butter sandwiches and I ate jam (jelly) sandwiches, too. But putting the two together? This was something an Australian child only ever experienced through the magic of the American TV series. Sure, we were aware that people ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but it wasn’t something any self respecting Australian would do. Hashtag TeamVegemite, right? But in the years since I’ve had the odd PB&J and it does have a certain charm. These two things do got together like…well…love and marriage, a horse and carriage. It just works.

According to Extole, something else that goes together like peanut butter and jelly is referral and loyalty. Customer loyalty programs, they explain, “began in the late 1700s, when American retailers started giving repeat customers copper coins they could exchange for a small bonus product at their next purchase.” The logistics are slightly different today and more likely involves a card or a smartphone, but the fundamentals are the same. But while loyalty is great, referrals are the real way to grow the business and Extole explains not only how loyalty programs can lead to referrals but also how to make sure that they do.

Some Good News for Twitter

Last week wasn’t the best for Twitter. Not only did they miss their earnings targets but their user growth – while up slightly – is well behind that of their rivals at Facebook, Instagram, and the rapidly expanding Snapchat. However, late in the week, there was at least one sign that Twitter was bouncing back in at least one area: the Google search engine results pages, or SERPS.

As Bartosz Goralewicz explains in a new post, Google is now featuring Twitter high on its SERPs for brands and celebrities. The end result is that Google is inserting relevant Twitter timeline feeds into Google SERPs above organic links to Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks. This has led to spikes in traffic to the struggling social network from Google search users and subsequent decreases in traffic to relevant Facebook and Instagram pages.

Is this the proof of ever closer collaboration by the two companies in the face of Facebook dominance? Is this just a way for Google to serve more relevant, up to the minute information to information-hungry searchers? Or is it – as your humble blogger believes – another sign that Alphabet has its eye on a Twitter acquisition? Read all of Goralewicz’s article and judge for yourself.

Write. Better. Stuff.

So your content needs to be good to attract readers, great to engage them, and over-the-top to have them begging for more. How do you get there? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. But to make sure that practice is structured you need some good advice, some pointers for keeping you on task and producing content that doesn’t, for want of a better word, suck.

Steve Masters at Vertical Leap explains that there are some specific things that writers can do to improve the findability of their work. In short, by concentrating on SEO as well as quality and producing evergreen content, writers can deliver better work and longer-lasting impact. Masters offers nine specific tips on how to improve writing with regards to SEO and they are all good; indeed, we’ve covered a couple of the blog before. As ever, the more writing advice you read the better your writing is likely to get – though you still do need to practice putting that advice into practical effect, too. Check it out.

This Week on The DOZ Blog 

This week on the blog we’re taking an eclectic look at social media, blogging and more. If you’re getting into Snapchat – and let’s face it: everyone is starting to experiment if they aren’t already committed users – then we’ve got a guide of who to follow and how to find them on Snapchat. We’re also checking in with Facebook and video on that channel, both of the native and Facebook Live variety. We welcome a guest post about business blogging, and we round out the week with a look at Mother’s Day marketing – you didn’t forget that Mother’s Day is this weekend, right? Oh, man, your mom is gonna be so mad…

Want More Marketing Goodness?

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Time to Get to Work

Know a great piece on marketing that we missed? If so, let us know and we’ll share it with the world, crediting your good self, of course, with the tip. Send your sources straight to Content Manager Dylan and you could be featured in next week’s Welcome to the Week post.

Will you be having a burger for lunch, hitting the links, taking a bike ride, or moving house today? No? Good. It’s Monday, and you need to get to work building the business that you deserve and the sorts of marketing you love. It’ll be National Burger Month on the weekend, too, so for now: welcome to the week – and now get to work.