Welcome to the second half of episode 8 of the Digital Breakthroughs podcast—dedicated to the 2020 holiday shopping (and marketing) season! If you missed the first half of the episode, you can click here to start from the beginning. But, if you are back for round two, we hope you are ready because we are about to turn things up to 11 (this one goes up to 11).
Let’s dive in beginning with what is going to happen (or is happening) when it comes to the retail world for the 2020 holiday season!
Trends in Physical Retail Holiday Shopping
Bernard May: With that, and talking about trends like that, what are the other things that we’re seeing with physical stores? I mean there are a lot of listeners out there, they’ve got their physical stores, and I mean are they in trouble, is it going to be, do they have to pivot? What are your thoughts, I don’t know who wants to take that one. Maybe hand that back to Matt.
Matt Erickson: Yeah, I’ll go into that, but then I’ll open it up, because I think Scott has some things to say, and I keep cutting him off. I think on high level, this kind of goes back to your, you mentioned FOGO earlier, fear of going out. But that could also be just fear of … I don’t know what the, fear of being touched, what that acronym is.
But if anyone, I have a Target several blocks from my house and in the last, I walk around and I … For the first few months I was hearing horns honking, and I didn’t know what the heck, what is that noise I keep hearing? And now that’s their new alert for oh, someone’s outside to pick up. So it’s a car driving up and it’s a horn sound. It’s like oh, okay.
Matt Erickson: That’s one part of e-commerce where it’s not just buying and then having it delivered, but it’s like yeah, they’re doing their purchasing, but they are also … I can’t remember what the stat was, I really wish I could, but there’s also been a big increase in people looking for part of the availability part, the local businesses.
Even if they want to buy it online then pick up in store, you see physical, like Best Buy, they had a line out for pickup outside, and waiting to go in the store.
Matt Erickson: And this isn’t just big brands. I mean, every restaurant in Los Angeles has … You buy it, and then you have to either GrubHub it, you have to have it Postmated, or you wait outside and you pick it up there.
So I think there’s a lot of small companies that have been able to stay open and mid-sized companies that, if the ones that figured out early on, like okay, I need to have something on my Google, my business, saying that you can pick up in store, you can order through this app, or you can have it delivered easily this way.
They’re going to reap the benefits, especially during the holiday season, because they’re prepared. If people haven’t, then that is a little more of an issue.
Matt Erickson : But I think what you said with, I think the stat was, I think it was in Q2, e-commerce purchasing had gone up like 44 percent. So that does go … People don’t have, they’re not spending. Well, they are spending, they’re just not spending the way they used to.
And I have done whole pieces of research on creating habits, we’ll go into that later, but I think when it comes to the retail versus the online, it’s more of a shift than just a shutdown. This kind of comes back again to where, if there’s local businesses that have closed, well people have to search other places to find whatever those products were.
Matt Erickson: The little touch on the pricing part you were talking about earlier. I think part of that’s also going to come into availability and products that are become far more available than they used to be in more places than they used to be and then other ones, or if the supply lines are squeezed, maybe the pricing volatility is not as big of an issue just because it’s not as widely available. Like Peloton bikes or something like that.
The Retail Experience Shifting in 2020
Scott McCutchan: Yeah, sure. I mean, I remember those first weeks of the shutdown. My first trip to Costco, I was fueled with anxiety. It was like every little thing, I was high alert. And over time, we’ve all adjusted. We all know the best practices now, we all have the social understanding of what to do and what not to do. And with the holiday season, I think it’s going to be a big opportunity for people to seek the things that are normal to them, that provide that sense of normalcy and comfort.
And part of that is the holiday shopping experience. Is it going to be different? Yes. But there’s also that feel good feeling when you’re going out and you’re shopping at your favorite places, or you’re doing your yearly ritual of going to your favorite stores and buying all the little things that your family members love and they’ve appreciated year after year.
Scott McCutchan: With that being said, I think there is a huge opportunity for brick and mortar locations. It’s going to vary significantly based off of your location. I know me being in Camarillo in Ventura County, it’s a little bit less population dense than something like LA. So I really don’t have those first hand experiences of what that’s been like. But I definitely have seen almost like an enhanced need to get out and visit your favorite stores.
Scott McCutchan: We’ve seen that a lot locally just in the past month or so. Small examples of this, or even like the farmer’s market. It was completely shut down and every single week, as I’m running around doing my errands, you’re seeing it get back to normal, and you’re still seeing people practice all of those COVID social distancing measures and what have you.
Scott McCutchan: But I think the fact that we were kind of trained into what we should be doing when we’re out and about, it’s going to provide a big opportunity for those physical retail locations to offer their own discounts or specials, or something enticing to get people back in the door, and it’ll be really interesting to watch.
Shopping Online First and Retail Second
Bernard May: That is really interesting. Just to add to this, I heard from Google saying that there’s going to be more research online, and then people are going to spend less time in the stores because they’re worried about the time in the store. So they’ve made all their decisions, they’ve found out for instance Target or Best Buy or whatever has this product in stock, and they’re just going to go in, pick it up, and leave. What do you think about that, Courtney? Does that ring true to you?
Courtney Pierce: Yeah, most definitely. That’s what I was going to say. Stores have basically been reduced to a transaction point. Everyone’s making their discovery and their decisions online and then going to the store for curbside pickup perhaps. It says that curbside pickup actually grew 3,000 percent globally year over year.
Bernard May: Wow. That’s a huge, massive, massive number. Do you think that it’s going to be something we’ll see for years to come or it’s only a COVID-
Courtney Pierce: Oh yeah. I think it’s going to change how everyone does shopping in the future.
Matt Erickson: I want to jump in on that real quick, I want to jump in on it real quick. Because I was going to throw this in later, but is something, because I think Courtney and I, we both, and I’m sure a lot of us if we’re in marketing, we’re interested in psychology and human behavior.
So I was doing some research for another article, because I was thinking at this point, I think right now, I think in California, the stay at home order that you went from that was I think it was in mid-March, like 15, 16, 17. March 19th, yeah.
Matt Erickson: So tallying up the days of this, any kind of restriction, we’re at 180, 190 days, somewhere in there right now, maybe a little bit more. Well, to develop a habit, if you’re trying to consciously develop a new habit, it ranges from around 20 to 254 days. With the average being for an automatic habit for the average person being around 66 days.
So even if it’s unconscious, and even if everything opened up full tomorrow, I think enough time has gone by to go with what Courtney was saying, that even if it’s not conscious, a lot of these habits are going to stick in some way, shape or form for a long time.
Focusing on Lifetime Value – Google and Amazon
Bernard May: That is so interesting. I want to jump into now a lot of the marketing, going to go maybe geek out on a couple marketing things. Scott touched on a point about lifetime value, so I’m going to say this in a slightly different way.
What Scott’s saying is even if you discount your product in the beginning, you get a new client and you can remarket to them via email, you can remarket to them via remarketing ads. And it’s all about the lifetime value of that client.
So maybe you lose up front, but over time you’ve got a client in hand. And maybe that goes with the bargains that people are looking for and the discounted pricing. That’s one strategy.
Bernard May: Yeah. So Courtney, I understand that Amazon is, been so successful. I think a lot of people think about going shopping and they go straight to Amazon. But both Facebook and Google are providing mechanisms to really compete in this e-commerce side.
I’d like to start with you, just talking about some of the areas that Google is trying to really capture more market share when it comes to e-commerce this holiday season. Are there any areas or any new features that you’ve seen that Google’s doing that our listeners should be aware of?
Courtney Pierce: Most definitely. We’ve experienced this with a number of our clients already that are set up in the merchant center.
It’s just a simple setting in the merchant center to say that you want to show on all Google surfaces, so make surfaces, so make sure you have that enabled in the merchant center, and it allows your product feed then show in Google organically below the paid listings. Or I’ve even seen it up on the right-hand side of Google. It’s very interesting.
Lifetime Value on Social Media
Bernard May: Great. Well, I’m going to move over to Scott. Scott’s our expert on social media. What is happening on social media, what trends, what’s new? I know last year the big thing was you could start buying products on Facebook. Is Facebook, Instagram, are they doing anything special for the holidays?
Scott McCutchan: Facebook and Instagram themselves, it’s nothing incredibly newsworthy that I’ve seen. One of the biggest things talked around the paid social community and a lot of the forums that I follow and groups on Facebook is a big change to ad creatives.
Facebook is removing the 20 percent text limit on ad images, which historically has been a big head scratcher. Because we want to utilize that space and the creative to advertise specific discounts or promotions. So that’s going to be something really exciting to play around with, because before if you did have over that 20 your reach would be severely limited.
Scott McCutchan: So now you can have more standard ads that are static, and they just are in your face about what it is they’re offering, and you’re not confined to just putting it into about this much space of the actual creative. That’s something I’m excited about, it’s something I’ve always wanted to take advantage of. Usually we have to go into taking those static images and turning them into some type of video creative slideshow type thing. So that’s one.
Even More Opportunity on Facebook
Scott McCutchan: But a couple other things happening outside of Facebook that are providing a lot more opportunities I would say are developers creating new plugins for different web platforms that make feed management and integration a lot easier, or pixel installation a breeze. Some of the things that have seemed maybe too technical for some business owners, there’s a lot of emerging players, independent developers who are providing these new resources that it’s making their lives a lot easier. And we’ve been actually able to take advantage of a few of these for some of our clients.
Scott McCutchan: Now one other thing that is going to be interesting on Facebook, and this goes back to one of the questions discussed earlier with what businesses are doing with the holiday shopping season starting early.
This is a conversation that we’re having with a lot of our e-commerce clients as well, because there’s going to be an extended holiday buying season. So, what we’ve seen is some of our clients come to us as well as us reaching out to them and saying, “You need to have your own version of Black Friday, and you need to figure out when it makes sense for you.”
We have seen some people wanting to do this the first week of November taking into consideration that Amazon’s looking to do something in October. But coming up with their own branded Black Friday type promotion where they’re fitting in between everything else and really digging deep into those remarketing audiences to get in front of them again and say, “Hey, you haven’t bought yet, this is your chance.”
Scott McCutchan: Those are a few things going on in the background that we’ve been watching and seeing with our clients, and strategizing with them. So it’s going to be really, really exciting and interesting to see how this all pans out.
Industries to Watch During the 2020 Holiday Season
Bernard May: That’s great. Very interesting. So now, I know everybody’s thinking I’m going into the holiday season, which are the hot products? Which are the ones that we really should look out for, who’s going to do really well? Are there ways for us to look for trends? I know Google has a Trends, trends.google.com for those of you who haven’t looked at that. But we’re seeing a lot of that on social media as well. Scott, I know I’d like to go back to you and maybe ask that question.
Scott McCutchan : Oh yeah.
Bernard May : Who should be cheering, like they’re going to do really, really well? Like during the lockdown we saw anything to do with the home, of course, people were just buying stuff like crazy for their homes because all of a sudden it was like wow, we’re stuck at home, let’s … They’re getting upset about the backyard, they’re getting upset about what’s … Their monitor that they have to work at home. What’s the holiday season going to look like for products?
Home Goods and Home Office Products
Scott McCutchan: Well, to that point you just mentioned, there were a lot of early adopters who were like, “Hey, I’m working from home, I’m going all out, I’m getting my home office set up, and all the bells and whistles.” There’s going to be a lot of people who were maybe adjusting in a similar sense but to meet other needs.
So, they weren’t necessarily investing in themselves or their own home office, but now it’s that opportunity for the wife or significant other to get them that new keyboard that they’ve been talking about and wanting, or that new monitor set.
Scott McCutchan: Anything home office related, we are still expecting to see really strong sales, as well for more personalized items or things to make it a little bit more fun to work from home, I guess you can say. So new audio speakers, new LED backed keyboards and extended monitors, things of that nature. We’re excited to see what the opportunities are there.
Kitchen, Cooking, and Meal Prep at Home
Scott McCutchan: But outside of that as well, COVID has served as a great opportunity for people to explore maybe past hobbies that they grew distant from or picking up new hobbies. Baking is something that I’m still doing since COVID started.
Started with the bread making like everyone else, and now we’re doing lots of homemade sweets and other things that we need where historically we’d just go out and buy it. Why not make it from home? Now we know how.
Scott McCutchan: But now I have the need for, I want my new Kitchen Aid mixer, I want my new baking pans, because the ones that I’ve been using and throwing in the oven over and over again aren’t doing the same good things that they were previously.
So anything with home office, anything with those at home hobbies whether it’s gardening, baking, home exercise as well, to Matt’s point earlier with Peloton. They’re doing great still. And once again, it serves as an opportunity for smaller players to enter the space and fill those gaps as well.
Fashion, Clothing, and Apparel
Scott McCutchan: In terms of apparel, we’re seeing a lot of search trends increasing around the at-home lounge wear. These are like your joggers, your sweats, your hoodies, things that make it comfortable to work from home. And this is really exciting as well.
I saw an article, I wish I had it in front of me, but Champion, the clothing brand, they offer products wholesale to independent businesses and you can put your logo on it, you can do whatever you really want with it, and it’s a high quality piece of apparel that you can put your name on and market for yourself.
Scott McCutchan: This is a huge opportunity for more, whether it’s drop shippers or people who are looking to come up with their own clothing brand, really affordable, and you can have a lot of fun with it too because you can make these almost like meme-able pieces of clothing that make it fun to their interests. I know I get advertised constantly like PPC, like paper click and paid social related swag. And I think that’s really cool.
Scott McCutchan: There are opportunities in every interest segment for new players to enter that space and take advantage of people’s needs.
Self-Care and Fitness
Bernard May: Fantastic. Maybe go around a little bit and talk about what best practices out there. Matt, or did you want to weigh in on what Scott was talking about? Are there any other products or best practices, who’s going to do well, who’s got a great opportunity out there?
Matt Erickson: I mean I think, and this may go into an area where we haven’t really touched on, but Scott briefly touched on it, but basically it’s that whole self care industry. I think at this point a lot of things like I know Bernard and I, we would go to the same gym chain, and those have been closed down for a long time.
Matt Erickson: I have a good friend in Orange County who she works at a gym, a small, independent gym, and they were very early on this. This comes back to the point of the trend. And they early on started installing cameras in their gym so they could do virtual training sessions. And now they’ve already been getting requests for can I give like a three-month training session as a gift that you can do on Zoom? And they’re like, “Yeah, absolutely.”
So I think, I know that I’ve already been looking for, and I have other people that have been asking about giving away subscriptions to home delivery things, or can I give away a year of Netflix, can I give away … Those kinds of things where, since a lot of I’ll just say the extraneous things we may have done that a lot of us maybe aren’t doing anymore, we know pretty much what our friends and family, what they need and what they’ve been doing, so if we can proactively give that for six months, I think that’s going to be an interesting trend to see what happens there.
Matt Erickson: But as far as, I think Scott nailed it as far as best practices go. I don’t really have a whole lot to add on that.
Outdoor Activities, Hiking, and Beyond
Courtney Pierce: Sure. I mean yeah, you guys both nailed what you’re seeing there and what you expect to see. I think the only thing that I would add in is headwear. I’m continuing to see a huge spike in headwear as people are doing outdoor activities, as that’s the safest option. Hiking, walking, that sort of thing. And then just as far as best practices, I’m telling my clients that we need to start implementing certain things now so we’re prepared for that spike that could start happening mid-October.
Little things that we’re working together on is making sure there’s a customer match list uploaded, the accounts we can utilize, that feature and look alike audiences. Responsive search ads and responsive display ads need to be implemented now if they aren’t implemented yet. We don’t want to lose out on auction opportunity, because we only have expanded text ads implemented.
Being Ecommerce Ready for the 2020 Holiday Season
Courtney Pierce: Let’s see. Merchant center health, huge. Make sure that sticks now before the holiday season. Site speed is an easy one to tackle before then as well. Outbound ads are a great idea for promotions leading into the holiday season. “You only have three more days to take advantage of this offer.” I think those are my biggest items I’m focusing on.
Scott McCutchan: Yeah, just to expand on one of Courtney’s items as well with the merchant center health. It’s not uncommon for some advertisers to have maybe a chunk of products that are quote-unquote “disapproved” because they’re out of stock, but they say, “Oh, leave it in there because we’re going to restock that later.”
You do not want to have any disapproved items in your feed going into the holidays because, god forbid, something happens where now one of your products got disapproved that’s maybe your bestseller, and if you typically have maybe a patch of red in there where your clients saying, “Oh no no, leave it, because we’ll restock it soon,” you want to make sure that whatever’s in that feed is live.
That way if you do see that first line of red for a disapproved item, you’re investigating that and getting it back online.
Staying Creative with Social Campaigns
Scott McCutchan: A few other things. When it comes to paid social, invest time and thought into your creative. It’s going to be competitive this season. Everyone’s going to be vying for those consumer dollars. And this doesn’t mean that your video has to be costly. It can be recorded directly on your phone and edited on your phone or using a simple editing platform like Animoto or something like that.
But putting thought into your creative to make it fun. And it depends on your brand image, right? You’re not always going to get to be fun and silly, but we’ve seen tons of success where people are able to get a little bit tongue in cheek with it.
And it doesn’t cost anything more than that. But what it does require is coming up with maybe just brainstorming internally, and just to figure out what’s going to help you really have that thumb stopping effect as people are scrolling.
Engaging with Social Comments
Scott McCutchan: Another thing that we are really encouraging is monitor your comments. Monitor the activity for your paid ads, especially during the holiday season, because that’s when you’re likely to be spending a significant amount more than you typically would month over month. And we have seen single comments completely slow down the performance or kill the performance of certain campaigns because somebody had a bad experience and they’re airing it out.
Scott McCutchan: On the other side of that coin, monitoring your comments serves as an awesome opportunity for you to provide that little nudge or that feedback that is going to result in that person making a transaction where maybe they’re just sitting on the fence, and maybe they were just dropping a comment to maybe voice a concern or ask a question.
And people love it when the brand reaches out directly to them in that same comment thread, and just saying, “Hey Megan, we have new colors and styles for our headwear. Check it out at the link below.” And it’s really fun as an advertiser and a social media user, I’m the weird one who’s always clicking on the ads and reading all the engagements. I love to see how brands are responding to that, that social feedback. Some of them do great. Other times, users hijack those ads and they just run with them, and it doesn’t look good.
Don’t Neglect Your Ecommerce Site Experience
Matt Erickson: So this is, because … And this is just something that it’s one of those things I think we all think about, and it’s easy to go under the radar. Don’t neglect your own e-commerce site and the experience you’re giving people on those sites.
A couple things that I’m finally seeing more of from some brands that I shop from, one is consolidate your product line. If you have … What I mean by that is if someone hits a page that has a product, that has a shirt, something crazy like this, well if you have six different color schemes for that shirt, don’t cause friction by them having to go back to the search results and then “go back” … Put all those options in there, that they can click through and see what those are. That’s 600 percent more of an opportunity to convert somebody.
Reducing Ecommerce Shopping Friction
Matt Erickson: I mean, make sure that everything is giving a fantastic user experience on desktop and on one of these guys. And anywhere that you can, reduce fire, friction in your checkout. So, don’t hide your costs. If there’s going to be a shipping cost, point that out up front. Don’t surprise them with an extra $10 shipping charge when they go to check out, because that’s why you have abandoned shopping carts.
Matt Erickson: One other thing that … Because Bernard, and I think a lot of people, I’m the only odd person out, I’m not an Apple user. I’m not an iPhone user. So sometimes I don’t think about how important Apple Pay may be as a digital wallet on your checkout. So if you just offer, like I have a Visa and MasterCard option. Well what about Google Pay? What about Android Pay? What about Apple Pay?
Make sure that you have obviously safe and secure checkout and more than two options for people to use, because you don’t want to miss out on someone who’s ready to purchase, but you can’t purchase with what they’re used to purchase with, and you’re just kind of out of luck. So make sure you reduce friction, you clearly consolidate your best products, and you have safe and secure checkout options.
SEO and Google My Business
Bernard May: All of these are such great tips. I want to just add a couple of SEO suggestions in there as well. Google has brought out a lot of Google My Business enhancements. You can, and please, just go in there and there are so many different questions that they have in Google My Business right now. Fill them all out. Whatever’s appropriate to you.
For instance, do you provide curbside pickup. Even feeding inventory into each of the locations for companies that have multiple locations, so for instance is that product in stock or not in stock? That’s a brand-new feature that just came out today actually.
And they’re obviously having your hours of operation, and all the, your images and videos updated, any Q&As answered, those all super, super important.
Making the 2020 Holiday Season Your Best Ever
Bernard May: Just to round up, I know National Positions is offering some help during this holiday season, Matt. What can our clients expect or what can people expect out there that are listening to this podcast that just want a little bit of help from someone like National Positions?
Matt Erickson: Yeah. For sure. Well for one, I mean, this is high level, this is something for encouraging everyone, especially on the e-commerce side, because that’s obviously where the opportunity is going to be. A couple things. One, of course we have our complimentary consultations, so if you want us to take a look at your e-commerce site, you want Courtney to check out how your Google ads are structured and where you may be missing out an opportunity, or maybe how you can test better Facebook advertising with Scott. We always have that available to you.
But something else we’re doing, we just recently started including shopping feeds, shopping and product feeds for places like Google Shopping and Amazon, and these places where anyone, quite honestly, anyone has access if they want to go and do this themselves, but it can be a time consuming thing to take on.
Matt Erickson: Just like Scott said, if you have, maybe you have 20 products on Amazon, but you haven’t structured them correctly, they could be rejected and all of a sudden you’re not showing on Amazon. So, anyone who’s running an e-commerce campaign, especially for the holidays, we’re including those feeds in those campaigns, so we will optimize that, we’ll do all of that for you, and have full transparent reporting for everybody so you can see what’s happening.
That’s probably the biggest opportunity and need. So that’s something that’s available right now.
Wrapping Up Episode #8
Bernard May: We’re in for a very exciting holiday season, expected to be bigger than ever before, 30, 40 percent. Expect that more shopping is happening because people are scared of going out. For those retail stores, make sure that you have all your inventory online.
People can do that shopping and investigation up front so that they can pick up via curbside or they spend less time in the stores. Everything is coming earlier this year, so make sure to, at least that’s what I’m hearing, so make sure that you are prepared as soon as possible for this holiday season. You are going to be in for a very competitive market.
There’s going to be a lot of sales, it’s going to be a lot of comparative shopping going on, there’s not a lot of loyalty, so that’s good for brands that are just breaking in.
Bernard May: I think this is going to be a super exciting time. Thank you so much to Matt, Scott, Courtney, you guys are awesome, and thank you everyone for tuning in to this Digital Breakthrough Podcast. We really appreciate all your time, and please reach out to us at National Positions if you need any help to be successful this holiday season.
Preparing for the Best Year Yet!
Well, another episode of Digital Breakthroughs is complete and just in time for the 2020 holiday shopping season. If you want to connect with any of the experts from our panel you can send an email to Marketing@NationalPositions.com today.
Remember, there is plenty of opportunity to be had this holiday season so if you want the National Positions team to check out your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Shopping feeds, SEO, or Google My Business setups, contact our team ASAP so you are set up for success this holiday season.
You can also check out previous episodes of the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, anytime! Until next time, stay healthy, happy, and productive!