Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest (05-11 October)

rgray weekly marketing insight and news digest 0510-1110

Is this classic marketing principle dead? Instagram updates ‘Threads’ App with messaging integration, 10 graphic design rules to never break, an e-commerce story: from lockdown to $1M in revenue, and much more from the world of digital marketing in our new episode of the RGray Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest.

  • If you have ever thought about what to do on quarantine, read Ash Young’s story in the weekly article, which tells you how he managed to start his own business from scratch during the lockdown to earn $1M.
  • Have you ever doubt the classic marketing principle that a product-market-fit is the basis for developing a company? Today, we will share something that refutes this concept. Check out our digest with an explanation. 
  • Instagram has shared a new update for Threads, that adds full messaging functionality to the app, which makes it like the discontinued ‘Direct’ app on Instagram, but with auto-status updates. See more detailed information in our article below.
  • If you haven’t created graphics for your platform or any social media profiles before, make sure to check the 10 main graphic design rules which will help you to not mess everything up in our weekly digest below. 

1. An e-commerce story: from lockdown to $1M in revenue

An e-commerce story: from lockdown to $1M in revenue

The last quarantine turned out to be a great opportunity for a lot of people to set up their own companies, and one of them who took this chance was Ash Young. For 15 years, he has been running a digital marketing company. But, at once, he decided to establish a store, that sells car mats, carmats.co.uk.

The target was to exceed $1M a year and the store already earned £297k in the first 4 months. Ash would, therefore, likely hit his target.

Let’s take a look at the Ashes story and see how he managed to succeed.

Firstly, why did he go for car mats? New vehicles do not always come with mats as we know, and they are usually sold for £150 by the dealer while Carmats.co.uk offers them for twenty pounds. (Of course, this isn’t the price of every car mat that he sells).

The same issue comes for used vehicles as well. They don’t come with mats. Start with the difficulties individuals may have. It’s not rocket science, but this phase is often ignored.

How do you sell car mats? Ash’s marketing campaign primarily concentrated on Google Advertising, as well as Facebook and Instagram retargeting advertising, essentially the e-commerce playbook.

When you can’t keep items off the shelf, what happens? When the store was just opened, it did not bring a lot of revenue. After, Ash installed Hotjar and released the copy that he’d been a little too cheeky. He understood that people don’t care about fancy copying while purchasing car mats, they just want car mats.

He changed the landing page to the simpler one and the conversion rate increased.

Moving to margins, one-third of the profits are taken up by promotional expenses. Then, after taking out COGS, costs for Shopify, transactions, returns, and other expenses, the store goes with 15% profitability.

They are planning to continue to promote other similar items because now they are aware of what kind of cars their customers own.

2. Is this classic marketing principle dead?

Everyone knows the classic marketing principle, that a product-market-fit is the basis for developing a company. However, today we will share something that refutes this concept.

Is this classic marketing principle dead?

The point this piece is about to make is that there’s no such thing as the product-market fit principle.

The creator of the article is Rand Fishkin. And this is the idea: the term does not have a clear meaning, and there are other ways to evaluate how well your product meets the needs of the potential users.

The matter is not just this (foolish) belief that customers buying behavior and whatever metric or score suits the product market are binary. It is that the very idea of fit vs. non-fit biases individuals to build and market goods to think in ways that damage their potential for success.

A lot of reasons were suggested by Rand Fishkin regarding why the mentioned above principle is broken. Check out his articles if you are curious about them and we will dive in the solutions.

The possible ways of fixing the flaws are:

  • Eliminate the idea of a binary yes or no.
  • Implement a range (since a spectrum falls along with every beneficial metric).
  • Apply segmentation.

Define for each type of consumer that your product serves:

  • How many of them can be achieved with an established solution. (Audience size)
  • How many of them know about your product. (Awareness)
  • What percentage purchase your product? (Conversion rate)

Now, instead of having only a concept, you have concrete numbers to deal with. And, you know what changes you have to make.

Should you alter the features of your products to reach a larger audience? Or should you concentrate on attracting more customers from the audience that is already informed about your brand?

3. Instagram Updates ‘Threads’ App with Messaging Integration

So this may be interesting to the individuals who are using the ‘Threads’ app on Instagram.

Instagram has shared a new update for Threads, that adds full messaging functionality to the app, which makes it like the discontinued ‘Direct’ app on Instagram, but with auto-status updates.

 Instagram Updates 'Threads' App with Messaging Integration

Threads only integrated messages from those you’d identified as ‘close friends’ in the main Instagram app at launch, but now, as you can see here, all your Instagram messages will be seen inside Threads, giving you a possibility to keep in touch with all your contacts across both platforms.

So, cool, huh? People who use threads can now keep in touch with more of their messaging interactions, though only their Instagram ones, not their Messenger interactions. On Instagram, they’ll be able to see them, but not threads.

In its first week of availability, Threads was downloaded 222k times in October last year. In contrast, in its first seven days, the standalone IGTV app from Instagram got 1.5 million downloads, while its Boomerang app hit 2.8 million downloads.

According to news, Threads hit around 374k downloads in its first month, and a look at the success of the app on the App Annie charts shows that it has failed since to gain any major traction. Download numbers still do not indicate active usage, which wouldn’t be a big surprise if Threads had an average of 200k active users.

It seems odd, in some respects, that Instagram is even bothering to roll out an app update since it doesn’t seem like it was a major success. ‘Auto status’ is the main, distinctive function of Threads, which assigns an emoji representation of what you are up to at any given time, without your input, based on your position, your activity, the battery level of your phone, etc.

Auto status' is the main, distinctive function of Threads, which assigns an emoji representation of what you are up to at any given time, without your input, based on your position, your activity, the battery level of your phone, etc.

Which is kind of fun, and may be useful for your close friends.

4. 10 Graphic Design Rules to Never Break [Infographic]

Have you ever created graphics for your platform or any social media profiles? Even if your answer is ‘’Yes!”, you should stick to the 10 main graphic design rules to not mess everything up.

Take a look at them quickly:

  • Design with consistency
  • Avoid poor legibility
  • Avoid color discord
  • Prevent non-proportional scaling of graphics and text
  • Stay away from raster-based images
  • Maintain alignment
  • Seriously, only choose 3 fonts
  • Establish a visual hierarchy
  • Watch your grammar, spelling, and punctuation
  • Embrace whitespace

Make sure to see the infographic for more detailed information.

10 Graphic Design Rules to Never Break