Created by Direct Agents EVP Megan Conahan, the Monthly Marketing Memo is a monthly newsletter that breaks down the latest trends and news across the marketing landscape. As a 17-year veteran in the marketing industry, Megan has successfully consulted with fortune 1000 brands on evolving marketplace demands and how to navigate them.
In case you missed it this month, we highlighted a few key points taken directly from the October newsletter, “Black Friday Is Dead, Consumers Cautious Optimism, and TikTok the Search Engine.”
Current Marketing Landscape
- While recession remains a risk, many recent forecasts suggest a period of flat growth vs. a full-out recession is more likely.
- Savings are down YoY; the personal savings rate was just 3.5% in August, down from 9.5% last year. Some of these YoY trends are affecting shopping behavior, with consumers saying they are cutting back on luxury goods, toys and games, apparel, and dining out.
- The other fun thing marketers are dealing with this Q4 is the intersection of political and holiday seasons, making media planning challenging.
Major Company Moves
- Sam’s Club partnered with Pacvue to provide brands access to its search ads.
- Walmart’s retail media business announced it would partner with Snap and TikTok (among others), enabling advertisers to buy ads on those social platforms through Walmart.
- It’s become increasingly clear that TikTok will become a search engine. TikTok just increased the character limit in posts to 2,200, up from 300.
- One of the keys to TikTok’s success is its creator base. This is why YouTube has been spending a lot of time building out its creator platform and now will give creators an option to monetize their content even earlier. YouTube creators can now become part of the rev share program with just 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views in 90 days.
- Outside of trying to woo creators, Google is also launching several new features that will make search a more visual experience.
- Meta is making a slew of new spaces available for advertisers.
- LinkedIn is also introducing several upgrades for advertisers, including Document Ads and offline conversion data integration.
Key Takeaways
- For marketers, you need to give the consumers a reason to buy this holiday season, which means offering value with consumers waiting for sales and discounts before even considering a purchase.
- In the past, Black Friday was the big shopping day, but that is no longer the case, with only 20% of consumers saying they will shop on Black Friday compared to 60% in 2015.
- If your holiday budget won’t stretch that far, look at efficient and less expensive channels for growth now (TikTok?) and double down on organic growth tactics and owned media.
To learn more, please reach out to [email protected] and be sure to subscribe to Megan’s Monthly Marketing Memo to get the full story!