Beware of fake Job Listings originating from “AbacusAgencies.com”

Recently we’ve been made aware of an ongoing scam impersonating our employees and using Abacus’ name, logo and imagery to entice prospective job seekers into providing personally identifiable information.

These listings are posted using the real names and photos of our employees, pulled from public information, but originate from AbacusAgencies.com emails, or via LinkedIn and Telegram messages.

Abacus Agency currently does not have any openings at this time, and we urge any prospective job seekers to alert us immediately if you are contacted via Direct Message or Email about a potential job opportunity. 

Abacus never conducts any interviews via text message, direct message or email, and we urge you to contact us if you see these listings online. 

Most importantly, at no time will Abacus ask you to deposit a cheque or transfer money as part of any new job hiring process.

How does it work?

The FBI released a statement in April 2021, warning of cybercriminals using fake job listings to target applicants’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In the COVID-19 era, over 16,000 people were reported to the FBI as scammed through fake job listings with losses totaling more than $59 million. 

Technology makes these scams easier and more lucrative than ever for fraudsters, often operating outside North America or Europe. They promise you a job, but what they really want is your money and personal information. 

Criminals first spoof a legitimate company’s website by creating a domain name similar in appearance to a legitimate company. 

Then they post fake job openings on popular job boards that direct applicants to the spoofed sites. Applicants then apply on the spoofed company websites or directly on the job boards. Applicants are contacted by email to conduct an interview using a teleconference application. According to victims, cyber criminals impersonated personnel from different departments, including recruiters, talent acquisition, human resources, and department managers.

The actual employees at these companies have no idea that their name and image are being used to defraud potential job seekers. 

Telegram or Zoom is then used to set up fake interviews to entrap potential victims.

How to Protect Yourself

• Conduct a web search of the hiring company using the company name only. Results that return multiple websites for the same company (abccompany.com and abccompanyllc.com) may indicate fraudulent job listings.
• Legitimate companies will ask for PII and bank account information for payroll purposes AFTER hiring employees. This information is safer to give in-person. If in-person contact is not possible, a video call with the potential employer can confirm identity, especially if the company has a directory against which to compare employee photos.
• Never send money to someone you meet online, especially by wire transfer.
• Never provide credit card information to an employer.
• Never provide bank account information to employers without verifying their identity.
• Do not accept any job offers that ask you to use your own bank account to transfer their money. A legitimate company will not ask you to do this.
• Never share your Social Security number or other PII that can be used to access your accounts with someone who does not need to know this information.
• Before entering PII online, make sure the website is secure by looking at the address bar. The address should begin with “https://”, not “http://”.
  • However: criminals can also use “https://” to give victims a false sense of security. A decision to proceed should not be based solely upon the use of “https://”.

If you are a victim of an employment scam, we recommend taking the following actions:

• Report the activity to the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov (USA) or the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre / CAFC (Canada)
• Report the activity to the website in which the job posting was listed.
• Report the activity to the company the cyber criminals impersonated.
• Contact your financial institution immediately upon discovering any fraudulent or suspicious activity and direct them to stop or reverse the transactions.
• Ask your financial institution to contact the corresponding financial institution where the fraudulent or suspicious transfer was sent.

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#Advertising #Branding #Marketing

Listen to The Recipe – A Podcast About Marketing

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We talk to ‘Renegade’ marketer and author Drew Neisser about building better B2B brands through design, authenticity and refusing to play it safe. Drew is a B2B expert and author; his new book “Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands” is out now.

Considered among the top B2B influencers by Adobe/Marketo, Gartner, IBM and Pega Systems, Drew has been a featured marketing expert on ABC News, CNBC, CBS Radio and Tony Robbins’ podcast among many others.

A frequent keynote speaker and moderator at industry conferences, Drew is deeply passionate about the role marketing can play to make our lives a bit better if not save the planet.

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Building Better B2B Brands with Expert Drew Neisser

#Advertising #Branding #Marketing

Listen to The Recipe – A Podcast About Marketing

Spotify: https://abacus.agency/listen-on-spotify
Apple: https://abacus.agency/listen-on-apple
Transistor.fm: https://therecipe.transistor.fm/

Sign up for weekly updates and exclusive #Webinar access
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With Facebook going all-in and changing their name to META, We talked to our co-founder and CSO Jeff Goldenberg about what this means for the future of ‘Metaversal’ media, marketers and society as a whole. From NFTs to Peleton and everything in-between, we’re talking all things Metaverse… tune in!

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Metaversal Marketing with Jeff Goldenberg

#Advertising #Branding #Marketing

Listen to The Recipe – A Podcast About Marketing

Spotify: https://abacus.agency/listen-on-spotify
Apple: https://abacus.agency/listen-on-apple
Transistor.fm: https://therecipe.transistor.fm/

Sign up for weekly updates and exclusive #Webinar access
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“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

⁃            Matthew Ball

 

The Metaverse is here.

That may sound unlikely to you, since most people’s idea of the metaverse looks like Ready Player One and is delivered via VR headset.

But if you step back, and then step back even further, you’ll notice that our physical lives and digital lives are completely entwined and it’s hard to know where one stops and the other stops.

We’re on our phones from the second we get up to the second we go to sleep. Every day.

We tap our phone and food shows up at our door.

We watch concerts we’re not at while communicating with other fans on social media

We create in the physical world to express ourselves in the digital world

We work virtually, with digital representations of ourselves adding as much value as in person

We view product demos in AR and see the product in our environment

We play in massive parallel worlds and games where we establish important personas and avatars

We’re one-click away from virtually any product, delivered next day.

So how did we get here? 

Slowly and surely. Just like the mobile internet developed slowly as technology changed what is possible, the metaverse will be a slow and natural extension to the mobile internet.

But what’s becoming clear is that people are living their lives in the “Near-Metaverse”, with brand new fusion consumer behaviors. It’s simply a primitive version of the user experience

 

“I don’t think that this [the metaverse] is primarily about being engaged with the internet more. I think it’s about being engaged more naturally.”

–        Zuck

I got an Intellivision video game system as a gift when I was a little kid.

It was primitive.

The graphics looked like bad children’s drawings and the latency was palpable. Compare that to sports games today, where you often have to wonder if it’s a live game or a video game, and the announcers and stats are mirrored to real world stats and up-to-date.

While the technology slowly develops to support a better integration, and our brains rewire to support a hybrid lifestyle, the quality and seamlessness of the interface will get better and better, just like video games.

The “Near-Metaverse” 

So how can marketers anticipate and prepare for this new hybrid reality?

What I refer to as the “near-metaverse” is a vision for the next 5-7 years on how converging changes in hardware, software, networking, processing etc will combine to better the user interface between the physical and the digital world. It’s this “near-metaverse”state that marketers need to start thinking about, and it’s already upon us.

Start with an insight.

The insight that it’s becoming increasingly hard, if not impossible, to separate one’s physical and digital lives when it comes to advertising to them. The bounds between traditional marketing and digital marketing are fading as people lead more hybrid lives.

Understanding the metaverse is understanding that it’s not the sum of physical plus digital; it’s a brand new way of living, the same way that America was a different society after the introduction of the television, not just the sum of the new parts. The better you can understand this new hybrid user behavior, the quicker you can create communications and messaging and ideas that are optimized for this brave new world.

Marketing and communications professionals need to pay attention to the metaverse because it’s the next frontier for online interaction. Just like social media revolutionized the online marketing landscape, so too will the metaverse. While we don’t have one shared metaverse at this time, there are companies positioning working on creating it.

–        Cathy Hackl CMO Network

 

The Near Metaverse Now: Examples of Metaversal Marketing

Here is how people are already blurring the lines between physical and digital lives:

Concert Collabs – 12.3M people watched Travis Scott concert on Fortnite, 33M people watched Lil Nas X concert on Roblox, 500,000 watched the Bigger Love virtual John Legend show. Over Covid, Phish’s Trey Anastasio webcasted live shows (performed to an empty venue) while chatting with fans onstage.

Peloton – what could be more metaverse than riding physical bicycles to digital instruction from people in virtual gyms through virtual exotic locales.

Sporting Events – after watching a basketball game in Virtual Reality, I wondered why anyone would want to attend in person again. A team could now focus on developing fans around the world, and not just the ones in the arena. Fans become participant rather than a spectator. Even features like multiple camera angles than the fans can choose from

Demos – AR and VR technology create opportunities to demo products remotely. Real estate companies can use AR and VR to tour properties remotely.  Car companies can realize huge savings by offering virtual test drives online or through small footprint, no inventory dealerships.

Social causes – Users of Grand Theft Auto V had clothing options to dress in yellow similar to the Hong Kong protestors while others dressed as police and clashed with the digital protestors. Users routinely donate their virtual avatars to causes, celebrations and remembrances.

Product Placements – Not just social causes, brands are making their apparel available to consumer’s virtual avatars. Companies like Levi’s have bundled virtual Levis with physical jeans. People discover new products and develop new desires from what they see digitally as much (or more) than they do physically.

Digital Experiences – brands are trying to leverage the new technologies to create branded experiences that cut through the clutter and replay through social video to a wider audience. The near-metaverse and metaverse will be all about creation, and brands will have to learn to create and how to support UGC experiences.

Moving Into The Future Of Metaversal Marketing

Almost every industry will be revolutionized as the metaverse develops, the same way the mobile internet revolutionized industries.

Remote working will be enhanced by holographic avatars and conference rooms that make Zoom meetings feel like a boardroom meeting.

Concerts and sporting events will offer fans views and experiences once reserved for the rich and famous.

Doctors will provide world class healthcare anywhere in the world.

Dating, personal relationships and sex work will be revolutionized for better or worse.

Marketers wanting to get a first mover advantage should start to think about ideas that can cross over between digital and physical worlds.

While the metaverse will have plenty of personalized advertising, brands that can understand the cultural differences around creator driven, shared economy will understand the context in which they need to create for.

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I had e-commerce brands and direct-to-consumer brands in mind as I scoured the web for examples of good digital-first brands to include.

What I realized is that DTC is just one example of digital first brands – it’s not the direct sale that requires a digital-first brand – it’s the direct communication with a digital-first consumer that creates a North Star that ensures prioritization of modern, digital touchpoints over traditional.

Here are 8 types of digital-first brands and examples that illustrate how digital-first is much more than DTC and e-commerce:

Digital First Brands: Software

This is really interesting because when you think of digital first brands you don’t think of most software companies, many of which are very traditional and established AND have an older buying demographic that supports more traditional brand thinking. Software went through a huge revolution, moving from boxes on shelves (see photo above) to digital products and then to software-as-a-service.

Companies like Adobe and Freshbooks are good examples of software companies with strong digital first brands. Freshbooks has an extraordinary community of dedicated digital devotees and they prioritize the direct relationship that digital provides. While they certainly have tactics and executions that require traditional means, both brands would never sacrifice modern digital-first interactions to anything else.

Digital First Brands: Experiences

More and more companies are selling experiences, and experiences are researched and planned online in digital and mobile environments. Even though the experience might be consumed physically, the brand is digital and must convey trust and security in new ways.

Airbnb is the example of one of the best brands in the world, not just digital-first brand. They’re brand platform and visual aesthetic allow for all the needs of digital-first marketing and can be agile and fluid in its execution across digital channels. They are self-aware, mobile and social first, and fundamentally understand how to take advantage of the inherent differences between digital, social and traditional.

Digital First Brands: Mobile Apps

Obvious in retrospect, but mobile apps can only benefit from digital traffic and as a result are a great category example of digital-first brands. While their goal is to drive an app install cost effectively, they also must play by the rules of a new digital ecosystem, where app store optimization, search optimization, digital reviews etc play a bigger role than something like a traditional magazine article.

StockX is a mobile app and marketplace that allows consumers to buy or sell the most coveted items, authenticated before they get shipped. StockX’s brand is optimized for the mobile app experience, and understands the challenges of their new environment.

StockX is able to harness the stopping power of their luxury items to drive app installs and subsequent purchases, so all their touch-points are digital.

Digital First Brands: Physical Products

Physical products are an interesting category because historically they represent a major tension between the benefits of the traditional retail supply chain and the benefits of the direct model. However, the argument to support the prioritization of the traditional supply chain is diminishing each day.

Covid killed foot traffic which in turn killed brick and mortar retail, and how it will rebound is still a big question. Traditional retail is the most cutthroat and competitive retail ecosystem in the world, and brands are realizing digital search can pit them against fewer competitors and more intentional (high intent) buyers.

Finally, the best brands are creating demand before the retail store, and the catch 22 is they need to be good digital first brands to attract their demographic in the first place.

A great example of a physical/retail product that created a digital-first brand is Sonos. They make app controlled wireless home speakers, that let owners add music to any room in their house and control it wirelessly.

They sell direct through their website but they’re also available in big box electronics, general big box retail, Amazon etc. Their brand connects directly with their consumers, vows to own consumer relationships directly whenever possible and builds a modern, digital-first brand that makes them a more valuable brand partner, even in traditional retail.

Digital First Brands: Metaversal Services

People are starting to talk about the concept of the Metaverse, but without the realizing that we’re already living in a Metaverse in many ways. When you think about the degree to which our lives are controlled by these small 3” x 6” rectangles you start to see what’s going on.

People live physically and digitally at the same time. We no longer have to be physically present to be present or to add value. Things are changing inside our minds that are opening up the possibility for a better merging of physical and digital.

An example of a metaversal service to me is Uber Eats. No matter where in the world you go, , Uber Eats knows where you are and makes available the best food the city has to offer. With very little input, and a couple of taps, food magically appears at your door, hot and prepaid.

In fact with contact-less delivery, you often never see the person who delivered. So Uber Eats needs to create a digital first brand that is so powerful that the service disappears into the background seamlessly.

Tap and food appears.

Digital First Brands: Streaming Entertainment

So much of our entertainment is streamed to home or to our phones, and it’s creating a marketing environment in which there really is no physical or traditional marketing requirements.

Whereas Apple needed advertising that worked across all its channels and touch-points, streaming entertainment can focus on digital branding to drive digital transactions and digital consumption.

Netflix is one of the most powerful brands in the world. They changed their logo to the one-colour, flat logo because that was the requirement to get a channel on Apple TV and they wouldn’t sacrifice the modern distribution for contemporary branding reasons.

Then as digital advertising and content exploded, they figured out agile and creative ways to reintroduce colour and sizzle, blowing the logo up into a colour palette reminiscent of how movies displayed their colour palettes to creatives.

If you’re looking for a crash course on digital first brands, study Netflix.

Digital First Brands: Luxury Apparel

Luxury apparel is another category that blends physical products, multi-channel distribution and digital/social marketing into something new. Most of our wants and needs today are driven by what we see online and on social. Seeing the people we look up to wearing stuff makes us want it more. It takes away some of the buyer risk as the brands get “GOATed” by the influencers who GOAT them.

There are lots of examples to watch, and I’ll pick two different ones.

Louis Vuitton is moving into digital in a big way, trading some traditional brand looks and moves for more contemporary and meaningful digital interactions. Their websites and social pages are breaking luxury rules, adopting low brow street aesthetics and forming more contemporary bonds with customers.

On the other side of the spectrum, Supreme is re-writing the rules for luxury digital first brands, using the direct connection and power of social to replace traditional luxury provenance with modern social driven fashion, which keeps demand extremely high.

Digital First Brands: Direct to Consumer

We finally arrive where I started, thinking that digital first brands are mostly DTC brands.

That’s because DTC brands and single channel e-commerce brands are advantageous because they don’t have the tension and conflict of multi-channel brands to contend with.

Their entire mission is to connect directly with customers, own the customer lifecycle, keep prices low by streamlining supply chain and being more agile towards the feedback they receive from their customers.

Endy Mattress is a great example of a powerful DTC brand that is digital-first in every way. Their branding and aesthetic are contemporary, built for social and mobile and their tone of voice and attitude is what modern consumers are looking to interact with.

Endy was acquired by Sleep Country, and now can combine their digital-first brand and direct relationships with brick and mortar distribution, proving that great digital-first brands make great retail partners because they understand the customer better.

Why does all this matter?

Anyone born after 1985 is a digital native. They never lived traditional and they never formed brand opinions through traditional means. If your brand is targeting people under the age of 40, your ability to connect digitally with them is a matter of life or death.

Abacus has a solution for digital first brands called Fluid Identity. Instead of brand guidelines that tell brand what they can’t do (based on outdated guidelines) we build brands that are agile, fluid and built to handle all digital, social and mobile marketing environments.

Drop us a line if you want to chat about it.

Looking for more brand building content? Check out these other great articles:

E-Commerce: Product Pages That Work (With 5 Great Examples)
Content Marketing: Building A Content Marketing Matrix In 8 Easy Steps
Advertising: Instagram Reels For Advertisers: Essential 2021 Update
The Future: You Wont Need 30 Second Ads Soon – Here’s Why

You’ve all heard this one: create an article or video once, post, and let the long-tail leads come rolling in year over year.

“We still get leads from a 2011 post!” marketers will shout from the rooftops.

Content marketing is everywhere, and for good reason. Unlike social, content marketing actually gets more valuable the longer it’s around.

What Is A Content Audit?

A well executed content audit will give more than a faceless dump of Google Analytics data or bounce rates: it’s an attempt to deconstruct the “DNA” of your best content and clone those traits (topics, structure or tone) into your new content.

When do I need a content audit?

• The content strategy just isn’t working. Pretty simple: you’re not moving the needle. You’re trying everything to see if anything sticks and it hasn’t, or, you’ve tried to replicate a winner and it’s not reaching the same level of success and you don’t know why. This is much more common for marketers than you think!
• The content strategy is kind of working. . .but it’s kind of a mess. You’ve got a blog with hundreds of posts, or a YouTube channel with hundreds of videos, and some of it has stuck gold, but there’s a huge amount of dead weight that’s actually hurting your results, or your small team can’t manage to keep your content matrix properly working: there’s just too much to focus on the good from the, well, not so good.

Congratulations: If you feel like your content is stuck in either of these two ruts, your brand could benefit from performing a content audit.

Common triggers for a content audit:

• Your traffic has plateaued (or is declining!)
• Your page rank or SEO score has suddenly changed
• Old content is out of date
• You don’t even know how much content you have!
• Leadership has questions you cant answer about performance
• There’s too much content to manage for you or your team

If any of these sound familiar, then you’re in the right place.

A Content Audit is not an SEO Audit…or a creative audit

How to Do a Content Audit (in 4 steps)

Here’s our first secret to share: The trick to a proper content audit isn’t to collect infinite data to try and identify any and all factors for performance, it is to actually narrow the scope’s focus to be highly effective: start with a well defined goal and see if your articles or videos are furthering that by any metric you see fit: sales, shares, time on page or anything else that matters to your strategy.

1. Identify Your Main Area of Focus

• Your overall traffic is declining month-over-month, and you don’t know why.
• There’s way, way too much content, and you need to better focus your labour
  
• You suspect technical problems hurt the SEO performance of your content.
• Your business goals are not being supported by your content, even though it’s popular with an audience

Identifying any of these problems is a great way to provide a focal point to your content audit: since each problem is unique to the other, different data will be required to find a solution and guide your content marketing strategy.

If you thought that the content audit would help expose what’s working for you and this seems backwards, don’t worry. Even a simple hunch that, say, articles to do with holidays are performing better is enough to get started.

2. Choose Key Data Points

Of course your views, customers and cash-flow should trend upward.

There’s one crucial data point missing from this list, and that’s because it can’t be quantified by Google Analytics: the experience of your content. Data-heavy audits can make it easy to overlook important qualitative hallmarks of quality, while creative only audits can lose sight of discover-ability or delivery problems:

• Are your articles difficult to read because of bad formatting, run on sentences or busy design?
• Are your videos paced properly to convey a story or reward the viewers interest?
• What can you show with a graphic instead of a wall of text, or someone just talking to a camera?
• How does your content speak through your brand?
  
• Or most important: are you boring your audience?

Each of these qualitative data points can have a huge impact on content performance, but they won’t show up in a generic auditing spreadsheet.

This is where the critical thinking of a content audit comes in: is this truly the best content experience for your audience? Can you test against two styles of article or video? Can you poll your audience to gauge their response directly?

Quality, while seemingly ephemeral, has a massive impact on the performance of your content strategy.

3. Choose the right content audit tools

4. Use Your Data to Make Moves

• Your historical performance. Compare your content to it’s last period: is their growth or decline? What metrics like keyword ranking or referring sites / accounts may be affected by this?
• Compare to industry benchmarks. How does your content, and performance, compare to others in your industry? Even with steady growth you could be left in the dust by your competitors. What benchmarks can you compare?
• Look for outliers. Which moments or metrics stand out, for good or bad. Unexplained spikes can also help expose outliers and dramatically change your strategy once you learn why.

If your content audit is streamlined, researched and pointed towards a concrete business goal, you’re in good shape. Here’s an example of how a goal (better discovery) can become actionable via an audit.

• Problem: Website has low domain authority.
• Data: The number of backlinks per article, and their content type.
• Analysis: Our SEO content generates almost no backlinks; our thought leadership content generates more of our backlinks.
• Strategy: Shift focus for new content away from SEO and toward thought leadership; refresh and re-promote old SEO content to generate new backlinks.

Below are some of the most common recommendations made in content audits.

Growth from Old Content

It’s not about simply “being online” anymore. It’s about being “always there”.

Building a brand that’s “digital first” is key to growing your business and connecting with customers in the coming decade.

Companies like Casper Sleep and Warby Parker took a digital-first approach and became retail juggernauts by eschewing traditional brand conventions and innovating the way brands are built and marketed.

Event the world’s leading brands, from Apple to Nike to Wal-Mart, are evolving into digital-first organizations. They’re investing money and manpower into creating product content that serves as the bridge between the online and offline worlds, helping consumers shop when, where and how they want.

In this 1-hr live stream, Chief Strategy Office and Co-Founder of Abacus Jeff Goldenberg will break down how to build a brand that’s not transitional, but truly “digital first”.

“Building A Winning Digital First Brand” Topics & Timeline

– How to identify the right channels for your audience
– Launching a “digital first” brand online
– Building authenticity with your audience
– Creating a storytelling strategy
– Finding the right calls-to-action to drive conversions

And much more.

Register free and ask our experts questions LIVE!

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Yes, the homepage is the first thing visitors see when they arrive… to your homepage, but we both know it’s really your product pages that close the deal. The true goal of any E-commerce website is sales, and there’s no way you’ll convert your curious audience into satisfied customers without high quality product pages. In fact, it might be the most important part of your E-Commerce or DTC experience.

When consumers are prepared to make a purchase on a website or mobile app, Episerver’s “Re-imagining Commerce” Report found 60 percent go directly to the product page for the item they’re looking for. That’s a number your brand can’t afford to ignore.

Effective product pages not only convey the value of a product, but also help build your brand and create trust with customers. They show potential customers the look of your product, tells them what it feels like, and makes them trust that this is the right choice for them. If your homepage is the storefront, your product page is your salesperson, and a good salesperson is essential for any retailer.

The Episerver report has an ever more startling statistic: 98 percent of shoppers have been dissuaded from completing a purchase because of incomplete or incorrect content on a brand’s website, underscoring the need for well written, accurate, and up to date product pages.

Done right, product pages feel as much a part of your brand as a logo or packaging, and give a great place to share social proof without being pushy.

Product Pages: what makes a great product page?

You might think that the secret behind a great product page is some arcane SEO trickery, flash videos or manipulative UX design, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, product pages are pretty straightforward.

You want to highlight the product, give your audience the right amount of information to help them buy something they want, and convince them that buying this product is going to be simple and satisfying, turning the curious visitor into a customer as smoothly as possible.

As Rosara Joseph, Content Strategist at VentureWeb puts it,

“The paramount goal for your product pages should be to build user confidence by providing all the information necessary for a purchasing decision and making the process as intuitive and straightforward as possible.”

But if you’re thinking that’s easier said than done, fear not, we’re going to break down the ingredients behind a few great product pages so you can add them to your own recipe for selling success.

I know what you’re thinking: With so many options, where do you even start?

Product pages can be broken down into 5 key areas, and only when these 5 things come together can you create a truly great product page:

• Your product the star of the show: but what product you’re selling might change how it’s presented—and what questions your customers have before they can commit to buying. You’ve got one chance to make a first impression, so your product photos, packaging, and presentation are paramount to how it’s received.

• Your brand is the most important part of your business: from social post, display ads and even your post-sale emails it’s everywhere, but it’s especially important on your product pages. With the way products are discovered these days, someone might never see your homepage before buying from you, so branding on your pages matters. Remember that even little things like colours or the amount of white space you use in your layout can have a psychological impact on how your brand is perceived.

• Your copy is important, because it’s how you combine the written information your customers need with your brand’s unique voice and tone. Too much copy (text) leaves customer’s dazed and confused, too little leaves them unsatisfied and frustrated, so make sure you remember your audience and what they will want to know.

• Your Social Proof What are people saying about the product? Social proof is essential in the digital economy to build trust. This doesn’t only mean reviews: press, video demos and more can go a long way to build buyer confidence and build your brand bank.

• Your page design, and your user experience, is going to be informed by all of these things, but there are nuances involved, especially from the user’s perspective. How things are arranged on the page, and what’s included, can have a big impact on your conversions. Things like sizing, colour or subscriptions can be an integral part of your product, so relegating them to an afterthought will only increase friction for your potential customers. Offering payment options can help sweeten the deal, so where they’re presented on your product pages can have a lasting impact on the buying decision.

But before we begin…Do you have a good understanding of your customer?

To make any of these decisions well, from how much detail to include, to which product attributes to highlight in your photography, you need to really understand who your customer is and what they want from you. If you’re still unsure, you’ll need to identify your audience before going any further.

Understanding your audience, and meeting their desires through the design of your brand, is the most important factor to any E-commerce retailer.

“We created a multifaceted character named Phoebe James that reflected the brand (Phoebe James) principles. We worked to create Phoebe’s world – thinking about everything through the lens of this character and her values. From there, you can start to craft your story and carve out space for yourself in the marketplace. Make sure that this story is woven through your product page. Don’t just show one product shot on white, invest the time and money to make your products stand out.”

There are so many different ways to build product pages, and so many different types of E-Commerce products to sell, there’s no single source of truth to guide you.

If you’ve already got a handle on your audience (and you’ve updated your buyer personas, of course) then you’ll know intuitively how to make some of the design decisions towards great product pages.

But, if you truly know your audience and have a well defined set of brand guidelines, creating effective product pages is deceptively simple. It’s all about balance, and adjusting each of the five main ingredients until the mix is just right.

To show what we mean, let’s dive into some examples of stellar product pages and why they work so well.

Product Pages That Work: 6 Examples

#1: Mighty

Mighty plays your Spotify and Amazon Music without a phone, screen, or Internet connection. It’s a tiny device made for those on the go or those who want no-hassle music without using a phone. Mighty only sells a single product, so having it featured prominently is key to the product page being so impactful.

Right from the top of their product pages, the Mighty is shown in full colour and in hand, illustrating it’s size and feel immediately. Product options in the gallery are framed to the left, rather than the bottom, adding more emphasis on the gallery than the traditional position below, and allow this customer to see it in use, zoom in and inspect it’s finer details. In fact, there’s not a single photograph on the page that doesn’t showcase the product in use.

The user experience on the Mighty’s product pages is smooth and concise, using photographs effectively to convey size, ease of use, range of functions and much more. By pairing these images with spare copy, they’ve created a great experience and a great sales tool to create happy customers.

Why it works:

Showcasing the product through images is key

Product images are incredibly important when it comes to the conversion rate of your product page.

Baymard Institute discovered that 56% of users immediately started exploring product images after arriving on the product page. Surprisingly, that research revealed that 25% of E-Commerce sites failed to provide product images that met the user’s needs.

Here are the three key things that you need to pay attention to:

• Image resolution: It’s been found that users extend their disappointment beyond the specific product that they are viewing to the site or brand. Low-quality images affect not only how people perceive a particular product but also how they perceive the brand that sells it.

• Zoom-in functionality: 93% of ecommerce desktop sites allow users to zoom in on some or all product images. However, on some of the sites the level of zoom on the images is insufficient to see the visual details required to make the purchase decision. This leads some users away from the product page since they can’t get a rich visual understanding of crucial product details. Also, consider offering additional features such as the ability to rotate the image to see the product from different angles.

• Images of the product in use: Showing the product on a plain background may not be enough: for brands in lifestyle, fashion or home electronics you will absolutely want to show the product naturally in the real world on your product pages. For best results, always try and produce original content. Don’t rely on using mockups or stock photography unless it fits your design system.

The takeaway here is that you need to allow online shoppers to visually examine the product if you want them to feel confident enough to buy it. By blending your product images with your brand identity, you’ll be able to do just that. Mighty’s example above is a perfect example of how to use product photos effectively.

#2: Studio Neat

Great product pages focus on supplying shoppers with all the information they need to make a purchase. Studio Neat exemplifies putting your brand front and centre through the combination of all four main ingredients we listed above.

With beautiful long-from product pages, which includes video, big, bold social proof in the form of quotes, product photos that stick to brand guidelines and casual, confident copywriting, this brand understands their audiences love of words, of clean and classic design, and of simplicity.

When you first land on a page, you’re greeted by a video explaining more about the brand and its products.

By naturally continuing down the page, the audience is shown social proof and key reasons why you should buy the featured product. The descriptions are catchy, speak in the voice of the brand, and are paired with high quality images to make a customer imagine they’re enjoying the product already. This is a great example of user experience that is both enjoyable and on brand.

Highlights of product features are broken out and highlighted, rather than simply listed in a dense block of text: remember what we said about giving the right information on your product pages? Studio Neat’s design understands this perfectly as shown below.

These product pages finish off with a series of ” in the wild” photos to highlight the product in everyday use, but also (and most importantly) they reinforce the brand’s identity through the locations, colours and surrounding accessories. It’s this section that brings it all together and offers an excellent “one shot” approach to connecting with customers who hit that landing page as their first touchpoint with your brand.

Why it works:

Branding is everything.

If we marketers know one thing, it’s the importance of branding.

Emphasizing your brand identity can actually be the most important part of your product pages, says Mark Perini, Founder of ICEE Social.

“The difference between creating a mediocre product page and a stellar product page is your ability to weave your brand’s DNA into the page. As a visitor, as soon as I land on the product page I want to know within two seconds what your brand is all about.”

Branding is much, much more than a few photos or a Shopify theme. If your company fails to build that elusive connection with it’s audience, be it through a bad website experience, boring design, confusing or low quality information, or even a lack of visibility in your market, consumers will move on to another brand or product without a second thought.

Make no mistake, we know that’s exactly what your audience will do: according to an Kissmetrics, 61% of customers take their business to a competitor when they end a business relationship, and with multiple touch-points along your customer’s journey the chance to drop the connection is ever present.

With this sobering statistic in mind, here are 3 key reasons why focusing on branding helps build product pages that work.

• Branding your product pages improves recognition: Of course your brand includes both visual elements (logos, photos and such), but it’s the almost ephemeral associations people make with your products and services through non-visual interactions that create a brand identity. The more memorable your logo design or colour choices are the better, but your customer service, checkout options, testimonials, shipping, charity associations or environmental ethos are even more likely to help customers make those positive associations. And as long as those associations are positive, customers will buy, keep buying and provide positive social proof in the future through recommendations or evangelism.

• Branding your product pages helps you create connections that count: Building a brand helps you to create trust with your target market, and helps to create brand loyalty, according to an article by The Branding Journal. By evoking positive feelings within a person, they will feel more comfortable doing business with you, and continuing to do business with you. Here, your tone and copy become essential to convey that you and the customer are connected through more than just the purchase. By incorporating lifestyle imagery, particular models or situations, you can help drive home the values of your brand and the place it fits in your customer’s lives.

• Branding shows that you’re put-together: People notice if you put time and effort into your brick-and-mortar business, and your online presence should be no different. If your store is dim, dirty and disorganized, we both know you’ll fail as a business. The same goes for your branding. If you (or your agency) create an engaging, focused and effective brand throughout your product pages, as Studio Neat has done, it will help connect with the customer, establish trust and help reduce friction to that all important conversion.

#3 Mojo Gummies

Mojo is a groundbreaking product from Gwella, a startup focused on bettering mental health through the power of functional mushrooms.

By highlighting their bold, beautiful packaging against a rich, green background colour, Mojo immediately establishes their brand identity along the axis of the natural and the now, with on-trend typesetting and design front and centre. Close-up shots highlighting the details of the product allow the customer to imagine having it in hand.

Mojo also doesn’t clutter up the page with heavy amounts of text: for the more curious shopper the ingredients and what they do are presented after the buy button:

Why it works:

Copywriting: Mojo gives customers the right amount of information

Beyond the design, Mojo’s product pages include a few key elements to help the curious decide if they want to try:

• Short, descriptive product information, available at the customer’s discretion instead of before the buy button
• Discounts for volume and subscription up-front before the checkout, giving the customer confidence in the product
• Shipping policy / ship dates to show transparency and build trust

With a product so new and in a industry with a lot of buzzwords and jargon, it can be daunting to new customers to be confronted with acronyms and technical terms they may not understand. Mojo smartly places this information further down the product page to not put off potential customers with too much, too soon.

Copywriting isn’t always slogans and sales pitches, it’s also important to deliver your products benefits, ingredients, instructions or other info as quickly and understandably as possible.

#4 Lindt

Lindt is a chocolate maker with over 150 years of history and a reputation for quality. A recent convert to E-Commerce, Lindt smartly puts their recognizable packaging up-front and let’s their   photography tell the story. This product page shows how the right amount of information can have more impact rather than having the most information, and why an up-front call to action can help drive your desired outcomes.

Design wise, by splitting the page in half and placing the product between two distinct colours, Lindt cleverly showcases both their brand identity and draws the eyes to their product by utilizing  the white space on the page.

Further down, their copy tells the company’s history and engages the customer by having them imagine the sensation of enjoying the product, a great way to use text to help create interest without cold hard facts. The footer of the page cleverly keeps a persistent “add-to-cart” banner to keep the product purchase at the front of mind for the shopper, making the key conversion (add-to-cart) always present.

Why it works

User experience: It’s all about that call-to-action (CTA) button

It’s not rocket science: You should make it clear to potential customers what you want them to do next, which is the purpose of the call-to-action (CTA) button. For your brand’s product pages, you will want your visitors to add a product to their basket, or potentially sign up for a subscription, or even get a quote….there’s not much more to do in 99% of E-commerce transactions…but getting that conversion is the hardest part of the entire process.

While it can be tempting to be clever or “over design” the experience, research by Hubspot has shown that personalized CTAs that appear as buttons perform far better than images.

Typically, ecommerce stores use the phrase “Add to Cart” as the CTA button copy. That being said, feel free to experiment and conduct A/B tests to find which is the most effective CTA for your products, such as “Buy Now”. What works for one company may not work for yours: the key is to make it central to your product pages’ experience, not an afterthought.

User experience is often confused with the visual design of your product pages, but in reality it’s the path your customers take that’s most important, not the scenery. By showcasing a clear, bold, customized CTA you can guarantee both you and the customer get the desired interaction from your product pages. Lindt does this by putting their both above the fold on their product pages and as a persistent footer, giving the customer a constant, but gentle reminder of where to go next.

#5 Perfect Keto

Perfect Keto checks off many boxes for having great product pages. It helps give shoppers the information they need as quickly as possible, uses a descriptive product title to answer questions before they’re asked, puts the reviews at top of mind, highlights the product immediately through great photography and ties it all together in a clean, clear and concise way.

The brand is also showcased through great “in the wild” photography that allows the customer to imagine the product in hand, in their home and their daily lives, paired with the added benefit of answering “what is it for” or “how do I use it”.

But where Perfect Keto really shines is in their choice to elevate the social proof of their product pages by not only having traditional customer reviews, but also press and staff testimonials. This is going above and beyond what’s required and really drives home that all important trust in a customer.

Why it works:

You need social proof reviews on your product pages

Social proof is a theory, popularized by psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini, that describes our tendency to rely on the opinions or actions of others to guide our own.

Whether you’re familiar with social proof or not, chances are it has influenced decisions—both big and small—throughout your life. Leveraging the appeal of following the “wisdom of the crowd,” social proof captures our attention because we’re naturally curious about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what the correct behaviour or response is.

Potential customers care less about what you say about your product and more about what other people say about it.

That’s why displaying customer reviews can have a drastic impact on the conversion rate of your product page. According to Spiegel Research Center, the purchase likelihood of a product with 5 reviews is 270% higher than that of a product with zero reviews:

However, as you can see, the effect the number of reviews has on the conversion rate isn’t linear: the marginal benefit of additional reviews starts diminishing after the first five reviews, so as always it’s about the right amount of information presented by your product pages. (If you want more sources of social proof, read on to our next example for other options)

Keep in mind that when it comes to customer reviews, it’s important to make sure that they don’t come across as fake. Here’s what Spiegel Research Center found:‍

“Is five stars “too good to be true” in the eyes of consumers? According to our research, it is. Across product categories, we found that purchase likelihood typically peaks at ratings in the 4.0 – 4.7 range, and then begins to decrease as ratings approach 5.0.”‍

So make sure that your product pages have at least five customer reviews and don’t delete negative reviews should you get any. While it can be tempting to moderate your reviews and leave only the highest compliments, your product pages will actually suffer without them.

In fact, this final example may be our best, here’s why:

Perfect Keto’s product pages bring all 5 elements together:

• The brand is highlighted with their product photography, typesetting, copy and colours.

• Showing social proof: curious customers are always more likely to try if there’s testimonials easily accessible, and Perfect Keto goes above and beyond with 3 different sources.

• High quality product photography that highlights the product and packaging, as well as showing the product in day to day use.

• Communicating product benefits with a bulleted list rather than a more “story telling” approach shows the right approach to copy-writing, but dense with information for those that need it.

• Immediately delivers the benefits directly under the product title (which in of itself is great; short and descriptive), has a customized CTA, offers subscription and shipping instantly plus other small touches makes for great user experience.

Conclusion

It’s not as simple as choosing one of these ingredients and calling it a day. Your product page is always going to be a balance between all of these factors, and it’s going to evolve as you go.

You’ll need to understand your customer and have a solid brand identity in place to make it work.

Each of our examples above exemplifies one of the keys of great product page design, but as always without a true understanding of your customer and their needs, you won’t be able to make the right choices to use each of those ingredients the right way. Mighty knows their audience is looking for simplicity and durability and delivers that information through great photography, while Perfect Keto customers may need a little more convincing of it’s taste or quality through social proof. Every brand is different, and will need to learn what helps their customer to complete their journey and adjust their product pages accordingly.

By including these five ingredients we’ve outlined above in the right amounts, you’ll be on your way to making your e-commerce site not only sell more, but help build your brand for years to come.

Still need a hand in building a great brand online? Give us a shout!

On Tuesday, Shopify gave word that its one-click checkout service, Shop Pay, will be available to all merchants selling on Google, as well as Facebook and Instagram Shops, even if those brands do not have a Shopify store. The new offering comes after Shop Pay was made available to Shopify users selling on Facebook back in February, and available to Shopify merchants selling on Google in May.

This is the first product that Shopify has made available to merchants who don’t use Shopify to manage their store, and signals part of an ongoing battle with Amazon to help woo brands onto their platform.

While there are over 1 million Shops globally on Facebook and Instagram, Amazon is the undisputed E-Commerce giant, with a little over 3 million Amazon sellers across North America (and over 6 million globally), according to Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce data firm.

According to Shopify, by the end of this year, Shop Pay will be available to all one million merchants across both Facebook and Google. The option will roll out to U.S. Facebook merchants by the end of July 2021, and Google merchants by the end of the year.

With so many DTC and E-Commerce brands at odds with recent changes to Facebook and Google’s privacy policies (most notably after the release of Apple’s iOS 14.5), this move by Shopify could create new opportunities for online retailers looking to regain some trust on those platforms and better compete with Amazon online. But for the privacy minded, be aware: Facebook and Google will receive data to complete orders, including email address, shipping address, and credit card numbers as part of their checkout flow.

Why should I use Shop Pay?

With a friction-less customer experience key to brand growth now more than ever, Shopify is looking to expand in this market, using their trusted name and in-built payment ecosystem to be the solution to retailers woes on Facebook and Google.

The company claims that Shop Pay is 70% faster than a typical checkout process, and has a 1.72x higher conversion rate than manually entering information.

By making Shop Pay widely available on Facebook and Google, it could help brands using those platforms catch up with competitors on Amazon, who’s long running one-click buying option has been shown to greatly reduce cart abandonment and drive sales.

Why should I use Shop Pay to sell on Facebook / Instagram / Google?

According to BigCommerce, “As of October 2018, more than 800 million people globally use Marketplace each month to browse, buy, or sell items, giving retailers an opportunity to drive discovery and sales of key products in a place where their consumers are already shopping.” Google claims that more than one billion shopping sessions happen on the site daily.

That’s a LOT of shoppers!

But when it comes to brand growth, using Shop Pay in connection with Facebook Marketplace gives you 3 major opportunities your brand may be missing:

1. Extended reach.

Retailers on Marketplace will be able to get their brand and products into the marketplace and increase those important touch-points on the customer journey. You would hate to miss that “buy now” impulse purchase or final consideration by sending a customer of platform.

2. A Personalized customer experience.

Facebook Marketplace surfaces products relevant to consumers, helping your business find the right customers. This helps ensure that your product is being seen by the right audience, ultimately resulting in an increased opportunity that the interaction will lead to a purchase, and providing a great customer service opportunity though using Messenger.

3.) Friction-less Checkout

As stated above, a friction-less checkout using Shop Pay can help almost double your conversion rates and reduce abandonment to help spur sales in an easy to execute, easy to integrate Multichannel solution. Many customers may balk at giving Facebook their data, while Shopify, a much more “trustworthy” partner, could help ease their payment anxieties.

Looking to help boost your brand’s E-Commerce growth? Abacus is the partner you’re looking for. Let’s talk.