Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: November 2019, Week 2

Another Wednesday is here which means we have a brand new iteration of our Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. Within this column, we feature some of the most exciting and relevant industry-related news that our content marketing team collected and selected over the past week (or so). 

In this edition, you can read about the following events: 

• Facebook rolls out new corporate logo 
• Bing to introduce link penalties 
• Chrome to warn users when they are about to visit a slow page 
• WhatsApp has a new feature called ‘Catalogs’ to help small local businesses
• Shopify introduces ‘Shopify Email’ 

And more…

Let’s get started.

 

Bing to Start Exercising Link Penalties for ‘Inorganic Site Structure’ Violations

The upcoming link penalty policy by Bing is soon to be implemented and is basically aiming at taking down PBNs (private blog networks), manipulative cross-site linking, as well as sub-domain leasing.

Bing uses the term Inorganic Site Structure to refer to the patterns of interlinked pages, especially the patterns that deploy cross-site linking (with external domains) and internal site-level link signals (with sub-domains) – with an overall goal to boost their search engine rankings without actually deserving it. 

These are basically spam techniques that have been within the SEO landscape for years, but now Bing is about to exercise penalties for websites that utilize this type of interlinking structure. 

 

Facebook Introduces New Corporate Logo 

The social media giant decided to refurbish the company branding by rolling out a new corporate logo. The new dynamic design features the recognizable brand name in all caps that changes distinguishable colors according to each company the corporation owns, from Facebook blue, to Instagram red and WhatsApp green.

Here’s the new logo in all its glory:

(Source: SEJ)

With this simple all-caps logo, Facebook wants to help its users visually differentiate the brand’s corporate entity from its social media platform. 

The company stated the following in an official blog post:

“People should know which companies make the products they use. Our main services include the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra. These apps and technologies have shared infrastructure for years and the teams behind them frequently work together.” 

 

WhatsApp to Roll out Product ‘Catalogs’ to Support Small Businesses 

Back in April, Facebook announced several new and exciting features and offerings, among which were WhatsApp’s SMB product ‘Catalogs’ that should be of great use to local businesses in terms of discovery and commerce. 

Small local companies can now showcase their awesome products and/or services more easily and more efficiently targeting-wise as they can now use WhatsApp to reach both their existing and potential customers via the app’s messaging function. 

This is a useful new feature from the consumers’ standpoint as well as WhatsApp users are now able to quickly track down businesses and browse services/products in a more direct manner.   

The Catalogs feature is initially being rolled out in the following markets: US, UK, Brazil, Germany, India, Indonesia, and Mexico; while more countries are soon to be added to the list. 

 

Chrome Plans to Warn Users of Slow Pages in the Future

Google Chrome made an official announcement saying that they plan to introduce badging as a new way to inspire publishers to improve site speed. The purpose of these badges is to tell users, before they click, that a site they are about to visit is slow. The ultimate goal, claims Google, is to reward fast sites. However, this announcement raised some troubling questions among users and website owners.

Will this slow speed badge on a website increase abandonment rates? Is causing users to abandon slow sites in favor of faster pages what Google means by rewarding fast web pages?

Here’s an official statement by Google:

“We think the web can do better and want to help users understand when a site may load slowly, while rewarding sites delivering fast experiences.”

Google says they want to warn users which sites are slow before they click on a link. Website owners are worried that this warning may cause users to abandon the click and simply choose to visit the faster loading site.

Undoubtedly, this announcement caused quite a stir in the market, but Google reminds the users and site owners that this is still a work in progress.

“This may take a number of forms and we plan to experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most value to our users,” says Google.

 

Shopify Is Introducing Shopify Email

The successful Canadian e-commerce platform – Shopify – is launching its newest marketing app extension called Shopify Email. This extension will provide Shopify merchants with an opportunity to easily create, execute and monitor email marketing campaigns within the platform. These new features and options will be available in early 2020.

By introducing Shopify Email, the Canadian e-commerce platform plans on making marketing tools more accessible to sellers. This new feature will allow emails to be sent from the merchant’s domain name and will require little technical setup.

Email is still one of the highest-converting marketing channels and it is critical for establishing trust with customers. This will make easier for Shopify users to communicate with their customers and manage their inventory, while it will also save merchants a lot of money and resources they would otherwise spend on investing in a third-party provider.

 

Salesforce Rolls Out Hybrid Content Management System Built to Integrate with Other Platforms

Salesforce introduced a brand new content management platform on Thursday – Salesforce Content Management System. With this new system, Salesforce is trying to give content marketing teams a tool both newbies and skilled experts can use.

They call it a “hybrid” CMS because users are now able to create, manage and deliver content on the platform, and distribute it to other websites by using the company’s Experience Builder or Commerce Page designer tools.

The main advantage of the new content management system is that it allows marketing teams to create more personalized content easily. And, considering that the CMS is user-friendly and that it does integrate with other platforms, marketers won’t have to worry about their design resources or the restriction of their content.

 

Make sure to check our blog next week as well when we will have a fresh batch of exciting news from the dynamic world of digital marketing. Until then, check out our previous edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots in case you’ve missed it!