Today in Digital Marketing - 135: I Obviously Don’t Know Anything About Oil.

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Tuesday, April 21st, 2020. Happy Local Self-Government Day, Russia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Google makes its product listings free. Pinterest's latest trends report has some good ideas if you are desperate for pandemic-appropriate content. And Facebook cancels the biggest planned change it had for its ads platform.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by Tresta.com. Well, the news has been full of doom and gloom about the impact of COVID-19 on marketing and consumer sales. Now comes word that maybe, just maybe, things are on the upswing, at least in the U.S. Quoting Marketingland, the Economic Sentiment Index tracks consumer sentiment across five economic categories in the states, including a willingness to make major purchases. These indicators dropped off a cliff as the lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders took hold in March. But as of the end of last week, four out of five of these indicators started ticking up. In particular, people's perceptions of the U.S. economic outlook improved significantly. While this may be a function of hopeful thinking about an impending return to normal life,

Starting point is 00:01:51 whatever that's going to mean, it's potentially significant. That's because psychology and confidence play a major role in personal consumption, i.e. consumer spending, and consumption drives roughly 70% of the U.S. GDP, unquote. One thing the U.S. government did was send stimulus checks to, as far as I could tell, pretty much everyone down there, and that seems to have triggered meaningful consumer online spending. Shopify's CTO tweeted that they are seeing Black Friday-level traffic every day. One research firm reported that the spike was especially notable in these categories, apparel, furniture, automotive, footwear, outdoor living, audio equipment,

Starting point is 00:02:32 and cosmetics, all of which experienced significant day-over-day growth without any change in their advertising strategy. So all in all, maybe some good news coming for us digital marketers and brands. will include products at no charge to the brand, and they plan to roll it out worldwide by the end of the year. You will need a Merchant Center account to publish these free product listings. That is because all items in Google's shopping starts as product feeds uploaded to Merchant Center. A nice little touch if your brand's website uses Google's Optimize tool. That's an A-B testing tool that can serve slightly different variations of your website to visitors

Starting point is 00:03:26 and measures the impact of changes like the position of an image or your header body copy. Now they have added a way for you to add a bar across the top of your site to provide information about any impact on your business from the pandemic, like changed hours or reduced services. Normally, these experiments are only intended for a short time period so you can determine a winner and then change your site to the more effective variation. But in this case, Google says that top bar will stay there for an extended period of time, at least until the end of July.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So it's been several weeks since you've had to completely revamp your content strategy. I feel it. Boy, do I feel it. You've gone from promoting your products to making coloring books for kids, posting yoga at home instructions, and other pandemic-friendly content. Well, if you are running out of ideas or inspiration, Pinterest has come to your rescue in the form of a list of trending searches on their platform. So, ready for some ideas? Here are the topics they say have spiked in terms of interest.

Starting point is 00:04:29 In health and wellness categories, stress relief and stress quotes and home workouts. In parenting searches, easy lunch ideas for kids and science experiments for kids. In food, bread in crock pot. I'll admit I actually searched for that myself last week. Freezer meals and something called sweet Amish bread. No idea what that is. In personal care, home haircuts, spa day at home and homemade eyebrow wax recipes. In entertainment, family

Starting point is 00:04:59 movies, indoor date nights and drinking board games. And in the holidays and home category, how to start a garden for beginners, embroidery for beginners, and canvas painting step-by-step. There you go. A whole month's worth of new content. See why you listen to this podcast? Facebook has made a surprising policy reversal

Starting point is 00:05:24 that would have affected every ad campaign on its platform. For more than a year now, they've been saying that they will be switching everyone to CBO, campaign-based optimization. That's where Facebook would decide what share of your budget it would apply to each ad set, rather than you having granular control over it. And it was going to be mandatory. And now, apparently, it's just not happening at all anymore. You will still be able to use CBO, to be clear, if you want. It's been optional since it was introduced. The difference here is that they no longer plan to force everyone into CBO without choice.

Starting point is 00:05:59 According to one person who reported a conversation with a Facebook rep, they'll actually be reversing any existing campaigns where CBO was forced on as well. To be fair, you know, most people that I've talked to, and certainly our experience who've used CBO, report it's actually been pretty solid. That Facebook's auction does seem to make the right decisions in allocating spend among the ad sets. But if you are a control freak,

Starting point is 00:06:22 and you want to force specific spends on individual ad sets, it sounds like you'll be able to still for the foreseeable future. from anywhere. With Tresta, you can set up your business phone number, download the app, and start calling and texting unlimited right away. Tresta is the best business phone app on the market. Whether you're just starting your business or you're already established, Tresta offers the call management features that empower you to communicate smarter and more efficiently. One of the best things about Tresta is it's so flexible. If you just need a business phone number, you can set up a local or toll-free number instantly. If you're looking for a complete business phone system, all their powerful call management features are included.

Starting point is 00:07:13 Everything from auto attendance to call recording to user groups and so much more. It's just $15 per user per month with no contract, and you don't need any special equipment, just the smartphone you're already using start your free 30-day trial today at tresta.com slash today that's t-r-e-s-t-a dot com slash today i'm a pretty big fan of app sumo that's the site that coordinates lifetime deals of web apps mostly in the digital marketing space. And these deals are genuinely good. A lot of the tools that our agency runs on, from quick file

Starting point is 00:07:48 sharing tools, to a web design tool, to a media monitoring tool, we bought them once for about 50 bucks, and that's it. Even though the same sites charge others that price or more every month. And today, quite a good deal popped up that I wanted to tell you folks about. You might be familiar with BuzzSumo. This is a content discovery tool. So basically you punch in any topic keyword and it will show you articles published online about that topic sorted, and here's the point here, sorted by social engagement. So in other words, a quick way to see what's trending on very specific topics. One example, one of our agency's clients

Starting point is 00:08:26 is a shopping center in Winnipeg. So every day we're searching for things around Winnipeg that people are talking about as measured by the engagement levels on social platforms. Now, this deal is not for BuzzSumo. It is though for a site called Social Animal, which is a pretty close clone, I have to say, of BuzzSumo. In practical terms, back to that Winnipeg example, once we get a search of trending content for a keyword, you can then only show

Starting point is 00:08:52 results for the last month, narrow it down to the last week or even the last day or any custom date range. You can tell it to only show you memes about that topic, Winnipeg in this case, or listicles or videos or podcasts or restrict the search to a specific domain. And then once you've got your list, you can sort it by the number of engagements on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Reddit. This really is a good weapon in any community manager's arsenal. And AppSumo has it on right now for $69 for life. By comparison, BuzzSumo's cheapest plan costs $950 for a year. And this social animal deal is $69 forever. AppSumo has a no questions asked 60 day refund policy. You don't even have to talk to anyone or email support. You just go on their site and click refund and they refund it immediately. There is a link in this episode's description if you would like to check out Social Animal.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And four quick items to wrap up today. First, following up on the story yesterday about what the various social media platforms are offering when their customers are looking for relief due to COVID-19. Buffer comped us a few months. Promo put our account on pause with a promise to resume with our grandfathered plan. Sprout Social, not quite as helpful.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Basically, our rep sent us to another rep who pretty much just said we could downgrade to a lower functionality plan, which we did. Not quite what the other platforms are doing, but still an option for you. Second, been seeing reports that publishing to Facebook directly on their site is a bit buggy this afternoon. Apparently, people are seeing the publish button just grayed out. So if you noticed that today, you are among friends. Third, if you are sick of your Spotify playlists, Sirius XM has gone free on its website. I've been really enjoying channel 33, 80s first wave. And finally, I'm trying something new with the podcast chapters. Now, if I did this right,

Starting point is 00:10:43 and your podcast app supports chaptering, you should be able to skip between stories now. If none of that makes any sense, I've obviously screwed something up. And well, we will just forget that we had this little discussion. Some of you got two nearly identical episodes of this podcast yesterday. You'll notice the second was about 20 seconds shorter than the first. That's because in the first I reported incorrectly that the price Thank you. lane and not try to report stories about the energy sector. Follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. And if you are in the market for a business phone system, don't forget to check out Tresta.com slash today. That's T-R-E-S-T-A.com slash today. I'm Todd Mathen. Talk to you tomorrow. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more.

Starting point is 00:12:07 It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - 135: I Obviously Don’t Know Anything About Oil.

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