Today in Digital Marketing - 189: You’ll Love This Episode, [𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿] Person in Their [𝗔𝗴𝗲]s!

Starting point is 00:00:01 On today's show, different people, different creative, makes sense, but now one company has figured out how to apply that to organic content. Plus, we should have more inventory for YouTube ads soon. How does changing the web link in your Google My Business profile affect your search engine ranking? And why you should absolutely start using the new feature that Instagram rolled out globally today. It's Wednesday, July 8th, 2020. Happy Family Day, Ukraine. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Instagram today added a new feature, pinned comments.

Starting point is 00:00:38 You know these, of course. They've been on Facebook and YouTube forever. Well, now, as of today, Instagram will let you pin up to three comments to your brand's post. And starting today, you should do exactly that for every post. Remember that Instagram doesn't show every comment below a post, usually only one. And the one they choose, well it's algorithmic of course, but it mostly seems to be comments with a lot of engagement or comments of people connected to the viewer's social graph. Which is a long way of saying that it is Instagram, not you, who is making the decision of what comment to feature.

Starting point is 00:01:15 By pinning a comment, you take that control back and can feature comments that are positive about your brand and so on. By the way, when you do pin a comment, Instagram will send a notification to the person who commented, letting them know. One thing that doesn't appear to be part of this? API integration. Meaning that, much like pretty much everything on Instagram, you've got to do this on your phone, and not through your third-party tool. Let's stick with Instagram for a moment because a big user interface change being tested this week on their app shows the priority that they are putting toward e-commerce. And

Starting point is 00:01:53 starting today, some users around the world are seeing a new tab at the bottom of the Instagram screen, a shopping basket. It replaces the heart tab. Tapping it lets users filter products by some fairly broad categories, travel, beauty, clothing and accessories, that sort of thing. Today, there is a shopping section, but it's inside the explore tab for most people. It doesn't really offer much in the way of filtering or searching. Other than the new filtering ability, this new tab basically takes people to the same shop page as we all have today, so it's really just a shortcut, but an important one at that from a user interface point of view. Interestingly, in the tests that people are seeing so far, not all the products surfaced are part of Instagram's instant checkout program.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Some are just regular product catalog pages that send people to the brand's website to complete the purchase. TikTok says it is opening up its self-serve ads platform globally. This back end is like Facebook's and Google's and Twitter's. You go in, you set up your campaign goals, you're targeting budget creative. Until now, only a few handpicked brands were able to advertise and most of those contracts were manual through a TikTok ad rep and an insertion order, that sort of thing. They say they're also giving away $100 million in ad credits for small businesses, part of their COVID response. You can apply in the self-service dashboard, if you can get in, that is. Despite TikTok's announcement that the doors are wide open, I still found that door firmly closed shut. The signup process process is just a contact form which you fill out and get a

Starting point is 00:03:26 thanks-we'll-get-back-to-you-soon message. So maybe that code is still rolling out slowly. They do say they're opening it up as of now. Who knows? Anyway, this happened the same week that the American Secretary of State says that they are considering banning TikTok outright in the U.S. because of its Chinese ownership. After his comments, TikTok told Reuters it has never provided user data to China.

Starting point is 00:03:47 By the way, it took Instagram about five years to get a billion users. TikTok, they hit that milestone in just two years. I know, I know, you're a professional digital marketers. You don't just run one ad creative, you run lots, partly to A-B test and also partly to put different images out for different demographics. We do that at my agency all the time. Women in their 20s see an image of a woman in their 20s for their ad, while the same ad shows an elderly man to male users over 60. It's almost always effective, except it's been hampered by one limitation.

Starting point is 00:04:24 It really only works for paid media. It's almost always effective, except it's been hampered by one limitation. It really only works for paid media. It doesn't work for, say, your blog post on your brand's website. And I know, sure, there are CMS plugins that will try to figure out some demographic information and show different page elements to different people, like saying, hello Google user if they came from a Google search, or hello Canadian if their IP address is in Canada. But that's A, a lot of busy work, and B, it's never really been tied to people parameters, like age or gender or interests. See where I'm going with this?

Starting point is 00:04:56 Yes, now Adobe says that they have built a tool like that, one that uses AI to dynamically change page elements. The software can suggest different headlines, different stock images, and different preview texts for different audiences. This tool came from one of Adobe's hackathons, but 60%, 6-0, of the things built at those events end up making it into a final product of some kind. Quoting TechCrunch, the developer showed me a mocked-up blog for a tourism company where a single post about traveling to Australia could be presented differently to thrill-seekers,

Starting point is 00:05:33 frugal travelers, party-goers, and others. Human writers and editors can still edit the previews for each audience segment, and they can also consult a snippet quality score to see the details behind the recommendation. He also noted that the AI isn't changing the content itself, just the way the content is promoted on the main site. From a privacy perspective, Adobe says these audience personas are usually based on information that visitors have already opted to share with a brand or website. So your brand has a Google My Business profile.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Excellent. And you've filled out all the fields. Also excellent. And in the field that asks for a website link, you've put your brand's website, right? Maybe not so excellent. The SEO firm Sterling Sky did some tests recently and found that the link you choose to put in that field does have an impact on your position in the local pack. That's those Google business results that show up in a kind of carousel box at the top of the search results page.

Starting point is 00:06:41 They tested this with the profile of a personal injury law firm in New York City. Oh, and while we're here, can we just have a moment, law firms? Your branding sucks. This law firm in question, its name, I swear to God, this is the name of this law firm. Gare, Gare, Conison, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Herschenhorn, Steigman, and Makoff. Okay, anyway, back to the story. So Sterling Sky took one of the lawyer pages that wasn't ranking for any terms and changed the URL in their Google My Business profile to point to the law firm's bus accident page. Quoting Sterling Sky's blog post about the test, we picked this as the target due to how specific a niche it was and because the listing for the firm wasn't ranking for any of these terms currently. We didn't want to cannibalize existing traffic, which often happens with practitioner listings due to the filter. The results showed that the landing page did have an impact. The presence of bus accident

Starting point is 00:07:35 queries on the landing page content and in the URL increased the relevance for the listing and the ranking increased as a result. We repeated the test a second time on a different practitioner listing. This time we linked the listing to the bicycle accident page. We saw the same results a couple of weeks later, unquote. So it seems for businesses that qualify to have multiple listings, the web link that you put in Google My Business does have an impact on what keywords you will rank for, and maybe not an insignificant one. I watch a lot of YouTube videos about video games.

Starting point is 00:08:16 Just in the last day, I've watched Overwatch Healers, Bloodied Build Characters in Fallout 76, and Transit Tutorials for Cities Skylines. And all of these videos had one thing in common. They were all just over 10 minutes long. Why 10 minutes? Well, there's no study saying that that's the maximum attention span or anything. No, it's because YouTube would only turn on mid-roll ads for videos longer than 10 minutes. So if you made a video that was nine minutes long, it could get potentially much less revenue than one that you stretched out by just a minute.

Starting point is 00:08:57 And this is why YouTube is filled with videos that should be about four minutes long, but the creator spends the first six minutes telling you about what they're going to tell you about. Anyway, YouTube says starting in a couple of weeks, videos longer than eight minutes now will be eligible for mid-roll ads. For us digital marketers, this means more inventory, especially because YouTube says it will retroactively turn on mid-roll ads for all eligible videos. Even those videos where the creator previously opted out of mid-roll ads. In future uploads, we'll have mid-roll ads turned on by default. If you are a creator and mid-roll ads are not a good fit for your videos, you can indicate this in YouTube Studio by July 27th. After these changes, you will still be able to turn mid-rolls off or adjust the placement in each video, but you'll have to do it manually. And finally, in the wait-they're- this now department hootsuite has added some new metrics

Starting point is 00:09:49 to its analytics tool post level engagement on instagram's business account posts so now you're able to get numbers on post engagement impressions reach and so on say it with me friends wait they're just adding this now also sprout social was having an issue with its login page today, so if you were having a hard time logging in, it wasn't just you. And Japan has banned screaming on roller coasters because of the COVID-19 thing. Their advice? The single most terrifying sentence I have read all week. Please scream inside your heart.

Starting point is 00:10:21 Well, if you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show. People like Jamie Ian Hall in Canada who wrote, I listen to seven podcasts every morning. It gets me fired up and kicks my brain into high gear. A few months ago, I added this podcast and it has quickly moved up to the top of my list. With limited time, this is the podcast to listen to, and the premium content is great too. Thank you very much, Jamie. If you are getting value from this daily news podcast,

Starting point is 00:10:50 please consider paying it forward by reviewing this podcast as well. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. Our theme music is by Mark Blevis, ad sales by Podcorn. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 189: You’ll Love This Episode, [𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿] Person in Their [𝗔𝗴𝗲]s!

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