Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 13 — British Grannies Who Like Chuck Norris (Ep 214)

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Facebook removes more than 1,000 ad-targeting categories Be protected. Be Zen. and loyal customers who left you during the pandemic lockdowns. It's Thursday, August 13th, 2020. Happy International Left-Handers Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. One of the things that makes Facebook's ad platform so strong is its interest targeting.

Starting point is 00:01:00 If you want to target British grannies who have an interest in Chuck Norris, you can. By the way, I just checked that very search in Audience Insights. There are about a thousand British grannies who have an interest in Chuck Norris, in case you're curious. But as of this week, you will have fewer interests to add to your campaigns. Facebook announcing they are removing more than a thousand ad targeting options because either nobody really used them much or they essentially duplicated other interests. Of course, they didn't provide us with a full list

Starting point is 00:01:30 of those thousand interests, but they did say they're pulling multicultural affinity segments out. So if that's a grouping that you use in your campaigns, they recommend you infer that group now using options like language or culture. Also gone, the ability to combine options that will get you military bases as a targetable category. They say just use the broad military interest instead, which isn't quite as good as military bases if that's what you're trying to target. I mean, I'll bet half of the teenage Call of Duty video game players are thrown into the military interests bucket. A couple of years ago, they pulled about 5,000 interest categories because they found people were using them in a discriminatory

Starting point is 00:02:16 manner. Oh, and a little personal side note here. There was a time when you could create a custom audience containing just one person. If you had that person's email address and it matched on Facebook's side, you could run ad campaigns to just one person. I did that with this girl that I was dating. I ran ads to her for about a month. Did it work? Conversion ratio 100%. Jocelyn and I have been happily married for about seven years now.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Well, we knew the good times wouldn't last. When the pandemic lockdown started, many brand advertisers put their campaigns on hold. And the digital ad market is an auction. So fewer advertisers means cheaper CPMs. CPMs which are now creeping back up. No, actually not creeping, racing. A huge spike in the average Facebook CPM was noticed by the performance agency within. They publish what they're seeing in the market on their website, and according to their numbers, at the start of this month, Facebook desktop CPMs were nearly double what they were at the start of last August.

Starting point is 00:03:30 Facebook mobile is also up year over year. It's up around 20% right now, but that was nearly 60% up just a week or two ago. If you're looking for a bargain on the Facebook platform, Instagram might be your best choice. CPMs there have been less than the same period last year, ever since early March or so. There was one brief spike mid-April when it was more than mid-April of 2019, but that blip disappeared pretty quickly. The last measurements they have are from the first week of this month. The Instagram feed is about 20% cheaper than last August, and Instagram stories almost 40% cheaper. So you have been listening to this podcast for a couple of months.

Starting point is 00:04:13 You keep up on the industry's blogs. You subscribe to a couple of newsletters. You probably know then that one of the most important things you can do for your brand's website to improve your Google ranking is to speed it up. The faster your company's website loads, the better its Google position. And you probably know and have hopefully used Google's PageSpeed Insights, a free tool that will show you how fast your site is. And you run your site and it came back with a failing grade. And you stared at the screen and thought, I could have sworn we were faster than this. Well, friend, you are not alone.

Starting point is 00:04:49 A new study from SEO toolmaker Screaming Frog found that only about 13% of websites scored a passing grade on the core web vitals. Yikes. The core web vitals are actually three metrics. One measures how fast your content loads. The other measures how fast people can interact with a web page after landing on it. And the last measures how often your website's layout jumps around. The study found that most web pages take more than two and a half seconds to load and do jump around a little bit.

Starting point is 00:05:22 So there you go. More work for you to do. Some interesting upgrades to the marketing tools on LinkedIn's Sales Navigator platform. One of the tools, Buyer Interest Alerts. These will notify you when an employee or leader at a company you're tracking has engaged with your brand's LinkedIn page

Starting point is 00:05:43 or your website. And a new outreach listing in its lead lists. This gives you a kind of dashboard overview of all of your LinkedIn activity with each content. So that's connection requests and mail messages, that kind of thing. They've also upgraded their CRM integration for Sales Navigator, making it easier for you to get your contacts into it. Sales Navigator isn't exactly cheap, but if you are doing high-level B2B marketing and trying to connect with decision makers, it might be worth kicking the tires. Your third-party social media tool

Starting point is 00:06:17 should be adding more Twitter features soon. Twitter Today rolled out its new API. That's the backend platform that lets developers access Twitter's features. And when there's new features in an API, that means that third-party tools, like Sprout Social or Agorapulse or Hootsuite or Buffer, they can all use those too. And that's great news because until now, Twitter has kept a lot of the cool stuff only on its own platform. You want to schedule a poll on your brand's Twitter account? Nope, not from your platform of choice, you can't. You want to schedule a poll on your brand's Twitter account?

Starting point is 00:06:45 Nope, not from your platform of choice. You can't. You want to pin a tweet? Got to do that on the main Twitter site. So the API is out now. Of course, it's going to take some time for the developers at your tool of choice to figure out the new code, build it in, test it, and release it. These things usually take about a month or two. But when the big platforms add this stuff, you will hear about it first, right here. Last year, brand marketers were having a great time. Studies were showing that consumers were becoming more brand loyal, getting in with one brand and sticking with them through thick and thin. This was especially great because, as I'm sure you know, it's usually cheaper to get a sale from an existing customer than from a new one.

Starting point is 00:07:28 And then... A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world... Since COVID-19 has arrived, there's been a shift, and not for the better. A recent report from McKinsey has found that brand loyalty is not as rock-solid as it used to be. More than 75%

Starting point is 00:07:45 of consumers have tried new brands or new places to shop or new ways to shop. The main reason? Their usual preferred products that they were loyal to just weren't available during the lockdowns. So they checked out the alternatives and in some cases found better prices or better service. If you are looking for a way to get some of that lost loyalty back, the study suggests improving your return processes and making your website easier to navigate. Both of those were cited as to why they were leaving brands they used to be loyal to. So have you watched any Instagram Reels yet? You know, Instagram's copy of TikTok? Do you even know how to watch Instagram Reels?

Starting point is 00:08:30 Like literally, where in Instagram's app is the Reels section? I mean the view the Reels section, not the make a Reels section. That's one of the things that TikTok's app was great at. Open the app, the videos are right there. But on Instagram? Really, think about it. Like, where is the Reels section? It turns out it's in Instagram Explore.

Starting point is 00:08:51 That's the tab under the magnifying glass icon. You wouldn't know it when you go there, because that just takes you to the regular old Explore tab with photos and a handful of videos. It's only when you scroll down will you find one or two vertical videos in there with the word Reels above it. It's a horrible way in, and it seems like Instagram is now realizing that too. People are reporting seeing a test in their Instagram app where that search icon has been replaced with a video icon, and instead of the explore grid, it's a scrollable list of videos. All videos, mind you, including Reels and IGTV previews.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Oh, and every third video, an ad. Instagram says they're also planning to test a separate tab just for Reels. My guess is until they do that, most people won't even know Reels is in there. And speaking of TikTok, they are now rolling out globally something that a handful of people have had for a couple of months now, the ability to create a thumbnail with text so you can make your thumbnail look a little bit more, you know, YouTube-y. And finally, the popular web chat system Intercom has added a few improvements. First, they will let you drop the old email-based ticketing system and the messenger-based support tool if you want to. The new features include more efficient workflows for Intercom's automated agent to collect information and prioritize issues, including identifying emergencies. And they've added 12 new reporting metrics.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Yes, it's International Left-Handers Day. About 10% of the world's population are lefties. Of the last six U.S. presidents, three were lefties, Obama, Clinton, and Bush Sr. Also in the club, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and Leonardo da Vinci. Our Slack group keeps on growing. About 40 digital marketers in there now, including a social media manager of a political party, a real estate agent, a Salesforce-focused marketer, the marketing manager for a major sports team, a media buyer at an ad agency in Texas. Thank you. episode notes. Starting soon, exclusive longer form content that you will only find in the Slack

Starting point is 00:11:06 group. Follow me on social media. All my links are in the notes as well. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. matter where you might be and i smiled and i sat for a while watching people go by and just thinking about it could it be there's a dream of a team and it's all for somebody like me

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 13 — British Grannies Who Like Chuck Norris (Ep 214)

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