Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 18 — All Your Beer Memes Are Belong to Us (Ep 217)

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

Consumers are more willing today to give you some of their personal information, if you know what to ask for. Plus: Google is poised to show the public how fast your brand’s web site is… Facebook doubles down on its TikTok clone… and I reveal the numbers behind this podcast’s ad campaigns — you are not going to believe which platform has the lowest CPC. JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: http://TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: ratethispodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: TodayInDigital.com/scripts • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • Instagram: instagram.com/todmaffin • TikTok: tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, better fix up your website before Chrome starts ratting you out to your visitors. Microsoft wants to give your brand free ads on Bing. Anheuser-Busch wants to own all your beer memes. And why today's cleverest digital marketing campaign includes the word butthole. It's Tuesday, August 18th, 2020. Happy Helium Discovery Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. We spent a lot of time on that blog post.

You put all the right keywords in. You ran it by your marketing head, then legal. You got all the image alt tags done, and you hit publish. Nice work. Except one thing. You may have ignored perhaps the single most important part of putting a blog post out there. And that is its actual readability. Have you matched your writing to the way people read?

After all, only 16% of people who visit your website will read your content word for word. The rest will scan it. So, you should be writing your brand's content to be scannable, not necessarily readable. A study from 1997, which, by the way, is still absolutely valid today, is making the rounds on Twitter this week. Here are some of the important things to consider. Pick out the most important words every sentence or two

and highlight those words, either through a color or by bolding or italicizing it. Use meaningful subheadings, not clever ones. If there's more than three items, use a bulleted list. Use the inverted pyramid form of writing

where the most important part is at the start and aim for about half the word count or less than you would for conventional writing. The study also found that users hated your promotional writing with boastful claims like hottest ever or award winning. Yes, the study is a bit old, but the way people read online hasn't changed. In fact, I would argue since then it's gotten even more important

to write concisely. You'll find a link to the full study in the show notes. One big change on the web since 1997, website security, and specifically secure web pages, pages that send their data in encrypted form. You can spot those easily. They use the HTTPS prefix, not the HTTP prefix. When these pages first came out, website administrators put them on any page that requested private information, like your banking info or credit card number. These days, though, most large brand websites are secure on all their pages. That just comes by default. Even the website builder I use for this podcast has every page secure,

but there are still some smaller brands out there who haven't made the switch. Or their web pages are secure, but their forms are not. If this is you, you should be aware that the next version of the Chrome browser will pop up a very scary warning message for your users when they try to complete a form. It says, the information you're about to submit is not secure. Because the site is using a connection that's not completely secure, your information will be visible to others. Yikes! The fix? Tell your website administrator to fully migrate the forms on your website to HTTPS because that error message would be a huge conversion killer. Still on your brand's website for a moment, remember last week I reported that WordPress 5.5

was coming out and that you should probably wait for 5.51 before upgrading, because big releases like that tend to break a lot of things. Well, 5.5 broke a lot of things. Maybe as many as 10,000 websites, according to Search Engine Journal. There seemed to be a couple of issues. First, this version dropped support for a JavaScript library that caused a bunch of old legacy plugins to fail. And second, there's now some kind of glitch with pagination. So the first one, the JavaScript library in question is called jQuery migrate.

The purpose of that code is to help older code function on WordPress. Older code found in older plugins usually. Well, the problem with old code is that it often has security vulnerabilities that are not patched out. So WordPress 5.5 shipped entirely without that library. And that caused all those old plugins to stop working. Some of those old plugins were pretty popular, though. One is a classic editor, which was used by people who hated the new block editor, so that doesn't work anymore. Not really WordPress's fault, to be honest. If you're a plugin developer, you're sort of expected to keep your code up to date, and as the website administrator for a brand, you're sort of expected to get the updated versions of your plugins.

For now, WordPress has released a plugin to restore that library, but it won't be around forever, so if your website broke with 5.5, maybe spend this time looking for a replacement for your old legacy plugin that broke it. And second, apparently pagination is failing on some sites. Those are the navigational page numbers at the bottom of a multi-page document. Apparently, this is because of a conflict in the use of the word page in the code. WordPress's next bug release should fix that one. Google did it first, and now Bing has done it. Free product listings for you in its search engine. Quoting a Microsoft announcement today, product listings allow you to promote your

product offers for free on the Bing Shopping tab, starting in the US and soon rolling out to other markets, the UK, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. Product listings are currently offered to those who already have a Microsoft Merchant Center store with approved offers and will launch with a small volume of traffic this month with a gradual increase over the next month.

So if you are already a Microsoft Shopping Campaigns customer, you don't actually have to do anything. All your products will be automatically opted into this. If for some reason you'd rather not get that free traffic, there is a checkbox that says Show Free Product Listings. You can turn that off in the Settings page of your Merchant Center store. I don't know why you'd do that, but whatever.

One thing to know, reporting will not be immediately available for these free ads, but Microsoft says they do plan to have basic reporting, including clicks and impressions, available in the fall. One more reason to use product feeds, even if you only sell a handful of things. If you are in the political space and market a party or candidate, you might be interested to know that Facebook this week upgraded its ads library in anticipation of the upcoming American elections. They will now show what other advertisers have run ads with a shared

paid-for-by disclaimer in each political ad listings. Those new listings will now show which organizations paid for the ads. Also, this is kind of fun, there's a new widget that you can put on your website if you want to show your users a real-time Facebook ad spending tracker for U.S. presidential candidates. The marketing world has always been a little, shall we say, creative with its job titles. You've seen them, haven't you? Director of Awesome, VP of Happiness, Information Sherpa, Brand Warrior,

and pretty much anything that ends with the word guru. We'll add one more to the list, and you can thank the marketing team at the beer brand Anheuser-Busch. They are looking for a new CMO. No, not Chief Marketing Officer. Chief Meme Officer. You'll have a pretty big canvas to paint on. This is for a relatively new brand, Bud Light Seltzer, which only launched this past January. The job is more of a marketing stunt than a real job, of course,

though apparently it will pay $5,000 a month. It is only a three-month gig, though, and you'll have to create at least 10 memes a week. But worse, and no one's really been talking about this in the coverage that I saw today about this meme job, but Anheuser-Busch is being a little shady about it all. In order to apply, you have to create some free spec work and give it to them. Like literally, you have to make a meme and upload it as part of the application process. A process governed by a lengthy terms and conditions in which you will find the text, all submitted ideas disclosed or offered to us by you shall become the exclusive property of Anheuser-Busch. Maybe one day we'll live in a world where creative people aren't expected to give their work away for free.

Apparently today is not that day. So here's a special kind of genius marketing idea happening right now. There is a new Battle Royale video game out. If you're not familiar with the format, Battle Royale games take about 100 players and they all compete to stay alive in the game. The last one standing wins. Until now, nearly all these games have been shooters.

You and 99 others are dropped on a map with no weapons. You have to run around and find weapons and armor and kill other people until hopefully you have gotten to the end. But there's a new version of this out called Fall Guys. And instead of shooting people, you play a series of cartoonish mini-games. And if you lose in any of these mini-games, you are out of the game, and like the shooters, the last one alive wins.

I have won one Battle Royale game in my life, and I will tell you, it was one of the best experiences I've had in gaming. So anyway, back to the marketing thing and Fall Guys. The players are all represented as little colorful cartoon beans. And yesterday, the game developer launched a two-week Battle of the Brands event. The brand that donates the most amount of money to the charity that the developers have selected

will win the ability to brand one of these player characters in-game. I mean, if you're a brand that caters to gamers, having some little bean with your logo running around all the time is pretty good, right? Lots of brands thought so. The company behind the game Warframe

put $20,000 into the pot. Then a hosting company bid about $39,000. And then another brand bid $40,000 and one cent. That brand was a bidet company. And their tweet read $40,000 and one cent and the best design submission you'll receive. And attached to their tweet was a mock-up of how they wanted their character to appear if won. No, no logo, just plain text across the chest of the bean reading, Ask me about my butthole. Sadly, they will not be in the running.

The current high bidder is an esports brand at more than $130,000 donation. But hey, we're only on day two of a 14-day bidding campaign. The best tweet of all came today from the developers of Fall Guys, who tweeted, Shout out to all the community managers out there that are having really awkward meetings today with their higher-ups about why they should put their logo on a bean in a video game for $130,000. LOL. And a couple of small items to wrap up. First, Google seems to be showing a

bugged map in the local knowledge panel section in Google search. It does show a map, but not anywhere near the business in question. It's not happening on all listings, but it has been for some for a few days now. Also, earlier today, Squarespace was having some problems previewing templates. That should be fixed now. And news today came that the latest company apparently vying to buy TikTok's operation in four countries, the old school database company and current cloud computing darling, Oracle. It is Helium Discovery Day. Back in the mid-19th century, scientists were trying to understand the chemical composition of the sun. So in 1868, a French astronomer went to India to catch an eclipse.

That day, using a prism, he found a yellow light that at first he thought, well, this is sodium, but no, it turned out to be helium. The scientific community did not believe him. It took 30 years, and the discovery of helium on Earth before people were like, okay, this is a thing. Today, of course, we use helium in MRI

scanners. We use it for arc welding, for determining the age of rocks. And you've probably heard, we are running out. Some scientists believe the planet will run out of helium in as soon as 25 years. So maybe skip the pretty floaty balloons next time we're all allowed to gather for a birthday. My apologies for getting this out later than usual. As I mentioned yesterday, we are onboarding a couple of new clients over here at our agency, so things are a little busier than usual.

But hey, new clients, good thing, right? Join our Slack community. It's free. It's at todayindigital.com slash slack. You can tap the link in this episode's notes too if you like. I'm Todd Mathen. Talk to you tomorrow. Remember when we used to say

Take it all our cares away Back in the good old days Talk to you tomorrow.