Today in Digital Marketing - Beware the Phantom Digital Agency

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. 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.

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. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, did you just lose that RFP to a phantom agency?

Starting point is 00:01:05 A big Shopify bug is giving product managers headaches. Influencers are already in the metaverse, but who will control the ethical guidelines of virtual selling? Expert advice on running Facebook ads this quarter. And on the premium podcast with more stories, no ads and expert deep dive episodes. The perils of overstating your business hours on Google. It's Monday, January 17th, 2022. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I'm Todd Maffin from Engage Q Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 541. Terence Sautel owns a digital agency in Vancouver. Recently, he and his team bid on a big project.

Starting point is 00:01:46 Really big. They spent a lot of time on their RFP response. But when the phone call came... We were notified that we were not selected, which happens. Like, that's totally fine. Luckily, the organization offered Terrence and his team a postmortem. And during that meeting, we found out who won. And, you know, after doing some digging, I realized this agency was just a one person who just subcontracts to people or professionals and, you know, UX, UI, dev.

Starting point is 00:02:15 And the worst part is this wasn't a UX, UI design agency. They're very heavy marketing based on their website. Yes, Terrence's agency called GOAT lost out to what is essentially an agency that doesn't really exist, at least in the sense that the one-man shop doesn't even do the work he bid for and won. This kind of phantom organization is pretty easy to set up in our world and it can look pretty convincing. The pitch that they had was very strong and the people they presented were very strong. I'm like, did you look at their website or the history of this company? And they go, oh, no, we didn't do that. We just based it on the proposal. I'm like, well, you're asking for a website. You think you'd look at the website. If you are agency side, there's not a lot you can do other than try to educate the buyers. But if you are a buyer, Terrence has some suggestions to making sure you don't get caught up in this trap. I think the big one is

Starting point is 00:03:07 how many full-time staff do they actually have? If you see a lot of collaborators, contractors, partners, you start using these words that isn't employee, that's a flag to me. I think as a business, I take a lot of pride in the fact that I have, I provide, you know, full-time salary, well-paying roles for people. Uh, and we take a lot of risk as business owners, but benefits and, you know, taxes, there's a lot of, a lot of risk to that. And a lot of people and agencies don't take that risk. They, they know that it's risky and they'd rather, you know, stretch margins out by hiring risk. They, they know that it's risky and they'd rather, you know, stretch margins out by hiring contractors. Well, where's the cohesiveness

Starting point is 00:03:48 of the team? Where's the camaraderie that stuff. So I think that's a big flag. Um, I think another flag when you're trying to evaluate, you know, proposals is, are they, are they spending more time talking about outcomes and not about how it's going to happen. It's really easy to come up with, like, we want it to be fully accessible or, you know, we want it to be, you know, have certain page load speed levels. Like there are certain levels of front end quality. But if they're not talking about, if they can't talk to how they're going to do that i'm not saying you have to like ask the company to try to come up with the whole strategy before taking the project on that's impossible um but uh there is they can talk to their expertise or talk

Starting point is 00:04:39 about other projects there's other ways to do that so i think those are two two pretty classic ones terence autel is the founder and strategy director at Goat. You can learn more about them at meetgoat.com. So what are your ad accounts looking like so far this quarter? If your results are down, you're not alone. To help you out, Foxwell Digital worked with some top ad buyers to figure out what's working for them and what you can do today to get back to positive ROAS. They did a very detailed post on their blog, which is at foxweildigital.com slash blog.

Starting point is 00:05:15 So, quoting from their piece. First, consider defaulting to CBO, that's campaign-based optimization, when you first launch new testing campaigns, as the Facebook algorithm tends to know more than we do about the target audience. Then, once data and learnings have had time to settle in, try switching to or implementing ABO and ad set spending limits on both ceilings and floors. Two, interest stacks. We know larger audiences are working better, but instead of lumping all your interests together, try segmenting them by persona while still stacking similar interests. Three, creative testing. Still important. Reels and TikTok videos are taking over the world right now, so don't be afraid to make a

Starting point is 00:05:56 quick cut, low-quality iPhone video of your product with a voiceover, or even the awful robot voice, and run in all placements, not just Reels. Also try static image graphics with text overlay of a bold statement, or the two to five words that the customer should take away from your ad, if that's all they see. Canva will be your friend for this. And four, Reels-only placements. For a minute, when this placement first launched, we saw insanely low CPMs, and insanely low purchasing intent, CTR, and conversion rate. However, you may want to try these again as we're seeing lower

Starting point is 00:06:32 CPMs in other placements and we're seeing profitability and higher CTRs and CVRs across the board for Reels-only placements with Reels TikTok specific video creative. Bonus points if the video is a trending audio or voiceover that is impactful and entertaining to your target customer. Unquote. So there were four of the items in the blog post. There's actually 11. Very detailed. Definitely worth a read. Check it out at foxweldigital.com slash blog. electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. 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.C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:07:46 fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Reports today say a nasty bug in Shopify's API is passing incorrect sales data to third-party data connectors like Supermetrics. Quoting Supermetrics here, We've noticed some discrepancies with sales data figures being passed through our Shopify connector. Shopify's technical experts have uncovered a bug in Shopify's Graph API that is causing this problem. The API may occasionally return correct sales data for a certain time

Starting point is 00:08:33 frame while returning incorrect data for other time frames. Our teams are partnering with Shopify to ensure this situation is resolved as soon as possible, unquote. So if you suddenly made a million bucks in your store today, maybe hold off on the bubbly for a couple of days. Influencers may be leading the way into virtual worlds. The majority of social media influencers polled in a recent study claim they are already working in the metaverse, and 72% say they are considering or are already making money in the virtual world. This study is by IZEA Worldwide. Here's why they say marketers

Starting point is 00:09:13 need to start thinking about developing their brand strategy for entering the metaverse. 72% of social media users and 90% of influencers support brand sponsorship in the virtual world. 73% of respondents who have played VR games have seen sponsorships. And 42% remember the brand names. Here's a scary thought. 70% of influencers believe the metaverse will eventually replace social media. But are we really there yet? What is holding consumers back? 20% of consumers are waiting for VR technology to become more affordable, and 12% are waiting for VR technology

Starting point is 00:09:51 to improve before they join the metaverse. If you're wondering where to invest your money, here are the top activities for consumers in the metaverse. 68% will join for gaming, 53% for exercising, and 48% want to use it for watching media. The study surveyed just over 1,000 American internet users aged 18 and up. With social media influencers apparently leading the way into the metaverse, the company that wants to own the space says it's the perfect organization to establish the ethical boundaries there. Yes, Facebook's parent company, Meta, says it's currently working with developers to establish clearer boundaries on its apps to avoid things like deepfakes. Take this example.

Starting point is 00:10:40 We all know virtual influencers are coming. Hell, they're already here. AI-generated, animated, and incredibly lifelike personas selling and promoting products. In the metaverse, this AI influencer will be able to do a lot more than in a normal video. Speak a different language. Do a backflip.

Starting point is 00:10:57 That kind of thing. In addition to creating synthesized versions of real people, the technology has been used to create deepfakes, where a false representation of a real person is designed to misinform viewers. Deep Tom Cruise, for example, is a digital deepfake on TikTok. The days are early yet,

Starting point is 00:11:15 and there's much to explore in this space, but is Meta the right company to establish what's real and how digital characters can be used? Color me unconvinced. Google has done a bit of catch-up, and the Google Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google's good page experience criteria.

Starting point is 00:11:39 Previously, this was only available for mobile. This new report offers metrics like the percentage of URLs with a good page experience over time and search impressions so you can access performance data quickly. This will be very useful for analysis as page experience will be a ranking factor on desktop beginning next month. YouTube wants to help more creators land branded content deals and help brands gain a better understanding of who to collaborate with. The company revealed a new feature that will be rolling out to creators in the next few months called Media Kit.

Starting point is 00:12:14 Media Kit will be available through the Brand Connect tab and will help creators pitch themselves to businesses by providing a shareable summary that will give advertisers insight into their audiences. The data will provide channel audience and viewer stats, including subscribers, unique viewers, average watch time per clip, and so on. Additional insights, including demographics and audience interest, will also be included in the report. A BrandConnect partner brand will then be able to search this information, and a channel manager will be able to download the listing in PDF format.

Starting point is 00:12:50 Don't forget the premium podcast feed is just like this, but with more stories, no ads, expert deep dive episodes on the weekends and chapters. So you can jump right to the story you're interested in while listening. More info at todayindigital.com slash premium feed. So last week, after reducing our agency's website to a single page, which by the way, I have to say felt very, very, very good and also updated it to reflect what we've been doing for the last six years. Let's not talk about it. I did the same in my own personal website, which I don't really use. I did a long time ago when I was a professional keynote speaker and was doing like 30, 40 conferences a year. You need a big website, but I don't do that anymore. Happily.

Starting point is 00:13:30 So I scaled that back to one page and it also feels good. So if you're curious, you want to see it. It's at ToddMaffin.com. T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N.com. It's very little there really. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Beware the Phantom Digital Agency

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