Today in Digital Marketing - How Long Will Digital Agency Offices Stay Empty?

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, do they stay or do they go back? The question agencies are facing now.

Starting point is 00:01:06 While you might be doing LinkedIn posts all wrong, which platform has more staying power for consumer trends? And you might want to sit down for this. Facebook is removing even more data from marketers. It's Tuesday, September 21st, 2021. Happy Independence Day, Malta. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 472. It's been a rough few months for marketing agencies. Besides the usual, social ad campaigns

Starting point is 00:01:38 all messed up because of Apple's restrictions, and gearing up for the holiday season, you know. But this time, it's even more difficult. When the pandemic started, many agencies moved their teams out of the office. Now that things are settling back into place, at least in some countries, agencies are having to decide what to do with these people. Do they stay a remote operation? Does everyone come back like the old days? Or something in the middle? The mega-agency Publicis Group planned to return to their offices earlier this month,

Starting point is 00:02:09 but after the highly contagious Delta variant became a factor, those plans have been backed off from. It's not just pandemic-related reasons either. Sometimes it's just financial. Quoting Marketing Dive, The Tony Manhattan office has historically been a staple of ad agencies, an association enshrined by media touchstones like Mad Men. Quoting Marketing Dive, new business. One of the key arguments in favor of preserving a physical presence is around company culture and collaboration. But as the pandemic stretches on with no clear finish line, some are more skeptical of how necessary an office is to achieving those goals, unquote. Yeah, I mean,

Starting point is 00:02:58 we were pretty fortunate when March happened, the beginning of the pandemic, we were six months left in our lease. Terrence Sautel is the founder and strategy director at GOAT, a design and development agency in Vancouver. He spoke with me earlier this afternoon. It was a blessing and a curse in the sense that we had to make a decision quickly. And personally, I never wanted to have a remote team. So it was kind of a forced hand. That being said, I'm glad it happened because it pushed us into being a little bit more lean and adapting processes to work within a remote environment. Now that everything's slowly opening back up, conversations happen again. Funny enough, there hasn't been a lot of desire to go back to an

Starting point is 00:03:34 office. For a couple of reasons, we started hiring nationally. So we've got a project manager in Belleville, Ontario. We've got a developer in Nova Scotia. Those staff would feel alienated, feeling that, you know, if there was an office in Vancouver, you know, for our seven staff here, you know, they're missing out. Much of what's making this a hard decision for the industry is the effect a lack of an expensive lease is having on the bottom line. Most of the big ad holding groups returned to growth this year, a handful even beating their pre-pandemic net profits. One expert Marketing Dive quoted in their piece today thinks the smaller shops will be more likely

Starting point is 00:04:10 to return to the office since they don't have to worry about real estate investments of multiple locations. As for Terrence, he's made a decision for his agency. We're going to stay remote. You know, I think selfishly I'm sad about that decision because I really relish those times where you work with your team and you're beside them. But that being said, the team overwhelmingly was pushing to continue the way we are and work on process. You can learn more about Terrence's agency at meetgoat.com. Some interesting data for you B2B marketers who rely on LinkedIn to get your message out. New research from Lightspan Digital has found that text posts without links perform better than those with links. There is one exception to this, job posts.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Those do better with the link there. The study analyzed the likes, comments, and shares on about 86,000 LinkedIn posts across 883 different company pages. But what about if you throw images into the post? In that case, the average engagement rate is 70% higher for those without links. This is becoming a truism across all social platforms. And it makes sense from their point of view if you think about it. Why would platforms encourage you to have people leave their site? So a few people have started putting the link as the first comment in the post. But that's a very few. Only about one-fifth

Starting point is 00:05:35 of one percent of the posts analyzed did that. As for what type of post will get the most engagement, on LinkedIn, that's an image post, followed by video posts and job posts. From business marketing to consumer marketing now, and Pinterest today releasing its latest overview of the main key trends gaining traction there. A bit of context. This is actually tied to their Pinterest Predicts report, which came out last December, went over 30 different trends that Pinterest thought would become bigger movements this year based on engagement and how many people were searching for those terms. How did they do? They got a B plus, basically, saying they got about 80% right. This is part of an effort to

Starting point is 00:06:21 promote their Pinterest Trends tool, which is very similar to Google Trends, if you know that app. Some examples that social media today quoted on how brands have used that data, quote, Buick created a campaign around the Little Moments of Big Love trend, based on research that people on Pinterest are celebrating even the smallest occasions, and tapping into the insight that people were hosting movie nights under the stars. The campaign exceeded benchmarks with 74% higher video completion rate compared to automotive industry benchmarks. And Dawn took advantage of the rising trend, Bland is Banned, and launched a trend package based on the Spiced Up Recipe spike,

Starting point is 00:07:00 resulting in 24% more efficient CPMs than the household benchmark, unquote. Pinterest says the trends that pop up on their platform have more staying power. Quoting the company, most trends on the internet last about six months and then fade out. But not on Pinterest. Here, trends sustain monthly growth more than 20% longer than trends on the rest of the internet. In other words, they're not just a flash in the pan, which means brands and creators who feature those trends

Starting point is 00:07:28 benefit from content with a longer lifespan, unquote. You can check out Pinterest's Trends tool at trends.pinterest.com. 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,

Starting point is 00:07:58 and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Twitter has expanded its official partner program to include seven more third-party providers that can enhance your marketing efforts on the platform. They are Black Swan, which has consumer intelligence data. Bloomberg, which will provide what they call actionable signals in strategic analysis. No, I have no idea what they're actually offering.

Starting point is 00:08:27 HootSuite gets access to more official tweet data tools. Listen First is an analytics tool. Meltwater is a media monitoring platform that now gets direct access to Twitter's data. NetBase Quiz, an analytics and market data provider. And TalkWalker, also a social analytics platform. In a move that I don't think will surprise anyone who is a regular listener here, Facebook is apparently testing removing some data that marketers have relied on. I know, shocker, right?

Starting point is 00:09:06 The test removes your ability to see the names of people who have viewed your brand's stories. You'll only see their name if they react or comment on it. And to be fair, I don't think many brands check this data at all. It's not in the API, so you can't find it through any third-party tools. There's not really any marketing value to it. You can't download a list of users and use it in targeting. Thus, this is probably less about a change to marketing data and probably more a wider approach to privacy and mental well-being, for which they should be applauded and not mocked mercilessly by some D-list marketing podcast host. Who put that in the script? Google has added a nice little touch on its Gmail app on Android. You can now filter email and search results faster.

Starting point is 00:09:50 Search filters can be used independently or post-search. You choose from filtering options from dropdowns. For example, you can type a query and further narrow results by selecting search filters like from, colleague's name, or a specific time frame. This has started to roll out to the Android mobile app now and should be to you folks by the end of next month at the latest. And finally, potheads rejoice. Amazon says it has reinstated employment eligibility for you. The company says former employees and applicants that were penalized for failing marijuana screenings can now be considered for you. The company says former employees and applicants that were penalized for failing marijuana screenings

Starting point is 00:10:25 can now be considered for jobs. Cannabis is legal everywhere in Canada. In the US it's a little more complicated. It's legal in 18 states, but only under state jurisdiction. The federal government there still considers it an illegal drug. No, I

Starting point is 00:10:42 don't understand that whole setup either. But apparently it opens the door to a whole lot of people. More than you think. Inside Ecommerce today reported that Amazon believes this will boost applications by 400%. Christina works in a boutique digital agency in Vancouver. Louisa is in Qatar about to start a marketing role with a government organization. Ian is a marketing specialist at an apparel brand in the U.S. Midwest.

Starting point is 00:11:15 Kyle works at a crisis PR firm in Washington, D.C. Just four of the people who have joined our Slack community in the last 24 hours. It is completely free for now. More on that in a moment. Thank you. to make the Slack community a paid community in 2022. So now is the chance to get in, because if you're in before we flip that switch, you will be grandfathered. You'll get it for free forever. So again, todayindigital.com slash Slack,

Starting point is 00:11:55 or tap the link in the episode notes. Also, by the way, if you are on the free newsletter, you get it every Friday, you may have discovered that yesterday you probably got the premium newsletter. I accidentally clicked the wrong button and everybody got it instead of just the premium people. So if you're on the free weekly list, don't worry. You have not been switched over. And if you're not on the free weekly list, you could benefit from my mistakes. Not only will you get an issue every Friday at no cost at all, every

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Today in Digital Marketing - How Long Will Digital Agency Offices Stay Empty?

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