Today in Digital Marketing - How Robots That Call You 'Assface' Are The Future of Digital Marketing

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

NOW do you believe mobile is important?! How Google’s zero-click strategy is affecting your brand Who’s on Snapchat? Boomers, that’s who! And that top performing influencer isn’t what you think she is. The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Like this podcast? Click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can send out to your followers. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] Sources: https://www.pcgamer.com/does-fallout-4s-codsworth-know-your-name-check-this-list/ https://www.marketingdive.com/news/t-mobile-boosts-customer-acquisitions-400-with-personalized-videos/568222/ https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-winners-and-losers-of-black-friday-2019/568214/ https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/27/20985721/google-photos-tagging-manual-people-face-pictures https://www.jonloomer.com/2019/12/01/facebook-ads-automatic-translation https://hootsuite.com/whats-new https://wersm.com/report-virtual-influencers-get-nearly-3-times-better-engagement-rate-than-real-influencers/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Monday, December 2nd, 2019. Happy Chatham Islands anniversary, New Zealand. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, now do you believe mobile is important? How Google's zero-click strategy is affecting your brand? Who's on Snapchat? Boomers, that's who. And that top-performing influencer isn't what you think she is.

Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Well, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you'll know that I am quite obsessively into video games. And one of my wife and my favorite game is called Fallout. And so about four years ago, when Fallout 4 was announced, Jocelyn and I were glued to YouTube to watch the live reveal. And normally in video games, if other characters in the game address you, it's, hey, or you there, because they won't have recorded every possible name that you could have put in, right? Well, there's this moment in the Fallout 4 reveal where they're showing the game playoff and a robot butler suddenly says this.

Mr. Howard, Sean has been changed. Did you catch that? He says, Mr. Howard. Mr. Howard. Which at first I thought, oh, okay, I get it. My character's name is Howard. But no, explained the game director, whose name is Todd Howard. You heard Codsworth say my name.

That isn't for the demo. We actually have recorded around a thousand of the most popular names for him to say. And we were blown away. Characters in the game would call you by pretty much whatever you told it your name was. You could tell it your name was Assface, and the characters in the game would address you as that. And so, being the filthy digital marketer that I am, I thought, this has got to be a thing in our world. And now, it is.

Hi Nathan, thank you for using Magenta One. This is a personalized video ad from a very recent T-Mobile campaign that uses the customer's name. We're offering you some tips to help you get the most from our services. And those tips are personalized to each user. They appear on screen and are based on the package that the customer already has. By using Magenta One, you already take advantage of these great discounts. The discount being shown on the video here, again, is personalized to each customer based on loyalty and their existing package.

Not only that you get T-Mobile television, but see how much you can save. Did it work? Sure did. Customer acquisitions jumped by 400% with this campaign. T-Mobile used a technology from a company called the Adastra Group to pull it off. No word if the T-Mobile video will call you assface. Black Friday is behind us, thank God. And how did it all pan out?

Pretty well, most retailers report. But the really stunning numbers are in mobile penetration. This shouldn't come as a surprise, of course. Mobile has been dominating almost everything. But getting people to actually make the purchase on their phones instead of going back to a desktop machine for that purchase, has been a hurdle for some stores in previous years. Not this year, though. Sales from mobile devices jumped 17% this year, according to Salesforce. So now 65% of all e-commerce purchases on Black Friday came from a mobile device.

So if your store still somehow does not play nice with smartphones, stop playing this podcast right now and go fix that. The numbers were even higher on Shopify, by the way. Nearly seven out of 10 shoppers completed the purchase transaction on their phones. This has some ramifications on your desktop ad campaigns as well. Some digital marketers use mobile for top of funnel, like branding on Instagram, and maybe some mid funnel messaging like reviews or returns, but keep the actual sales push to desktop devices only, thinking that that's where they are going to come from. So knock that off. Oh, one more stat, purchase revenue from smartphones was 11% higher than purchase from desktops. If you use Facebook's Ads Manager a lot,

you may have noticed that they've improved their multiple languages function. Now it can provide automatic language translation for your ads. We have tested this with a handful of our clients here at EngageQ, and I have to say, it's been pretty solid in terms of results. John Loomer has a great blog post up on his site

about this with lots of step-by-step screenshots. There's a link to his post in this episode's description. By the way, John will be December's featured digital marketing pro for you premium subscribers. We will be chatting about how to identify top-performing campaigns and scale them the right way. The most common ad campaign mistakes that digital marketers make. And he will walk you through his very clever evergreen campaign tactic, which uses this series of custom audiences that kind of turn on and off at different parts of a prospect's journey within your brand story. Really, really, really clever use of custom audiences.

And I haven't really ever seen anyone else do it. So he will explain how that works. That's coming up in a couple of weeks on the premium feed. There is, of course, a whack of stuff there now, including a full description of how we handle the Facebook algorithmic repair at our agency, a deep dive into TikTok's organic algorithm with Michael Sanchez, plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies, and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail. You can click the link in this episode's description if you want to learn more about the premium episodes.

If you manage the social channels for your brand or client, here is another reason to make sure you have a comprehensive monitoring and engagement tool at your disposal. Google is now rolling out the ability for users to tag other accounts in their Google Photos images. This is similar to Instagram, where people can tag your brand, and then you review those to make sure that you're okay with the tag and the context. You do do that, right? Google's implementation will be a little bit different in that, for now at least, people will only be able to tag actual faces. You can't just tap anywhere in a photo and tag someone, which will

probably reduce the number of brand tags that we'll have to review, unless of course your brand is a person. Still though, something to start monitoring once your platform starts supporting that. Another thing that social media content managers need to keep on top of, your business listings in the search engines. The most important of which, of course, is Google My Business. A new study from Yext shows that consumers took 17% more actions on business listings compared to the previous year. So what is an action? That's clicking the call business button or the visit website button or requesting directions, that sort of thing. These business listings are all a part of Google's push to a zero-click search engine, or the visit website button, or requesting directions, that sort of thing. These business listings are all a part of Google's push to a zero-click search engine,

meaning they want users to get information they're searching for by literally just searching and seeing the answer on the search results page, instead of clicking another link to see that. In other words, zero clicks. And one consumer action in particular that's really spiking? Reviews. Reviews per business location grew 27% in the last year. And if you are in the financial services sector, your industry's review volume jumped 91%. So if you run social for your brand or your client, and you have not yet checked your Google My Business listing, it might be a good time to do that. Don't count Snapchat out yet in this new TikTok world.

New numbers from eMarketer show that Snapchat will have grown their user base by nearly 6% by the time December closes out. That's a lot better than 2018 where they lost 1.4% of their base. And where demographically is that growth occurring? The highest age group for growth, are you sitting down? Ages 55 to 64. So, welcome, boomers. Yeah, 13% growth in that range, and 12% growth for the ages 35 to 54 in fact all main age groupings will have grown the only one that has gone down is 18 to 24 year olds but even then only

by one-fifth of one percent down e-marketer predicts slowing but still positive growth for snapchat for the next four years. Okay, lightning round. Facebook's obviously getting spooked by the antitrust investigations going on and has started testing a tool that lets users copy all their Facebook images over to Google Photos. Hootsuite has improved some workflow stuff. Now within the inbox, you can approve replies sent to you and see the name of who replied to a specific messages. Honestly, it's a little strange it took them this long to get around to that.

Also, Hootsuite's ads interface now lets you indicate your campaign is in a special category like housing or jobs, which matches the self-service Facebook UI. And finally, this. Some new numbers are showing that virtual influencers have nearly three times the engagement rate of real influencers on Instagram. That is to say, real human beings, not virtual influencers who are computer-generated avatars that brands or agencies set up on Instagram.

Hype Auditor's study shows that robots are winning friends, and worse, more than a quarter of them don't even post as often as the human influencers. I, for one, welcome our new virtual influencer overlords. Well, that is it for today. If you value a fast-paced daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to it. It really does help. Follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Check out our agency at engageq.com and I will see you tomorrow.