Today in Digital Marketing - Idiot Sandwich

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, YouTube's new AI bots may break your brand's website, Be protected. Be Zen. it on the most unlikely of social networks. It's Thursday, October 1st, 2020. Happy Independence Day, Nigeria. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by the Keep Optimizing podcast. Bit of a shorter episode today, but we start with some changes announced by YouTube this afternoon that may cause your brand's embedded videos to stop working. If you use YouTube as your brand's video hosting provider and you embed those videos on your organization's website, this applies to you. It's all tied to changes that they are making to

Starting point is 00:01:18 age-restricted videos. From now on, if your video is age-restricted, that is to say you've told it only people 18 and older can watch it, those embeds won't work anymore. Instead, visitors will be redirected to YouTube, where your visitor will have to sign in with a Google account to confirm their age. And while you might think this doesn't apply to you because you haven't set any videos to be age-restricted, well, here's change number two. YouTube is going to start automatically turning age restriction on certain videos when their AI thinks the video isn't appropriate for a younger audience.

Starting point is 00:01:54 AI is, of course, mediocre at best. Anyone who's had a perfectly on-policy ad campaign rejected by Facebook knows that. While Facebook's AI has banned this podcast's page from advertising for no apparent reason, the appeal was also apparently handled by AI. I was in touch with eight Facebook reps over the better part of a year, and not a single one could even tell me if a human being ever reviewed what the AI thought it saw. So keep a close eye on your embedded videos, I guess.

Starting point is 00:02:24 Or perhaps easier, you can check your YouTube studio. Also, YouTube is expanding age verification in Europe by requiring people to send a photo of government-issued ID or a credit card to prove they're over 18 if their systems think they're not. Systems run by, of course, AI. Back in the old days of digital marketing, SEO was simple. There was Google, and Google had an index, and you were trying to rank higher in that index.

Starting point is 00:02:59 Today, though, SEO isn't one thing, but many. There's regular SEO, there's video SEO, local SEO. And these days, more attention is being paid to one very visible part of Google that most people don't even think about trying to optimize, and that's P-A-A-S-E-O. P-A-A. That's People Also Ask. You've seen this on Google, of course. When I googled why are AI bots bad,

Starting point is 00:03:24 the top three results were, number one, an ad, number two, an organic result, and number three, a PAA box. Inside that box, four questions. They were, what are the negatives of artificial intelligence? Are bots considered AI? Can AI make mistakes? And what are the benefits and risks of AI? You click a question, it expands out,

Starting point is 00:03:46 it gives you a little chunk of what it thinks is the answer based on text that it found on a website. And at the bottom of that chunk, a link to that website. In other words, optimizing for the question could drive your listing into the top three results. And new research from SEMrush has found that the PAA box is now showing up in more than half of all searches.

Starting point is 00:04:10 And when that search is phrased as a question, it jumps to 86%. Quoting from the SEMrush study, a PAA SEO strategy is applicable to almost all sectors, and, unlike featured snippets, it is possible to appear in a PAA box and hold a standard organic ranking on page 1 of Google. 75% of the time a PAA result appears, it is within the top 3 results in Google, providing a good chance of high visibility. As with other types of rich results, brevity is key, with paragraph results averaging only 41 words. And this year, with consumers avoiding bricks and mortar locations, it's even more important that you're at the top of your marketing game. That's why the podcast Keep Optimizing has you covered with a special in-depth Black Friday episode featuring tactics and strategies from industry experts. Here's a clip. Your success will really be defined by the size of your subscribers list and by the engagement of your subscribers list. So you still have time to do that.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Invest in your marketing budget now. Don't wait last minute and start building relationships with your customers now. So if you're in e-commerce in any way, online or storefront, you owe it to yourself to check out the Keep Optimizing podcast. It's at keepoptimizing.com or wherever you get your podcasts. or storefront, you owe it to yourself to check out the Keep Optimizing podcast. It's at keepoptimizing.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Quick, which advertising channel is seeing the greatest growth in the use of influencers? If you said TikTok, wrong. Instagram, wrong. Actually, it's outdoor billboards. Yeah, apparently advertisers have increased their use of influencers in out-of-home advertising by 83% in the last year.

Starting point is 00:06:13 This from a study by the marketing agency Takumi, which I should note works primarily in influencer marketing. Nearly three out of four marketers they polled in the US, UK, and Germany said they've put more resources into influencer marketing in the past year. After billboards, in terms of the highest increase in usage, TV and radio, with 81% growth in the last year, and print at 80%. Another trend we're seeing get bigger, multi-platform campaigns. More than half of the respondents said they used influencers that way. Quoting MarketingDive.com, multi-platform campaigns, more than half of the respondents said they used influencers that way.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Quoting MarketingDive.com, most marketers recognize the ability of influencers to drive sales, with almost two-thirds saying influencer marketing provides a better return on investment than traditional advertising. 41% of consumers said social media influencers should use their platforms to discuss current affairs and everyday activism. Among content creators, more than 50% said diversity was the number one issue that marketers and brands need to address. If you've been experimenting with TikTok for your brand, they've added some new duet options. A duet is a format where you are recorded as you watch another video and both videos play. Often people use it to dance along with someone or react to what they're saying. My favorite take on this is Gordon Ramsay, who watches people's cooking TikToks and then duets the videos to berate them. I'm making a low-carb sandwich with orange bell pepper and cream cheese.

Starting point is 00:07:46 No. Come on. No, that is not a low-carb sandwich. Young lady, that there is an idiot sandwich. So if you're playing around with duets for your brand, here are the formats now available. Left and right, that's the old school layout, which puts your video alongside the

Starting point is 00:08:01 original clip. Top and bottom, also been around for a while, overlays your response above the original. There's also now picture in picture and three screen, so more people can get in on it. Or I suppose you could duet a duet. And while we're here, currently viral on TikTok, a 40-something guy riding a skateboard, drinking juice, and singing along to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. It's at 17 million views and counting. Even more impressive, in the three days since that TikTok was posted, the song, which was

Starting point is 00:08:36 recorded in 1977, has had about a five-fold increase in digital download sales, and more than triple the number of people who streamed it on Spotify were hearing it on that platform for the first time. And wrapping up today, a couple of things from the It's Not Just You file. Squarespace was having some connectivity issues yesterday, and I saw a bunch of

Starting point is 00:09:00 reports from Shopify merchants that something was up over there. And finally, yesterday's story, where I reported on YouTube's decision to kill user-generated captioning. That's where regular users could help people with hearing impairment by suggesting captions. It turns out they chose to make that announcement this week, which is Deaf Awareness Week. So, yeah. Good job, YouTube PR person. We've got a couple of big client deadlines this week here at the agency, so it has been all hands on deck. That is why today's episode was a little shorter than usual.

Starting point is 00:09:52 Tomorrow's probably will be as well. But either way, I will see you then.

Today in Digital Marketing - Idiot Sandwich

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