Today in Digital Marketing - I'm Sorry, They're Watching Stories... WHERE?!

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

On today’s show: Stories are everywhere. But which platform do USERS prefer? You’re not going to believe it Snapchat offers up an ads database ripe for your competitive snooping And how to get more Email Opens now that email use is seriously on the decline Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. 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. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It's Friday, September 20th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, stories are everywhere, but which platform do users prefer? You're not going to believe it. Snapchat offers up an ads database ripe for your competitive snooping and how to get more email opens now that email use is seriously on the decline. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

So this happens. You make a post or an ad on your brand's Facebook account and some Yahoo posts a really stupid comment or worse. What do you do? Delete comment. YouTube? Delete comment. Instagram?

Delete comment. Twitter? Uh, ignore? Keep the boss off her smartphone? Well, Twitter has a solution now. Sort of. Now, you can't just delete their stupid tweet. It's on their feed, after all. But if you're in the U.S. and Japan, you'll be able to hide that tweet now, so it's harder for others to find. We've had it up here in Canada for a while now in testing. Users will have to click a show hidden tweets link to see them. Of course, Facebook has a much more elegant solution to weird-ass comments. Their version of hide prevents

anyone from seeing that comment, except for the original commenter and all their Facebook friends. Facebook is getting some new ad tools ready for the holiday season. The one everyone I know is talking about are poll ads. These are simple two-question polls that can now pop up over a video ad, and each poll response can have a URL attached, which will briefly tease that web page to the user. But does it increase brand awareness and conversions?

Well, the jury is still firmly out on that one. Even in Facebook's own surveys, only five out of nine of their brand lift studies saw increased brand awareness compared to regular video ads. At the very least, we can probably expect this will result in another custom audience option, people who have voted in a poll. Speaking of cool toys for Facebook advertisers, Facebook is updating its augmented reality ad tools. What's that? You don't have those? No, nobody does really, except for a handful of makeup brands.

But Facebook says it will be giving the feature out to more brands as a beta later this fall. In a study with the WeMakeup app, the AR versions of the ads drove a pretty solid 27 point lift in purchases. Those ads let people virtually try on different lipstick, and they drew a 53% higher click-through rate. Stories are everywhere these days. I don't mean stories you tell your kids. I mean Instagram stories, Facebook stories. YouTube even has them. Of course, the granddaddy of stories, Snapchat. But on which platform do people prefer to watch stories?

HubSpot says Facebook? Yeah, 70% of consumers they polled said they prefer to watch stories on Facebook But hold up, that sample size of their study, 275 consumers Not a big audience But if you haven't been following the data Facebook stories surpassed the 500 million daily active user mark in April this year. So put another way, fully one third of Facebook's 1.5 billion daily users are posting or watching Facebook stories each day. Now that number might be juiced a little since Facebook's create post workflow includes a really easy checkbox for,

hey, throw this into my stories too, but still. If you are a small agency or a brand with a limited budget and are tired of paying every month for a social media tool like Hootsuite, AppSumo has an interesting promotion on right now. It's a platform called Social Horsepower. It does a lot of what these mainstream platforms do with one interesting unique feature, team gamification. The system tracks engagement on organic posts

and turns it into a kind of leaderboard to see which of your internal team members are getting the most social proof off of posts that they make. The Social Horsepower plan that comes with 50 team members normally costs $250 a month, but AppSumo has it on right now for $49, not per month, forever. You pay $49 once, and you can use it forever. I have not tried Social Horsepower myself.

I hadn't even heard of it before, so do your own due diligence. But I have bought lifetime promotions like these from AppSumo and have always had a really good experience. Refunds are quick and easy if you want, and I figure we're saving about 500 bucks a month at my agency on various deals that we've bought. Anyway, AppSumo.com if you want to check it out. They did not pay for this mention. More competitive snooping available if you compete in the political space. Snapchat has released its political and advocacy ads library.

Unlike Facebook, though, where you can just type in a competitor and see their ads, Snapchat has two big spreadsheets, one for 2018 and one for this year. But still some good data in there, including the name of the advertiser, what zip codes and ages they were targeting, and all the interest data in their campaigns. And it's not just political candidates. I spotted Ben and Jerry ice cream in there, some charities, even the Scottish police, who, by the way, targeted 18 to 34-year-old men in the clubbers and party people audience with an ad about getting consent before sex.

One interesting thing I noticed in the spreadsheets, they break down both the advertiser name and who paid for the ads. Sometimes those are different groups and can inadvertently expose the agencies that certain brands are working with. For instance, the Scottish Police's agency is a firm called the Republic of Media. See how much fun snooping is? Some interesting news for people who market music. YouTube is changing the way it calculates its weekly music chart rankings, and this one is definitely in the, what, it took them this long category. YouTube uses video views, of course, to determine its top charts listing. In other words, the more views you had, the higher on the charts you went.

Only until now, it included paid views. Yes, if you wanted to be the number one song, you could literally buy your way into the rankings. Now they say they'll only use organic views to rank artist videos, and they'll adopt the same ranking policies as more mainstream charting firms like Nielsen and Billboard. Finally, it's not the sexiest digital marketing platform, but there are still a lot of believers in good old-fashioned email. If you are using email in your marketing mix, though, you're going to have to work a little harder. Adobe's 2019 email usage study came out this week and found people are spending about 25% less time in their email than they did just three years ago. Open rates are still low. Only about 25% of marketing emails get open now.

So how do you make sure your brand's emails are opened? Bruce Swan from Adobe recommends spending more time personalizing the email. That means more than just insert first name here. That means aligning your offer with the recipient's personal interests. It means stop sending them promotion for things your database should be able to tell you they've already bought. And the study found even misspelling their first name will cause a third of people to just give up on you. The email marketing platforms make it easy to hit send, but there is a lot of prep work to do before clicking that little button. Well, if you're listening to this on the web and have not yet subscribed, please be sure to do that.

Today in Digital Marketing is published every weekday. You can find direct links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash todayindigital. That's bit.ly slash todayindigital. That is What You Missed Today in Digital Marketing brought to you by engageq.com. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Monday.