Today in Digital Marketing - It's All About the Bordens, Baby! 💵

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, are you getting gouged by that influencer you hired? Be protected. Be Zen. down. It's Tuesday, September 7th, 2021. Happy Rosh Hashanah. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQDigital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 462. Now that the cool brands are on TikTok and you're thinking of joining them, you might be thinking about how much to set aside for an influencer or two. After all, how much could they possibly cost? The answer, like everything of course, is as much as others are willing to pay. And those others are paying more than you think. New research from the

Starting point is 00:01:12 influencer marketplace Intellifluence asked influencers a bunch of questions. One of those, what kind of compensation do they prefer? Cash, free products, or a mix? Nearly 7 out of 10 wanted both money and free product. Only about 5% said they'd be happy with just getting a comp. So be prepared to show up with the Bordens, baby. That's the Canadian version of the Benjamins. And how many Bordens? That scales pretty directly to the number of followers an account has. Drilling down to Instagram, micro-influencers, that's people with up to 1,000 followers, are asking for an average of $193 per post. People with more than 90,000 followers are asking about $1,200 per post.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Of course, follower count shouldn't be your only metric in measuring these. You also want to factor in how engaged their audience is. And a number of studies have found that smaller accounts with more niche topics can often drive better conversions. So that's Instagram. On Facebook, the costs are lower. Twitter is even lower than Facebook or Instagram. And for YouTube, the average cost depends on what type of content they generally host. If they're a high-profile celeb with a million or more followers, the average video is close to $3,700. If you're a high-profile celeb with a million or more followers, the average video is close to $3,700. If you're a regular creator that produces more factual content, an account of around 15,000 followers should cost you around $730 per video.

Starting point is 00:02:38 TikTok influencers seem to be charging a little bit more than their YouTube counterparts. The study polled 1,249 influencers from Canada, the US, and the UK. Today's premium newsletter has all the numbers for all the major platforms and follower size, as well as a direct link to the full PDF study and three other similar studies for comparison. So if you heard those numbers and thought, yikes, a thousand bucks for a single post, there is another option, just straight up buying an ad. If you plan to do it on TikTok, they've released some best practices on developing a campaign for their platform. The best practices are pretty straightforward, but in case you're new to it, it all comes down to this. Don't cross post campaigns originally produced for YouTube. TikTok also says 83% of top

Starting point is 00:03:26 performing videos have a minimum 720p resolution. 82% use a vertical aspect ratio. In fact, the company says it delivers an average of 40% more impressions for vertical videos than it will with horizontal or square videos. Also, mix up the video with lots of cuts and different camera angles. Almost all the top performing videos published on TikTok use different angles and shots. Those videos ended up with more than 40% in impression lift. You can check out their recommendations at b.link slash TikTok campaigns. By the way, if you're still not convinced of TikTok's potential, remember TikTok users now spend more time each month watching videos than people on YouTube do and have in some countries like the US for more than a year now. First, we had e-commerce, then m-commerce for mobile commerce.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Are we about to see the start of t-commerce? Twitter seems to think so. Some people have noticed a new menu item showing up in their Twitter. Purchases. Well, for now, it seems to be tied to their new monetization stuff like super follows or tickets to a live audio space. But it's clear this has much broader potential. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, it will also be where Twitter will list products purchased through the app, which is not an option as yet, but it is coming, as Twitter outlined in its

Starting point is 00:04:50 Analyst Day presentation back in February. Twitter's product listings are currently being developed on several fronts. First, there's the new product display panels for professional profiles, which Twitter is currently testing with a small pool of businesses in the US. Twitter launched live testing of its new Shop module back in July, which enables users to scroll through the carousel of products and tap through on a single product to learn more and purchase seamlessly in an in-app browser without having to leave Twitter. By the way, if you use a Mac or Apple mobile device,

Starting point is 00:05:20 you may have noticed a change to how Twitter displays photos and videos today. Instead of being tucked under the user avatar, they now take up the full width of the window. And yes, I hate it too. It's been a few months now since Google put core web vitals into the search algorithm, encouraging website admins to improve page load times, responsiveness, and visual stability. But for the many of you who outsource your website to places like Squarespace or Wix, you don't really have a lot of control over those finer elements. So how are those platforms in terms of core web vitals? Not great, at least according to a company which, to be fair, competes against those platforms.

Starting point is 00:06:02 The company is called Website Builder Expert. They say they tested more than 3,000 URLs on both desktop and mobile across the major e-commerce platforms. Overall, across all three metrics inside Core Web Vitals, Squarespace had the worst performance score, followed by Shopify and BigCommerce following up the end of the pack. Interestingly, they reported that mobile sites

Starting point is 00:06:25 performed consistently worse than desktop. This is actually a huge problem given that Google only indexes mobile sites now. In the middle of the pack were Wix and Square. The best performance scores came from two platforms I bet most people have never heard of before, Shift for Shop and Volusion, though the study authors were careful to note that these two offer fewer features and interactive elements, likely contributing to faster page loads. You spent weeks on it, months.

Starting point is 00:06:59 It went through everyone on the marketing team. The CEO even signed off. You did a full staff Zoom and now you've got it. A spanky new graphics standards manual detailing everything from how to use the logo to specific Pantone colors and more. That's the good news. The bad news? Nobody is using it. New research this week from Lucidpress finds that fewer than a third of businesses that have brand guidelines have staff that are using it. Only 30% of survey respondents reported that their guidelines were well known and used by most people in their company when preparing ad campaigns, presentations, and the likes. 23% said their brand guidelines were only being used by their

Starting point is 00:07:40 creative teams. And 13% said they have guidelines, but either they're not being used or nobody can find them. As a result, more than three out of four people said stuff gets pumped out of their shop that's off-brand at least a few times a year. There is a glimmer of hope here. Almost everyone, 92%, said their company does have creative templates in place for people to use, but only 16% reported that those templates were being used across their entire organization. The study was based on a survey of 452 people from a wide range of industries. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots.

Starting point is 00:08:26 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. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca.

Starting point is 00:08:54 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.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Microsoft Today announced what it's planning for updates to its ads platform this month. First, some advertisers can now run video ads on the Microsoft Audience Network. Those videos can be from six seconds to two minutes in length. This is in testing right now in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. So if you want in on this, reach out to your rep or the support team. They're also testing vertical ads on Audience Network. Also, they have started to roll out a better system for checking the status of your Merchant Center account. It's called Inline Appeals and will show any policy violations and a nice little bar chart showing which misdeeds have been triggered the most.

Starting point is 00:09:59 Also, for those in certain industries, you can now run disclaimers in the ad copy. It shows up as a gray link reading disclaimer information. When people click it, a little pop-up box shows your fine print. Even though they show up per ad, you've actually got to turn this on at the campaign level, and you cannot back-apply it to current campaigns. You've got to start a new campaign. Also, Microsoft now integrates with more third-party apps to simplify the setup of the UET tag. Those new connections include Google Tag Manager, Squarespace, WordPress, and Shopify.

Starting point is 00:10:30 And finally, Microsoft now offers flexible insertion orders, so you can set open-ended or unlimited budget insertion orders. And finally, we come back to my favorite kicking horse, Facebook's drunken infatuation with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Last week, the company found itself on the rather embarrassing end of some AI decisions. Specifically, the code that automatically categorizes things it finds in photos and videos. So, for instance, it can pick out what a dog is, and what a bus looks like, and what a flower is. The idea is that if you're watching a video about flowers, at the end of the video, the AI will say,

Starting point is 00:11:09 do you want to keep watching videos about flowers? One thing it's apparently not good at, categorizing black men. Oh, the AI can put them into a category. Unfortunately, in some cases, that category was primates. Yes, like apes. Responding to a media inquiry from The Verge over the weekend, Facebook says, it's now turned off the topic recommendation feature site-wide. Six years ago, Google found itself in more or less the same spot after its Photos app tagged photos of people of black people as gorillas.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Robert Borden, unless you're Canadian, that was probably a new name to you. Even if you're Canadian, you probably didn't know that he was the old dude on the back of the $100 bill. He was a teacher first and a lawyer, and he became Canada's eighth prime minister in 1911, so all through World War I. His government passed the War Measures Act and eventually introduced compulsory military service. Yes, Canada had that once too, but we peace-loving Canadians weren't into it. Of the 404,000 men eligible to serve, more than 385,000 asked for an exemption.

Starting point is 00:12:25 After Borden retired from politics, the Queen made him a knight, the last Canadian Prime Minister to be knighted. He was first put on our $100 bill in 1976. About five years ago, government said they would be replacing Sir Borden with a different person. But so far, he's still there. Talk to you tomorrow. When I look around me, I can't believe what I see. He's still there. Talk to you tomorrow. The largest country on this planet Earth And if Russia keeps on shrinking

Starting point is 00:13:09 Then soon we'll be first As long as we keep Quebec The USA has tanks And Switzerland has banks They can keep them thanks They just don't amount Cause when you get down to it You find out what the truth is.

Starting point is 00:13:25 It isn't what you do with it. It's the size that counts. Most people will tell you that France is pretty large. But you can put 14 princes into this land of ours. It'd take a lot of work It'd take a whole lot of work We're larger than Malaysia Almost as big as Asia

Starting point is 00:13:50 We're bigger than Australia And it's a continent So big we seldom bother To go see one another Though we often go to other Countries for vacations. Our mountains are very pointy. Our prairies are not. The rest is kind of bumpy.

Starting point is 00:14:21 But, man, do we have a lot. We got a lot of land We got a whole lot of land So stand up and be proud And sing out very loud We stand out from the crowd Because Canada's really big.

Today in Digital Marketing - It's All About the Bordens, Baby! 💵

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