Today in Digital Marketing - Our Slice of Pie is Shrinking

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, less money, more problems. Facebook. Be protected. Be Zen. Wednesday, July 14th, 2021. Happy Bastille Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. There are lots of ways to slice and dice numbers, especially when you're trying to examine the health of your digital marketing campaigns or even your whole department. One telling KPI has been what percentage

Starting point is 00:00:58 of an organization's entire revenue do the marketing budgets hold? We can't have it all. HR gets a chunk. Legal gets a chunk. So how much do the marketing budgets hold? We can't have it all. HR gets a chunk. Legal gets a chunk. So how much do the marketing teams get? The latest numbers are not good. In fact, marketing budgets as a percentage of overall revenue have reached the lowest level recorded since the Gartner Group started tracking the number. Last year, marketing was given an average of 11% of company revenue. This year, it's way down to just 6.4%. And brands with revenue of more than $2 billion were even lower, 5.7%. Quoting MarketingDive.com, as in the past, the research firm found that CMOs have

Starting point is 00:01:41 generally held rosier projections than what's actually been realized when breaking out the numbers, unquote. Indeed, a Gartner executive said, quote, despite facing in-year budget cuts in 2021 due to the pandemic, most CMOs expected budgets to bounce back in 2021. This budgetary optimism was misplaced, unquote. If there's any good news, it's that the leading indicators are looking decent. Global ad spending is expected to rise almost 13% this year. Facebook today announced it too would join the whole creator fund thing, and they're committing a billion dollars to the cause.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Creator funds have traditionally been set up by emerging platforms, like TikTok, as a way to stopgap monetization. Unlike YouTube, there's no direct percentage that creators get when brands place ads around their content, so this big pool of money is broken out to a bunch of top creators. The more views you get, the bigger piece of the pie. The model was so successful, it was copied by Snapchat, even LinkedIn, and even Spotify's Clubhouse clone, which they call Greenroom. Now Facebook has put its chips on the table too. Not everyone will get the cash, of course.

Starting point is 00:02:51 Creators will need to hit certain milestones. Milestones they did not disclose. And creators will only be allowed into the program by invitation. Among the new buckets of money, a bonus for turning on IGTV ads, extra cash for doing things while on an Instagram Live, like going live with another account. And of course, they've copied TikTok's program and will pay creators for posting reels on Instagram. If you are a creator and want to learn more, visit the Monetization Tools section on Facebook for Creators. Creators on Instagram can learn more in the bonuses section of the app, which will be available in the coming weeks.

Starting point is 00:03:32 An interesting new feature of Facebook groups could prove useful to brands that host groups of their most engaged fans. It's called automatic invites. You, as the admin on your brand's page, will be able to tell Facebook to send out invites automatically to top fans and recently active page followers. Those invites would ask them to join the group. There were other changes announced too. A new group expert designation. This is one of those little tags that appear as a title beside someone's name. You've seen these before. Top fan, visual storyteller, rising star, and so on. The idea, I guess, being to identify people with some level of topic authority.

Starting point is 00:04:10 Group admins will then be able to pull them into Q&A sessions with those experts and ask these experts to weigh into group discussions. You'll also be able to search outside your community for experts in specific topics. You'll be able to invite them to the group easily. Facebook did not say when these changes were rolling out, which usually means they've started the rollout already. Interrupting the show briefly to remind you about our listener Zoom this Friday at 3pm Pacific. I'm hoping to have a special guest expert with me. I'm hoping I can announce who that is tomorrow. It will be a chance to pick their brains and the brains of your digital marketing peers.

Starting point is 00:04:46 The Zoom link is in today's episode notes. That's Friday at 3 p.m. Pacific, which is 6 p.m. Eastern, 11 p.m. London time, and, sorry Australians, 8 in the morning on Saturday in Sydney. If you miss it but still want to hear it, Premium Newsletter subscribers will get a link to the replay. You can sign up for the Premium Newsletter at

Starting point is 00:05:05 todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in today's episode notes. Microsoft this week announced new video extensions that are available on their platform to display in Bing search result ads. They're available now for all advertisers globally. On desktop, it looks like a regular

Starting point is 00:05:25 link ad, but on the right is a small video thumbnail with a play icon. When you click the video, it pops up as an overlay on top of the search results. On mobile, the video is a lot more prominent and appears above the headline. I have to say the mobile presentation is super eye-catching. It basically puts your video in the top half of the screen. Premium newsletter subscribers today can see what these look like. You'll also be able to set up an action link on the video overlay that will direct people to your site. The details. This will only be available in the U.S. for now. It will gradually roll out to other countries.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Video extensions can be shown with other ad extensions, including site links. Clicks on those video extensions will be charged the same CPC as clicks on the ad headline. And your video must be between 6 and 120 seconds long, but can be horizontal, vertical, or square. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do 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

Starting point is 00:06:31 750 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 atuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.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. Google keeps driving forward with its shopping platform, this week announcing an integration with the web hosting company GoDaddy.

Starting point is 00:07:26 If you're using GoDaddy's online store, and to be honest, I didn't even realize they had one, you can now get your products listed across Google platforms without leaving your store's backend. This is done the way it happens on the other sites. You have your product catalog, which is a database of your inventory along with prices and sizes and so on. You manage that on the store side. Then that store creates a kind of backdoor link for Google and Facebook and the others to tap into that database. Google does give away product placements for free. In the U.S., those listings can show up pretty much everywhere on Google sites like search, shopping, maps, images, and lens. Of course, you can also port those products over to a Google Ad account

Starting point is 00:08:06 if you want to drop in some paid placements. Three small items to wrap up. First, Instagram is adding auto-captioning on feed posts. Last September, they turned this on for IGTV uploads. Then a couple of months ago, they expanded it to Stories. It's kind of a weird implementation. You turn it on by adding a special captions sticker to the video. Well, now an Instagram rep says they are planning to make the auto caption tools available

Starting point is 00:08:34 for regular feed posts as well. Second small item, Twitter has now expanded its new feature where you can choose who can reply to a tweet. The expansion now lets you add or change a restriction after you've tweeted. Until now, you had to do it at the time of the tweet. This could prove really helpful if you're a brand and a tweet starts picking up traction in all the wrong ways. This is already rolled out, though, of course, it's just on their own sites and apps.

Starting point is 00:08:57 This is not in the API yet, so don't go looking for this functionality in your third-party tool of choice. And third, a nice little change for agency people who run PPC campaigns. Google says you can now create sub manager accounts in your Google ads platform from within your existing manager accounts. Before this, you had to create these accounts on the manager account homepage. You'll still be able to do it this way if you want. This is just another method. Well, my second COVID shot is today. I know yesterday I said it was then. Well, funny story, I guess my phone is now just picking and choosing

Starting point is 00:09:34 which calendar appointments to remind me about. I was deep into Overwatch, trying to crawl back into Plat when I had that head-smacking moment. No reminder on my watch or my phone or anything like it just it was in my calendar with one of those little, you know, remind me half an hour before things. And it just didn't. Luckily, it was pretty easy to reschedule. So wish me luck. Talk to you tomorrow. I'll see you next time.

Today in Digital Marketing - Our Slice of Pie is Shrinking

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