Today in Digital Marketing - Split-Test Your ORGANIC Posts (!)

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

The one marketing tactic that consumers say will bring them BACK to your bricks-and-mortar store… Instagram is thinking about letting links in captions be tappable — for a price… Facebook’s quick new ad format has one potentially big tradeoff… and I have the proof, friends, that humanity is going to hell. JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links are in the transcript (visit TodayInDigital.com and click today’s episode). --- 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. Today, the one marketing tactic that consumers say Be protected. Be Zen. big trade-off, and I have the proof, friends, that humanity is going to hell. It's Tuesday, September 15th, 2020. Happy Independence Day, Costa Rica. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. If there's one thing that we digital marketers like to do, it's test. Test everything. Test website designs, test email subject lines, test ad campaign creatives. But one big gap in the multivariate testing world has always been organic social media posts.

There's never really been a way to test those, at least on Facebook. Sure, you could post two different versions of the post and see which does better, but that's not a real test because it's quite likely that both posts will be shown to the same person. Well, now Facebook is rolling out that exact feature. It will be found in the creator studio. And when you click the create post button, there'll be a new option called create post tests. You'll be able to test up to four post variations, which will get shown to a portion of your audience. You can set the duration of the test and even what defines success. And then when Facebook finds a winner,

only the winning post will get distributed to your full audience. Well, the 1% who see your stuff because, you know, organic reach. No word on whether this will make it into the API, which frankly is more valuable for us digital marketers since that would integrate with the tools that we already use. And it's still rolling out, so you may not have it just quite yet. A new study from PodSites of more than 530 podcast ad campaigns has found the average ROAS, that's return on ad spend, is $2.42. It's one of the first and largest studies of its kind. The campaigns that were monitored generated 2 billion impressions over a media spend of $28 million. You might wonder how

they tracked ROAS. After all, there's not as direct a connection between impressions and conversions as, say, a link in an email newsletter. They used a combination of pixel data, custom-branded URL links, and discount codes. There are some verticals that even got higher ROAS, healthy living, insurance, and meal delivery. The study also found that running ads across multiple different podcasts converted nearly two and a half times better than ad campaigns that were only run on one or two podcasts. Well, here it is, your regular reminder that Facebook is mostly run by AI bots these days, bots that will shut off access to your personal account or block you from doing any advertising for your brand or clients with no warning and no functioning appeal process. David Herman,

probably one of the most active Facebook ad consultants who has many clients with big budgets, has once again been shut out. Quoting his tweet today, Facebook won't let us spend money. They closed our support ticket saying I'm blocked from running Facebook ads. No way for me to respond. Open new ticket. Support then says things look fine. Turn the ads on and they should spend. So I do. and then Facebook turns them off again. I'm a preferred partner with Facebook. I'm not getting anywhere. Our launch is in two days. No, I have no Facebook rules running, and I'm verified to run social issue ads, unquote.

This happens a lot. There's one poor person in this podcast Slack community who's been shut out of her personal Facebook account, which means she can't get into ad accounts or business manager or her brand's Facebook page. Nothing. It's been weeks. I don't have a lot of advice here, but I'll tell you what I've done, and that's to straight up stop using Facebook or Instagram for anything personal. It's not a boycott thing. I just live in fear of having an AI bot mistake my kidding around with a friend as a hate crime or whatever it's triggering on these days.

Here at the agency, we've also been steering client budgets away from Facebook and finding some surprisingly good channels in the process. Whatever you do, tread carefully, friend. Very carefully. Well, it's been a depressing month for digital marketers who run the marketing for bricks and mortar stores. The pandemic lockdowns have kept people away. Now fear continues to keep foot traffic low. But there is a shining star in the forecast,

and that star is couponing. A study from CodeBroker of 1,400 American consumers has found that, yes, more than half are shopping less often, and three-quarters are spending less than at their favorite stores, but you put coupons in the mix, and, according to this research, they'll come back. Quoting StreetFightMag.com, among those who said they were not planning to shop at their favorite stores locations, 61% said they would change their mind if they received a high value mobile or digital coupon for a product in which they were interested. Another opportunity, pandemic fatigue. As stay at home restrictions are easing in many states around the country,

and with many retail stores opening their doors, consumers are craving the kind of interaction only in-store retail can provide. While Amazon offers unquestionable variety and convenience, real-life on-site experiences are gaining ground because consumers find it appealing. By a 3-to-1 margin, consumers say they prefer mobile over paper coupons, and that preference is on the rise. In just one year, the percentage of consumers who prefer mobile over paper coupons has grown from 67% to 77%. It might be the single biggest thing that we digital marketers have been begging Instagram to add.

Tappable links in captions. As I'm sure you know, links just aren't tappable at all right now. They just render as plain text. This has led to a small industry of link-in-bio providers. Are tappable links coming soon? Maybe. A new patent application filed by Facebook, which owns Instagram, of course, shows this functionality in operation. That's

the good news. The bad news is the patent also shows a pop-up window where you have to pay Instagram to make that link live. It acts sort of like a promoted post does on Facebook. Once you hit publish on an Instagram post, if you've got a link there, it'll offer to make it tappable for a price. The price on the patent app is $2, but that's obviously just placeholder text for the filing. Facebook has not confirmed this publicly, and let's not forget, there are many, many patent applications that go nowhere, so this might not ever happen,

but at least they're thinking about it. One thing we know Facebook is adding are enhancements to automotive ads. Quoting the company, when a shopper clicks on an auto dealer's ad, they'll land on a dynamic vehicle detail page on Facebook that's created using information from the dealer's auto catalog. From this page, shoppers can research vehicles, discover additional inventory, and connect with dealers via Facebook Messenger, lead form, phone call, or by visiting a dealership in person.

The important part here is that the vehicle product pages are hosted by Facebook on mobile accelerated page, much like Instant Articles. And that's good in terms of user experience, but bad since you don't get those people on your dealership site and triggering whatever platform pixels you've got there. If you've got retargeting banner ads, those just won't build an audience since visitors would never visit your site and never hit that pixel. For its part, Facebook claims in testing, the new format reduced cost

per lead by 82% and cost per content view by 17% versus a website destination. An update now on a story I covered last week. People are making exact copies of podcast series, then re-uploading them to the Spotify-owned Anchor podcast platform and turning on monetization. So people looking for a specific show might accidentally listen to one of these copycats. Those copycats would get the money instead of the actual producer. People have found copycats of Serial, Nice White Parents,

The Ezra Klein Show, and many others. Well, Anchor has now commented on this. They say they found, quote, a few dozen examples out of the more than 650,000 shows on their platform, and they say they're working to knock them out of the catalog. A few nice improvements to the tools that you might be using on a day-to-day basis. First,

Google Analytics now has a change report, so you can review past actions in your GA account and find out who did what and when. It goes back two years. Sprout Social has a new export feature that lets you get a CSV file of inbox activity across any date range you select. That means if for compliance reasons or your boss or client wants it, you can get an external file of every incoming message that's ever hit the social channels in your Sprout report.

And Facebook has added lookalike expansion. This works similar to the old Audience Expansion, where it would reach slightly outside of the limits that you set up if it could find better results. Now that can apply to your Lookalike audiences as well. Also, your ads can appear in Marketplace search results on desktop devices now when you select the Facebook search results placement or use automatic placements. And finally, just in case you need a reminder that humanity is going to hell,

so far this year, there have been 591 million Google searches for the word Google. Yes, that's people on Google Googling Google. In fact, the top

five search terms are all sites that if the person had just put.com at the end of their search, they'd have gone directly to the site they were looking for, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, and Amazon. This is from some new data from SEMrush. But remember, you can't equate search popularity with product popularity. In their study, Amazon Prime gets more searches than Netflix. That doesn't mean Amazon's streaming video service is more popular. In fact, maybe the opposite. Because what it really reflects is that people need more help finding it

than they do Netflix. After all, with Netflix, most people know it's just Netflix.com. But Prime? Is it Amazon.com slash Prime? Or Prime.amazon.com? Or AmazonPrime.com? Actually, it's none of these. It's PrimeVideo.com.

So, sometimes these are more a measure of poor web presence brand awareness than anything. Also, the eighth most popular question asked of Google, Where am I? Indeed, friend, where are any of us these days? Well, if you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed this show. If you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. I'm Todd Maffin. More news from the world of digital marketing tomorrow on a very special anniversary episode. sunshine to my life.

So part of your job is to manage your brand social media accounts. That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to, issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm, a partner who's handling all that for you, either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. And that is where my agency, EngageQ, can come in. We've handled the social engagement for dozens of brands. We start with a brand briefing to collect the info we need, answers to the most common questions, and an escalation path.

Then leave it to us. Our team can answer product questions, encourage purchases, thank your customers, hide or delete the bad stuff, reply to reviews and more. And best of all, your customers won't know it's not you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's engageq.com. Look for the link in this episode's notes in the About This Podcast section.