Today in Digital Marketing - That's a Nice Lookalike You've Got There. Be a Shame if Something Happened to It...

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

I know you WANT to, but don’t you dare touch that lookalike audience A couple of year-end content ideas for those of you on Snapchat Twitter just gave a whole lot of PR people a huge headache And two killer Facebook ad campaign tactics from Jon Loomer, including how to geotarget people who are in one specific building The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital 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. Like this podcast? Click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can send out to your followers. Links to Tod's social media at at the bottom of http://TodayInDigital.com Sources: Jon Loomer: https://powerhittersclub.com/ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4aggmw/twitter-bug-private-lists https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/news/year-end-story-news https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1644546649/?fbclid=IwAR0WdjEDguGLGn6zM2aYjYk0yGue_aRg0LgBvCsNr0u1-25cEBV-h2pwNlk https://buffer.com/resources/best-instagram-stories https://marketingland.com/stock-photo-service-unsplash-launches-image-based-advertising-for-brands-272854 https://www.marketingdive.com/news/report-amazon-cuts-dataxus-access-to-fire-tv-inventory/569126/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-improve-content-web-site-28687.html https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-get-approved-instagram-shopping-product-tags/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Monday, December 16th, 2019. Today is the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, I know you want to, but don't you dare touch those lookalike audiences. A couple of year-end content ideas for those of you on Snapchat or using Instagram Stories. Twitter just gave a whole lot of PR people a huge headache. And two killer Facebook ad campaign tactics from John Loomer, including how to geo-target people who are in one specific building.

Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. So you've read all the SEO best practices, you've gone through your company's webpages, and you've edited the copy to do all the right things. Sprinkling some keywords in the copy, making a couple of them headers, putting one of them in bold, you know, everything the blog posts tell you to do. And still, no improvement. What's happening? John Mueller, who is a search engineer at Google, does these weekly office hours hangouts online where he answers a bunch of questions from webmasters. Recently, he fielded this question, which I bring to you here because I think a lot of us have this issue. The question was, quote,

I have a website that was of mediocre quality, but I improved it a lot in terms of content. Now, it's suddenly appearing on pages four to six and sort of stuck there for the last two months. I read once you mentioned that the effects of refining websites can take more than six months to reflect in search. Does that still hold true? John replied saying, it sort of holds true. Six months is an average, so smaller websites could take a smaller amount of time and so on. But here is the main point that he had. Quote, it's not just rewriting some pieces of text and making them look a little bit better. If you're active in a competitive area, then it also makes some sense to think about how you can differentiate yourself from other sites, not just with regard

to the kind of content you have there, but with your offering in general. What can you provide that is significantly different than everyone else? So there you have it. Apparently, Google is looking both at your keywords and content in general, but also as a whole, what you're offering in terms of your products and services to see if you are different than other companies in your sector. Something I hadn't really heard from Google before, so it's interesting to see their level of depth there. And maybe time for an audit of your competitor's sites.

If you market a podcast, you might be interested to know that Apple's Podcasts app is now connected to Alexa devices. So now you can tell your listeners to say something like, Alexa, play today in digital marketing on Apple Podcasts. My apologies if I just triggered that thing for you. Apple also has launched a fairly basic site that will create a short link for your show, graphics with that logo that says subscribe in Apple Podcasts,

and even QR codes for your listeners who are stuck in the early 2000s. So I am increasingly seeing reports from other digital marketers who use Facebook lookalike audiences that those audiences are getting really, really touchy these days. Like, touch them and bad things happen. One fellow in one of the groups I'm in said that he was feeling impulsive one day and deleted

about three years worth of lookalike audiences so that he could completely refresh his lookalikes and, as he called it, clean things up. Bad move, apparently, because he reports that since doing that, he's seeing his performance drop by nearly half of what it was before he did this. More and more, it seems, Facebook ad campaigns are following the old adage, if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. If your brand is on Snapchat, you might be able to take advantage of that platform's memories section. They're launching a new pre-packaged year-end story.

Of course, it's mostly meant for people, not for brands. But that doesn't mean that we digital marketers can't co-opt it. You could look back at products you unveiled, interesting things around the office, or better yet, just check your past analytics and republish your top performing posts from 2019. Honestly, you can even be transparent about it. Here are our biggest snaps from 2019, or here's our top performing story from the past year. Regular people do this all the time with things like my top nine on Instagram. If you want the Snapchat pre-packaged year-end story, you can find it in Memories.

However, not every account will get one, so don't worry if you don't see it. They decide which accounts based on things like how often you've published. And sadly, there is no way to request one. But again, you can make your own any time you want by just reposting your most engaging snaps or stories. So, this was a little embarrassing for Twitter. You probably know that Twitter has these lists that you can add accounts to,

to make it easier to organize and follow groups of topics at a time. And you probably know that these lists can be public or private. If they're public, sometimes when you get added to a list, you'll get a notification, hey, so-and-so just added you to a list called People I Love or Marketers to Follow, which is cool. And of course, you wouldn't get a notification if someone added you to a private list, right? Right? Yeah, except when there's a bug. This past Friday, one tech journalist got a notification that said, Morgan Culbertson added you to the list called haters. And who is Morgan Culbertson? Why, only the PR coordinator for Amazon's Ring brand. And why would this Morgan think that this reporter

was a hater? Well, the reporter did spend a lot of 2019 reporting on privacy concerns and other issues around the Ring cameras. It was a bug, of course, and that reporter wasn't supposed to get notified at all because this haters list was a private list. Yikes. So, if you manage your brand's Twitter account and you have some lists with names that would prove embarrassing should that leak out, maybe now is a good time to change the names of those lists. You could rename the haters list to just the letter H. Nobody needs to know what the H stands for. Or you could call your haters list bronze and your lovers list gold.

You get the idea. Many meetings this time of year will be devoted to the topic, will we hit our sales number this season? If you're in retail, some early forecasts suggest, yeah, you should be okay, despite a later-than-usual start to the buying season. The National Retail Federation says it's been slow to get started this time around because of American Thanksgiving falling on a later date than it usually does.

That also pushed Cyber Monday into December, which rarely happens. That group says it expects holiday retail sales will grow about 4% compared to last year. This past November, online sales were more than 7% higher than last November. But not for every category. Electronics and appliance stores were actually down 1.7%, and sales at brick and mortar clothing stores were down almost 3%. So you run a stock photo site, and you literally give the photos away for free. How do you make money?

That's what the folks at Unsplash have been obviously asking. Unsplash, by the way, is quite a decent site for commercially usable free stock images. Now they've launched something they call Unsplash for Brands, where companies can have their sponsored images show up when people search for something matching that topic. So a search for a sandwich might yield a bunch of photos from Quiznos, which of course would be free for users to download and use. It's a pretty clever idea. Marketing Land noted that this might have a side benefit

with brands showing up in more blog posts and presentations and articles now that there's actual brand imagery to use. Some brands are already on board, including Google, Harley-Davidson, and Square. It's currently invite-only, but you can request to join the program at unsplash.com slash brands.

Looks like another phishing scam is afoot, but this one targeting admins of Facebook pages, which I'm guessing, dear listener, is you. This time, it comes as a Facebook message and purports to be from Facebook, saying that your page will be delisted because of a policy violation or something or other, let alone from the fact that it comes from some guy, not from Facebook. And the message says you have to go to a particular web page to appeal it,

where, spoiler alert, it will ask for your Facebook email address and password. It sure looks like a Facebook page, but of course it's not. As always, the tip-off here is the domain name of the page that you are being sent to. And it is not facebook.com or fb.com, the only two legitimate Facebook domains. In the case of this phishing scam, it is facebook.copublisher.support, which still sounds official, but it's not. If it doesn't end in facebook.com or fb.com, it's fake. So there's your reminder. Check the domain name before you click anything.

Okay, time for the Pulitzer Prize winning lightning round. If you run a Facebook group for your brand, Facebook can now automatically approve people with rules you set up ahead of time. Like if they are in the right geography, have answered all your questions, or are a friend of someone already in the group. The Queen is looking for a head of digital engagement. Apparently they have a small team of people who you'll lead, and the job description warns

that you will be going to a lot of state visits and award ceremonies. The folks at Buffer have published their picks for the best Instagram stories campaigns of 2019. Definitely worth checking that article out. There's lots of really creative uses of that format that you can steal. Sorry, be inspired by. Link in the description. And has your application for Instagram shopping and product tagging been denied? Link in the description. manager, changing your Instagram account to a personal account, both of which you reverse after doing a couple of other things.

You will find a link to the article in the description of this episode for those of you with a strong constitution. Finally, earlier today, I had a really great deep dive conversation with John Loomer about some advanced Facebook ad strategies. John runs the very popular Power Hitters Club, which I've been a member of for years now. You'll find more information about it at powerhittersclub.com. One of the things I asked him to walk me through was geographic micro-targeting on Facebook. You probably know that you can target to a city or to a zip code or even a one-mile radius around a specific address. What if you could advertise only to people in one specific building,

like a particular office tower or a convention center? So first of all, this was inspired by Trey Edwards. I want to make sure I give him credit. He wrote a blog post a couple years ago now that got my attention. I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to try that. And I did. So basically the concept was you put in the address, or you don't even have to put in an address. You can find it on the map and drop a pin. So we dropped a pin on the convention center.

This is still a pretty big convention center. And then go within a mile radius of it. Then the thought was then you put a bunch of other pins to exclude additional radii around it so that we could not just be – we don't want to be that entire one mile radius. We want to be even tighter than that. So we'll drop other circles kind of around the fringes of it exclusion circles yeah exclusion circles so that we could focus just on what wasn't excluded within that first circle and um so basically you know it was a conference of i don't know 2,000 2,500 people and um i was just again trying to reach as many of those people as I could

to let them know of my session. And, you know, one of my favorite things is, you know, once they're in there, it's like, well, how many of you saw my ad? And you see a bunch of hands go up, and that's always a good sign that it worked. My full conversation with John Loomer also details his very clever evergreen strategy, which uses a series of custom audiences that sort of turn on and turn off on a schedule that walk people through a series of ads, which is great if you want to move a prospect quickly down a funnel or even slowly introduce them to your brand story.

We also talked about the right way to scale a campaign that shows early signs of success because there are so, so many ways you could screw it up. He also gave me an inside preview of what he sees for the Facebook ad platform in 2020. You can find our full conversation in the premium episodes. There is a link to the premium episodes in the description here. You can also find it at todayindigital.com. It's only five bucks a month and you will be able to listen to my conversations with experts in the TikTok algorithm, social funneling, the future of digital agencies, and much more. Again, a link to the premium episodes are in the description of this episode. You will find John Luer's interview up there now, along with others.

Very excited that Jurassic Park Simulator that came out on Xbox a few months back that I've been pining for showed up in games with gold, which means it's free for me now, which means I already remote installed it on my Xbox from the office, which means when I get home, my wife is going to have to make dinner for herself because I will be busy. If you value a fast paced daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to it. It really does help. And if your brand could use some help

with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.