Today in Digital Marketing - The Custom Audience You Should Be Using

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, they tried to compete with BuzzFeed, and they lost. Facebook adds content plugins to Ads Manager. The custom audience you're not using, but probably should try. Google adds more pandemic-friendly labels for your product ads. And is the Ring company trying to pull one over on all of us? It's Friday, September 25th, 2020. Happy L'Ajour d'Hommage Hockey, France. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Quick, can you guess

Starting point is 00:00:33 what the number one app right now is in the lifestyle category of the mobile app stores? That's the category with all the social networks. If you said TikTok, wrong. Facebook, wrong. Actually, it's Pinterest. Not only is it number one in its category, earlier this week, they actually broke the record for the most daily downloads of their app ever. And what's driving it all? The new iPhone operating system, specifically the ability to customize your main home screens.

Starting point is 00:01:04 You can now add informational widgets and even change the icons of each app, although it's a bit of a hack you have to do with the shortcuts app, but it does work. And so people are apparently flocking to Pinterest to get design ideas. My favorite is one that faithfully recreates the original Windows 95 design. Of course, it's not just Pinterest. It's big on TikTok too. Which brings us to your digital marketing efforts. Here is an opportunity for you to pretty easily jump on this bandwagon. If you have a consumer-facing brand, maybe you hire one of the hundreds of new iPhone home screen designers who've popped up on Etsy to create custom icons for the standard app

Starting point is 00:01:41 by using your logo or your colors or your mascot. At the very least, but using your logo, or your colors, or your mascot. At the very least, even an iPhone wallpaper, since it seems everyone's talking about it this week. Is it a fad? For sure. But hey, fads are popular for a reason. They tried to compete head-on with BuzzFeed and Vice for those all-important millennial eyeballs, and they lost.

Starting point is 00:02:06 CNN yesterday announcing they will be shutting down The Great Big Story, a digital short-form video unit that they launched almost five years ago. The production unit had offices in New York and London. About 30 jobs were part of that. It's been a time of upheaval in that space. Just a month ago, WarnerMedia laid off 800 people. This past June, Twitter added a new pop-up window to try to dissuade people from retweeting a link without actually having read it first. And you might have thought, as I did back then, come on, how effective is that going to be? Well, the data's in and, turns out, quite effective actually. Twitter today said they are seeing people opening articles 40% more often after seeing the prompt.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Twitter also noted that a healthy number of people saw the post, opened the article, and then chose to not retweet it, which said Twitter is fine. Some tweets are best left in drafts. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, adding any level of share friction seems to have some effect. Back in 2016, Facebook added similar pop-ups on posts which had been disputed by third-party fact-checkers,

Starting point is 00:03:16 prompting users to rethink their intention before they hit share. Analysis conducted by MIT found that those labels reduced people's propensity to share misinformation by about 13%. While Facebook has since also added new prompts when users attempt to share a link that's more than 90 days old to reduce the spread of outdated content, unquote. Facebook today emailed all of its advertisers to tell them about a nice new feature in its ads platform. Nah, I'm kidding. Facebook didn't say a thing to us because, I mean, it's Facebook. So we are all finding out through Facebook's current communication strategy with the advertisers that fund its business,

Starting point is 00:03:57 screenshots leaked on Twitter. All snark aside, it's actually kind of cool. They're apparently adding plug-ins to Business Manager, specifically the content creation parts like ad platform and the creator thingy that nobody uses. The plugin apps are Canva and Vimeo, a couple of others to make it easier to create content. Apparently, they're going to be calling it the Facebook Business App Store.

Starting point is 00:04:18 Some people have it. Seems most people don't have it yet, but hopefully it's coming soon. Oh, and one more thing. It looks like you can now create Instagram ads that link directly to an IGTV video of yours or to your brand's IGTV channel if you use IGTV, which you probably don't because nobody does. I'm always learning stuff from Andrew Foxwell's newsletter, which is definitely worth a subscribe.

Starting point is 00:04:45 This week, he talked about a post from a user of his Facebook group. You probably know that you can advertise to people who visited your website or to your Facebook page in the custom audience section or, you know, engaged with your Instagram account. But you can actually get quite specific. And this one user says he's been finding really strong results with the people who saved any post or ad. This, of course, is more for brands with lots and lots of traffic on their Instagram account, but it makes sense. People who save something are probably

Starting point is 00:05:11 at least mid-funnel, right? Like, quite seriously considering. I suppose, in truth, you don't need lots of traffic. You could put a small budget behind it and just run it all year long, and it would just collect people as it ran. Remember that you have to set a date range with these things, like in the last 90 days, so it's not like there'll be a huge ad fatigue problem. If they haven't saved anything from you in the last

Starting point is 00:05:32 however many days, they'll just fall out of the bucket. Anyway, it's a good reminder that there are far more and probably far better targeting options than just everyone in my country. Google is expanding its local inventory ads. Now they'll let bricks and mortar stores indicate when a product is available for a pickup later. Google said, quote, this gives you the option to promote products that may not be available in store now, but can be available for pickup within a few days, unquote.

Starting point is 00:06:03 I have not had a chance to go into any of our clients' GMBs to see if it's in there, but the Google statement does say to contact a rep if you want it turned on, so maybe this is a manual thing. It's one in a series of pandemic-friendly labels they've been adding lately, like in-store pickup and no-contact delivery. And finally, I remember the exact day that Gmail launched. It was 16 and a half years ago. And I remembered it for a couple of reasons.

Starting point is 00:06:31 First, I was the national technology reporter for Canada's public broadcaster, so I covered it. But also, it had a gig of free email storage. That might seem like nothing today. I think the basic account is like 15 gigs free now. But this was back in a time when you were lucky to get a quarter of that storage. Any more and you had to pay or do what I was doing and always backing up my email folder and then clearing the active one out. When they did launch Gmail with a gig of storage for free, nobody believed them at first. And that's because they chose to launch on April Fool's Day. And rather brilliantly,

Starting point is 00:07:07 I thought later, they let the internet speculate and chatter all day long until the next day when they finally put out a statement saying, no, no, for real, it's not a joke. That stunt kind of scarred me a little bit. So, you know, whenever I see like a, that just can't be a thing story, I check the date to make sure I'm not getting punked. Well, that happened today when a news release came across my desk from Ring. The people who make those home security cameras and doorbell cameras, they have a new camera that they're working on. You ready for this? It's a tiny flying camera drone for your house.

Starting point is 00:07:43 I'm not kidding. It's called the Ring Always Home Cam. Quoting from the company, this autonomous indoor security camera flies your chosen personalized paths so that you can easily check in on your home for peace of mind, like whether someone left a window open or forgot to turn the stove off.

Starting point is 00:08:02 When Ring Alarm is triggered while in Away Mode, the Always Home Cam will automatically fly a set path to see what's happening, and you can easily stream video while the camera is in flight. Unquote. Don't go checking Amazon for this. They're still working on it, and given that it's a flying thing,

Starting point is 00:08:19 they have to get regulatory approval for it, which they do not have yet. But maybe one day soon. Weird world, friends. Weird world. And so here it is, your final warning that I am moving the feed of this show this weekend. Theoretically speaking, you shouldn't have to do anything. But if Monday comes and you don't see me in your queue, then I broke something. And you will be able to get the new feed at todayindigital.com.

Starting point is 00:08:46 Or of course, none of this will even be an issue for you if you're in our Slack community, since I'll be updating everyone there in case I break something. Todayindigital.com slash Slack, that's where you sign up, or just tap the link in this episode's notes under about this podcast. And so that puts paid to the week. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild, theme composed by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio. This podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at EngageQ.com.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Full transcripts to every episode, including sources, are on our website, TodayInDigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I will talk to you on Monday. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Starting point is 00:09:29 Kisses from you Cause they take me to heaven 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Kisses from you Cause they take me to heaven Shoot

Today in Digital Marketing - The Custom Audience You Should Be Using

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