Today in Digital Marketing - The New Marketing Formula: Bacon + Clubhouse + ASMR

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Where are the good CPMs? On YouTube — when you don’t use any video in your ads. Also: TikTok’s demographics are broadening, a clever marketing campaign on Clubhouse merges three trends, and how subscription fatigue may end up helping digital media buyers.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, where are the good CPMs? On YouTube, when you don't use any video in your ads. Also, TikTok's demographics are broadening, a clever marketing campaign on Clubhouse merges three trends, and how subscription fatigue may end up helping digital media buyers. It's Tuesday, April 13th, 2021. Happy Burmese New Year. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Seems every time you turn around, some company is releasing the results of a survey they've conducted. We get a million news releases like this a day, and don't cover most of them because they have a low sample size or are just otherwise a low-effort PR attempt.

That can't be said for one annual conversion rate benchmark study, because the group that does it is Unbounce, and they have access to 44,000 landing pages. That means in this year's study, they have datasets from 264 million landing page visits that culminated in more than 33 million conversions. So let's start there. 33 million conversions on 264 million visits is a 12.5% average conversion rate, which is higher than I thought it would be. But, of course, the devil is in the details, and they've broken this all down by industry. Obviously, I won't cover every industry here, but I am going to report on the agency breakout.

First, the bad news. Lead forms for marketing agencies convert about 46% less than other industries. But one thing I thought was interesting, quoting from the study, across all types of agency pages, readability doesn't do much for your conversion rate one way or another. On form pages, though, easier to read copy actually correlates with a drop in conversion rates. Form pages tend to perform best when they're written in a way that requires a higher level of reading comprehension. So what's the deal? When visitors are filling out a form on your agency page,

it's usually because they're about to take the next step. They're ready to have a serious conversation about working with you. But before they do, they want to be sure you know your stuff. Unquote. This study also found that the biggest increase in agency conversion rates about working with you. But before they do, they want to be sure you know your stuff, unquote. The study also found that the biggest increase in agency conversion rates came from increasing the occurrence of emotionally charged language.

Fear words in particular resulted in a nearly 23% uptick in form completions. Is TikTok the young person's platform? Yeah, sure. In the way Facebook was for college kids once, then it became broad. And how Instagram was for teens, until it wasn't.

The same thing is, of course, happening with TikTok. Their demographics are broadening out and some new data from the platform suggest parents, in particular, are piling in. The moms on TikTok hashtag has 44 billion views. So how can we filthy marketers exploit this information?

Quoting from TikTok, compared to TikTok users who are in the same age group but don't have children, TikTok parents are more likely to post about home appliances, snack products, business, cars, and grocery products, unquote. So while, yes, it's still a younger than average platform, don't forget that any platform closing in on a billion users this year like TikTok is will have many people outside of the teen years. Remember when cable companies went from the monthly package price to all sorts of bundles and packages and three packs, and we all complained and begged the industry to come up with a way to just buy one single channel rather than having to buy a group of them? Ah, the good old days. To their credit, the industry responded by giving us digital video on-demand services. So now,

CBS is $6, NBC is $6, Netflix is, what, $15 now or something? Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV, Paramount, they all have separate monthly subscriptions now. Be careful what you wish for. Which is why it's probably not surprising to find new data that reports ad-supported video-on-demand services, sometimes called AVOD, are gaining in popularity. Increasing from 34% market share in the U.S. last February to 58% this February. The data comes from Hub Research, quoting MarketingDive.com. The maturation of AVOD means further fragmentation of digital marketing channels, but also potentially new opportunities to engage viewers. Marketers are following viewers to the channel and finding plenty of inventory, as AVODs operated by media companies like ViacomCBS's Pluto TV,

the free version of NBCUniversal's Peacock, looks to build out their ad business. Still, at this point, the inventory might exceed demand. One of the reasons for an ad experience where consumers see the same ad repeated. This is likely to change as marketers further embrace the channel and better understand how it works, unquote. One industry expert, the piece quote, says advertisers haven't completely jumped into all of this yet because of the measurement issue. They haven't really been able to understand the incremental reach from linear or from premium video. Back to Marketing Dive, quote, still,

AVOD offers the promise of digital targeting and measurement in a TV-like video environment without the use of third-party cookies or Apple's IDFA, which will soon be restricted or deprecated altogether. While marketers determine how these changes will affect their strategies on Google and Facebook and other digital platforms, Avod could be a place to reallocate spend, thanks to its targeting capabilities. SearchEngineJournal.com has a helpful piece up today about how to launch a YouTube audio campaign.

Did you even know they had audio-only ads? And Journal.com has a helpful piece up today about how to launch a YouTube audio campaign. Did you even know they had audio-only ads? They do. We've actually had them for about six months, though it's been a slow rollout. They're basically like radio ads, though you do get to put an image or an animated image in place when it's displayed. YouTube says they've got lots of inventory still, so your CPMs should be reasonable. And where do these ads show up? On podcasts or music content like YouTube's Spotify competitor. You can use the regular targeting or also layer in targeting based on music genre. Some brands are not eligible,

including alcohol and gambling, but also healthcare and medicine is one of the off-limits industries. One huge caveat though, This is still in open beta, and Google requires you to run two brand lift surveys before they'll let you into the test group for audio ads. Also, in the I'll-bet-you-didn't-know-they-had-that department, did you know Facebook has an A-B testing tool for organic content? They do.

It's in the dog's breakfast they call Creator Studio. They've been rolling it out for a while now and say most everyone should have it by now. TikTok has one. LinkedIn is getting one. YouTube is one. We are talking about direct payouts to people who keep the channels full of content.

These are often called creator funds. And a new player has joined the game, Pinterest. The company says it set aside a half-million-dollar fund to support creators from underrepresented communities. In this way, their fund differs from that of others, which reward anyone who gains a certain number of followers. Pinterest Fund will initially only be available in the U.S., and they say creators participating

in the first group are fashion, photography, food and travel influencers. You are listening to the sound of a room active today on Clubhouse. No, it's not static, and there's no bug. This is a marketing campaign. The IHOP restaurant brand is playing a loop of the sound of bacon on a grill. That's it. All day long. It's part of their rollout of their new and improved bacon. I'm not making this up.

Their new bacon is five times thicker than the previous bacon was. All funny aside, this is actually a pretty clever merging of three very popular trends. Clubhouse, of course bacon, which is always a popular social media topic, and ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which are ambient sounds played for relaxation. There is an entire category on the live streaming site Twitch full of mostly scantily clad young women whispering into microphones. Here's an example that I recorded today of one of these. A woman whispering and brushing bubbles onto her mic using a makeup brush.

Oh, so do that. And you said the internet didn't have good content anymore. Finally, a number of reports out there today that Google reviews are not publishing and going live in Google's local results. It's not clear if this is a bug or a bottleneck, but if it's happening to you, you are not alone. 3, 2, 1, go! We try really hard to make this a good use of your time. Short, punchy, no rambling. And if you find this valuable,

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