Today in Digital Marketing - The One Where Elon Isn’t Mentioned Once

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

A new partnership that may have your ad being featured alongside local break-ins... Yelp launches a new feature to help your business with lead generation... Klarna launches a new e-commerce tool that brings in-store experiences to online shoppers... And Similarweb expands its capabilities as an all-in-one SEO suite...Go Premium! No ads, weekend editions, story links, audio chapters, better audio quality, earlier release time, and more.Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links).LIVE LISTENER HANGOUT:Join us every Wednesday at 1pm PM/4pm ET for the Happy Hour Hangout! Click here at this time: todayindigital.com/happyhour HELPFUL LINKS:ADS: Reach thousands of marketers with our ad options.CLASSIFIED ADS: Only $20 — more infoMORE CONTENT: Email newsletter, expert interviews, and blog posts.HANG OUT: Join our Slack communityEnjoying the Show? Tweet about us • Rate and review • Send a voicemailFOLLOW US:The Show: LinkedIn • TikTok • Reddit • FB Page • FB GroupTod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • Twitch • InstagramDEALS:Jyll Saskin Gales — Inside Google Ads Andrew Foxwell — Foxwell Founders Membership • Scaling After iOS14 • All CoursesOthers — AppSumo lifetime marketing deals • Riverside.FM podcast recording siteCREDITS:Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Ad coordination by RedCircle. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.(If the links in the show notes do not work in your podcast app, visit https://todayindigital.com )Some links in these show notes may provide us with a commission.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, a new partnership that may have your ad featured among local break-ins. Yelp launches a new feature to help your business with lead generation. Klarna launches a new e-commerce tool that brings in-store experiences to online shoppers. And SimilarWeb expands its capability as an all-in-one SEO suite. It's Tuesday, May 17th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Well, soon your brand's ad might run alongside local content about who doesn't pick after their dog. Today, Nextdoor announced its API partnership with Microsoft to deliver hyperlocal neighborhood content to its users. This is the first time a partner has used Nextdoor's API to fetch content and host it on their site or app. The social networking service says it will display its trending public posts

from its neighbor-generated content directly on Microsoft properties in the U.S., including Bing, MSN, and StartFeed. Anyone using those properties in their preferred city will be able to view next-door content for that specific area. Later this month, Google will be doing its annual huge marketing live day where they reveal new ad products and map out their marketing offerings for the next year. And you are invited to a live event with me and my friend, Google Ads Pro Jill Saskin-Gales. We'll be watching, having an in-depth discussion of what matters, what it means for advertisers,

talking about how the changes will affect your campaigns. So be sure to put the following event in your calendar for May 24th at 8 a.m. Pacific, the unofficial Google Marketing Tailgate. The URL will be b.link slash Google Tailgate. That takes you to a YouTube video. You can actually go there now and set a reminder. Again, that's b.link slash Google Tailgate, May 24th, 8 a.m. Pacific. That's 11 a.m. Eastern Time and 4 p.m. London Time.

While Nextdoor works on targeting more consumers through partnerships, another crowdsourced platform is working on lead gen. Yelp announced today that it is launching a new feature called Request a Call that allows users to, well, you guessed it, request a call. The new feature builds on Yelp's existing Request a Quote option, which lets users contact service businesses, request quotes, schedule appointments, those sorts of things without ever leaving the app.

Customers can also request return calls at specific times. Businesses will receive a message in their Yelp for Business inbox when someone requests a call, which they can reply to by selecting Confirm Call Time to schedule the call or replying and trying to schedule a different call time. According to Yelp, an early pilot program of Request a Call led to a 10% increase in total projects started on the website. The buy now, pay later platform Klarna is offering merchants a new virtual shopping feature. The company recently unveiled the launch of its virtual shopping tool, which helps consumers shop online by connecting with in-store sales associates through live chats and video calls.

By using its merchant-facing Klarna store app, in-store teams can share photos and videos of items right from the store or the home or wherever they are. Merchants can integrate the tool into their online stores and use the app to connect their staff with customers. The company hopes to increase brand engagement and loyalty while reducing return rates to the service. The live stream shopping offering is currently being used by more than 300 brands, including Levi's, Hugo Boss, Herman Miller, and more. A small partnership emerged this week between iStock, the stock video and photo library, and Epidemic Sound, which provides commercial licenses for music. The two teamed up to create what they call iStock Music. The company says there are now 35,000 tracks available and that their licenses cover all the major social platforms, including use in ads. This is a subscription-only product, though, and it's only available at iStock's highest tier, which is $250 a month Canadian. And that only gets you 10 downloads a month.

That cap also applies to any video clips or images you download. The price jumps to $570 a month Canadian if you want 50 downloads. There is a discount if you commit to an annual plan. But if you just want the music, you probably want to go directly to Epidemic Sound, which is about $24 a month for unlimited downloads. Do you have business insurance? for unlimited downloads. Data breaches and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Yesterday after our deadline, SimilarWeb, the SEO tool, announced that it had acquired RankRanger, an SEO and rank tracking company.

This bolsters its term rank tracking along with its keyword research and analysis tools. Quoting the announcement, users will be able to monitor, track, and report on the rank of keywords over time across all leading search engines, now connecting how they rank for key search terms with the actual traffic those terms are driving. These combined insights will allow search professionals to quickly identify the most effective ways to drive traffic growth

and therefore deliver greater returns on their search investments, unquote. Rank Ranger's tools include rank tracking over time for important keywords or keyword groups, search optimization for local markets, as well as at the country level, landing page optimization, and a number of enterprise platform integrations. And finally, and by the way, parents, there is a nasty word in this story. The social media platforms are always struggling with moderation. There's just too much content coming in 24-7 for even an army of human moderators to handle. So they turn to AI to make those decisions, often with poor results.

Ad accounts being banned with no appeal because you used the phrase secret weapon in your copy, or some nonsense like that. And then there are the truly horrific moments, like the mass shooting in New York earlier this week. Twitch, where the shooter live-streamed the massacre, said it took down the video within two minutes. The Verge reports today that a re-upload to Facebook lingered on the platform for nine hours. And in a bizarre, dystopian, truly mind-boggling departure from common sense, that action, Twitch's removal of the video, appears to have broken American law, at least in the state of Texas. That state recently passed HB20,

legislation that techdirt.com calls a, quote, ridiculously fucked up social media law, unquote. Basically, this law makes it illegal for platforms to remove content based on someone's viewpoint. Lawmakers there even voted down an amendment that would have carved an exemption for domestic terrorist acts, letting platforms take those down. And so, according to the law in Texas, anyone in that state can now bring a lawsuit saying they were deprived of the right to watch that video because it was someone's viewpoint. The shooter posted a politically charged manifesto prior to the shooting, laying out his viewpoint that people of color should not exist. That manifesto was a Google document, which has since been removed. But now, this law may force Google to put it back online and force Twitch to make the massacre available for on-demand viewing.

So we went to spa school yesterday. It was much more complicated than I was expecting it to be. So we're going to do our best. Luckily, my wife has a graduate degree in cell biology. So I think she's going to be in charge of the hot tub chemistry, to be perfectly honest. Anyway, a bit of a short show today. I'll leave you with this classified ad. Fed up with your slow WordPress host and sucky customer support?

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