Today in Digital Marketing - TikTok Ain't the Junior Platform Any More

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

TikTok's ad platform is getting stronger... YouTube's change might increase your video views... Another retailer starts selling its first-party data... New chat features from Facebook your company probably isn't using... and PayPal has its acquisition eyes set on a huge social platform.• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter GET YOUR WORD OUT:• Ads as low as $20! See https://todayindigital.com/ads• Be a guest expert: https://b.link/pod-expert JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!- Slack: https://todayindigital.com/slack- Discord: https://todayindigital.com/discord- Reddit: https://todayindigital.com/reddit ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). 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

It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, TikTok's ad platform is getting stronger. YouTube's change might increase your video views.

Another retailer starts selling its first-party data. New chat features from Facebook your company probably isn't using. And PayPal has its acquisition eyes set on a huge social platform. It's Thursday, October 21st, 2021. Happy Spirit Day, United Kingdom. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 488. Well, CPMs are climbing, and there's one reason for that. Increased competition. Everyone's trying to squeeze their ad in before the ad markets go crazy on Black Friday. So now, well, they're just going crazy earlier.

If you plan to run Google Ads in the next month, I implore you to join our live episode tomorrow at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Jill Saskengales will join us again. Jill spent six years at Google Ads. Now she has her own busy consultancy, helping e-commerce vendors and brands navigate the PPC world.

She will join us to give us some detailed, tactical advice on improving your campaigns. Yes, your campaigns. You can come on and ask her questions as well. Everyone will get the episode this weekend. Premium newsletter subscribers will get a full transcript and some additional resources. That's tomorrow, Friday at 12 12pm Pacific, 3pm Eastern. Here's the URL todayindigital.com slash live. Attention music marketers. Spotify this week announced a partnership with Shopify that could prove to be the best move yet for monetizing artists on the music app. With the new partnership, Spotify artists will be able to market their merchandise directly to fans by connecting their profiles with their Shopify stores. What will this Shopify partnership look like?

Artists will be able to sync their product catalog to Spotify to showcase whatever products they choose on their profile. And fans will be able to browse the products and make purchases. The company says this new integration will open up opportunities for artists that have not yet established a merch website and give incentive for those that do have one elsewhere to switch to Shopify. Spotify has partnered with other companies before to allow artists to market their merchandise through its app, including MerchBar, and in previous years,

Band Page and Topspin. Of all the platforms I get asked about, it's TikTok that's the most common. We digital marketers are still trying to wrap our heads around the new golden child. This week, TikTok announced a series of live events that they call TikTok World. And in the announcement, they either recapped or announced new digital ad tools broken down into two areas, measurement and commerce. Now, the way they roll these things out is like all the other platforms do, of course. Some ad accounts have had all of these for a couple of weeks or months. Some have had none. Some have had a handful. So I thought I would just sort of roll through their main ads platform as they wrote it

in their announcement. So here we go. First on measurement. Today, we're sharing tools to help brands easily buy ads on the platform, measure the success of their campaigns, and track performance. Reach and frequency. Brands can run effective, predictive, and transparent campaigns on TikTok. Brand lift studies. This survey-based approach measures how users feel about the ads they see on TikTok. Ad viewability. With DoubleVerify and Moat, we will be able to provide partners the insight they need about invalid traffic and viewability on TikTok. Brand safety and suitability tools. And the TikTok inventory filter, enabling advertisers to gain more control over where they'd like their ads to run adjacent to. On the commerce side of things, they say, we're excited to introduce TikTok shopping,

which includes direct integration. Merchants can tap into a full e-commerce experience with the capability to upload products and manage everything from shipping to fulfillment and point of purchase. Partner integrations for Shopify, Square, and PrestaShop, among others, with Wix, Shopline, OpenCart, and Base to be available soon. Product links. Brands can highlight one or more multiple products directly from an organic TikTok video,

leading users to instantly loaded product detail pages, live shopping, collection ads, and dynamic showcase ads. Unquote. So sorry if some of those things were old hat to you. If you're of larger budgets, you may have had some of those things, but I know our ad account had only a handful of those. So it sounds like they are rolling out a lot more and to everyone. You can access two resources that TikTok has provided for marketers to dive deeper into their commerce solutions and branding solutions. Links to those are in today's premium newsletter.

The new features from Pinterest we told you about yesterday could now be worth $45 billion. PayPal is reported to be in talks to buy the social platform. The news comes as Pinterest launches new features including Amazon affiliate links and creative rewards. What are some of the reasons behind PayPal's big bid? According to a piece in Search Engine Journal, PayPal is in a position to finance the deal largely with its stock due to the e-commerce pandemic and acceleration. The PayPal stock is up 36% in the last 12 months.

Pinterest reports that weekly users spend two times more on average every month than non-pinners, and their basket size is 85% larger, unquote. Considering Pinterest's user base consists of over 60% women and 45% of all households in the U.S. that earn over $100,000, PayPal could find that audience extremely lucrative. Yet another retailer is building out its own private ad platform. This time it's the American grocery chain Kroger trying to attract more media spend. Kroger has actually run its own platform since 2017, but yesterday it launched Kroger Private Marketplace, a private programmatic platform that allows clients to use their demand-side platform of choice. Quoting Marketing Dive,

The Kroger Private Marketplace draws on Kroger's troves of first-party shopper data. The grocery chain is the largest in the U.S., serving 60 million households annually per company estimates to generate what an executive called pre-optimized audiences. Those are intended to help brands better hit campaign targets, whether they be sales, consideration, or general awareness. Kroger claims it captures shopper data on 96% of transactions tethered to its loyalty program, while the marketplace attempts to protect consumer privacy through a deal ID. Unquote. The company says more than 1,300 brands engaged with its ad inventory portfolio last year, 85% of which in 2019 returned in 2020. It has not released numbers for this year yet.

It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen.

The videos on your brand's YouTube channels may soon be getting some more traffic. YouTube says it'll provide more targeted search matches with the addition of auto chapters as a search element. A YouTube spokesperson explains, quote, starting this week, auto chapters are going to be used as a source of metadata in searches made on mobile. Previously, only creator-defined chapters were used in this way. Auto chapters now will only appear in search if creator-defined chapters are unavailable, unquote. As a result of the new addition, YouTube can highlight specific segments based on searches, making it easier for users to find the content they're looking for.

Each clip's element becomes searchable, providing more information about what people are searching for. And over time, the new feature could increase video discovery. YouTube has some advice for us digital marketers trying to make the most out of auto chapters. First, check the segmentation of your own YouTube clips. Optimize your chapter names based on relative keyword search. I'm going to say that one again because it sounds pretty important to me. Optimize your chapter names based on relative keyword search. Don't spam it with unrelated segment names and clearly label each segment and ensure that any automatic segment

elements of your clips are properly named, as this could improve your search results. Facebook today announced new tools for small and medium-sized businesses, including more ways for customers to communicate with them via Facebook. The new tools include video and audio calls directly from the Facebook inbox, new appointment booking functionality to better facilitate connection, live audio rooms now to selected small and medium-sized businesses, and new ad creation options in Business Suite,

including the capacity to create Instagram-only ads on desktop, and new insights to help measure ad performance. Also in Facebook news, the Facebook Messenger app is getting scary, and no, it's not because your racist uncle sent you a DM. From this Saturday to next Saturday, Messenger will have a new set of Halloween-themed AR effects, new video backgrounds, and stickers for your text and video chats with customers. Other updates include expanding the use of its new word effects. This option sees specific emojis tied to your use of certain terms in your chats. And new themed backgrounds, including Dune, a relaxing care visual,

and James Bond sound emojis to promote the release of the latest Bond film. I haven't actually seen that many brands use the custom backgrounds and stickers and stuff in Messenger for marketing, and I've never understood why. Especially for brands whose voice is aligned with GIFs and lots of emojis. Maybe have your team end a good chat with a customer by changing the background to the love version or something. Google is adding new dedicated focus time entries to Calendar. Focus entries will appear on your calendar with a small headphones icon

and can be given a different color to separate them on your schedule. You can set time entries to automatically decline meetings that are scheduled during those blocks. These focus time entries will also appear in your Time Insights panel so you can see what percentage of your time is spent in meetings and on focused work. And finally, another quick plug for our upcoming live episode tomorrow at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Jill Saskengales will join us to answer your questions about running Google Ads during the holiday season. So please join us. The URL will be todayindigital.com slash live.

That's tomorrow, Friday at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. So interesting discussion in our Slack community yesterday. We were asking people how they got started in digital marketing, and there were some really interesting stories. Michelle was in real estate marketing in the early 2000s and says postcard mail drops only got us so far. So she decided to pick up some digital stuff. Now it's a career for her.

Michael worked at his dad's architecture firm and owned a tapas restaurant, then worked in marketing for a countertop manufacturer. Now he manages digital for brands in Florida. Coincidentally, Mitchell also owned a tapas restaurant, then ran a Kickstarter to fund a food truck, then left the food business entirely, brought a local agency's social media in-house. Now he is a solo consultant. That's just one of the almost 700 digital marketers. Lots of smart people in our Slack community. You should be one of them. Tap the link in today's episode notes, or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. Remember, this is transitioning to a paid community soon. So get in now while it's free.

Todayindigital.com slash slack or tap the link in the episode notes. Talk to you tomorrow.