Today in Digital Marketing - Wait, what?! Michael Bloomberg owns TicToc?!

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Instagram’s likes are back — and Instagram’s not going to like that MORE global brands put digital marketers in the C-suite Some clever custom audiences you should be EXCLUDING from your next campaign And surprise — Michael Bloomberg owns Tic-Toc?! 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. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] Sources: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-return-of-the-likes/djfggogjickolkmoijohpgmojangelni https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/listenfirst-launches-cross-platform-branded-content-analysis-suite-300968223.html https://marketingland.com/podcorn-launches-self-serve-podcast-advertising-platform-272081 https://business.twitter.com/content/dam/business-twitter/resources/marketing-calendar-2020/US-CAN-Twitter-marketing-calendar-2020.pdf https://www.autonews.com/Assets/pdf/MillenialsWhitePaper_Final.pdf https://downloads.ctfassets.net/inb32lme5009/45YeutyxZLA4JwIJdkG0ch/f7efa9a4ef15b4b0b3036198420ddb76/Final_AutoVerticalPlaybook_112219_Spreads.pdf https://marketingland.com/5-audiences-you-should-exclude-from-your-ppc-campaigns-272061 https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/pinterest-outlines-rising-pin-trends-in-latest-report-infographic-4/568274/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019. Be protected. Be Zen. brands put digital marketers in the C-suite, some clever custom audiences that you should be excluding from your next campaign, and surprise, Michael Bloomberg owns TikTok. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Well, now that Instagram is hiding like counts on the web and on its mobile app for most of the world, we digital marketers have lost a bit of competitive research. It used to be fairly easy to understand how a competitor's popularity was trending on individual Instagram photos by just manually checking out the number of likes on their photos. And this was especially easy to do on the web, where you just needed to hover over each of their images to get that like count.

But now, of course, Instagram has taken that away for most people around the world. There is, however, a new solution, at least for those of you who access Instagram on the web. It is a new plugin for your browser called Return of the Likes. And what does it do? Well, it returns the likes. We can probably only expect it to last a week or two until Instagram's lawyers send them a cease and desist.

But if that is something you feel you need, you will find a link in the description of this episode. Instagram, please don't sue me. Probably don't have to tell you that podcasts are becoming incredibly popular, and with popularity comes the opportunity to market. Until now, though, it's been difficult for podcasters and advertisers to get together, although a few marketplaces have sprung up. And one of those marketplaces officially launched this week, called Podcorn. It works by podcasters putting in their audience numbers and topics, then the site will match them with a list of potential sponsors who are willing to pay to be on those shows. These numbers are a little bit old, but when a study from Hacker Noon was done last year, there were more than 700,000 podcasters, but only 15% of them, one five, were running ads. More moves by Fortune 500 companies that show the influence of digital in the marketing mix.

Unilever has now created a new C-suite level role called Chief Digital and Marketing Officer. Quoting Marketing Dive, Unilever's revamp of the CMO title is one of the strongest signals yet that the owner of brands like Dove and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream will prioritize digital with its marketing moving forward. Centering more business around e-commerce has also become another priority for Unilever in the Amazon era, a shift that has had a heavy impact on its marketing. On a call discussing Q2 results with analysts in July, the company cited online retail as Unilever's, quote, most important growth channel.

Google Ads now lets you create and share keyword plans with your colleagues. You'll find that in the Google Keyword Planning tool. Here's an explanation of how you'd use it. Let's say you are a sports retailer planning to launch three new product lines, running shoes, fitness apparel, and gym accessories. In order to share your keyword plans in the past, you'd need to create, download, and email them individually, now you can create separate plans for each product line and share them directly with others for feedback, all without leaving Keyword Planner. This actually launched a couple of weeks ago, but Google only announced it yesterday. Snapchat has published a guide for automobile marketers on its site. They call it the Auto Playbook, and they have stuffed it with tips and numbers on how to use Snapchat's platform to reach potential car and truck buyers. You're

thinking, Snapchat? Yup. A study from Auto News says four out of five millennials plan to purchase a vehicle within the next five years. And as I reported on yesterday's show, Snapchat has some new wind under its sails with some strong growth numbers across almost all demographics. There is a link to both the AutoNews Study of Millennials and Snapchat's guide in the description of this episode. One of the most powerful arrows in a digital marketer's quiver these days is, of course, custom audiences or matched audiences or whatever the platform of choice calls it. I expect you probably use custom audiences to market to your past customers or maybe to your email list and so on. But custom audiences can be especially powerful when you use them to exclude people as well. And the folks at Marketing Land have put

out an excellent piece this week about using custom audiences to exclude groups. Among the groups they recommend excluding, job seekers. In other words, people who visit the career pages of your website because they're not looking for your product, they're looking for a job. And similar to that, people who visit the support pages of your website because those people are more likely current customers looking for help and not prospects looking to buy. It's a great article and you'll find a link to it in the description. I always like Pinterest's monthly trending report. It's nothing we can really use at our agency for clients, but sort of an interesting way to keep tabs on, you know, what the kids are talking about these days. And so trending topics on Pinterest in the last month have included green caffeine, in other words, green tea with lots of caffeine in it, belts as a fashion statement, and clever staircase designs. Which brings us to the lightning round.

A company called Listen First today launched its branded content analysis tool. It analyzes influencer and branded content partnerships across social, gives you performance analytics on both owned and competitive content partnership programs. Sprout Social has rolled out its new user interface to customers. Nothing really to write home about, just move some navigation elements around. Apple has announced its top downloaded free iPhone apps for 2019. And they are in order YouTube, then Instagram. Which do you think came first, TikTok or Snapchat? In third place, Snapchat, followed by TikTok, and finally, Facebook Messenger.

Twitter has released its 2020 events calendar, covering all the important dates that social media managers care about. We're not talking about things like World Happiness Day or World Ice Cream Day here. This is more like when are the Grammys and when is hockey championships and so on. And finally, the Bloomberg company TikTok has changed its name. Did you know Bloomberg owned TikTok? I bet you didn't. They do. TikTok. T-I-C-T-O-C. Not the Chinese-owned TikTok, T-I-K-T-O-K, that you're probably thinking of. Obviously, that caused a little bit of confusion, so Bloomberg has changed it to QuickTake. They actually tweeted out a little video that they titled Here's Why,

and honestly, it is just full of PR nonsense about getting the news faster and blah, blah, blah. And not once mentions the obviously real reason that they changed their name. Well, that's it for today. If your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement or digital advertising, check out our agency at engageq.com

and follow me on social. Links to my channels and agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. I'll see you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do,

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