Today in Digital Marketing - We'll Get By With a Little Help From My Monetized Friends

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, February 28th. Today, new targeting options are now available for LinkedIn. The secret to getting consumers to use your coupons. Has BeReal lost its marketing mojo? TikTok launches new sounds just for marketing campaigns. And searching for brand mentions on Reddit just got a lot easier. I'm Todd Math, and that's ahead today in digital marketing. And we start today with LinkedIn, which has added some new ad targeting options for B2B brands.

Starting point is 00:00:30 There are now more than 400 professional interest categories across industries like business technology, financial management, cybersecurity, and so on. LinkedIn has also added new product categories focusing on software, like revenue management and sales analytics software. The platform has also added more than 20 new service interest attributes, including real estate, environmental consulting, and application software development. On top of the new interest targeting capabilities, LinkedIn also recently conducted a study to identify the top-performing ads for B2C brands.

Starting point is 00:01:04 The report found that business to consumer campaigns work best on LinkedIn when they focus on aspirational messaging by connecting your brand to desirability, innovation by focusing on new ideas and unique products and loyalty-based messaging by reflecting your audience's values. Coupons can be very effective at driving sales, but of course they're only useful if consumers actually use them. How do you get your customers to use your coupons? Turn them into a social

Starting point is 00:01:38 activity with a friend. According to a new marketing science study, earning a coupon by doing an activity with a friend makes consumers 20% more likely to use that coupon. So what activities? Simple things like watching a video together or playing an online game or solving a puzzle online. And why? The study's researchers suggest that when consumers share an experience with someone referring a coupon to them, they see the coupon's role as a social activity rather than an economic incentive. In this way, it becomes less about the money and more about a bonding experience so people feel more comfortable accepting and redeeming the coupon. The concept of coupons focused on a shared experience between the giver and receiver

Starting point is 00:02:21 is relatively new, but some companies have been experimenting with it, including e-commerce giant Alibaba. The company ran a competition in which customers and their friends formed teams and built a virtual skyscraper in exchange for coupons. The study is published in the Journal of Marketing. It's called The Missing Link of Experience Co-Creation in shared coupons. Well, has Be Real peaked? There's an interesting piece up today on Digiday.com that looks at how the app isn't just losing popularity with users, but also with marketers. While the app still has potential for advertisers, its hype period has flatlined. As of February, worldwide downloads have decreased to around 4 million, from an average of 15 million in October, according to data from Apptopia.

Starting point is 00:03:12 On top of that, daily active users have been cut in half. Marketers are taking note. The only brands currently remaining on the platform are those that pride themselves on having a voice across social media, not just an ad presence, while other marketers have put the app on the back burner, choosing to focus on more established social media apps. Is there a future for ads on the app? Well, the team at Be Real has not responded to individual requests for comments, but they have posted a statement on their site about their current priorities. It says, quote, Be Real is free to use and we don't have ads. You may be wondering if we'll have ads or how we think about monetizing the app. First, we want to stick around for as long as you'll have us. But working with brands is not our priority, unquote. As it stands,

Starting point is 00:03:58 the platform believes it can build a successful business without ad dollars. Digiday noted that the problem is other social media apps have already copied B-Real's mojo, which will no doubt make it even more challenging for the platform to beat the competition. 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. While this is long overdue, TikTok is adding some new audio options for brands today.

Starting point is 00:04:45 The platform is launching Sounds for Business, which is a collection of sounds that are designed as templates for marketing content creation. The collection features a range of audio elements like voiceover clips, music, and other sound cues. The sounds will be available for use in organic and paid content and are pre-cleared for commercial use on the platform so businesses don't have to go through the process of obtaining their own licensing. Comment trolls beware! Reddit has finally made it easier for brands and users to search within comments on a post. As of today, you can now search comments within a post on desktop, iOS, and Android instead of manually scrolling. Reddit added a comments tab to the search bar last year, which let users search comments across the platform, but not within posts.

Starting point is 00:05:36 This new update will let you search comment threads without expanding them. The company also said its subreddit search algorithm has been enhanced to surface more relevant subreddits for most queries. Some good news for brands in regulated and security-conscious industries. Google expanded client-side encryption to more of its email product users today. Once enabled, the feature ensures any sensitive data sent as part of the email's body and attachments, including inline images, will be unreadable and encrypted before reaching Google servers. The company says this can be helpful for businesses that have to meet strict compliance or privacy standards. Users can encrypt emails they're sending within their company as well as emails they're sending to other parties, even if the recipient doesn't use Gmail or Google Mail. However, the feature is only available to

Starting point is 00:06:29 customers with Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, or Education Plus accounts, and not yet available to users with personal Gmail accounts. And finally, there's this scene in the classic film Alien, where Dallas crawls through some ductways with just a flashlight and a flamethrower to light it up. And you can watch that video on YouTube, on your desktop, or your iPhone, or almost anything you like. Almost. One device you can't watch it on? Google Pixel phones, specifically models 6 and 7. For some reason, that specific YouTube video is causing those specific phones to crash.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Like, hard crash. Like the phone reboots itself spontaneously. Nobody's sure what's causing the crash. Google hasn't commented. Some people think it might be a problem with how the pixels handle color, which is reportedly what caused a certain wallpaper to crash Android phones a little while ago. That or Google just hates James Cameron. On the show tomorrow, a new Twitter alternative is out, and it's made by the co-founder of Twitter. And will Meta's latest campaign metrics finally convince you to trust their AI?

Starting point is 00:00:00 That's tomorrow. See you then.

Today in Digital Marketing - We'll Get By With a Little Help From My Monetized Friends

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