Today in Digital Marketing - What a Sex Toy Blogger Can Teach You About Content Marketing

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

There’s a new Google Analytics out, and if you spend your days thinking about the customer lifecycle, you’re gonna love it… Wendy’s clever Twitter campaign tied retweets to discounts… You can now use music in your podcasts if you’re hosted on Anchor — and you’re willing to lose 93% of your audience… and why the best advice you’ll receive this year on content marketing will come from a sex-toy blogger.Join our Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slackNot subscribed yet? Subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Produced by: engageQ.com Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsClassified Ads: TodayInDigital.com/classifieds Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffiTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, there's a new Google Analytics out. And if you spend your days thinking about the customer lifecycle, you're going to love it. Wendy's clever Twitter campaign tied retweets to discounts. You can now use music in your podcasts if you're hosted on Anchor and you're willing to lose 93% of your audience. And why the best advice you'll receive this year on content marketing will come from a sex toy blogger. It's Wednesday, October 14th, 2020. Happy World Standards Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ

Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with a bunch of Google news. The first, things are officially getting creepy now. Google has expanded appointment booking via automated calls. They're adding hairstylists and barbershops. The way it works is a customer uses Google's voice assistant to indicate what times they're free. Then Google will tell that customer to hold on for a bit. It will place a phone call to the salon, but rather than connecting the salon to the customer,

a Google bot will actually have a conversation with whomever answers the salon phone and will try to book an appointment for the customer. Google first showed this technology off a couple of years ago and used this video as an example. Hey Google, book a table for two at El Cocotero on Tuesday at 7. Alright, just in case that's not available, can I try between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m.? Sure. All right, I'll call to book under your name and phone number, and I'll update you in the next 15 minutes.

Is that okay? Perfect, thanks. El Cocotero, how may I help you? I'm going to interrupt briefly here to make it clear that the voice on the phone that you're about to hear is actually a Google bot, not a real person placing the appointment. El Cocotero, how may I help you? Hi, I'm the Google assistant calling to make a reservation for a client. This automated call will be recorded. Can I book a table for Tuesday the 12th?

Okay, cool. And how big is the party? It's for two people. Great. And when did you say they want to come in? Tuesday at 7 p.m. Okay, let me check. Mm-hmm. I don't have 7, but we can do 8.

Yeah, 8 p.m. is fine. Perfect. And can I get their name? First name is Anna. Okay. We'll see you on a Tuesday. Thank you. Okay, awesome. Thanks a lot. See what I mean by creepy? The restaurant booking service has actually been operating in a limited form for a couple of years now,

but clearly they think enough bugs have been worked out that they're willing to grow the vertical it serves. If whomever answers the phone at the restaurant or salon sounds like they don't want to talk to the bot, it will hand the call off to a human operator at Google. It's also grown to more countries. Now in the UK, Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain. So if you're in those countries and are in the restaurant or hair salon space, better get your front office staff up to speed on having conversations with robots. Okay, this one's for the data nerds. Those of you who think the perfect date is a glass of wine and a spreadsheet of analytics data.

Google Ads is testing a cross-network attribution tool between Google and YouTube. Quoting the company, the attribution reports in Google Ads offer advertisers the ability to report on search network campaign conversions using different attribution models. YouTube campaigns often play an assisting role in a conversion path, but this role isn't visible using the last-click model. To help marketers uncover these insights, we are integrating YouTube clicks and video engagements into the top paths, path metrics, and assisted conversions attribution reports.

So if you opt in, these three reports will include YouTube ad engagements from May 2019 onwards. YouTube ad engagements occur when a user watches a video ad for at least 10 seconds or clicks the ad. You can view YouTube ad engagements in these reports by selecting networks from the dimension drop-down menu. Also in Google News, you may be seeing an increased number of reviews left for your brand if you are a retailer in any way. Some people are noticing that Google has a new trick, quoting seroundtable.com. If Google thinks a searcher purchased at a specific retailer, when that searcher does a search for the brand, Google asks the searcher, have you made an online purchase from this brand before? Google then asks the searcher to help others shop by writing a review.

Google knows this searcher clicked from Google search results to the online store before and is pushing the individual to leave a review, unquote. So there's that. And from reviews to analytics. A new Google Analytics, in fact, the company rolling out a pretty significant redesign of its popular tool today. The current tool has the reports in the left nav bar that you're probably familiar with, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. This new version breaks those reports down into a customer lifecycle.

So now the primary reports are acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention. You still have the same old ones like demographics and tech and conversions. If you're listening to this and have popped open your own dashboard to see this, you probably have noticed you don't have it. Well, you do and you don't. Current dashboards don't have it. So you will need to set up a new property. So go to admin, set up a Google Analytics 4 property. That's for the digit 4. This is formally known as app and web. It may still actually be listed as app and web. Once you do that, you will get the new reports plus a deeper integration with Google Ads. Google says, quote, it even helps you anticipate future actions your customers may take.

For example, the new version calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure. We're continuing to add predictive metrics like the potential revenue you could earn from a particular group of customers, unquote. And one little bit before we leave Google, they said today they have temporarily disabled the request indexing feature of the URL inspection tool within Google Search Console. They're making some infrastructure changes and it should return in the next couple of weeks. Remember, this affects manual indexing requests only and not the regular crawling that Google is always doing. All right, some non-Google news for a change.

A clever digital marketing campaign this week from the fast food chain Wendy's, they offered a coupon that got more valuable the more people shared it on Twitter. The coupon was an image tweet that had a legend showing what those targets were. If it got 100 retweets, that coupon would be good for 10% off. 5,000 retweets put it to 30% off. 44,444 retweets would get everyone, you guessed it, 44% off. And if they had hit 3.3 million retweets, the discount would have been 99% off. In the end, they got about 11,000 retweets. So they tweeted out the formal coupon

that ended up being 30% off, saying, don't thank us, thank yourselves. So that's a campaign that worked. Here's one that didn't, or maybe actually secretly did. Kraft's mac and cheese brand, something we call Kraft Dinner here in Canada, used National Noodle Day last week to launch a campaign centered on a message of send nudes. Get it? Nudes. N-O-O-D-E-S. Nudes. Like noodles. The other send nudes, N-U-D-E-S, mostly popular as a saying on Reddit. It literally means send me naked photos. But Kraft tried this nudes thing and have now pulled everything related to the campaign. Everything. The videos gone. The social posts are gone. The ads on dating sites that they bought are gone. There are even some billboards in Chicago. One thing that's not out

there, an apology, which makes me think this was part of the plan all along. Get some attention, some media to talk it up, and then just pull it. Oh, sure. There was a petition from angry parents. About 500 people signed it. There was a cancel craft hashtag going around for a while. But I don't know. I think pull ads was 100% on that campaign's task list. Call me crazy. You know you were thinking the same thing. All right, some podcast marketing news now.

Google has added some new tidbits into its Podcasts Manager. Podcasters can now see how many times their show appeared in Google Search and what search terms led to that podcast. That in itself is nice since you don't get that from Google Analytics anymore. Also, the developer behind the popular podcast app Overcast says he's considering removing any podcast hosted at the Spotify-owned Anchor.com. This because some

people have been essentially cloning popular podcasts, tricking listeners into listening to their cloned shows and collecting ad revenue. The developer says Anchor isn't taking that seriously enough. And speaking of Anchor, they've added licensing for commercial music in podcasts.

You can now use any song in your podcast that you can find on Spotify. In a blog post announcing it this morning, the company said, starting today, you can express yourself freely, unquote. Except that, well, I wouldn't use freely as the word there. There are some big catches. First, you can't play a clip. You can't talk over a song. You have to use the entire piece of music or nothing at all. And worse, if you opt to do this, be aware that you will be severely limiting your podcast's reach since Anchor will stop distributing your podcast

to any platform other than Spotify. That means no Apple Podcasts, no Overcast, no Pocketcast, no Stitcher, nothing. I just ran the numbers on this podcast, and if I were to do this based on the share of downloads that Spotify is responsible for, I would lose 93% of my listenership. Finally, Sprout Social has added an integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365. They also had integrations with HubSpot and Zendesk. And this morning, I was the guest on Agorapulse's fantastic social media lab live show.

We talked about negative response strategy that we developed here at my agency and walked through how to apply it to your brand's own social channels. You can find that replay on Agorapulse's Facebook page. here at my agency and walked through how to apply it to your brand's own social channels. You can find that replay on Agorapulse's Facebook page. Don't forget about our Slack community where you can find exclusive content that doesn't appear on this podcast just today. We added an interview I did yesterday with Kate Sloan, a sex toy blogger.

And why, you ask, is a sex toy blogger appearing in a digital marketing podcast? Because she just finished writing her 1,000th blog post. She joined me for a deep dive into her process and how you, as a digital content manager, can also keep churning out high-quality pieces. You will find that only in our Slack community, along with other exclusive episodes, an expert on managing Google My Business profiles, how to apply the scientific method to your next ad campaign, Thank you. or tap the link in this episode's description. Once there, introduce yourself, then head over to the exclusive content channel,

todayindigital.com slash slack, or tap the link in this episode's notes. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow.