Full Transcription

[Introduction] – 00:00

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 70 of This Week In Marketing. This is your host Sajid Islam, and today I’ll be going over the notable news and updates in the digital marketing space from the week of August 16, 2021.

[Update 1 – LinkedIn Publishes New Guide to Effective Brand Building on the Platform] – 00:38

Today, First off, we’re gonna start with LinkedIn. Well, LinkedIn has published a new guide to effective brand building on the platform. So it’s a 23 page guide in in their latest series of marketing overviews for the platform, which is also published, which also published a similar branding last month. One key advice from LinkedIn in this thing that really resonated with me was like something I think you all need to know. Is it before customers come to marketing a bike scenario? Right? They should be primed with reputable or repeated memorable exposure to your brand. Then ask those buyers coming market. More rational messaging can help you capitalize on this underlying. Grand Stream to achieve the short-term results and this is one of the reasons why I’m covering this right in our broadcast because this is $1,000,000 listing right here for any market here. Any business owner listening to the podcast right now should know that. You know people don’t people only buy from. People you know like and trust, right? So you have to always position your brand and make sure you’re building, you know. Thanks. Good image in the people’s mind before they come to market with their money to buy something from both of you or in that sector. With that, let’s jump into Twitter.

[Update 2 – Twitter Pauses Verification Program, After Accidentally Verifying Fake Accounts] – 01:56

So, Twitter has paused verification program after accidentally verifying fake accounts. Again. This is a program that Twitter has been struggling with at first. You know, depositing back in 2017 and it was paused for some time because they were not sure what they’re gonna do. Then they opened it up, announced last year that they gonna open it up and they opened up. Tomorrow, I think March of this year and they were flooded with requests that after treated they paused it, now they unpaused, they were going through all this verification process and now it turns out that they have accidentally approved some fake accounts with Twitter verification again and trying to figure out how do they. I look best. Proceed. This actually shows an underlying problem with these platforms were having to verify an account with this blue check mark, which is really a big task. But how I do not know how Facebook is able to figure it out but but I will let Twitter figure it out. That’s not for us, but I just wanted to let you know that you know we have covered Twitters pause-unpause verification system in our previous episodes. So I would just want to take. Announce it and make you all aware that you have this program is currently on hold. With that, let’s move on to Pinterest.

[Update 3 – Pinterest Introduces Hair pattern Search for Inclusive Results] – 03:18

Pinterest keeps on improving their product, and this week they announced is that to maximize inclusion, what they’ve done is they’ve added a first of his kind here pattern search option which enables Pinterest or pin Pinterest users pinners to search for hair products and ideas based on their. Hair types. This is similar to Pinterest skin tone Qualifier search qualifier where peanuts were able to discover ideas based on their skin color. Now from the demo video I’ve seen, it seems like. I know whether you have curly hair straight here, you know, WAVY hair. You can search on it and you can feel the things and things like that. So This is actually. Another thing that is really amazing about this thing is that technology has advanced so much that you now computer vision can not just understand the face and the image, but also understands the hair color, hair color, hair things and the Pinterest has used over 500. Million images to train their AI model right and in the past month alone, there were about 120 million searches for here and over 5 billion pins we created related to her on Pinterest. So here’s another tip. If you’re listening to it and you’re wondering, you know, what’s the next business venture you should get into like her? People are going to have here. People are gonna love their people are gonna shrink, press themselves through here. Maybe that’s a product you need to venture into. I don’t know. I’m just. You know, sharing with all these things, you know, check out our show notes where I will have some more examples for them taking directly out of the Pinterest announcements, but this is nevertheless a very, you know, people moment for us in the industry just because while the computer vision can do nowadays, Next up is TikTok.

[Update 4 – TikTok Partners with Vimeo and Canva to Streamline Content Creation] – 05:14

TikTok has partnered with Vimeo and Canva streamlined content creation. Now, this is good news because and obviously if you within you as Vimeo create studio a lot of TikTokers probably did not have the bandwidth or the resources to go ahead and get Vimeo same thing with Canva. Canva has about 50 templates for users. So basically All in all, word, TikTok is doing is TikTok is pushing through forward and creating all these things that unfortunately Facebook has failed or should I say Instagram has failed or maybe they tried and they couldn’t do it, but nevertheless you know this is really good you know. Effort from TikTok, where it shows that they care about the users they want to make their users life or creators life easier so that you know they can create more videos effectively and they can, you know, reach their targeted audience. With that. Let’s go to Snapchat.

[Update 5 – Snapchat Launches ‘Snapchat Trends’] – 06:10

Snapchat, for the first time, has launched Snapchat trends. This is a big news for many reasons. Number one is you now you can actually look at Snapchat trends and find the most popular keywords shared within the Snapchat community. Whether it’s public stories, my stories. And you know, this is a searchable database of terms, right? No. The other things that are good about this Snapchat trend is like you can do product market research, you can right creative messaging and copywriting, you can do build user profiles and personas. You can research key moments and comparative research. This is similar to what Google has Google Trends and you know obviously this is yet another data point. You know, if you ask me, I have looked at Google Trends to figure things out. Whether certain things like, you know, taking off, like for example, I used to be in working industry where I had coworking office, working spaces. And I’ve done trends where, you know, is this an upward trend? Is it a downward trend of people searching for it ’cause it gives me a lot of. The idea about an industry right soaping Snapchat is going to be yet another tool in my toolbox. Check it out. Let’s move on to Google.

[Update 6 – Google: Cover All Your Bases With Searcher Intent & Your Content] – 07:25

So Google has come out a specially John Mueller from Google has come out and that says you know, you should cover all cover all your bases with search with searchers’ intent and your content. So let me unpack this for you and what it means. It basically means that You know, if you have an ecommerce site right, you cannot just create one type of content. You should try to create content from different angles like the probably, let’s just say you’re selling bicycles, so you shouldn’t just create car content that is related to bicycle transactional pages like by bicycle or bicycle. You know, feature space, things like that. You should also create content such as. You know best bicycles for you. Best bicycles for 2021. Why uh, your bicycle is better than this, so you know basically what John Mueller Mueller is saying is like in going to blogs and try to do all sorts of angles because you never know which way shape and form a searcher is gonna search. So try to cover as many as many angles as you can. You think of varying user use cases and things like that. And this is where your search console data comes in handy so folks, if you don’t have Google search console get it integrated, get your site verified, get those data and see what people are searching for, how they’re coming, because that will be very valuable to you to write all this content.

[Update 7 – Google Now Allows You To Report Indexing Issues] – 08:51

Next us Google, next up is Google Now allows you to report indexing issues. Again this goes back to Google search console. If you don’t have Google search console, you’re missing out big time, but Next up is that. You know you if you see a site or a particular page, it’s not index or certain aspect of your website not getting indexed or you know showing up. You cannot file a feature and not file a complaint with Google and they’re gonna manually take a look at it. This is a big move. So folks, again, Google does Let’s say that be careful. Check their community forum. Check sample documentation. Don’t just like say I do not know, my search is not Site is not showing up on page one. Maybe it’s in Page 2, maybe it’s in Page three like you know. Do some digging. Don’t think you know Google is going to just do the legwork for you. If you think Google is there to serve you. I would say don’t because chances are something like this. The bug reporting two features are going to be understaffed. A lot of people are gonna reach out, so just be careful, right? Next up we have YouTube.

[Update 8 – YouTube Rolls Out 3 Updates For Creators] – 09:53

So YouTube Studio is getting three major updates for creators, which is OK myself. So one of the things we’re gonna get is improve real time cards. These cards are going to display up to the minute on important channel metrics like subscriber counts and video views, right? Next up is going to be an inbox for channeling mentions, which I think is great personally because creators will now have access to mentions Inbox in YouTube studio. They inbox will show you all the places where your child hasn’t mentioned on YouTube and if your channel is tagged in the comments section of another channels video for example dimensions in boxes where you can go to find out about it. Well, that’s great. I wish Facebook or Instagram will do something like this. That would really be a game changer for me. But anyway. And the third thing that they’re releasing is #autocomplete suggestions. So You Tube is launching a #autocomplete suggestion, which we recommend 11 hashtags based on what’s most popular. This feature works in a similar way to hashtag suggestions on Twitter and Instagram. Start tapping the hashtag and YouTube will display possible tags to use along with data on how many channels have been user. Using each hashtags. I love it, I love it. So hope you check it out and let’s go to the other part of the YouTube update, which is basically that you see on the front page.

[Update 9 – YouTube Updates Search Results] – 11:05

So YouTube is now updating a few things when you when you search for videos on youtube.com number one is improved visual presentation. So YouTube is making it easier for users to see what a video is all about before clicking on it. The search results pages and now. And now showing instead of showing a static thumbnails you just can see a preview of each video when the scroll over. It just can now also not make more informed decisions about what content they’re going to watch. Next up is automatic translations. YouTube is making more content available to more people with the introduction of automatically translated caption styles and descriptions which we have covered in our. Previous shows, but what is? What they’re saying is when you tubes are not able to return relevant content for a user search in their own language, it will translate, it will return translated content right? So you will first start with supplementing with English video with plans to expand more more languages in the future. This is big, folks. Now you have another incentive to create content. Not having to think like schedule like create English content as well as you know Spanish content. Just create one in Europe is going to do the work for you. This is amazing. Third is integration of Google search results so that testing this out in India and Indonesia. But you know what they’re saying is where they don’t have enough content, doesn’t get returned back, say on YouTube from YouTube doesn’t have enough content for a specific. They’re gonna go pull Google search or, you know, put it in there again. Yet another reason for you to create content, content, content folks. So stay on the content bandwagon and let’s move on to the next part.

[Update 10 – Google Advertisers Can Adjust Conversion Values in Smart Bidding] – 12:56

Next part is Google ads which is Google ads now is saying that you can in a smart bidding. In a smart bidding scenario or automated bidding scenario, you can adjust the value of your conversion value. So what What this basically means is like say for example you understand that you know certain users, certain users on your website are more valuable than the others. Alright, a certain audiences are more valuable than the other stuff. For example, if someone who buys over the phone purchase like $100 of product, but someone who buys on that desktop is buying $500 of product now, you would be able to like in a silicon version value for each of these scenarios. So that way you know you’re signaling that training Google algorithm saying, you know, hey. If I have someone who is on desktop, I’m willing to pay double or triple my, you know, whatever. I’m willing to pay for mobile because I know I’m. I end up making more money from that desktop user. That’s what it’s all about. So overall, it’s a great feature it as long as you are in the smart bidding space. However, if you have been following me, you know, I don’t like smart bidding. Unless you have actually figured out your sweet spot and then you can go ahead and go with smart building and you can train the algorithm ’cause you know, for all these algorithms you need a lot of huge datasets. You cannot train algorithm with like say $500 monthly budget. But if you’re 5000 or 10,000 or 20,000 a month, a month monthly budget, and you have a lot of data volume and then you can train it effectively. So where where like manual first is like you know, first find that sweet spot. You know you can be profitable and once you profitable you. Basically, putting gasoline in the fire and you just hike it all up. But that’s all for now.

[Closing] – 14:44

Alrighty folks! That’s it for this week in marketing. Now you need to know everything to be in the know. If you’d like to read more, please make sure you visit our show page where you’ll find the links to the articles. Once again, this is your host Sajid Islam signing off until next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thank you for tuning in this week. It was a pleasure to serve you all. Hit the subscribe button so that you remember to sign on next week. Same place, same time for another round of This Week In Marketing.

1. LinkedIn Publishes New Guide to Effective Brand Building on the Platform (0:38) – LinkedIn has published another new guide on the value of brand-building on the platform and establishing connections with your target buyers through a more all-encompassing promotional and outreach process.

The 33-page guide is the latest in a series of marketing overviews from the platform, which also published a similar branding guide last month. One Key advice from LinkedIn:

“Before customers come to market, in a buying scenario, they should be primed with repeated, memorable exposure to your brand. Then, as those buyers come in-market, more rational messaging can help you capitalize on this underlying brand strength to achieve short-term results”

2. Twitter Pauses Verification Program, After Accidentally Verifying Fake Accounts (1:56) – So it’s not the same as the total pause that Twitter put on verification applications back in May – a week after re-opening them, following a four-year halt. But it’s indicative of another spanner in the works for Twitter’s internal assessment and approval systems, which have been consistently problematic and have left many confused as to what Twitter’s blue tick actually means, and whether it carries the weight that some appear to place upon it.

 

3. Pinterest Introduces Hair pattern Search for Inclusive Results (3:18) – Pinterest is taking another step towards maximizing inclusion, with the addition of a new, first-of-its-kind hair pattern search option, which will enable Pinterest users to search for hair products and ideas based on varying hair types.

Similar to Pinterest’s skin tone search qualifier, Pinners will now also be able to discover ideas based on their specific hair type, which will help narrow down their results with more personalized, useful matches in the app.

Pinterest also notes that its system has detected a hair pattern in over 500 million images, ensuring that users will be able to get results based on their personal selection.

The easy-to-apply filters will make it much easier to find more specific matches for each user, and as noted, add to Pinterest’s broader focus on maximizing inclusion, and catering to a broader range of people with functional processes to help guide their discovery process.

And hair, specifically, is an important element of interest for Pinners.

“In the past month alone, there were over 120 million searches for hair and over 5 billion Pins were created related to the hair on Pinterest. We’ve also seen that top hair searches on Pinterest are personalized – for example, “natural hair twists protective” (15x) and “best haircuts for thick wavy hair” (13x).”

4. TikTok Partners with Vimeo and Canva to Streamline Content Creation (5:14) – Vimeo is used popularly for uploading and sharing videos (a decent alternative to YouTube), the TikTok users will be able to access the “Vimeo Create” tool on the platform which Vimeo had introduced in February last year. The Vimeo create has a variety of new tools which will help users in creating and editing their videos in such an attractive way that it will be a standout content among the millions of videos that circulate around TikTok and the best part about this is that users can directly upload their edited and finalized videos from Vimeo to TikTok.

This is a great opportunity for users who do not want to buy a subscription to a high-end editing application because it is way out of their budget and the subscription on Vimeo Create not only gives you access to a variety of new tools; it is budget-friendly too.

Moving on from Vimeo, another great platform we would like to talk about is Canva which now has worked on 50 TikTok-related templates for users and saving their time in the editing process. The best part about the tool is that it is extremely user-friendly, and so even if you are new to the application it will not take much time for you to get a hang of Canva.

 

5. Snapchat Launches ‘Snapchat Trends’ (6:10) – For the first time, Snap is giving a glimpse into the topics and moments most relevant to the Snapchat Generation with the introduction of Snapchat Trends. Snapchat Trends highlights the most popular keywords shared with the Snapchat community via public Stories and My Stories that have been viewed by a large group, in addition to a searchable database of terms. With these insights, Snap is able to provide a new level of visibility into organic chatter on Snapchat, looking at what our community is talking about and showcasing popular Snaps that exemplify each trending topic.

5 Ways to Apply Snapchat Trends to Your Business

#1 Product Market Research

Trends data can be a helpful jumping-off point in researching organic consumer behavior to evaluate the overall market fit for your product or service. Any vertical or industry — whether it’s Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Automotive, or Entertainment — can use trend data to understand what products, shows, flavors, or models are most commonly being talked about.

#2 Creative Messaging and Copywriting

For brands looking to build contextually relevant creativity, this is a great way to keep a pulse on those trends and ensure that creative copy not only fits its context but stands out.

#3 Building User Profiles and Personas

Because communication on Snap most often occurs among close friends, Snapchatters often share what they’re doing in their daily lives, including both major life moments and more mundane daily activities. This can lead to powerful insights when building a profile of who your target audience is and what they do throughout their days and weeks, like going to work, shopping online, and streaming the latest content online.

#4 Researching Key Moments

Similar to the concept above, we’ve seen that Snapchatters not only use Snapchat to celebrate major milestones, but they also tend to celebrate those moments in between — what we like to call Snapchat Holidays. This can be anything from National Ice Cream Day to International Women’s day, and we tend to see a massive groundswell in conversation around these “in-between” holidays. For any brand looking to “own” a relevant moment, Trends can be an incredibly powerful planning tool in finding just the right moment to align a media strategy to.

#5 Competitive Research

One final and very valuable use is to understand the market in which a brand, product, or service operates. It can be used not only to understand consumer sentiment towards specific products or types of products but also to understand competitive offerings and how those products fit in the market. By analyzing multiple products in one query, you can easily compare the peaks and valleys of conversation over time to see how your brand is faring relative to the competition on Snapchat. This can be incredibly insightful input for both ongoing brand-health monitoring and also larger quarterly business reviews.

 

6. Google: Cover All Your Bases With Searcher Intent & Your Content (7:25) – Lily Ray shared an interesting chart from Ahrefs, the SEO toolset, showing how for a single keyword phrase, there were multiple intents from searchers spike over a different time period. In which, John Mueller of Google responded that it makes sense to create content that covers “both possible intents.”

 

7. Google Now Allows You To Report Indexing Issues (8:51) – Google announced that all signed-in Google Search Console users who go to the English help form can now submit indexing bug notifications to Google.

To access the form, you need to be signed in to your Search Console account and access the English version of either of these two help documents.

Google did say “before reporting an Indexing issue, always consult our community forums and check our support documentation, which highlights some additional helpful tools.” “Support is limited to English at the moment, but we will explore expansion to more languages in the future,” Google added.

 

8. YouTube Rolls Out 3 Updates For Creators (9:53) – YouTube Studio is receiving three updates on mobile and desktop that will help creators stay informed on data that matters to their channel.

The updates include:

  • Improved real-time cards – These cards display up-to-the-minute data on important channel metrics like subscriber counts and video views. Realtime cards are getting improved at the video level and at the channel level. The improvements appear to be the addition of reach and engagement data, which now have dedicated tabs.
  • An inbox for channel mentions – Creators now have access to a mentions inbox in YouTube Studio. The inbox will show you all the places where your channel has been mentioned on YouTube. If your channel is tagged in the comment section of another channel’s video, for example, the mentions inbox is where you can go to find out about it. Replying to mentions may help get more eyes on your channel as it can make you more visible to different audiences. The mentions inbox can be found where you access viewer comments in YouTube Studio. A new tab will let you toggle between the comments inbox and mentions inbox.
  • Hashtag autocomplete suggestions – YouTube is launching hashtag autocomplete suggestions, which will recommend relevant hashtags based on what’s most popular. The feature works in a similar way to hashtag suggestions on Twitter and Instagram. Start typing the hashtag and YouTube will display possible tags to use, along with data on how many channels and videos are using each hashtag.

 

9. YouTube Updates Search Results (11:05) – YouTube is overhauling its search results with changes to the visual presentation of SERPs as well as the types of content returned.

The updates to YouTube search include three significant changes:

  • Improved visual presentation – YouTube is making it easier for users to see what a video is about before clicking on it. The search results pages are now more visual. Instead of a static thumbnail, users can see a preview of each video when they scroll over it. Users can now make more informed decisions about the content they watch. This is already possible on desktop and now the feature is coming to mobile. In addition, YouTube search results pages will display video chapters when available.
  • Automatic translations – YouTube is making more content available to more people with the introduction of automatically translated captions, titles, and descriptions. This makes it possible for users to enjoy a greater variety of videos regardless of the language they’re in. When YouTube is not able to return relevant content for a user’s search in their own language, it will return translated content. YouTube will first start supplementing search results with English videos, with plans to expand to more languages in the future. Eventually, YouTube hopes all its content will be accessible through automatic translations.
  • Integration of Google search results – Google search results are getting integrated into YouTube. But only on a limited basis, for now. YouTube is experimenting with returning search results from Google when there’s not enough video content available to satisfy a query. This feature is currently available on mobile devices in India and Indonesia. YouTube will consider further expansion based on user feedback.

 

10. Google Advertisers Can Adjust Conversion Values in Smart Bidding (12:56) – Stephen Chang, Product Manager, Google Ads in an announcement wrote “You can adjust conversion values based on characteristics like location, device, and audience. By applying a rule to these characteristics, you can adjust conversion values to align more closely with your business outcomes,”

This added feature means that businesses can use their inherent knowledge of what’s working in their industry to improve their conversion rates in Google Ads. For example, if advertisers know certain audiences or people in certain locations are most likely to convert, they can set a rule to multiply the conversion value for the chosen group by two.

For example, let’s say you run a sporting goods store and know that an audience of people similar to repeat customers who have bought triathlon gear will be worth more to your business in the long run. Now, you can set a rule to multiply the conversion value for this specific group by a factor of two.

“These rules will also be used by Maximize conversion value and Target ROAS to optimize your bids in real-time. Conversion value rules will be available for Smart Bidding across Search, Shopping, and Display over the next few weeks,” wrote Chang.

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