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Disclaimer

Likely, the best websites you have seen have involved more than just two people. Typically, great websites include entire branding exercises that span 2-3 weeks, content writing, design, and development… not to mention iteration as time goes on. This involves many different specialists for each aspect. 

Although, if you are a smaller business and want to do things on a budget, there are two key people you should make sure your project has. 

Person 1: The Designer

Sometimes my customers send me marketing quotes they received from agencies and ask me why the cost of the projects are so different. If the scope of work for both projects are similar, it typically comes down to the fact that the designer and developer of the project are the same people. 

To find a person that can do both design and development is like asking your Chief Financial Officer to run the HR office as well. It is extremely difficult because these jobs require completely different skillsets and use different parts of the brain. So, what ends up happening, is a business ends up with a templated website that is tweaked to fit their brand instead of something built for them.

A great designer can take a brand and, using their experience, creative knowledge, and design best practices, come up with something spectacular. I have yet to do a project where no designer is involved and end up with a totally unique website. Thus, having this person on your project is table stakes to compete and stand out against your competition.

Person 2: The Developer

This one is obvious. If you do not have a developer that can build the website for you then you just do not have a website at all. However, I wanted to highlight this because there is a difference in skillset amongst developers. 

Many people can call themselves a developer but may not have the skillset required to complete a project. When hiring a developer, depending on your project, you want to ensure they can write code from scratch such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. The reason this matter is that you will not end up with a developer who uses builders like Wix and Squarespace to develop your website. These platforms are not great to grow your business in the long term. You also so not want a developer that uses plugins to add things that would just take a couple of lines of code, thus creating more attack surfaces for hackers on your website.

A great developer will make your website fast, responsive, and scalable which is a noteworthy investment as well.

To summarize, having these two people within your project will ensure a much higher success rate. As your expectations go up, more specialists should be involved. As a Marketing Specialist that connects businesses with the right marketing agencies, I ensure that I set expectations for every project and ensure my customers have the right people involved.

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What a year it’s been.

We’ve been searching for the right things to say to bring more positivity to 2020, but honestly, we don’t think anything we say will necessarily make this year magically better. However, one of the values we preach and practice in house is “Be Grateful”, and that has helped us immensely by reminding us of all the things we do have, even when things aren’t so great. Hopefully, this practice can help you and your organizations as well. With that being said, we genuinely wish that you, your family, and your friends are safe and well, and that the second half of the year is much better than the first.

OUR BIG ANNOUNCEMENT ON LIVE TV

On to the big announcement; you may or may not have heard, but we started a sister agency called AndHumanity, an Inclusive Marketing Agency.

For a while now, we noticed a gap in the industry, where clients have realized both the value and importance of Diversity and Inclusion in Marketing, but didn’t have the guidance and expertise available. Thus, for over a year, we’ve been researching, training, collaborating with D&I experts, and developing a framework and model for brands that want to either dip their toes into Inclusive Marketing or further what they’ve already been doing. Click on the image below to watch my interview with CTV News where I discuss why we need inclusive marketing more than ever in our industry: 

BRAND INCLUSION SELF-ASSESSMENT TOOL

If you’re interested, you can discover how inclusive your brand is as well as tips on how to improve by utilizing our Brand Inclusion Self-Assessment Tool. The tool, which is adapted from Dr. Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, TWI Inc and ODR Inc., was developed in collaboration with Adeline Huynh, a Diversity and Inclusion Expert and trusted advisor of AndHumanity.

ABOUT ANDHUMANITY, INCLUSIVE MARKETING AGENCY

AndHumanity, Inclusive Marketing Agency
We Identify where exclusion or underrepresentation exists in your communications and offerings, work to close these gaps by elevating these marginalized voices and advocating for change. We do this through thoughtfully aligning brand values with communications, building authentic allyships, and creating relevant content which deepens customer loyalty and influences positive social change..

Underrepresented voices include but are not limited to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour), LGBTQ2S+, people with invisible or visible diverse-abilities, socio-economic status, age, gender and the intersection of these lived experiences. We realize this list is by no means exhaustive. Our ultimate purpose is for all individuals to truly belong as they are.

Thanks for reading, and wishing you all an awesome second half of 2020!

Cheers,

Tammy Tsang,
Founder and Principal, My Loud Speaker Marketing
Co-Founder, AndHumanity

The post A Big Announcement | Introducing AndHumanity, Inclusive Marketing Agency appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

The economy’s rapid expansion into the online world has made digital marketing an essential part of the marketing mix. Digital marketing is a collection of all marketing initiatives that use the internet or an electronic gadget.

At present, Canada has over 30 million internet users—it’s one of the biggest online markets in the world. Canada’s digital audiences are projected to increase to 32 million users by 2022, making up almost 85% of the country’s population.

This tremendous growth in the online audience reinforces the need and evolution of digital marketing.

SO, WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING?

Digital marketing includes specific efforts to impact your brand’s online presence, including search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, digital display advertising, games, e-commerce marketing and much more. The internet has become the medium of choice, with digital media as a part of everyday life for most consumers. It’s the primary source of news consumption, networking, research and references, shopping and plenty of other tasks.

BENEFITS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital marketing is the next era in marketing trends; it involves strategic planning and provides direct access to consumers. Digital marketing has several benefits:

Targeted

Most consumers begin their buying journey online. In online marketing, consumers can be filtered based on search histories, interests, hobbies, demographics, and purchase habits, thus allowing you to reach your target audience directly. The internet not only provides access to a massive number of consumers at the same time but also lets you offer them personalized content matching consumer interests/needs.

Measurable

With traditional marketing, it’s not always possible to get a quantitative analysis of results. However, with digital marketing tactics such as search engine marketing, you receive a report which includes real-time analytics and detailed audience demographic information. It removes the hassle of figuring out what’s working or not working. The report provides valuable insight into the performance of your campaigns such as email open rates and clicks, and there’s always room to pivot the direction for as needed based on the campaign’s success.

Cost-effective

Traditional marketing methods are generally expensive, often reaching up to six-figure investments. It’s nearly impossible for companies with a small budget to compete with large organizations. However, digital marketing is an extremely cost-effective avenue, with companies getting better results for their marketing spend. Digital marketing tactics have a low cost of entry into avenues such as online digital advertisements, pay-per-click, social media ads. Although search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media engagement tactics take time to show results, digital ads and social media ads produce quick results.

Digital marketing provides room for smaller organizations to remain competitive in a crowded market, still giving them a voice to stand out from the pack.

Lead Generation

Most of your customers are online, and now you can reach them directly. By using relevant keywords, you can reach more qualified buyers online through search engine optimization. Digital marketing can also help you reach consumers using mobiles, tablets, or desktops.

Higher Conversion

The best part about digital marketing is that customers are just a few clicks away. Through targeted content, you can narrow down on your ideal buyer, and they don’t have to pick up the phone or go to the store to make a purchase. You get a higher return on your investment, as consumers get all the information they need without investing the time or effort that’s usually involved in the traditional purchase decision process. The digital purchase process usually quick and seamless.

DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2019

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence will change the world of marketing—it analyzes consumer behaviour and search patterns, and utilizes social media to help businesses understand how people make purchase decisions. Companies that adopt AI in 2019 will get an edge over competitors, save costs, and accelerate growth. From content marketing to chatbots, AI has its presence in various avenues that assist brand development.

Chatbots

An AI-based technology, chatbots talk to customers and site visitors in real-time, day or night, using instant messaging. Chatbots are responsive, respond promptly, accurately recall customers’ entire buying history, and are always patient so it’s no surprise that many customers prefer interacting with them.

Chatbots provide outstanding customer service, meet customers’ expectations and automate repetitive tasks, allowing companies to focus on higher priorities. At present, 1.4 billion people interact with chatbots—by 2022, businesses will save over $8 billion each year using chatbots.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is changing the world of advertising. Programmatic advertising is the use of  AI to automate ad buying to help target specific audiences. It involves real-time bidding or auctions and is efficient and fast. This leads to high conversions and low customer acquisition costs. Almost 90% of online display ads will be programmatic by 2020.

Content Marketing

Key content marketing trends for 2019 will be:

• A more strategic approach to content marketing:  with many businesses now having a holistic content marketing strategy, supporting audience engagement and leads/sales generation.
• Focus on content quality based on a more in-depth understanding of personas.
• New roles and structure to support content marketing activities as investment increases.
• Improved measurement of content marketing effectiveness.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves using key people in a given field to get your brand’s message out. Instead of marketing directly to a group of consumers, you pay the influencer to reach his audience. It’s similar to word-of-mouth, and your brand’s message is shared through a credible source trusted by the mass.  People generally trust consumer opinions over corporate statements, so getting your brand’s message out through a credible influencer is optimal.

Paid and Earned Media

Advertising and PR complete the picture of digital channels. The big winners for 2018 were native advertising and video advertising — which we can expect to continue to be relevant in 2019 — given that video advertising overtook display advertising for the first time.

Social Media

• Facebook | Static or declining use in most age groups, except for the 55+ age group, which is now the largest number of users
• Instagram | Increased usage across all age groups with the largest, Adults 25 -34, followed by Adults 18-24.
• Snapchat | The largest increase and biggest user group is again Adults 25-34, showing that Snapchat isn’t just for teens. There are also increases in users in older age groups which are not far behind the younger age groups in adoption levels.
• It’s expected that Instagram ad spending will continue to increase in line with increased usage and better advertising options on the platform. Recent data shows that Facebook ad spending grew 40% VYA (2018);  the ad spend on Instagram soared 177% during the same period.

There’s currently an increased use of Facebook Messenger, which is an opportunity. Facebook reports on the importance of Messenger: 1.3 billion people used Messenger every month; 8 billion messages were exchanged between people and businesses every month;  78% of people with smartphones used messaging every month. As well as targeted sponsored ads, use of Messenger for conversations is a significant trend.

CASE STUDIES

Legal Services – Establishing Differentiation in a Competitive, Undifferentiated Market

Consumer and Market Research Formulation, Positioning Strategy, Branding Strategy, Legal Services Brand Identity, Repositioning, Brand Architecture, Service Structuring, Product Development, Advertisement.

Building trust and credibility when public perception of the industry’s not positive.

Lawyers have quite the reputation — public opinion involves a low level of trust and perceives lawyers as lacking empathy, with a primary focus on charging high fees. My Loud Speaker disrupted the legal services category with unique branding and positioning campaign.

When the client, Hammerberg Lawyers, first walked into My Loud Speaker offices,  they were only looking for a campaign to promote their legal practice in light of the new ICBC cap for minor injuries. However, when My Loud Speaker’s creative team worked on the messaging strategy, they realized that the brand architecture and the structure of Hammerberg Lawyers’ services created a significant roadblock for effective consumer communication.

In-depth research on consumer behaviour led to USP.

According to consumer research, if the current brand were to be rebranded and positioned with a USP that differs from the conventional and over-communicated benefits of hiring a lawyer, it would be an advantage for the client over the existing competition.

Our strategy team analyzed the consumer motivations and factors influencing purchase decision; we identified differentiation points using strategically planned consumer and neuro research, which showed us that hiring a lawyer caused cognitive dissonance among consumers. Although the cognitive dissonance still led consumers to well-known brands, coupled with the lack of trust for the legal industry, consumers were still uncertain whether they made the right decision.

Creating a go-to brand.

Research and analysis conducted by the agency, along with a separate study conducted by our strategy team in consumer behaviour, market perception and competitor analysis, revealed that there was an opportunity to be explored if the brand was restructured based on two service divisions: corporate and contingency based.

Our recommendation was to create a new brand, with the right positioning and tone of voice, to turn this behavioural insight into a breakthrough positioning opportunity, thereby disrupting the legal services industry and standing out from the pack.

The strategy was approved on the spot.

My Loud Speaker created comprehensive strategic and tactical roadmaps for splitting the service and brand, which was a 12-month action plan and required a multi-million dollar investment. The roadmaps were presented together with a 200-page strategy document and research findings — the client approved the strategy on the spot.

The only (but expected) challenge we faced was a demonstration of the necessity for and potential of such a big project to our client. Following approval, we walked the client through every step to relieve the stress of change — after all, they had to shift how they worked and thought about their business completely. We also explained all the next steps and the challenges these changes may create for the client; the comprehensive strategy and roadmaps prepared by the agency were highly instrumental in illustrating the potential.

Revolutionized how people think about legal services.

That’s how Helpforme was born: a personal, positive, and facilitative personal legal services brand positioned to change consumers’ associations and how people think about legal services.

My Loud Speaker developed the new brand name based on extensive behavioural research. We designed the corporate identity, brand maps, brand character, and also provided the client with marketing and business consultancy and internal training to make the transition as smooth as intended.

In less than three months, My Loud Speaker created all the brand, marketing communications, and new product development strategies. We also implemented the plan and created the branding elements within that period through agile planning and by using breakthrough design-thinking models for effective (and efficient) creative resource utilization.

A strategic digital marketing campaign to generate website traffic and leads.

My Loud Speaker worked as business partners for Helpforme; through a strategic digital campaign, our digital team drove traffic Helpforme’s new website and generated leads. My Loud Speaker developed, implemented, and managed the entire SEM campaign. The business objective of the digital campaign was straightforward: to generate 85 leads by the end of the campaign with a specified Cost Per Acquisition. The campaign, which launched in October 2018, had impressive results in just one month:

• Nearly 3,500 website visitors (more than 98% were new visitors)
• Average daily visitors +/- 180
• 73 qualified leads
• Mid-way through November, 58 leads were generated
• Cost Per Acquisition met the campaign’s specified target

What can we do for you?

My Loud Speaker acts as a shadow marketing department for clients to actively identify any potential challenges they may face and works proactively towards preventing them. In addition to that, clients have 24/7 access to the account managers and our creative team which helps both My Loud Speaker and the client identify and implement solutions to any challenges that may arise. Our clients know that My Loud Speaker works in their best interest.

This case is one of many examples of the work that we do. My Loud Speaker creates sound strategies, marketing communication campaigns, brand positioning, and rebranding (among other services) based on extensive research and market knowledge, depending on the needs of each client.

Branding and Positioning in the Crowded US Consumer Electronics Space

Brand Awareness, Product Positioning in Consumer Goods/Consumer Electronics Market, Start-up Marketing, Digital Marketing, Media Planning, and Advertising.

The rise and fall of start-ups.

Start-ups rise and fall all the time because they don’t have a clear direction. While there may be a vision, it’s important to have marketing management strategies in place to ensure that the company grows quickly and works efficiently. It’s also essential to keep the company’s long-term growth and success in mind and plan accordingly.

Sum Products — standing out as a start-up.

In Silicon Valley’s crowded space of tech start-ups and consumer electronics, My Loud Speaker had to launch a campaign to set one brand apart. Sum Products released its latest innovation, +sum DIAL, a wireless charger with a beautiful design and 360-degree rotation — the only wireless charger of its kind in the market. However, the consumer electronics market is flooded with cool gadgets and products from various tech start-ups. How did My Loud Speaker distinguish Sum Products among the competition?

My Loud Speaker truly knows, understands, and works in collaboration with start-ups. We not only handle branding, marketing communications, and positioning strategies but work as business partners invested in the client’s long-term growth and success.

We created a unique positioning strategy for the defined audiences.

Based on initial research, My Loud Speaker determined that the best way to stand out among a crowd of tech and consumer electronics start-ups is to aim bigger and be better in terms of branding and marketing communications. My Loud Speaker identified two consumer segments as potential buyers of the product:

• Lifestyle consumers who value design, aesthetics, and premium products
• Early adopters of technology

We broke down the target audiences further using demographic and psychographic segmentation, and recommended a brand awareness campaign to establish Sum Products as a major player in the consumer goods market, and increase its product visibility. My Loud Speaker developed a positioning strategy that branded Sum Products as a premium brand with sophisticated products, not meant for the everyday consumer.

The key message: your life + infinite possibilities.

My Loud Speaker suggested a traditional and digital advertising campaign to the client, one that was a strong mix of mainstream new media placements — it was approved, planned, and successfully implemented in less than two months. Why is this special?

Cutting through the noise.

With large, well-known brands, such as Sony and Apple, were launching their wireless chargers, Sum Products really had to compete with its modest ad budget. As a new brand, gaining awareness in the mainstream market isn’t easy, but our media plan, which utilized some of the most popular new media outlets, gave Sum Products tremendous brand exposure.

With a comprehensive media and communications plan, and a digital marketing strategy, My Loud Speaker ran a strong campaign during the busiest shopping season — December 2018 — and cut through the noise. From running ad spots on some of the most consumed US new media, such as Hulu and podcasts including Dirty John, 9to5Mac, and WNYC’s The New Yorker Radio Hour, My Loud Speaker developed and implemented a robust media plan.

The campaign resulted in a 100% increase in website traffic.

We also ran a social media campaign as well as a digital marketing campaign to increase brand visibility and attract more consumers to Sum Products’ website. The assets for the ad spots and social media were also developed by our creative team very quickly, showing yet again that My Loud Speaker can deliver a high-quality campaign in a brief period through efficient resource allocation. In the first week, the Sum Products website reported a 100% increase in traffic. Also in the first week, 91 major media outlets picked up the story. Looking forward, MLS will manage the Sum Products brand and the launch of its future products for key US markets.

DIGITAL MARKETING SCOPE OF WORK

The best digital marketing agencies have a clear strategy in place that supports their client’s goals. Digital marketing has provided a new way to tap into potential customers, promote brand awareness, and increase sales. Depending on the goals of the client, marketers can support a larger campaign through digital marketing tactics.

Here’s some information on of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of receiving website traffic to your site through free, organic, editorial search results. It optimizes your website to “rank” it higher in search engine results, thereby increasing the visibility of your site and its traffic.

The channels that benefit from SEO include:

• Websites
• Blogs
• Infographics

Content Marketing

Content marketing denotes the creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content to attract and retain a specific audience and to drive them to action. It helps to increase sales and attracts quality customers relevant to your brand. The channels that can be used in your content marketing strategy include the following:

• Blog posts
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Infographics
• Online brochures and lookbooks

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your product, service, or organization. It can be used to increase brand awareness, drive sales, increase website traffic, and generate leads for your business. These are some of the channels used in social media marketing:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Google+

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click or PPC is a type of internet advertising in which the advertiser pays a publisher every time the brand’s ad is clicked. Clicks are a way to measure interest in a particular product, brand, or service. Channels where you can use PPC include:

• LinkedIn Sponsored Messages
• Google AdWords allows you to pay for top ranks on Google’s search engine results
• Facebook Ads
• Promoted Tweets on Twitter

Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of performance-based advertising where the affiliate receives a commission for promoting a business’ products or services on their website. It’s performance-based marketing in which in the business rewards/awards the affiliate for every customer he/she brings in.

Affiliate marketing channels include:

• YouTube Partner Program Video Ads
• Sharing affiliate links on your social media accounts
• Affiliate links on your website/blog

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements or sponsored content that that blend with the editorial content on a website and match the look, feel, and tone of unpaid content. BuzzFeed sponsored articles are a good example of native advertising, but many people also consider social media advertising to be “native” such as Facebook and Instagram advertising.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many repetitive tasks that would otherwise be done manually can be automated, such as:

• Email newsletters
• Social media post scheduling
• Contact list updating
• Lead-nurturing workflows
• Campaign tracking and reporting

Email Marketing

Email marketing refers to the use of emails to promote your product, service, or organization. Companies also use email marketing to communicate with their audiences and keep them updated on the latest news. Email marketing can also drive traffic to the business’ website. An email marketing campaign may include the following:

• Newsletters
• Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something
• Customer welcome emails
• Holiday promotions to loyalty program members
• Tips or similar series emails to nurture customers

Online PR

Much like traditional PR, online PR is the practice of securing earned media coverage on digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. The channels used for online PR are:

• Outreach to secure media placements/editorial coverage on digital news sites
• Connecting with reporters and media outlets via social media
• Engaging with online reviews of your company
• Engaging with comments on your website or blog

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the process of attracting, engaging, and retaining visitors on your website. Every digital marketing tactic listed above can be used in an inbound marketing strategy.

25 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT HIRING A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY

What are you looking for?

You likely know that you need to have a digital presence, but why? Do you want to build brand awareness, or develop an e-commerce site? Are you looking for social media management, or a (relatively) simple website design? Do you already have a website, but are looking for a better customer journey? Your needs will determine the right kind of digital marketing agency to approach.

While most digital marketing agencies can do all of the above, some are, simply, better than others in certain areas. We recommend looking for those “rock-star” agencies that can do it all, and beautifully.

How long do you envision working with them? A website redesign is a one-off project, with a discrete start and end date. If you’re looking for on-going social media management, that’s a longer-term commitment. You’ll be working with these folks for a while; fit is important.

Learn the Topline of Digital Marketing

Not everything, of course — that’s what you’re hiring an agency for — their expertise. However, you need to know what’s available in the digital marketing sphere 1) to determine your own business needs and goals, and 2) to be able to know what to ask the digital marketing agencies you’re considering. There’s so much information available on the web to teach yourself, and you undoubtedly know others who work in the IT realm who can help you understand the basics. That way you’ll know both your business needs and what an agency can offer to help you with.

Budgeting

This is tricky because you’re entering a Wild West of pricing. Costs for a digital marketing agency depend on 1) what you’re seeking to do, and 2) the varied costs of various digital agencies. Prices can range from under $10,000 to $100,000 or more. Obviously, if you’re doing something simple (a graphic redesign of your website) or complex (setting up an e-commerce capability), the prices you hear will rise accordingly.

Again, this is a time when it’s good to discuss with any formal or informal business advisors you might have: peers in the industry with whom you have a good and trusted relationship, friends, possibly your accountant if you have one. There’s no standardized pricing here: a small-to-medium sized agency may charge lower rates than a very large one, used to dealing with bigger budgets.

Still, you’re the only one who knows how much you can afford. Pick a price range you can manage (remember, this is investment spending) and keep it in the back of your mind when you’re meeting with digital agencies.

Do your research

This may sound simplistic, but … go to the web! Any digital agency will — or should have — a robust website showcasing themselves and their work. What services do they offer? Who are their clients? Do they have any “success” case studies? (They should.) Any sound digital marketing agency will have a LinkedIn profile, too. And of course, there will be all the basic housekeeping information: their staff profiles (the key players, at least), their location, and their contact information.

A lot of it comes down to your personal “net takeaway” — how do you feel about them? Is their website attractive and welcoming? What sort of personality do you feel the agency has? Add or exclude them from your list as you see and feel accordingly.

Physician, Heal Thyself!

In short, a digital marketing agency should have a great website. If they don’t take pains with their website, what does that say about what they provide their clients? (That said, some agencies are so busy with maximizing their clients’ digital work that they neglect their own. A little sympathetic latitude may be called for here.)

Regardless, some things must be there: attractive and engaging web pages, starting from the landing page itself, sophisticated design, intuitive and easy navigation, the basic information you need where you expect to find it.

Case studies of what they’ve done for their client is important — that could be you, after all — but an unattractive/difficult to navigate website doesn’t bode well for their work. Again, it comes down to personal feeling: did you enjoy the experience of their website? Did it engage and inspire you?

Case Studies

Almost every digital agency (and certainly, most of the traditional advertising agencies) have a “success story/testimonial” page(s) on their website. They can either outline a client’s challenge, and how they overcame it, and/or personal testimonials from their clients. These are important. These are real people, who’ve paid good money to work with the agency and had a positive outcome as a result of it.

You can also see if the agency is a good fit with your size of business, small-medium, or large. Pay particular attention to any case studies that are similar in nature to your business, either by size or by what you’re seeking in services.

Ultimately, it’s the experience you’re going to have that counts. Case studies, or success stories or testimonials are significant, but not a deal-breaker. What’s important is how the prospective agency treats you, your particular needs, and helps you achieve your business goals.

What Are Other People Saying?

This refers to former/current client testimonials, which we’ve already discussed, but far more importantly, independent digital media platforms, such as Google or Yelp reviews. If you can find such reviews — and there aren’t all that many — they’re extremely valuable because they’re unbiased reviews on independent platforms.

Although many people do this after an agency has presented to them, you might want to check out their testimonials. You can either find them yourself or ask the agency for their clients’ contact information. There’s nothing better than a voice-to-voice interaction: if anything sounds iffy or negative, you can probe for details. Almost always, though, you’ll get nothing but a positive reference: it is, after all, why the agency chose them.

Agency Social Media Profiles

An agency’s social media presence is particularly important if you’re seeking social media management. Of course, any agency that professes to be particularly strong in social media should have an outstanding presence there themselves. However, for the greater majority:

Having a corporate LinkedIn page is price-of-entry: every agency should have one, period. It’s as essential a tool as it is to a job-seeker. The agency’s LI profile should be like a corporate resume, providing a snapshot of services offered and details about the company structure and staff. You can also use LinkedIn to research the people you’ve noted from their About Us section on their website. Find out more about their skills and past experience.

Having a strong social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram fall into the nice-to-have category. It’s great to see the more human side of the agency, and the information these platforms provide can often be informative. They may have posted information about new business wins, success stories — and they might even have responded to negative posts, which is an interesting way to get a sense of their corporate personality and how they deal with difficult situations.

That said, the agency is probably pretty busy managing social media posts and platforms for their clients. In a brief, local survey, we found that many agencies hadn’t added content for the past two years!

That’s not a bad thing — managing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds are a full-time job in itself. It could well be a sign that the agency is too busy focusing on client work instead. So this one’s a toss-up.

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

If the digital marketing agencies you’re looking at have blogs, these can be a good indicator of the quality of their work. They’ll likely be writing on digital topics, and you’ll get a sense of personality from them. Do they sound like they know their work? Are they authoritative? Do they back up facts and stats with research? What’s the tone of their “voice”: friendly, aloof; casual, formal? Are the blog posts recent? Are they dealing with new issues in digital marketing, and thereby keeping up to date?

Blogs are particularly important if you’re seeking content generation — that is, an editorial about your company. Someone at the agency has to write it, and you’ll get a good sense of the quality of their work. If you’re seeking SEO — Search Engine Optimization — cast a judicious eye at their own SEO and keywords.

Your List

By this time, you’re probably narrowing down your long list to a short one. The more you’ve explored, the more you’ve learned about what digital marketing agencies can do to help grow your business. And you’ve also likely got a sense of who you might like to work with based on their size, client base, and past experience.

It’s best to contact, then set up meetings with a number of agencies (not more than four, say) and meet with them all within a two-week window. Some will want to do a phone interview with you first, to see if your company and their agency are a good fit for one another. This is pretty standard practice. If you then agree to meet in person, you’ll likely be in for a presentation about the agency, and possibly about your own business category. (Maybe even your business, or business model).

Meeting with the agencies within a narrow window of time is like conducting job interviews: you get a good sense of comparison among the candidates. You’ll be able to assess strengths and weaknesses, their sense of budget versus your own, and possibly most important of all — fit, between you/your team and the people you meet.

Getting Ready

Establish your Top Ten list of questions, based on your business goals, your budget, and what you’ve learned about digital marketing agencies. The agency will undoubtedly have some sort of agenda prepared, but it’s important not to lose sight of your own questions. The biggest, overarching questions are simple ones: What can you do to help me reach my business goals? How can you prove it?

For the latter question, they’ll likely illustrate what they’ve done for clients with similar business goals, which is, at this stage, a fair reply. Until you’re actually working with them, defined goals won’t be set. And if someone does guarantee something like a 100% increase in web traffic, be wary right away. No digital marketing agency of good repute will make a definitive claim such as that without fully exploring your business and developing plans with defined and achievable metrics.

And remember, you’re coming to them precisely because they offer expert counsel. It’s all right to say I don’t know or to ask them to explain something you don’t understand. That’s their job: to walk you through the complex digital marketplace arm-in-arm.

Remember Who’s Hiring Whom

A good agency is like a business partner or a dependable employee. It’s assumed that they’ll be more than capable, they’ll be leaders on your digital journey. But you’re in the hiring seat here, so you need to make sure that besides value for money, there’s a good fit between you, the agency, and the individuals who’ll be working on your business. Be a demanding yet fair client, and you’ll be one of the agency’s favorites. Agencies like clients who ask smart questions: they’ll respect you for it.

Who Are They Working With?

If you’re talking to agencies with big clients (a department store, a phone company, a government department) they’ll be used to working with a large organization — with correspondingly big budgets and big demands. You could — in the worst case — drop to the bottom of the priority list if there’s a time crunch within the agency. Most agencies are adept at juggling their client roster, and won’t take on a small client if they can’t provide excellent client service. Some agencies, however, could … and it’s important to figure out where you fit in the landscape of their clients. Remember, if they take you on as a client, you have every right to expect the same calibre of service they provide to their largest client.

Some agencies have carved out niches for themselves in a certain category, or size of business — that is, they may specialize in SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises). Unless you’re a large, established firm, an agency with a strong SME client roster could be a good fit for you. They understand limited budgets and the knowledge level of their clients. As well, if an agency under consideration specializes in SMEs their local knowledge should be outstanding. Naturally, you need to ask them about their current client list to avoid any conflicts of interest with your company/category.

Do They Outsource Work?

Outsourcing work is very common in the marketing and advertising industries — freelancers are hired in some of the biggest agencies in the biggest cities. Agencies often don’t mention that unless asked specifically… so it’s important to ask. There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing work, but it means that you’ll have someone working on your business who you may not have met. Why go to all the trouble of meeting your new team, then?

That said, if you trust your agency’s judgement, you can trust it to extend to the people they hire. It’s a very common practice — so common, in fact, that most agencies maintain a stable of freelancers they know and can rely upon to deliver work to their standard.

Still, it’s good to know, and a fair question to ask.

Setting Expectations

Just as you would with one of your own employees, scope-of-work expectations need to be clear and mutually agreeable from the outset of your relationship with a digital marketing agency. You need to be as clear and as transparent as possible while outlining your business objectives and goals; the agency needs to be just as clear in stating what they can deliver.

A good agency will always want to exceed your expectations; a lesser agency will agree with whatever you say, which is not what you’re paying for. You’ve hired an agency as expert counsel, and no good expert will guarantee results in the multi-factored digital world. One example would be guaranteeing X number of visitors to your website as a result of a social media campaign. A precise number isn’t feasible, while an approximate goal or objective is.

Be clear and candid with your agency, and tell them you expect the same in return. That way your relationship will be fair and honest — and with no surprises on either side.

Find Out How They Do What They DoYou have every right to ask your agency how they do their jobs. While they may not give you every single detail — this is complex work, after all — a good digital marketing agency is usually happy to share their working methods. Usually, they’re proud to detail the kind of rigorous thinking and planning that goes into a digital marketing campaign. As well, they’ve probably done some deep research digging into your company’s category, and want you to know about it — and how they’ve really turned out a unique approach for you.

Almost always, a strategic considerations presentation will precede any work that a digital marketing agency performs. After all, they need your approval to go down that recommended strategic road and get to the next step of executing the plan. They’ll tell you how they arrived at their strategy and considerations, why they chose the route they chose, and explain how it can be executed.

Being a good agency means including the client in the work; being a good client means working with the agency when they need you.

Everyone’s Favorite Word: Free

It’s an accepted good-agency practice to offer a free overview of your existing web initiatives, if you have them. Digital marketing agencies rely heavily on analytical tools that can easily be deployed on your website to examine your number of visitors, how many times they’ve visited, which pages they’ve bounced off, which pages they’ve lingered on. They can also audit your content, examining it for SEO.

It’s good information for you: some free tips will likely be included, if not self-evident in the audit. And it’s good preparatory information for a digital marketing agency. They can see the scope of work at hand (the overview), and theorize about the strategies that would be required to improve your digital marketing efforts. As well, they’ll be able to give you a much more accurate estimate of what their services will cost.

Meet Your New Partners

If it isn’t offered, it’s certainly something to ask for: before you sign with a certain agency, make sure you meet with all the people who’ll be working on your business. Emails and phone calls are well and good, but they can’t replace being in the same room with the people working on behalf of your company. Any agency worth its salt will make sure this step happens, but if for some reason it doesn’t, insist upon it.

Prices and Contracts

Never lose sight of what you set out in Step 1 What are you looking for?, and Step 3 Budgeting. The question that remains is whether what you want and what you can afford meet realistically.

This is where clear and candid discussion with a digital marketing agency is critical to your business objectives, your expectations, and your experience with the agency should you proceed with them. Some agencies offer both standard plans and custom plans. For instance, they may bundle website redesign and SEO for a flat rate. The more sophisticated digital marketing agencies usually don’t standardize: they tailor their services to each and every customer.

Most agencies work on a flat-fee project basis, with clear guidelines of scope of work and expected outcomes. (Again, these are best guess/estimated outcomes, not a flat, defined number). This works out well for both parties: clients get to remain relatively loose in their connection with the agency, paying fee-for-service; the agency has the latitude to finish the project earlier than a defined contract time might specify — or later, if the need arises. In short, it’s project completion-based, not timeline-based.

Don’t Just Settle

Negotiate the deal you’re striking with a digital marketing agency. Again, there’s no one-size-fits-all digital marketing plan (from reputable agencies) and you may be faced with some options that you’d like to have but simply can’t afford. That’s where negotiation comes in — and a test of how the agency listens to you and respects your budget. As well, you may want to be more involved in the project, say, or have a greater transparency between client and agency: these are all qualitative things to be negotiated.

Remember to always keep your budget in mind: those are tight parameters you can’t shift. You may be able to negotiate amortized payments with an agency, paying for the total through a monthly retainer.

Negotiating can sometimes be daunting, but press ahead — it’ll show you as the professional you are.

Agency Processes and You

All digital marketing agencies have work processes, and you have every right to be a part of them. This can include how you work with your contact person (usually, an assigned account manager), an approximated timeline for results, and the agency’s reporting of project status, work hours, and best ways to stay in contact.

Face-to-face meetings, too, are up for discussion: when and why those meetings should occur might be spelled out — or left on a TBD basis while the work proceeds. Whatever the mode of contact you have with your agency, they should be almost-immediately available, by phone, text, email or (within a reasonable time) a F2F meeting.

Your Corporate Privacy

Protect your corporate details and information with a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Over time, your agency will be privy to confidential information about your company — your financials, and your business objectives and goals. If/when you stop collaborating, you wouldn’t want competitors to know your innermost organizational details. An NDA protects you after your project is complete and you and your agency have parted ways.

More Learning: Agency Tools

Digital marketing agencies use myriad technical tools to mine data, and track performance of the work they do for you. You don’t need to be an expert to know about digital analytics and other tools, but having overview knowledge would help.

This could be particularly useful information before you begin meeting with agencies: it’ll help you determine the differences between each agency, and how up-to-date they are in their technology. You may also want to look at sample data reports, or the reports on performance they show their clients. It should be clear and easy to understand — and at the end of the day, reports are the one tangible product an agency delivers to you.

Some agencies may demonstrate proof-of-performance to you with online reports, accessible by a web link. Ask to see one of those, too. Some reports can be extremely complex, and you’ll need someone at the agency to walk you through them. Knowing what the agency’s end-product looks and reads like should be part of your decision-making process.

No matter what tools they use, digital marketing agencies must prove that they have up-to-the-minute data collection, how they use it to report to you, and the reports themselves, which need to be clear and make sense. Good and reputable data, clearly presented, is what a digital marketing agency should provide.

Consider Agency Rankings

(With a grain of salt.) Agency rankings can be useful, because to make it to the top of the list (think Google here) agencies know the steps involved in getting there. That’s where you want to be to, so if they appear on a list of “best digital marketing agencies”, it shows they know their stuff. That said, there are all the other factors we’ve discussed: successful case studies, their familiarity with your company’s category, price and fit. Being in a Top Ten list is great, but certainly not the only way you should rank your list of candidates.

Where Do You Find Those Lists?

Google is a good place to start, and don’t just limit yourself to “digital marketing agencies”. A lot of “marketing agencies” and “advertising agencies” deliver extremely good digital marketing, and a whole lot more. For instance, you might need to develop collateral materials (letterhead, envelopes, business cards, etc.) that match your new website graphic design. Some digital marketing agencies either can’t produce such things, or outsource them. You may be better served by searching for a full-service marketing agency, with a strong skew towards digital work. That way, you can keep all the work under one roof, and achieve economies of scale with art direction and graphic design.

While you can work with an agency in a different city — and these days, it’s entirely possible to do so, competently — it can preclude face-to-face meetings, which we recommend as an essential part of the client-agency relationship. As well, if your business is a local one, a local agency knows the marketplace best. Unless you really feel the best agency is located in another city, stay local.

When All’s Said And Done

Follow this simple checklist:

1. Determine your business goals and objectives
2. Determine your available budget (and remember that this investment spending could be amortized through agency negotiation)
3. Talk to your peers, family and friends who may have used a digital agency: hear about their experiences
4. Come up with a list of candidate-agencies
5. Have a face-to-face meeting with them: see how prepared they are, and if they’ve done any homework on your particular business category
6. Find out how they work, and what tools they work with
7. Ascertain your personal fit with the individuals you meet, and the agency as a whole
8. Before you sign, expect to see some sort of detailed proposal to meet your marketing objectives
9. Find out how they report back to you, and how often, and in what method
10. Negotiate a price that works with your budget both immediately, and over time
11. And if you trust them (as you probably will, if you sign with them) follow their expert counsel. After all, it’s the reason you came to them in the first place

Vancouver’s My Loud Speaker Marketing is a full-service marketing agency. With just more than a dozen best-in-class individuals, they deliver customized, personal digital marketing plans that deliver far more than their clients expect. See how easy it can be to meet your goals, with a dedicated team working for you.

HOW TO CREATE A DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN

When creating a digital marketing plan, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. The following steps provide a framework to launch a digital marketing plan.

Narrow down your target market

Knowing your target market sets the foundation for your campaign. It’s important to know who you’re addressing and be clear about the action you expect from them. Define your target market based on demographic information such as age, location, gender, and income, and/or psychographic information such as user behavior, hobbies, and attitudes.

Set your goals

What do you hope to accomplish through your campaign? Set your goals, be it increase sales or build awareness for your product or service. The entire campaign revolves around your objective. At the end of the campaign, you can evaluate to see if you’ve accomplished those goals.

Evaluate your current channels and tools

What are you doing in terms of digital marketing right now? Evaluate your paid, earned, and owned media. Do you have a comprehensive campaign? Are you investing in digital advertising, search engine optimization, public relations, or influencer relations? Make a list of what you’re doing and the things you’re not.

Determine your digital marketing tools

Decide your digital marketing mix. Based on what you’re already doing, choose to invest or explore channels that give you a comprehensive campaign. If you’re already doing social media advertisements, include influencer outreach as part of your PR campaign. If you’re working on digital strategy, make sure you prioritize search engine optimization and Google Display Ads.

Monitor and evaluate

Is your campaign working? Monitor the analytics (Google Analytics is a good source) and evaluate the results. You can also frequently track the progress of your campaign with digital advertising and make adjustments accordingly during the campaign, rather than waiting until it’s completed (and sometimes, too late to do anything about). In any case, evaluating the numbers such as website traffic, bounce rate, and click-through rate will help your future campaigns as well.

TOP 10 DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCIES IN VANCOUVER

1. Popcorn

Founded in 2011, Popcorn is a marketing agency based out of Vancouver and Toronto offering a complete range of services including digital strategy development, community management, public relations, content creation, event planning, digital media design, and more. The agency’s passion is to connect people with brands they love. Popcorn specializes in lifestyles and retail brands, food, beverage, hospitality, technology, and government clients.

2. Marloo Creative Studio

Marloo is a full-service creative marketing & advertising agency providing most of the clients’ essential marketing needs. Marloo provides solutions in strategy consultation, branding, print and website development. The agency strives to provide quality customer service and creating a beautiful society.  Marloo is based in Toronto, Vancouver, and Dubai.

3. Stigan Media Inc.

Founded in 2009, Stigan Media is a Web Design and Marketing Agency in Vancouver. The agency’s vast experience and knowledge in online marketing enable them to take the guesswork out of online advertising and provide clients with options and solutions that are both easy and affordable to implement. With industry knowledge, innovative goal-oriented mindset, as well as creativity and drive, Stigan optimizes digital strategies for all types of businesses.

Services offered include web and logo design, and search engine optimization.

4. Jive PR + Digital

Jive PR + Digital is an award-winning agency providing public relations and digital marketing services.  The company has offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and Los Angeles and ensures its clients have a voice along both coasts.

5. My Loud Speaker Marketing

My Loud Speaker is a marketing agency based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The agency specializes in branding, public relations, and advertising—its mission is to help clients achieve their full potential. Some of its clients are Gateway Property Management, DMCL and GKS Law Firm.

6. Major Tom

Major Tom is a full-service digital agency that works to help its clients thrive in a complex market. The agency has offices in New York, Toronto, and Vancouver and provides branding, digital marketing, and website design services, among others.

7. York & Chapel

York and Chapel is a full-service digital branding agency started 15 years ago with offices in Connecticut, San Francisco, Vancouver, as well as New York. The agency provides web design, content marketing, and UX/UI design services, among others, and focuses primarily on technology clients.

8. Edkent Media

Edkent Media is a results-driven digital marketing agency located in Toronto, Canada. Edkent Media provides digital marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and website design services to its clients.

9. Jelly Marketing

Founded in 2012, Jelly Digital Marketing and PR is a digital advertising agency that specializes in public relations, social media, content marketing, and search engine optimization. Key clients include La-Z-Boy Furniture, Sussex Insurance, Greater Vancouver Zoo, Giants Hockey WHL, Ten Thousand Villages, Choices Markets, and CEFA.

10. Forge and Smith

Forge and Smith is a digital agency that provides digital strategy, branding, web design, web development and UX/UI design services. Key clients include Olympics Canada, United Way, Knowledge Network, and Discovery Channel.

The post Digital Marketing Agencies in Vancouver: Top 25 Factors Checklist to choose the right one appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

With a necessity to work with a wide variety of personalities and individuals with various job titles, it’s become important for us to whittle down not only how we can foster a great relationship with our clients, but how clients can help improve it as well. Here is what I believe to be a very concise list to help clients get prepared to work with an agency like ours.

1. Be prepared to work too

So, you’ve hired an agency – and it wasn’t easy at all. Investing in an agency is a huge leap of faith that takes a lot of work. So much so, that sometimes once you’ve made the commitment, there’s a huge collective sigh of relief from you and your team. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the work is only getting started. If you want to succeed (and help us to help you), be prepared to invest your time. You are experts in your field and industry, and we are experts in marketing. We need to know everything we can about your product or service. Let us test, try, tour and experience what you’re selling. It takes time, but it’s vital. Be ready to answer questions, provide specific, clear and thoughtful feedback – and most importantly, be on time, or we can’t either.

2. Never forget why you hired us

If you just wanted something to look pretty, you could have hired a freelancer or your niece who has a copy of Photoshop. We eat, sleep, live and breathe this work. We’re not like you. And you like that. Knowing trends, platforms, proven methods and so on, this is what you pay us for. Although it seems subjective, more often than not, it isn’t. Trust us. And if you lose trust in us, give us a real opportunity to gain it back. Anything else is a waste of your time and money.

3. Know that your business goals are our business goals

If you succeed, we succeed. Simple as that. A majority of our own business comes from returning clients from years back. It’s no secret – and other agencies are similar. No one benefits if you hide your business goals from us. If you treat us like a partner rather than a vendor, you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your business goals. We’re not doing what’s easy; we’re doing what we think will work best within the parameters given. After all, why would we lie? If what we recommend doesn’t work, you’re probably not going to hire us again.

4. Be ready to ignore the shiny objects

Things come up. All. The. Time. It is inevitable because marketing is especially fickle. There’s always a new trend, platform or opportunity that pops up in our industry. And sometimes things happen that require us to act fast. However, we lay out the initial plan and strategy for a reason. Remember the plan? The strategy? The thing we spent months working on and that we had all agreed upon? It’s there to keep us on track and focused on the original goal. We can’t let shiny objects get in our way.

5. Be friendly

This one seems odd, but it’s the most important one. As mentioned, this is an in-depth collaboration involving various types of people ranging from Copywriters, Designers, Analysts, Specialists, Account Managers and more. Each and every one of them plays a vital role in your business’ success, and we’re all here to provide you with our expertise. Having said all that, we’re all just people too. So when conflicts arise, try to provide commentary as you would one-on-one with your colleague. Be kind. Be fair. Don’t intimidate. Good work doesn’t happen if someone is pointing a gun to your head. Creating an environment of teamwork and friendship will open doors that lead to better, more effective work. But like we’re taught in grade school, friendship isn’t a one-way street. We’re friendly from start to finish; you just have to be open to it too.

Now that you have an idea of how it might be working with an agency like ours, why don’t you get to know a little bit about who you might be working with?

The post 5 Things All Marketing Agency Clients Should Know appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

This time, I tried to eliminate as many updates – with tears in my eyes – as possible that didn’t have a direct impact on businesses. This coincidentally means I’ve cut down on some of the obvious function updates to keep it short. If you want to know more or less – just let me know.

It feels like each digital platform slowed down a bit this month, but there are still plenty of new things happening you won’t want to miss. To read more updates from the few past months, visit our list of Digital Marketing Updates Recap posts. (They’re awesome)

A Summary Of February 2018

This month, you might notice several AMP updates. These include Google launching their AMP Stories which look identical to Facebook and Instagram Stories, as well as an AMP for Gmail which lets you create dynamic email content and more.

According to Marketing Land, 31 million domains that are Google’s ad network partners have adopted AMP, and they are earning three times more revenue per day. For those who don’t know exactly what an AMP is, it’s basically a super-fast-to-load mobile page. Since more and more people are demanding faster and quicker experiences on mobile, the AMP framework is playing a major role.

Speaking of Google, they’ve continued to focus their efforts on improving featured snippets to improve the user experience on Mobile and Voice devices as demonstrated by the launch of their comprehensive guide on featured snippets and the test of multifaceted featured snippet. They also never forget to update Google Assistant, the artificial intelligence behind Google Home.

For more sweet details, check out our updates below.

17 Google Updates in February, 2018

Google Ends third party e-commerce integration with Google Merchant Centre on March 20, 2018 – Jan 24

Google will end the integration of Google Merchants and third party e-commerce platforms including BigCommerce, Magento and PrestaShop on March 20, 2018. If you currently use this integration, you need to set up your shopping feed directly on Google Merchant.

Source:

Search Engine Land – Google dropping Merchant Center feed integrations with BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop

The Launch of Your Reminder Ads That Lets You Mute Remarketing ads – Jan 25

Since the launch of Mute This Ad in 2012, Google has seen millions of people using the functionality to silence ads on a daily basis. Along with the excessive demand to control ads users see, Google responded with their launch of Your Reminder Ads.

Reminder ads is Google’s way of remarketing to consumers. Now, you can check who’s remarketing to you and easily turn off any ads coming from that advertiser – as seen here:

Image: Google Blog – Greater control with new features in your Ads Settings

This update will roll out for Youtube, Gmail and search in the coming months.

Source: Google Blog – Greater control with new features in your Ads Settings

Google Bulletin: A New Platform for Hyperlocal Stories – Jan 26

As part of Google’s local initiatives, they’ve launched a new platform where you can share and discover hyperlocal news – Google Bulletin. The app is only available in some states in the US as it traverses through a test launch.

Google stated that the content published on Google Bulletin will be discoverable through Google search and social media. This implies they may integrate the content from Google Bulletin into Rich card like the current Top Stories as seen here:

Along with 50 million Google Map Local Guides, I’d imagine they’ll easily expand the user base. I’d recommend keeping an eye on Google Bulletin updates.

Source: Bulletin, from Google

Google’s Comprehensive Featured Snippets Guide – Jan 30

Google launched the comprehensive guide for featured snippets. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, 80% of answers provided through Google Home (Google Assistant), Google’s voice device came from the snippet and Google has been testing fewer search results on mobile (2-5 results / top page).

Without a doubt, the featured snippets have become more and more important especially for voice and mobile search. I won’t cover the detail on this post, but would recommend you take a look at the Google post.

Source: Google Post – A reintroduction to Google’s featured snippets

Google Flights: Airline Delay Predictions Before The Airline Even Knows – Jan 31

Google Flights now can predict airline delays before the airline even knows (what?). Google Flights won’t pull the delay information directly from the official airline, but rather use the historical data and machine learning algorithm to predict airline delays. I’m assuming they establish the probability based on weather, an aircraft arriving late, and so on. This will definitely help travelers.

Source: TechCrunch – Google Flights will now predict airline delays – before the airlines do

New SEO Audit category in Chrome’s Lighthouse extension – Feb 5

Google added a new function – SEO Audits – to their Chrome’s Lighthouse extension. It seems the SEO audit function only covers basic SEO audits like meta tags, HTTP status codes, robot text. It’s not going to completely replace the existing SEO tools – yet!

Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog – Launching SEO Audit category in Lighthouse Chrome extension

AMP Stories Launch – Feb 13

Google has been trying to provide richer experiences and the launch of AMP Stories is definitely a huge step in that direction. The AMP Stories format as super fast to load as other AMP content and is more visually focused.

It looks similar to Facebook and Instagram Stories. In order to see how AMP Stories look visit g.co/ampstories on your mobile and type one of the publisher names like CNN, Mic., SB Nation, or Mashable (among others).

Source: Google Developers – AMP stories: Bringing visual storytelling to the open web

AMP for Gmail – Feb 13

Google launched another AMP initiative – AMP for Email – in order to provide better experiences on email.

With this AMP framework, email content becomes dynamic content and it will be a big help for certain situations like setting up meetings. Everyone’s had experience with meaningless back and force emails just to find a time that works for both parties. Email campaigns will now provide richer experiences for receivers without leaving their inbox for more information – see below.

In order to get the access to AMP for Email, you need to sign up the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for email.

Source: Google Blog – Bringing the power of AMP to Gmail

Removal of View Image Button From Google Image Search – Feb 15

Google removed the ‘Visit Image’ button on Google Image search. This helps Google prevent people from stealing copyright protected images. Google officially mentioned this move is related to a new partnership with gettyimages.

Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites. This will include removing the View Image button. The Visit button remains, so users can see images in the context of the webpages they're on. pic.twitter.com/n76KUj4ioD

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 15, 2018

Source: Google SearchLiaison

Google Maps Mall Directory – Feb 19

Google now shows mall directories. You can navigate through the new tab ‘Directory’ when you search for local malls. With this update, you won’t have to go to the mall website, which can be hard to navigate, to see what stores are in the mall from now on.

Source: Search Engine Land – Google Maps adds mall directory search & browse in local panel

The Change of The Fetch as Google Crawling Limit – Feb 19

Google changed the crawl limit for their crawling request tool, Fetch:

1. For the Crawl only this URL, 10 URLs / d will be the new limit for the replacement of 500 URLs / m (30 days)
2. For the Crawl this URL and its direct links,  2 requests / d will be the new limit for the replacement of 10 requests / m (30 days).

To find more information, visit their new help page.

Source: Search Engine Land – Google changes request recrawl limits, noting daily limits versus monthly quotas

Moving More Sites to Mobile-First Index – Feb 21

Google announced they’ll keep rolling more sites to the mobile-first index over the next several weeks. If you’re not ready yet, I’d recommend creating a responsive website at least. Find out more about the details on mobile-first index here.

Source: Search Engine Land – Google to move more sites to mobile-first index in coming weeks

New Adwords Keyword Planner – Feb 22

Google updated their Keyword Planner to be consistent with the new Google Adwords and Search Console design.

The new Keyword Planner breaks down into two functions: keyword discovery (Find new keywords), Keyword metrics & forecast (Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords)

In the keyword discovery section, you can see keyword ideas, keyword search volume trends, as well as the breakdown of searches including platform (mobile, tablet, desktop) and locations (city, municipality, province, territory).

There are two new columns: Organic impression share and Organic average position. In order to activate them, you’ll need to link your Search console account with your Google Adwords account.

In the metrics & forecast section, now you’ll see the campaign projections with key metrics. This includes clicks, impressions, cost, CTR and average CPC. You can project the number of clicks you get with certain amounts of CPC, which looks pretty similar to Facebook’s ad performance projection.

Even though I feel the projections may be overestimating the metrics, this helps you get a better sense of how much it costs and how much you can expect in return.

Source: AdWords Keyword Planner update appears to be rolling out in the new interface

Function Updates on Google Assistant – Feb 23

Google keeps focusing their efforts on polishing up their voice intelligence, Google Assistant.

The updates include multilingual support, language expansion, and continuous function additions. including routines and location-based reminders.

They plan to make it available in 30 languages (up from 8) over 2018, which is a huge advantage over their competitors given Amazon’s Alexa only speaks three languages and Apple’s Siri speaks a modest 20.

To find more information on Google Assistant updates, check out these resources.

Source: TechCrunch – Google Assistant will support over 30 languages by year-end, become multilingual, Google Assistant is adding Routines and location-based reminders

Mobile Speed Scorecard and Impact Calculator – Feb 26

Google released a new tool, the mobile Speed Scorecard, which allows you to compare your mobile site speed with your competitors.

If you scroll down to the bottom, there’s a calculator for the potential revenue impact based on your average monthly visitors, average order value, conversion rate, in order to illustrate how  page speed impacts your revenue. It seems like this tool won’t detect the page speed for smaller websites like their new page speed insights which they launched in January.

Source: Google Inside Adwords – Introducing the mobile Speed Scorecard and Impact Calculator

Multifaceted Featured Snippets – Feb 28

Google updated the featured snippets to provide multiple featured snippets when a question or query is broad enough to have several interpretations.

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Source: Google Blog – Providing more comprehensive results to your questions in Search

The Launch of Hangouts Chat – Feb 28

Google launched Hangouts Chat as part of G Suite. Simply put, it’s a similar solution to Slack or any other work communication tools. Like Slack, this allows developers to build their own bots as well. What makes this different is the deep integrations with Google products like Google Calendar, Drive, Sheets, Docs and so forth. Secondly, the AI technology improves workplace communication with the @Meet bot which helps schedule meetings for multiple people without any hassle.

Source: TechCrunch – Hangouts Chat, Google’s Slack competitor, comes out of beta

6 Facebook Updates in February, 2018

News Feed FYI: More Local News on Facebook – Jan 29

Another update for your Facebook News Feed: Facebook is increasing visibility for local news on the News Feed. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, announced the platform will show more stories from news sources in the user’s local town or city.

Facebook stated small news outlets may benefit from this change more than other outlets since they tend to have concentrated readerships in one location. The following image will help you understand how it works:

They will test this update in the US first and expand to other countries over 2018.

Source: Facebook newsroom – News Feed FYI: More Local News on Facebook

New Ads Policy For Financial Product and Services Ads – Jan 30

Facebook updated their ads policy to ban financial products which are frequently associated with deceptive promotion practices. This includes binary options, initial coin offerings, and cryptocurrency.

Source: Facebook Business – New Ads Policy: Improving Integrity and Security of Financial Product and Services Ads

Updates on Organic Reach Metrics – Feb 9

Previously, Facebook counted organic reach (not paid) based on how many times Facebook delivered your ad. However, this indicator doesn’t necessarily show how many times your ads showed up on a user’s screen. With this update, Facebook will start displaying stricter definitions of organic reach, meaning only indicating how many times your ads appeared on the users’ screen.

Facebook will continue showing organic reach calculated by the previous definition. You may see drops in organic reach with this new definition, but there’s nothing to worry about.

Source: Facebook Business – Improving Page Insights to Help Businesses Understand the Results that Matter Most

Interactive 3D models in News Feed – Feb 20

Facebook rolled out their official support for 3D posts. Now, creators can create and share interactive 3D content on Facebook.

One of the easiest ways to create 3D content is Sony’s 3D Creator app through the Xperia XZ1 phone.

While leveraging the 3D format is no easy task, it holds the potential of providing richer experiences for fashion and retail industries down the line.

Source: Facebook for Developers – Richer 3D Posts on Facebook and New Ways to Share

Cleaning Up Redundant Metrics in Facebook Advertising Platform – Feb 22

To clean up advertisers’ confusion regarding ad metrics, Facebook will remove unnecessary and redundant metrics from Ads Manager and add clarification on each ad metric including how it’s calculated and how you should use it.

You can see the full list of the 20 metrics that they will remove here.

Source: Facebook Business – Making Ad Metrics Clearer

Expanding The Job Post to 40 Countries – Feb 28

Having launched ‘job post’ in the US and Canada last year, Facebook decided to open it up to a whopping 40 countries.

Like TechCrunch pointed out, it seems job posting is mostly used by businesses looking for blue collar jobs like cleaning staff and drivers. This may cultivate the type of job market that’s not the right fit for – say – LinkedIn.

Source: Facebook newsroom – Helping People Find Jobs and Local Businesses Hire

2 Instagram Updates in February, 2018

New Instagram API To Better Manage Instagram – Jan 30

Instagram launched their new API called Graph API to replace their old API called The Instagram API Platform. It will be easier for businesses to manage their Instagram along with new features which include post schedule, mention monitoring, and more.

If you are using the old API, they’ve laid out the timeline in terms of when they will end which function on their post. I’d recommend you check it out.

Source: Facebook for developers – Instagram Graph API Launches and Instagram API Platform Deprecation

Test Launch of Collection Ads On Instagram – Feb 7

Instagram started testing Collection Ad format on the Instagram feed, originally launched on Facebook.

Unfortunately, the new ad format is only available for limited advertisers, but it will be available to everyone soon.

Source: Ad Age – Instagram Gives Brands New Way to Sell In ‘Collection’ Ads

The post 25 Digital Marketing News & Updates Recap February 2018 appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

As always, Google and Facebook are aggressively updating their platforms. The two goliaths account for more than 85% of updates listed in this post! Besides them, we’ve covered massive regulation changes in the US: net neutrality repeal and continuing law enforcement in Europe.

While the number of updates in this list has decreased, there are a lot of new things happening you won’t want to miss. To read about more updates from the few past months, visit our list of Digital Marketing Updates Recap posts.

A Summary of January 2018

The major changes I’ve noticed are a number of Facebook News Feed updates, including a video content algorithm change, Engagement Bait penalization, encouraging back-and-forth conversation on users’ News Feed, and more.

When you take a look at Google, there aren’t as many drastic changes as say Facebook, but they have confirmed the launch date for Google Chrome ad-blocking. Throughout this month, it seems that Google’s moves were focused on improving digital ad experience overall, as shown by the ad-blocking launch in the hopes that it preserves digital ad revenue from ‘Good’ digital ads. On a personal note, we’ve included an interesting voice search ranking report from ROAST — it’s worth having a look.

Last, but definitely not least, is the net neutrality repeal by FCC. It happened a month ago, but it’s good to catch up. Even though there haven’t been noticeable impacts yet, there certainly will be. We’ve recapped how it works and how it could impact Canadian businesses.

For the details, check out our updates below. I’ve put together the important ones (meaning important important) up front and the less important ones further down.

4 Important Facebook Updates In January 2018

News Feed Algorithm Updates On Video Content – Dec 14

There are two updates to the algorithm for video content on Facebook’s News Feed that Facebook announced: 1) Intent, 2) Repeat Viewership.

When your video is proactively seeked out on Facebook, for example, people search for your video on Facebook’s search bar or visit your profile page just to see your video, it will boost visibility on the News Feed. Also, if your friends or followers repeatedly watch your video, it will get your video greater distribution on the News Feed.

Source: News Feed FYI: For Video, Intent and Repeat Viewership Matter

Penalizing Engagement Bait On Facebook’s News Feed – Dec 18

Facebook finally took action on Engagement Bait that encourages more people to engage on posts in hopes they get greater organic reach by saying something like “Like (or share, comment, tag) this post if you are ______”.

Image: News Feed FYI: Fighting Engagement Bait on Facebook

Posts that use these tactics will be less shown on the News Feed. If a page repeatedly uses this tactic, page level demotion will be applied to the page for several weeks as well.

Source: News Feed FYI: Fighting Engagement Bait on Facebook

Two Way Conversation Matter On News Feed – Jan 11

Facebook announced they changed the algorithm to bring people closer together. With this update, they will show more posts that encourage back-and-forth conversation and interaction. In the other words, likes, comments and shares over videos and blog posts. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post clearly states that:

With this change in mind, the focus of business pages needs to shift more towards conversation than content distribution albeit Engagement Bait is subject to penalty. Business pages may see a decline in their reach, video watch times, as well as traffic from Facebook. One thing to note is Facebook mentioned people often interact with public posts in Groups. If you really want to boost reach on your content, Facebook Groups may become the key.

Here’s the video from Facebook to explain how its changed:

Source: News Feed FYI: Bringing People Closer Together

Facebook Shows News From Trusted Sources – Jan 19

Facebook announced another major update for news content on the News Feed. Even though Facebook has discounted the reach of public content, including news, they still want users to interact with trustworthy news content, accounting for as much as 4% of the News Feed overall.

Here are three major signals they will use for the news content algorithm:

• Trustworthy: they surveyed various groups of people on Facebook about the familiarity and trust of each publication.
• Informative: as they announced in 2016, they consider posts that 1) people from Feed Quality Program rate as High, 2) are related to people’s interest, demographic and highly connected with publications, 3) are engaging a broader group of people to be informative.
• Local: they prioritize local news… That’s it.

They will start this change in the US first and will roll out in other countries accordingly.

Source: News Feed FYI: Helping Ensure News on Facebook Is From Trusted Sources

7 Important Google Updates In January 2018

Finally Negative Reviews From Former Employees Are Against The Google Guideline – Dec 14

Previously, Google review policies didn’t allow businesses to remove negative reviews made by former employees. Google has now added this as a violation item under Conflict of Interest. You now can remove negative reviews by reporting them to Google. See the updated guidelines here.

Source: Prohibited and Restricted Content

Google Confirms Ad-blocking in Chrome will start February 15 – Dec 19

Google has confirmed the launch date for their ad blocking tool on Google Chrome:  February 15, 2018. Given that Google Chrome holds 58.8% of browser market share according to W3C, the impact will be significant.

Don’t freak out. Not all ads will be blocked; only ones that don’t comply with their guidelines. In other words, annoying or intrusive ads. You can see what they’re considering to be annoying here:

Bad Ads on Mobile

Source: Creating better ad experiences for everyone

Bad Ads on Desktop

Source: Creating better ad experiences for everyone

Google also provided a new tool called Ad Experience Report for website owners to see which ads violate the guidelines. If the site owners don’t fix the violations or keep producing violating ads, Google Chrome won’t show any of the ads from the entire website.

Google has taken initiatives to regulate digital ads by distinguishing good and bad ads in the hopes they won’t lose all ad revenue. As an advertiser, it’s good news knowing that intrusive ads may harm the experience of other ads that happen to be placed on the same website in some way.

Source: Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15

Video Uploads On Google My Business Dashboard – Jan 4

Google is testing a feature where business owners can upload videos to their local listings through Google My Business account.

Source: Google My Business dashboard showing video upload section for some business owners

Note: As of January 12, this video uploading function is available to every business owner, but people are experiencing a bug where the uploaded videos don’t show up on local listings – find out more here.

New Google PageSpeed Insights Shows Real User Data – Jan 10

Google announced a new page speed tool that lets you analyze your page speed based on real user data. Now you see the new Speed score beside Optimization. The Speed score is calculated by two metrics: 1) First Contentful Paint (FCP), 2) DOM Content Loaded (DCL).

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): FCP is the point when a browser renders the first bit of content from DOM, or showing the first content (text, image, SVG and so on) from the page.
• DOM Content Loaded (DCL): DCL is the point when Javascript can safely start working after a browser fully parses a page.

Based on these metrics, the pagespeed tool shows your scores:

• Fast: The median value of the metric is in the fastest third of all page loads.
• Average: The median value of the metric is in the middle third of all page loads.
• Slow: The median value of the metric is in the slowest third of all page loads.

With this update, you can see more practical metrics but the issue is this new speed insight requires a website to have a statistically significant amount of Chrome traffic and data to function. Find out more on the Google Developer page.

Source: Google PageSpeed Insights now uses real data from Chrome browser users

Page Speed Will Be a Ranking Factor in Mobile Search Starting July 2018 – Jan 17

Google announced that page speed will be a ranking factor in mobile search starting in July 2018. Site speed has been a ranking factor for desktop and hasn’t mattered unless your website was extremely slow. With this update, site speed will affect the mobile ranking.

According to Google, this will only affect pages that provide the slowest site speed. It will only affect a small percentage of searches and it won’t beat out quality content that greatly matches search intent.

It sounds like site speed still isn’t super important yet, but it will affect site performance and impact things such as high bounce rates. You may need to pay more attention to your mobile site speed using Google’s new site speed tool. And there are other tools that Google recommends to use including Chrome User Experience Report and Lighthouse.

Source: Using page speed in mobile search ranking

Voice Search Ranking Report Reveals 80% of Answers Coming From Rich Snippets – Jan 18

According to ROAST, when Google Home provided an answer, 80% of the answers came from Answer Box (Rich Snippet) – I knew it!

Image: Study: 80% of Google Home results come from snippets

ROAST also mentioned 2 notable things: 1) sometimes Google Assistant (Google Home) doesn’t give you any answer or refers to a different domain, 2) Google My Business is key to local related searches.

Even though it’s not yet clear how we should design SEM strategies for voice search, the research may give you a better sense of what to look out for.

Source: Study: 80% of Google Home results come from snippets

New Search Console Features For Everyone – Jan 22

As reported in our previous post, Google launched a beta version of their new Search Console, showing 12 months of historical search data and it’s available to everyone.

Visit Google Search Console page (search.google.com/search-console) to find out more.

Source: New Google Search Console may be rolling out for everyone now

2 Important Updates For Other Digital Platforms

FCC Repeals Net Neutrality by Party Line Vote – Dec 14

You must have heard of the net neutrality repeal in the US. To see how it works, watch at the following video from Burger King:

Basically, this will break the internet’s basic principle: ‘all web traffic must be treated equally.’ And now broadband providers such as Verizon, AT&T or Comcast can legally limit or slow down traffic to services they don’t like. Or they can charge extra fees to businesses for fast lanes as seen in the Burger King video.

With this in mind, mostly small businesses who can’t afford the fast lane will be the biggest victims of this net neutrality.

There may be impacts in Canada, even though Canadian broadband providers are against net neutrality repeal. For instance, if your business targets US customers, chances are broadband providers in the US may charge you to bring your content to US customers on the fast lane.

Source: What the U.S. net-neutrality repeal means for Americans and Canadians

WhatsApp Officially Launches App Profiles for Businesses – Jan 18

WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Business which helps businesses connect with customers. This app is only available on Android in the US, the UK, Indonesia, Italy and Mexico. This will roll out around the world in the coming weeks, but its not clear when it will be available for the iPhone.

It offers basic features including Business Profiles, Messaging Tools which will allow you to answer frequently asked questions, Messaging Statistics, and so on.

It seems that Facebook finally made a move for WhatsApp monetization.

Source: Introducing the WhatsApp Business App

5 Facebook Updates In January 2018

Snooze Feature to Give You More Control Of Your News Feed – Dec 15

Facebook launched a new function: Snooze. It lets you temporarily unfollow your friend for 30 days. Facebook added this function to give you more control of your News Feed.

Source: News Feed FYI: Introducing Snooze to Give You More Control Of Your News Feed

Face Recognition Tech to Help Better Manage Your Identity On Facebook – Dec 19

Facebook launched a new tool that lets you better manage photos you’re in by using face recognition technology. Through this update, you can detect photos on Facebook that you are not tagged in and receive notifications on them. Whether you tag yourself in the photo or leave it untagged is totally up to you.

Image: Managing Your Identity on Facebook with Face Recognition Technology

This feature is optional and you can easily turn it on and off by changing tag suggesting setting.

Source: Managing Your Identity on Facebook with Face Recognition Technology

New Tools to Prevent Harassment – Dec 19

Facebook added new features on Facebook Messenger to prevent unwanted messages and friend requests. Now you have an option to turn off conversations on Facebook Messenger and remove the conversation from your inbox.

Source: New Tools to Prevent Harassment

Removing ‘Disputed’ Label on Fake News – Dec 20

Facebook put a hold on labeling ‘Disputed’ on fake news content. According to Facebook, it turns out the red label helps establish a strong belief the content is true which is the opposite of their intention. Instead, they decided to showcase Related Articles under the suspect article in hopes this informs users with more context around the topic.

Source: News Feed FYI: Replacing Disputed Flags with Related Articles

Facebook’s Age Targeting Option & Age-Discrimination Law – Dec 26

ProPublica and The New York Times pointed out that major companies including Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Verizon use age targeting options to run job recruitment campaigns which exclude certain age groups – this is against age-discrimination laws. As I mentioned last month, more targeting options on Facebook are being identified and more targeting options have been discontinued. While this target option hasn’t been stopped yet, we might see more restrictions on age group targeting.

Source: Facebook could prevent age-discriminating job ads if it wanted to

12 Google Updates In January 2018

Google’s Advice For The Mobile-First Index – Dec 18

Google announced the launch of mobile-first index in October 2016, and they’ve gradually applied it to more sites that are ready for mobile-first index.

According to Google, you’ll notice your sites have been moved to mobile-first index when you see, “significantly increased crawling by Smartphone Googlebot, and the snippets in the results, as well as the content on the Google cache pages, will be from the mobile version of the pages.”

If your websites are responsive and don’t hide valuable content on the mobile version, you’ll be fine. However, if you still separate URLs for mobile from desktop (ie. https://m.yourdomain.com), you may have additional setups in the backend to make sure Google bot understands clearly. Things like canonical and alternate tags, you can find out more on this useful slide from our previous post or Google blog.

Separating URLs for desktop and mobile is becoming more unmanageable. If your websites are still separating URLS, now’s the time to migrate to responsive.

Source: Getting your site ready for mobile-first indexing

Testing Images in Search Text Ads – Dec 18

According to Search Engine Land, Google search ads with an image were reported.

@GinnyMarvin @rustybrick landing page image pulled into an ad. New? pic.twitter.com/GkQBliAxEl

— Sergey Alakov (@sergey_alakov) December 16, 2017

It seems the image on the right of the description is pulled from the landing page. If this change is implemented, Google search ads will look more like social media ads.

Source: Google is testing images in search text ads

New Rich Results Testing Tool – Dec 19

Google launched a new structured data testing tool that is a more accurate reflection of the appearance on search results. You can test all data sources including JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa.

Source: Introducing Rich Results & the Rich Results Testing Tool

Mid-December Search Ranking Algorithm Updates – Dec 20

There were massive fluctuations in search ranking in mid-December, Google has confirmed it. As usual, they didn’t (or couldn’t) specify why. One thing of note is there were several improvements made during this time period.

There are lots of opinions about the update. Some say it was Fred related updates that ceased the ranking of sites which contain thin or low value content. Others say it was targeting massive sets of  keyword permutations for ecommerce, travel and review sites like having pages for “service offer A + location 1”, “service offer B + location 1” and so on.

Source: Google confirms mid-December search ranking algorithm updates

New Search Results Test Showcases Google Express in Mobile Search Results – Dec 29

Google is getting ready to fight against Amazon by partnering with large retailers including Walmart, Target, Costco and so on.

Now Google is testing new features:

1) “Get it with Google Express” promotion
2) Google Express label in shopping carousel

Image: New test prominently showcases Google Express in mobile search results

According to Search Engine Land, the test is quite limited but it can be seen on mobile in the US.

Source: New test prominently showcases Google Express in mobile search results

New Search Quality Raters Guidelines for Google Assistant and Voice Search Evaluations – Jan 2

Google published some of their Google Assistant guidelines to help raters better evaluate quality, specifically for Google Assistant. It consists of:

• Information Satisfaction: assessing if the answer meets the information needed
• Length: keeping the answers neither too little or too long. Unlike answers on screen, long answers will tire users because they can’t scan it.
• Formulation: ensuring grammatical correctness.
• Elocution: using proper pronunciation and talking rhythm to easily understand

Source: Evaluation of Speech for the Google Assistant

Google Pay: Consolidation of Different Payment Platforms – Jan 8

Google announced Google Pay to consolidate all the different ways to make a payment with Google including Android Pay (mobile payment platform) and Google Wallet (peer-to-peer payment app) into one brand.

Image: Bringing it all together with Google Pay

If you’re a retailer, make sure you implement Google Pay into your service – find out more on their solution site.

Source: Bringing it all together with Google Pay

A New Directory For Google Assistant and More… – Jan 8

Google launched a new directory page to showcase what Google Assistant is capable of so users can start using it for more than asking about the weather or their playing music.

Along with the update, Google announced a couple more notable features such as integration in Android Auto available on cars including Ford, GM, Nissan, Volkswagen and Volvo, as well as integration on smart TVs and headphones.

Source: New devices and more: what’s in store for the Google Assistant this year

Deletion of Review Extensions On Google Adwords – Jan 10

Google has deleted Review extensions from Google Adwords where you showcase third-party reviews in Google ads. The historical data will be stored by February 2018. If you want to save it, you’ll need to download it before then.

Source: Google is sunsetting AdWords Review extensions

Controversial Google’s Art Selfie – Jan 15

Google launched their art selfie feature on the Google’s Arts & Culture app.

Though this new feature went viral, it’s been controversial. They discovered that people of colour have a relatively limited pool of artwork to match with their faces.

*usng the @Google Culture and Arts app*
white people: "Wow what beautiful renaissance/impressionist/european painting do I look like?
me: "Wow what racist stereotype of black people do I look like?"

— jimmyNUDEtron (@liluzi_girth) January 12, 2018

Source: Why inclusion in the Google Arts & Culture selfie feature matters

Google & Salesforce’s First Elements of Partnership – Jan 17

Google and Salesforce announced the integration of Google Analytics 360 and Salesforce in November 2017 and it’s finally available. You can import sales pipeline data from Sales Cloud into Analytics 360.

This gives more visibility from first contact (site visit) to sales within a single dashboard.

Source: Integration of Salesforce Sales Cloud to Google Analytics 360 is now available

Google AdSense Adds Style Automation for Native In-feed Ads – Jan 23

Google launched AdSense Native In-feed Ads last year and now they’re offering an option to use Google’s machine learning for the In-feed Ads.

Image: Introducing AdSense Native ads

Source: Let machine learning create your In-feed ads

2 Updates For Other Digital Platforms

Social Networks Face Huge Fines in Germany for Not Removing Illegal Content Within 24 Hours – Jan 2

Germany started rolling NetzDG law which targets publishers and social media with more than 2 million registered users in Germany (Facebook, Youtube and Twitter). This law was designed to combat hate speech, fake news, and illegal content. Site owners have to remove the illegal content within 24 hours after the content is reported as a violation.

Source: Social networks to face huge fines in Germany for not removing ‘illegal content’ in 24 hours

A Tougher Rule For Monetization on Youtube – Jan 16

Google announced 3 significant rules for monetization on Youtube. The biggest change is you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 400 hours of watch time over the past 12 months to start showing ads. This change will be in place beginning February 20, 2018. If you are interested, find out about other updates here.

Source: A New Approach to YouTube Monetization

That’s all for this month. See you next month

The post 32 Digital Marketing Updates Recap January 2018 appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

Digital platforms are still massively evolving and getting more vital to marketing initiatives. That’s why I created a massive list of 51 digital marketing updates, which is significantly larger than my digital marketing updates from October and November.

Summary Of Digital Marketing Updates Recap December 2017

Instead of placing a summary at the bottom, I’ve placed a summary here so you can get a quick rundown of what’s been happening without scrolling all the way to the bottom:

Besides new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the major trends I see are 1) Google is increasingly moving to voice search along with their updates on Google Assistant (simply put, a voice search assisting tool), Knowledge Panels and Search Snippets, 2) Facebook is tapping into new ad revenue sources, 3) Instagram is focusing on enhancing user engagement with new features.

You’ll see Google has a lot of updates and tests on their Google Assistant, Knowledge Panels and Search Snippets this past month. I would assume they had to focus on voice search because the use of voice devices are drastically rising. In 2015, there were 1.7 million voice-first devices shipped. In 2016, there were 6.5 million devices shipped and VoiceLabs predicts there will be 24.5 million devices shipped in 2018. In addition, 64% of US voice assistant owners surveyed by Invoca said that they use voice assistants more frequently.

I would say improving their Knowledge Panels and Search Snippets is a part of their voice search improvement initiatives. In order for Google Assistant to answer the user’s questions and demands quickly, it’s better to have both within Google’s search results: Knowledge Panels and Search Snippets and it shouldn’t be on third party websites or apps.

In the future — maybe not in 2018 but around 2020, users won’t have to visit any third party websites or apps to complete their needs and Google will directly give them an answer in most cases.

As for Facebook, you’ll see more news about them tapping into new arenas including moving to a local selling model to touch on potential market such as Europe and Asia, the launch Of Facebook Creator app for video influencers, pre-roll ad test in Facebook Watch, and so on.

For Instagram, they’ve added several new features to encourage user engagement and to foster Instagram communities such as a new function to request to join a friend’s live video, a new function to follow hashtags on Instagram, the launch of their standalone Instagram Messenger app and so on.

For greater details, check out my updates below. I’ve put together important ones (meaning important important) up front and less important ones further down.

25 Important Digital Marketing Updates – December 2017 Recap

15 Important Google Updates In December

Google Assistant Updates To Make Google Assistant More Discoverable  – Nov 15

Google updated the functionality on their Google Assistant. The notable features added are listed below:

1. The addition of a new section for further categorization (ie. Food & Drink -> Order Food or View a Menu): If you are an app developer, just make sure to put the information within your app description to encourage Google Assistant to show your app as a result. Also they added a new function for users to reach your app by contextual queries such as “book an appointment to fix my bike”

2. New APIs:
2.1. Connecting Google Assistant with a phone: you can now pass a map or transaction information to your phone.

2.2. Account Linking in conversation: now you can encourage users to link their account to your app, though users had to link their account before they had a chance to consider account linking.

They’ve launched a lot of other features too – visit Google Developers page to find out more.

Source

Google Adwords New Features: Promotion Extensions, Custom Intent Audiences & Ad Variations – Nov 16

For holiday season, Google launched a couple of functions for Google Adwords.

First, a Promotion Extension that lets you showcase sales and discount offers on Google Search Ads.

Image: New AdWords innovations to drive better results for your business

Secondly, Ad Variations which lets you create and test small variations of ad copy and apply the change to pretty much any ads you wish in less than a minute. It’s available under Google Adwords Experiments function – Find out how to use it here.

Lastly this is the most important update:

Custom Intent Audiences, this allows you to reach people who want to buy a specific product you offer based on previous data from your campaign, website and Youtube. Available on Google Display Ads.

You can now go beyond the pre-defined audience categories. You can set keywords, URLs and services related to your offerings and capture those who are researching through websites, Youtube and apps.

Source

Google Shopping Mobile Interface Updates: More Product Info & Buying Guides – Nov 21

Google redesigned their Google shopping design on mobile to showcase a bigger image of the product, product details and reviews without users going into the shopper’s page for product related searches.

Image: A merry mobile holiday with Google Shopping

They also added a function that allows you to compare reviews, prices and specs.

Along with the update on the knowledge panel, it seems Google wants to create a user experience where the user can satisfy their needs without visiting the website.

Source

The Launch Of Google Lens For Google Assistant – Nov 21

Google launched the Google Lens which is only available for the Pixel phone. Working together with Google Assistant, Google Lens will tell you more information about what you’ve taken a picture of.

Image: Learn more about the world around you with Google Lens and the Assistant

What’s significant about the Google Lens is its ability to read text information. It lets you access URLs, call phone numbers and navigate towards an address from a business card. Other features listed are recognizing landmarks, art, books, movies and barcodes. You can see how accurate Google Lens is on this Search Engine Land post.

Source

Google Trend Updates: YouTube, Google Shopping, News & Image Search Trends Are Now Available – Nov 28

Google updated Google Trends to show search trends for Google Image, News, Shopping and even Youtube searches. This is the first official tool that gives you Youtube search estimations. I hope they’ll add Youtube search volume estimations on their Google Keyword Planner soon.

Source

Warning For Webmasters Promoting Coupons In Event Markup – Nov 27

Google pointed out the misuse of event markups, specifically for those who use it to promote discounts and coupons. An example Google mentioned:

Google said this will take a manual action and may result in removing all of the structured data markups from the search results. Check out the notification on Google Search Console in case you’re implementing this tactic.

Source

Updates on Google Assistant To Help You Find Local Service Providers – Nov 30

Google Assistant started showing nearby services including electricians, plumbers, house cleaners and more. The following gif better explains how it works:

Image: Get local help with your Google Assistant

This feature is available only in the US. Only service providers that are prescreened by Google, HomeAdvisor and Porch appear. If you want to get the Google guarantee, visit their Google guaranteed page.

Source

The Launch of Questions & Answers On Google My Business To Desktop Search – Dec 1

Google added Questions & Answers to their local knowledge panel on desktop. Originally this function was launched on mobile and has been causing spam or offensive comments within the section – example below:

Not just random users either. Some w/Local Guide status doing it too. Google should have learned their lesson from G+ years ago. pic.twitter.com/JgRxCmtUvO

— Taycan Darling (@TaycanDarling) August 28, 2017

There’s no real solution for businesses to remove these comments, but it would be good to check out your Google My Business account and see if there’s any negative comments.

Source

The Extension Of Description Tag Length In Search Results – Dec 1

According to Search Engine Land, Google has confirmed their recent change on Search Snippet which provides more useful and detailed information in search results and the average length increased from 160 characters to 230 characters.

This is happening as a result of dynamic Search Snippet. Therefore, you don’t need to bother extending your description tag.

Source:

Google Often Tests Longer Search Results Snippets

Google officially increases length of snippets in search results

A New Answers Carousel Test Within The Search Results Snippets – Dec 5

Google is testing a new feature to show quick answers within search results.

OK, I see them again. Here are Answer Cards in both desktop and mobile search. The mobile version includes a carousel so you can swipe through answers. And check out the green "Best Answer" box with the number of votes. Looks like it's being tested now. h/t @cremf pic.twitter.com/F1tKQbwfnN

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 5, 2017

If the update gets implemented, users may be able to get information they want for how-to searches without stepping into any web pages and site owners may experience traffic drops through organic search.

Source

Google Mobile Search Interface With Fewer Organic Results – Dec 6

On mobile, fewer search results were reported. The first page only includes 2-5 search results and has “see more results” which loads more than 10 results instead of the traditional “next page”.

Source

Voice Search Data May Soon be Available On Search Console – Dec 7

Google’s spokesperson, John Mueller, began asking the search community what kind of information they wanted to see in regards to voice search. Soon enough we’ll be able to see data from voice search through the Search Console.

Source

Testing Easy Checkout on Google Search Results – Dec 8

Easy Checkout began appearing on Google ads on iOS devices. Previously, it was launched on Android, but now tests have started on iOS devices too. Easy Checkout lets you buy products directly through Google as long as you have payment set up through your Google account. They want to encourage more purchases through Google shopping ads to compete with Amazon. According to Search Engine Land, this has been in the works for a while.

Source

Adwords Customer Match By Phone Numbers & Mailing Addresses – Dec 11

Now Google Adwords Customer can be set up by using phone numbers and mailing addresses. Previously, you needed email addresses to activate audience targeting.

Customer Match lets you target users for all Google products, including search ads, shopping, display, Youtube and gmail. Like Facebook’s lookalike audience, it has a similar audience targeting option for Youtube and gmail campaigns. For more information about Customer Match, visit this adwords help.

Source

Search Data For Last 12 Months Is Available on Beta – Dec 12

On Google Search Console’s beta version, 12 months of historical search data became available. Previously, only 3 months of data was available. This makes wider search data accessible to search marketers and will help them analyze search trend data more easily.

Personally, this is so exciting!!!

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5 Important Facebook Important Updates

The Launch Of Creator App For Influencers To Build Video Communities – Nov 16

Facebook launched Facebook Creator, wherein creators can easily create a video, go live and engage with the community on Facebook. A notable feature is the community tab which lets creators connect with their fans and collaborators as well as foster their community. Here are some of the other features:

• Live Creative Kit: Access exclusive tools that make it easy to create live broadcasts with a personalized and fun feel. Creators can add intros as openers to their live broadcasts, outros that conclude them, custom live stickers that viewers can use to interact, and graphic frames to create a consistent brand.

• Camera & Stories: Use fun camera effects and frames and easily crosspost content to other platforms. Creators can also access Facebook Stories to engage with their fans.

• Insights: Easily access metrics to inform content creation, including analytics about your Page, videos and fans.

Facebook also launched Facebook for Creators where creators can learn about how to make great content and reach new tools to support their production.

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Testing Messenger Broadcast For Businesses to Send Message Blasts Via Messenger – Nov 28

Facebook developed a mass-messaging tool called “Messenger Broadcast”. They are testing the function internally and it might be available soon.

Facebook said that brands only can reach people that have initiated conversation with them. Therefore, brands need to encourage users to use Facebook Messenger to communicate before they can take advantage of this Messenger Broadcast.

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Temporarily Stopped Racial Group Targeting For Exclusion – Nov 30

As I mentioned in 17 Digital Marketing Updates Recap October 2017, ProPublica revealed Facebook’s multicultural affinity ad targeting violates federal law. In response, Facebook temporarily disabled the ad option which prevents advertisers from excluding people based on ethnicity.

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Pre-roll Ad Test in Facebook Watch  – Dec 1

Facebook rolled out their pre-roll video ads exclusively for Facebook Watch, not the newsfeed.

Facebook launched mid-roll video ads  – or ad breaks – for non-live videos early this year. It doesn’t seem as profitable as they had projected according to Marketing Land. They needed other revenue source from video content and it is pre-roll video ads where viewers need to see ads before the content.

It might make sense to have a pre-roll video ad for Facebook Watch since the way people consume their videos is similar to the way they would on Youtube, whereas the way people consume videos on Facebook in-stream videos is more passive.

Anyway, advertisers may notice a boost for their video ads in upcoming weeks.

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Moving to a Local Selling Model – Dec 12

Facebook announced they will have a local office to support sales to local advertisers for each country. They are aiming to implement this change through 2018 and to complete their plan by Q2 2019. TechCrunch pointed out the majority of Facebook’s ad revenue is made up by the US and Canada. They want to focus on international market.

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3 Important Instagram Updates

Instagram has focused on reinforcing engagement on Instagram by adding several new features that encourage users to interact each other.

New Function to Request Joining a Friend’s Live Video – Nov 21

Instagram rolled out a new feature to their live videos: you can now request to join other’s live videos. When you’re live on Instagram, your viewers can request to join your live video. Previously, hosts could invite their friend to join a live video, but it had to come from the host.

The feature fosters more 2 way conversations between hosts and guests, as well as collaboration. It doesn’t mean everyone who requests to join will join the live video. Hosts can pick who to do live video with.

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The Launch Of Story Highlights and Stories Archive – Dec 5

Instagram launched 2 new features:

1) Stories Archive

2) Stories Highlights

Allowing users more opportunities to share their stories. Stories Archive will automatically store your stories beyond the 24 hours. These archives can be seen by you and you can turn off the auto-archiving anytime. Story Highlights allows users to choose any Instagram stories to highlight and it stays on your profile. Viewers can access your collected stories unless the user has removed it.

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A New Function To Follow Hashtags on Instagram – Dec 12

Instagram rolled out a new function which allows users to follow hashtags rather than people to encourage users to discover new posts easily. This update allows users see more photos from people they don’t follow in their newsfeed and will accelerate engagements on Instagram. From a business point of view, now it makes more sense to promote hashtags rather than the brand’s Instagram account to foster conversation in a more collaborative way.

Source: Now You Can Follow Hashtags on Instagram

2 Important Updates For Other Digital Marketing Platforms

GDPR Is On Its Way To Businesses In North America – Nov 17

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation that protects personal data for users and this regulation is about to affect businesses in North America as well. Starting in May 2018, GDPR will apply to companies that have traffic from EU citizens no matter where the businesses is located. They will have to comply with EU’s notification requirements and data storage obligations. Think about it, if you operate your business in English, chances are you have some visitors from EU. There are 2 ways you can do to avoid GDPR penalties:

1) Blocking all EU users

2) Complying with regulations.

For more information, visit this article from Wired UK – they summarized this GDPR issue well.

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Announcing support for AMP article analytics on Twitter – Dec 6

Twitter enhanced their support of AMP and added article analytics. Now you can record the view when Twitter loads the AMP version of articles.  

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Apple Launches ‘Set It and Forget It’ Search Ads Basic for the App Store – Dec 5

Apple launched Search Ads Basic which is a simplified version of their search ads to help advertisers who don’t have time to manage their campaigns. In short, it’s like Google Express for Apple.

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27 Digital Marketing Updates Recap In December 2017

By now, you have been through all the important ones. But if your job as a marketer is to make sure you are on top of current updates. Here are a bunch more tidbits for you.

16 Google Updates

Google for Job’s Search Function Updates – Nov 15

Google updated their Google for Job’s search function. The notable updates:

1. Estimated salary range for each job – as you know, the majority of job postings don’t show salary and this may give users a better understanding of how much they’d earn.
2. Location filter that allows users to see job available near their location.
3. Ideal platform for you to apply to specific job postings. If you have a solid resume on Monster, for instance, Google will find if the job posting you found on another platform is available on Monster and give you a choice.

As an employer, you can either simply post your job opening on a major job posting site or create a page on your website to leverage Google for Jobs – see the technical instructions here.

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Google Maps Design Updates – Nov 15

Google updated their user interface on Google Maps which boasts a new colour scheme and icons to better navigate users to reach what they are looking for.

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More Transparency On News Content With The Trust Project – Nov 16

Like Facebook and Twitter, Google took a step further towards transparency on news content, partnering with The Trust Project. As their first step, they released eight indicators that newsrooms can add to their content: 1) Best Practices (ie. the mission of the news outlet, who funds them), 2) Author Expertise, 3) Type of Work (ie. opinion, analysis, sponsor), 4) Citations and references, 5) Methods, 6) Locally Sourced, 7) Diverse Voices, 8) Actionable Feedback – find the full details here.

From an SEO point of view, this action may not be ranking factor and may be just a label next to each article.

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Announcement For Usage of AMP’s Canonical Pages – Nov 16

Google will require AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and canonical pages to match as of February 1, 2018

Google announced that the AMP content needs to be comparable to the original content to show it as an AMP page. In case you’re not familiar with AMP, AMP is a super-fast-to-load version of html and Google has encouraged it to improve the user experience on mobile.

An example Google pointed out was an AMP page used for teaser content, like in the image below:

Google repeatedly emphasized that AMP is not a ranking factor so, you don’t need to worry about it unless you’re a publisher who gets traffic through Google Top Stories.

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Google Flights Redesign – Nov 21

Google launched the new design for Google Flights.

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Knowledge Graph Data Integration In Local Search Panels – Nov 27

https://searchengineland.com/google-showing-knowledge-panel-tabs-local-panel-results-287276

Google was testing and added 2 new tabs to Local Packs, About and Posts. Not all brands are showing the new knowledge panel in Local Packs, but it will likely be added to more brands in the future.

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Google Finance Updates – Nov 28

Google updated a couple features on Google search for finance and stocks. Now you will be able to access the latest news about your interests.

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A New Donate Button On Search For US-based Nonprofits – Nov 29

Google added a Donate button within search results for brand terms of non-profit organizations. It’s available for US based non-profits. In order to activate this feature, visit Google for Nonprofits and find out more.

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All Google Posts Are Now Available On Desktop – Nov 30

Now you can see all Google posts on desktop even though only recent ones could be seen.

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Audiobook Results On Google Book Search – Nov 30

Google included Audiobooks in their Google book search feature.

Have audiobook, will travel. Book the perfect holiday road trip read with new audiobook options, now in Search. pic.twitter.com/GHPmAaDWjX

— Google (@Google) November 29, 2017

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New Updates On Google Manufacturer Center – Dec 1

Google Manufacturer Center expanded their availability to more countries including the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Brazil and the Netherlands. The product information now appears in Google Knowledge Panels (only in the US for now) and can be updated through API.

Google Manufacturer Center lets brands upload product features, descriptions and images to make sure the information is accurate and attractive enough to appeal to their target audience.

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Discounting The Old AJAX Crawling Scheme in Q2 2018 – Dec 4

Google finally decided to change the AJAX crawling scheme in Q2 2018. The AJAX crawling scheme was designed in 2009 to render dynamic pages made by JavaScript. At the time, Googlebot wasn’t smart enough to index the dynamic content and webmasters had to provide additional information in the backend for Google to understand the content.

But it’s no longer the case and Googlebot understands JavaScript and CSS as long as you’re not blocking it.

Even if your website follows old recommendations for supporting ‘_escaped_fragment_‘, your website will be indexed the same as before according to Google’s Q&A.

Here are tips from Google:

• Content in Flash, Silverlight, or other plugin-based technologies needs to be converted to either JavaScript or “normal” HTML, if their content should be indexed in search.

• Verify ownership of the website in Google Search Console to gain access to the tools there, and to allow Google to notify you of any issues that might be found.

• Test with Search Console’s Fetch & Render. Compare the results of the #! URL and the escaped URL to see any differences. Do this for any significantly different part of the website. Check our developer documentation for more information on supported APIs, and see our debugging guide when needed.

• Use Chrome’s Inspect Element to confirm that links use “a” HTML elements and include a rel=nofollow where appropriate (for example, in user-generated content)

• Use Chrome’s Inspect Element to check the page’s title and description meta tag, any robots meta tag, and other meta data. Also check that any structured data is available on the rendered page.

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The Test Launch Of ‘Notable Moments’ Carousel in Knowledge Graph Cards – Dec 3

Google added notable moments to their knowledge graph cards.

Google is testing "notable moments" carousel in knowledge panels pic.twitter.com/Wiu2shmEs7

— Sergey Alakov (@sergey_alakov) December 4, 2017

New Features For Featured Snippets: Images, Related Search & Content, and People Relations – Dec 6

Google updated their Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels by adding more images and related searches.

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Google AdWord Auction Insights & Impression Share Data Refreshed Multiple Times A Day – Dec 7

Now Google Adwords refreshes impression share and auction insights a few times a day. This allows advertisers to make adjustments quicker. To learn more about data freshness for Google Adwords, visit adwords help.

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Now Google Shows You a Video Response Directly From Celebrities – Dec 7

Google started showing selfie videos when you ask frequently asked questions about celebrities.

Image: Your Search questions, answered selfie-style on Google

Right now, it applies to selected well-known personalities. They said it’s only available on mobile in the US, though I can see it from Canada.

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5 Facebook Updates

PayPal’s New Chat Extension In Facebook Messenger For Sellers To Invoice Buyers – Nov 21

Partnering with PayPal, Facebook launched a Facebook Messenger extension that allows PayPal sellers to invoice buyers on Messenger without leaving the conversation.

Facebook has focused on their Facebook Marketplace to compete with C2C platforms including Craigslist and this initiative is one of their efforts. Deals in those existing platforms are done anonymously and often, it causes trouble. Here’s hoping Facebook will become the major platform for secured deals.

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Facebook Drops $50M/year Worth of Fee on Donations – Nov 29

Facebook decided to eliminate their 5% fee for donation through Donate buttons on Facebook. Therefore, non-profit organizations will receive 100%. Facebook also announced a Fundraiser API to connect Facebook fundraiser to offsite campaigns partnering with limited non-profits.

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Messenger Kids: a New Messenger App For Families – Dec 4

Facebook rolled out ‘Messenger Kids’ for users under 13 years old. The messenger app can be controlled from their parent’s Facebook including their kid’s accounts and contacts. There are no ads in Messenger Kids, of course.

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New Functionality To Import Instagram Contacts into Facebook Messenger – Dec 4

Facebook started testing out a function that lets users import contacts on Instagram to Facebook Messenger. While I see why they did this, I’m not convinced that it works knowing the user demographic of Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messenger is different.

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The Launch Of ‘Did You Know’ Social Questionnaire On News feed – Dec 6

Facebook launched a new feature on Facebook called “Did You Know” to encourage people to share about themselves, with questions like “The superpower I want most is”, “The first thing I’d do after winning the lottery is” and so on.

They wanted people to have a personal connection with Facebook rather than users only sharing content like articles and videos that may include commercial purposes.

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3 Instagram Updates

Stories and Save on Mobile Web – Nov 16

Instagram rolled out 2 new features on Instagram mobile web: creating stories and saving posts. Previously things that could only be done through Instagram mobile.

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Remix Photos From Friends in Direct Message & Control Replays – Nov 28

Instagram updated 2 new features to their messenger function. First of all, now you can easily remix photos that your friends send you on messenger by adding stickers, text and doodles. This encourages further interaction on messenger.

Second of all, you can choose “One View” or “Allow Replay” for messages you send to your friends.

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Standalone App for direct messaging – Dec 7

Techcrunch reported that Instagram is testing a standalone messenger app. This app is only available in Uruguay, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Portugal and Israel, and has yet to arrive in North America. It makes sense to have a separate messenger app for Instagram given it has a different user demographic than Facebook.

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2 Youtube Updates

New Initiatives For YouTube and YouTube Kids User Protection – Nov 22

Youtube announced 5 ways they are currently working to make Youtube a safe place for families and kids. These are some of their most prominent initiatives:

1) Expanded their enforcement guidelines and terminated over 50 channels as well as thousands of videos that go against it.

2) Removed ads from inappropriate videos targeting families including ones where kid characters engage in violent or offensive behaviour. Since June, they have taken down 3M ads from these videos.

3) Blocked inappropriate comments on videos featuring minors

For more info, visit Youtube Official Blog.

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YouTube Director App No Longer Available – Dec 1

Youtube decided to shut down their Youtube Director app which helps SMBs create video ads through their phone.

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1 Other Digital Marketing Update

LaterPay The First Paywall Platform for AMP pages – Nov 29

LaterPay, the German-Swiss online payment infrastructure provider, released the first paywall platform for AMP page.

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The post 51 Digital Marketing Updates Recap December 2017 appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

How Much Should You Allocate For Your Marketing Budget in 2018?

To answer that question, this report from CMO Survey conducted by Deloitte might offer some good insights. According to the report, 6.9% is the average percentage of marketing budget against revenue in 2017. Below is a breakdown by B2B vs. B2C, as well as product vs. service.

The following tables show the average percentage of marketing budgets broken down by industry category and revenue size:

Source: CMO.Deloitte

As you can see, organizations with a lower revenue size are willing to spend more of their budget on marketing in order to grow. Of course, those are just moderate averages and you don’t have to follow these numbers. There are always exceptions: when you take a look at a rapid growing software company like Salesforce, the marketing & sales spend accounts for nearly 45 – 50% of their revenue, so it’s dependent on your strategy.

Where Are They Spending Their Marketing Budget?

You may be wondering where the increased marketing spends have gone. The answer is digital – you can see the trend chart below:

Digital marketing has continued to grow through 2017. Global digital ad spends are projected to increase by 17.4 percent to $583.91 billion according to CNBC. This is a bit surprising given P&G and other organizations are concerned about affecting brand safety by placing digital ads. P&G said they were planning to decrease their budget for digital ads since digital ads are unclear in terms of placement and can potentially be placed next to extremist content.

What are key drivers for the growth? As mentioned in 20 Marketing Statistics & 5 Trends To Implement In 2018, a combination of digital video and mobile will be key drivers for growth in digital marketing spends.

Google and Facebook are leading the rapid growth. Google accounts for 33% of the total net digital ad revenue share worldwide and Facebook accounts for 16.2% in 2017.

Source: eMarketer

In terms of which advertising channels marketers have invested in throughout 2017, social ads hold the highest growth at 72% according to a survey conducted by Hanapin Marketing.

Source: Hanapin Marketing

Hanapin Marketing asked the same marketers how their budgets will change in next 12 months. Google Adwords, Facebook and Mobile are the major mediums where marketers will be increasingly invest their budgets.

Where Should You Spend Your Marketing Budget?

By now, you have a better understanding of how others are allocating their budgets in 2018 and where it makes the most sense to invest. Before you bounce out and go work on your marketing budget allocation, let’s turn the tables.

Traditional media hasn’t died even though the growth rate may not be as sexy as it’s digital media counterpart.

According to Nielsen Insights, radio reaches 88% of Generation Z and 93% of Millennials each week, and the amount of time spent listening to radio each day increases when you compare generations from youngest to oldest. By radio, I’m talking good old fashioned AM/FM radio.

Even billboard advertising is still effective as 71% of consumers ‘often’ look at roadside billboards and 56% of respondents say they talk to friends and family about funny or interesting billboards they see while on the road according to a recent Arbitron study.

If you are in the realm of local businesses, print media may be an option since out of the $148.8 billion that is predicted to be spent on local advertising channels in the US, print media claims 8.3 percent according to BIA Kelsey.

Image: BIA Kelsey

So should you focus on traditional media instead of digital media? Not exactly. You should consider both types of media to make the most of your marketing initiatives. Today, consumers use an average of almost six touch-points when buying an item. The touch-points may include both traditional and digital.

Source: Knexus Group

This means you need to provide a consistent customer journey through every touch-point including your Instagram posts, website, customer service, physical shop and so on – meaning you might want to think of it more holistically than focusing on one medium or two.

Putting your focus solely on digital, mobile or video doesn’t make sense regardless of the growth of digital platforms. As a matter of fact, 87% of online shoppers think brands need to work harder to create a seamless experience for customers according to Zendesk.

Think about social media, it’s one of the most popular mediums that companies tap into.  While Marketers expected to expand social media spending by 33% over the next 12 months and 89% in next 5 years, 45% of marketing executives felt they couldn’t see the impact on their business from social media according to the COM Survey.

Source: CMO.Deloitte

This doesn’t mean social media marketing is ineffective – it depends on the company. Social media might not directly affect your sales figures, but it plays another important role. For example, social media lends well to generating awareness, customer service and social hearing. Harvard Business Review states that consumers with positive social-care experiences are three times more likely to recommend the brand to others.

Even though social media can also work as a customer acquisition channel, it’s a bit more challenging to prove performance and direct ROI compared to search engine marketing (SEM), which is known as the marketing channel producing the best ROI. One of reasons SEM is seen as effective in ROI is because SEM is good at capturing searchers who are more likely to convert by leveraging the user’s intention.

This doesn’t mean you should only focus on SEM – for a couple of reasons. The most prominent reason is, as you’ll see below, brand affinity has a lot to do with the performance of organic search and PPC campaigns. The stronger brand affinity you have, the better performance you’ll get from SEM.

Image: Wordstream

This is supported by research from Marketing Week: companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue, compared to 3.4% for weak omnichannel companies. Similarly, strong omnichannel companies see a 7.5% year-over-year decrease in cost per contact, compared to a 0.2% year-over-year decrease for weak companies.

Wrap It Up!

Hope this article gave you a clear view of what you should do for your 2018 marketing spend. Having had years of experience in marketing, one thing I can say is it’s hard to say what exactly you may need without knowing your business. It really depends on your business model, industry, revenue size or your stage in the business life cycle.

Drop us a line if you wonder what marketing initiatives you may need. We are here to help you and initial consultation is always free

Header Image: Pexels

The post Marketing Spend Trend: How You Should Budget For 2018 Marketing appeared first on My Loud Speaker.

The Challenges of the Influencer Industry

High Turnover

Most of the time, influencers with under 100k followers are able to score relationships with brands here and there, but it doesn’t make their gig lucrative enough for ‘digital influencing’ to be their full-time job.

There’s a large initial investment of time required to build a loyal follower base before an influencer can start reaping the rewards of their mini-fandom. It’s harder work than some would think. As these influencers begin to fully realize the amount of time and energy required to build a powerful social following, many begin to drop off and stop investing in their accounts.

As an influencer begins to step away from their account, it directly impacts the health of their community or following. It takes time to build a relationship between the influencer and their audience, and when they are no longer consistent or tending to their following, that relationship in turn falls apart. In order for an influencer to be successful, they have to continually engage their following.

Free Coverage

Another thing about the Influencer industry is there is a continuous stream of up and comers. Oftentimes, we’ve found brands can get free coverage from influencers without having to pay a cent. However, this is especially true of brands with a strong and established brand presence.  

When Rihanna launched her new cosmetic line, Fenty, beauty influencers were more than happy to purchase and promote the line without ever being approached to do so. In fact, FENTY Beauty received so much buzz it quickly sold out in many locations after the launch. The success of Fenty is a direct result of Rihanna having an established following and personal brand, but secondly, the line was unique in that it offered a stunning area of foundations that catered to POC – something missing from the market.

With a press party invite, brands can get the same amount of coverage they would if they were to pay each one individually. The main challenge for less established brands is that it can be difficult to guarantee that notable influencers will attend – they have the privilege of choosing which invitations they accept. There’s a better chance less notable influencers will happily to attend in hopes of swag.

This creates a bit of a double edged sword between brands and influencers. It can be difficult to get free coverage from high profile influencers for less established brands. On the flip side, less notable influencers are more willing to attend and promote for free as they build, and this makes it challenging for other influencers to cement their place as paid professionals.

Less Interest in Sponsorship

Influencers have begun leveraging alternative revenue avenues. Some have started creating their own goods to sell themselves as opposed to opting into brand sponsorships. This trend could create challenges for brands attempting to use influencers for marketing purposes. Alternative avenues to create direct revenue of their own may be much more lucrative for influencers than short term project payments or brand sponsorships.

Seen as Low ROI

Influencers have had some strong conversion rates in industries like luxury fashion brands. According to research by MuseFind, in the case of luxury brands “…92 percent of consumers trusted influencers over celebrity endorsements.” However, influencers haven’t proven to be as effective in other industries.

Budgets invested in the influencer community are still limited even in industries with high ROI. In fact, less than 10 percent of marketing budgets are allocated to influencer marketing among 59 percent of luxury brands. Influencers have been used as an exposure tool much like traditional media, which is why a lot of Public Relations companies have placed influencer marketing under their umbrella.   

Much like traditional media, you can pay for sponsored content but it will never be as strong as organic earned media.

Opportunities in Influencer Marketing

New Celebrities Everyday

There’s an unlimited number of people hoping for fame on their mediums. This means the industry won’t be going away anytime soon, even withstanding the high turnover of celebrity influencers. Simply put, people get bored and are constantly seeking new accounts to follow.

In order to keep up with the onslaught of new and changing influencers, brands who benefit from influencer marketing should develop a standardized process that can work with any which influencer as time goes on.

In addition to high turnover, each social medium produces its own celebrities. Each influencer having leveraged their medium to garner a mass following who buys into their values.  As new mediums are created so are new mini-celebrities. Of those many, few will rise to full stardom.

This allows brands to capitalize on some of the rising stars at a more affordable rate – which leads us to our next point.

Can be Affordable

Influencers are an affordable way for brands to engage with audiences more intimately and authentically.  While brands can’t control the conversation as much, they can tap into the trusted relationships influencers have with their followers.

You’ll see in some industries – especially beauty and luxury fashion brands – these relationships have resulted in strong conversion rates. In many cases, you’ll now see brands giving full control to the influencers and finding the return to be highly worthwhile. And it’s not only luxury and beauty brands that have reigned in success from this strategy.

Lynda.com, a website offering learning resources for online skills development wanted to find a way to skirt ad blockers. They decided to work with YouTube influencers instead, and while they didn’t have control of the content, they were able to reach an audience of 46 million people through strategic influencer choices such as The Fine Brother, Rooster Teeth and Jacksfilms.

It worked perfectly because the influencers were perfectly aligned to what Lynda.com was offering, which meant the influencer’s audience was poised to gain value from the partnership.

Word Of Mouth

Word-of-mouth is still the number one influencer of purchasing decisions. According to 2017’s Environics Communications CanTrust Index, “74% of Canadians trust recommendations or word-of-mouth (WOM), second to just sampling a product or service (76%).“

Brands willing to co-create with influencers is a massive step. It allows the influencer to maintain trust with their followers while endorsing a brand authentically. Further, this allows brands to tap into an authenticity which is elusive to most marketing avenues beyond word-of-mouth.

More Studies to Prove Value

There are more and more studies coming out proving that influencer campaigns can generate ROI.  While it’s been mostly seen in the beauty and fashion industry, it is believed this can spread to other industries too. “Social media campaigns have 11 times higher ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing.”

Verdict

Yes, influencer marketing is here to stay but the state of the industry’s growth is still a work-in-progress. As this art form becomes an overanalyzed science, we’ll begin to breakdown the most optimal ways for brands to work with influencers of all shapes and sizes to produce the highest ROI.  

For now, the organic collaboration is exciting. Brands who are most willing to hand the reigns over to influencers have the opportunity and potential for a surge of revenue.

Header Image: Pexels

The post Challenges & Opportunities for Influencer Marketing in 2018 appeared first on My Loud Speaker.