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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Latest Digital Marketing Trends Update
00:28:37
Daniel and Ciaran are back this week with some of the latest Digital Trend updates. Under discussion are the new Snapchat location update and the geo-sharing privacy issues it highlights, as well as Snapchat streaks which is gamifying the use of the...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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And today, Daniel, we have a trends update for our audience. Yes.
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B
So we're going to try and talk about some of the tactical changes that people may or may not be aware of and then just talk about some of the strategic changes that seem to be going on in digital at the mom, just to give you a bit of a regular update.
- [00:35]
A
So first up, Daniel, we need to share our thoughts on the new Snapchat location. What is it and why should we be interested in it?
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B
I think this is more of a controversial one than a necessarily grabbing the tactic. But basically what you can see in Snapchat now is the location of other Snapchatters that you are connected to, where they're leaving snaps or leaving images, but actually where they are at the moment. Now, from a privacy point of view, this is an absolute shocker because you kind of opt in or opt out of it and anyone you're connected to then goes onto a map and can see where you are any given time. So many of you know I have a teenage daughter and she showed me hers and it was hilarious because what you could basically see is the amount of snaps that are being done at school. There's huge, I mean, really dense population of people at school on Snapchat. But also, I mean, she was quite smart, immediately switched it off for her because what you're basically doing is going through leaving load of images of what you're doing. But actually people can now see where you are. Now, obviously with Snapchat, you have to follow someone and you have to kind of allow them to do that. But the reality is that lots of people are connected to lots of people. They don't have a clue who they are in reality, really. And this takes us back a long way where suddenly geo sharing was seen as very controversial with Facebook early in the beginning and they locked it down a lot more. But this is very much, I can see someone's pictures, I can see where they are in the world and there's all sor sorts of security issues around that, especially if you're, you know, if you're a teenager, whatever it may be. So just to make people aware of it, Snapchat are constantly adding new features and they don't really document them a great deal and they just kind of arrive and it's been, it's been used quite widely. But just be aware that that's there. So maybe it's one just to keep an eye on. It's quite interesting looking at where your connections are in the world, but I'd be a little bit cautious about it as well, from a kind of sharing privacy point of view as well. Now, the other thing that you might not be aware of if you're not an active Snapchat user is Snapchat streaks. And basically a streak is if I send you an image, you send me an image. And we keep doing that. The streak keeps going as many days that we've sent an image to each other. So we have to each day send each other an image and it's gamification in quite a clever way because once you put up a 30 day streak, you think, well, I don't want to lose this because it will go back to zero. And then you do it the next day. The next day. So they're gamifying the platform to keep you using it so you go in and do things on a regular basis.
- [02:58]
A
So it's got nothing to do with invading a football pitch?
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B
No. There's no nudity whilst at cricket or anything like that, I'm afraid, Kieran. So the reality is that again, thinking about gamification, we've spoken about it before, we've got some great examples on the website about gamification, but how can you encourage people to come back and do something on a regular basis and Snapchat have kind of cracked it? What I'd say is this is very anecdotal evidence though. We've seen a lot of people moving from Snapchat back to Instagram and as I say, I haven't got many numbers to back this up at the moment. There was also talk with Snapchat of the 35 to 45 year old group growing a lot. The evidence I would see would say that they're not using it that actively, they're connecting to their kids or they're trying to work out how it works. They might have one or two friends that use it, but it's not their kind of go to platform still at the moment. But bear in mind, if you said you would be using Instagram for B2B advertising, to me two years ago, I'd have laughed you out of the room and now that's what we're doing. So you just have to keep an eye on these things as well. So be careful. Now, the reason people may be moving back to Instagram a little bit as well in some cases is stories and stories being everywhere and What I mean is that stories is that opportunity where you can go in and over a 24 hour period, you can add to your story pictures and videos. Now, originally you could do this in Snapchat and then Instagram copied and you could do it in Instagram, but now you can do it in Facebook. So if you haven't noticed, you have Facebook stories, you can go in the. Again, anecdotal evidence I've seen there hasn't been huge uptake within Facebook yet. That may grow. We'll see how that kind of changes. But the idea is that, you know, if you're posting something to Instagram or maybe to Facebook, it's Facebook. It's probably some sort of life event. You're on holiday or you're going to a wedding or something along those lines. Instagram, you know, a little bit less formal, maybe you're having some nice food or you're traveling to a particular place. Whereas the stories is very, a little bit more informal, a bit more throwaway. Here's me arriving at the event, here's the event filling up, here's one of the speakers. And you can build a narrative. So from a company point of view, there's a lot of opportunity with narrative, with stories. And actually for Instagram, we found that works really well. But not many people are using it in Facebook, which might say, well, don't do it. But to me, what that says is you've got a bit of a lead advantage if you don't try it out and you go in there and you try these kind of stories as well. So take a look at stories, you haven't played around with them and try them out as a technique.
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A
I think that's really fascinating because I'm a great believer that we are intrinsically driven by stories. Everything we do, everything we think is along kind of storylines. And it makes perfect sense that in a social network you would integrate that way of communicating into the actual platform because it's natural, right? I love telling stories. It's was one of my great, great passions.
- [05:34]
B
I think that's it. And narrative just brings things alive. And actually what we can suddenly do is take a subject and make it a little bit more interesting. So if I am in Instagram trying to talk about, you know, digital marketing, e learning, it's not really the most exciting thing in the world from an Instagram point of view. But actually if I can give the. The narrative journey of someone improving their career and getting a better job and having a happier life, there's all sorts of things you could do around that, that humanize the whole thing as well. And actually I'm at the event. Well, that's all very well and good, but actually here's behind the scenes and here's the green room of the speakers. Here's a quick 10 second clip interviewing one of the speakers. Suddenly that's a lot more interesting. So it just gives us more creative opportunities to bring to life some of the topics that we want to talk about as well.
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So there've been some really interesting changes in Google Analytics and we really wanted to cover those. Certainly some big interface changes and they really seem to have upped the ante on the intelligent insights. So Daniel, tell us a bit more about that.
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So this is the bane of our life a little bit because we do these digital marketing, e learning, the interactive training stuff that we do. We have a lot of screenshots and videos in there and every time Twitter or Facebook or particularly Google Analytics change something, we have to rerecord our videos and take new screenshots. So I'm really pleased about this, but I also hate it quite a lot as well. So essentially what they've done is when you go into Google Analytics, it used to be you would land on your audience report that basically tell you some high level stuff about how many visits you got. So the sessions, visit duration, all those kind of things. There's now a homepage and the homepage is trying to use some slightly cleverer data visualizations, different types of charting and things like that to give you some insights into actually what's going on with your audience a bit more. So basically it's a new screen, new page within Google Analytics with some nice little reports in there and there's a nice one, for example, at the average time of day that people are accessing your content and you can see it by day of week at the same time and it's kind of heat mapped to some extent. So. So I think it's great, I think it's a really nice interface change and I expect when they start doing this, you'll see more of this stuff as well. They seem to go through a round of it at the moment. The intelligent stuff is really interesting. The intelligence is trying to use more natural language and basically allowing you to ask questions so you can go and type in. Which day of the week do I get most visits? What's the optimum time of day for posting content and things like that? And they're starting to understand those questions and giving you the results of those as well. Google has A huge focus on machine learning at the moment. So they've done a few events recently talking about how they're going to change pay per click, how they're going to change their advertising platforms. And it's all about intelligence and machine learning. So the idea is that you don't need to go and change every setting under the sun. You can go and say, I want to optimize for this. And they'll do all the work behind the scenes for you and just either get you more traffic or get you more conversions, whatever it is that your.
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A
Objective is very interesting. About a year ago now, so kind of last summer 2016, I got the opportunity to speak with the MD of Google and one of the questions I asked him was, what's making your engineers really excited at the moment? And one of the answers he gave back then was artificial intelligence. And it's very clear they've been working on this because you're starting to see some of that work, I believe, coming through into all of their products. If you haven't seen it already within Google Docs, if you go into spreadsheets again, they've got this insights area and there it's currently at the bottom right hand corner where you can literally ask it a question of your data and it will draw you up a graph to illustrate that. And I think you're going to see this roll out. It's definite trend, you know, artificial intelligence in terms of making the data and taming big data and making it much more understandable is definitely a trend that we're seeing on the up at the moment.
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B
I mean, basically it's what Google do, if you look at what they've done for a long time, is big data passing that big data to try and get insights out. And that was, you know, we look at the beginning of SEO, quite basic sets of rules, you know, did you have the keyword in the right place? And so on as well. But actually what's happening is they're finding ways of improving that big data analysis. A lot of the big data technologies were created by Google because they were dealing with volumes of data never seen before, to the extent, you know, trying to go through every website in the world to give you a quick answer. So actually what's going to become complicated is that the artificial intelligence means that it will learn over a period of time. So actually understanding the Google algorithm will become completely impossible because essentially it will be changing constantly because it will constantly be learning, which is actually a good thing because it means you can get back to fundamentals is what is it trying to do? It's trying to give you relevant results. So if you look at something and go, well, we're going to try and fiddle this to the top, it's not that relevant. It's not going to work. So actually, just focusing more on content quality is going to continue to be the real optimum thing to do for SEO.
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A
There are going to be some winners and losers with this as well. This is something I found working within an agency, is that very often you will come across some clients who just won't listen to what you're saying, or they won't listen to what the data is saying because they have their set way of doing things. And if that's you, you're really gonna suffer in Intelligent Insights world because it's not necessarily gonna tie up with your view of things. You do have to work with these technologies. You can't fly in the face of them. So in terms of, for instance, Google personalization, if Google's finding your customers are particularly interested in a certain thing and pushing that and you're not following that, you're not taking an interest in that, you're gonna be at odds with the algorithm, and in my opinion, you're just gonna lose. You have to go with what the crowd are most interested in. Certainly at the moment, that personalization thing is still very much a very broad church. So you have to be aware of those things, as you always have done in marketing. But I do think it's important to note that as more and more artificial intelligence is put out there within various different platforms, you are going to need to listen and learn how to listen to that data in order to make the right decision.
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B
Just to point something out as well, the difference between chatbots, artificial intelligence, because I was talking about this other day and there was a bit of confusion. Most chatbots are not artificial intelligence at the moment. They're scripting, which basically says, if you do this, then reply this, then do this, if you do this. And they're very clever scripts, but they are just rules of kind of decision trees. Whereas the idea of an artificial intelligence is it will learn and it will learn from the data over a period of time. If you're interested in this a bit more, there is a great study where if you show a load of pictures to a computer and say, which ones are cats, for example, it's actually a really difficult thing to do because a cat and a dog to you and I might look quite different, but actually they've got four legs generally at the Corners, they've got a tail sticking out the back and they've got whiskers and a nose kind of thing. So actually differentiating cats and dogs and other creatures is quite difficult. The work that Google have been doing, showing images to these artificial intelligence and identifying them, they've hit a level of accuracy that's never before been achieved. That might not sound like a lot, but actually image processing is one of the really important things, the task you can do with artificial intelligence. So as a marketer, if you're thinking I've got no interest in artificial intelligence, you need to read about it and learn a bit more about it because it's going to become an increasingly big part of your career and you're going to come up against it all the time. And I really believe those organizations that create artificial intelligence based websites and apps and content and are feeding back in these feedback loops will actually be at a great advantage just because there's so much noise. There's an increasing level of noise, allows you to cut through by getting the right stuff to the right people in the right way, but in a very, very smart way.
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So we should also talk about another trend that we've seen, Daniel, which is the adoption of faster mobile website technologies. And this is one. I mean if you've ever attended any of the major marketing events, there's always experts banging on about the importance of mobile first strategy and what have you. But I think we were chatting about this this morning and the ante's really upped of late and actually we're starting to see a lot more people put, put this into practice. Daniel, any kind of thoughts you want to add to this?
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Yeah, so I think, yeah, long time we've said you must do mobile and you must be fast. People on mobile want the stuff faster. They do, but we've said it for a long time and speed of websites is something that's very easy to say yes, yes, yes to. But the problem is it's complicated to get it working. So take a look@gtmetrics.com it will analyze your website. So gtmetrics, we'll put it in the show notes and it analyzes your website and tells you what's slowing things down. Now that's a very traditional website build kind of analysis. But what Google is saying is that we want things as fast as they can possibly be and we're going to give you a standard for doing that. So amp, which is accelerated mobile pages is a way of creating your pages in a specific format so that Google not only can load them quickly, but it'll cache them in some cases as well. So you literally click on it and it loads up almost instantaneously. It seems that Google are really pushing AMP quite hard at the moment. If you're using Search Console, there is a part of Google Search Console that will kind of analyze your pages to work out which ones are amp ones and not. If you're using WordPress, there are a couple of plugins that will help you essentially turn your pages and create AMP versions as well. What you normally need to do is use the plugin, create the amp versions, then point Google Search Console where they are because it won't necessarily find them automatically. You also probably have to change your original version of the page to point out the amp version as well. So this is a very techy thing, but it's worth setting up because Google are, as far as I can make out, prioritizing pages that are loading quickly to some extent and punishing very much punishing pages that are loading slowly. So don't look at your website as we all have done at one point and go, it's a bit slow. And then do nothing about it, which I did for years. WordPress is also hugely susceptible to slow pages because you buy a theme off the shelf and that theme is built to be very flexible. But by nature of that, it's probably loading up loads of stuff that you don't really need and actually it can slow things down. And the more plugins you use, you get kind of plug in bloat where there's more and more code on the page each time. And our website even is suffering from this a little bit at the moment. So we're going for another round of tidying things up. So get your pages loading quickly. The key thing that Google has said for a while is the bit of the page that I can see. So, you know, not when I have to scroll down, but the bit of the page that I see should load up in less than a thousand milliseconds. That is one second. So they're saying, you know, we've talked about five second loads some and three second loads on. They're talking about one second load times. So that's what you need to be aiming for because one, lots of people started doing it and if you're the people that haven't done it, that's obviously going to have a material impact. There's loads of evidence that says people drop out where they have to wait more than a certain period of time. We've all done it ourselves. As well. But it's also something we all seem to ignore for some reason, just because it's a bit complicated and it's a bit involved. So I think now is the time to really take this seriously.
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Absolutely, I couldn't agree with that more. I think also there's some other angles that we could look at. Daniel. So in terms of kind of overall strategy trends, certainly one of the ones that we've been seeing is channel crossover.
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I think I've been talking about this probably for five years and I think it's just become apparent to me how important this is. When you create a piece of content, you've got your content, content marketing, you have to optimize it for the search engines. But actually that content is going to generate links which is going to potentially affect your SEO. That might be a social media piece of content like a video. And actually your pr, your public relations, is generating people linking through and talking about your stuff in the real world and so on as well. So my key point here at the very least is you cannot separ your content, your search optimization, your social media and your pr, your public relations type activity. All of that stuff is so deeply linked in with one another now that considering one in isolation is not a great idea.
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Depending on how you're set up within your organization, this could cause you a few problems to say the least. Because very often different departments plan different aspects of the campaign and actually in order to get this really working well and kind of everything synced up really, really well, I like to think of this as a really well orchestrated or orchestra if you like. Because actually if your PR team are playing slightly out of sync with your social media team and playing slightly out of sync with your content marketing team and your email team, then it's going to sound pretty ugly when actually everybody's a really great player. Right. They all know how to play their instruments really, really well. So that's the kind of analogy that I would use to kind of show you how to get your ducks all lined up in a row. You know, you're aiming to orchestrate this really beautifully. And unless you are planning these things together and actually, you know, sharing information on who's doing what and when and strategically working out the order of things together, this is really, really hard to get to get right?
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B
Yeah. I mean the key thing here is you need some sort of technique doing it. Content calendars do the trick, but you need a content calendar that talks about content search, social media, pr, social outreach, email and maybe paid campaigns as well. So you can line it all up and to see what's going on. And are we maximizing the impact of all this kind of stuff as well? And this as a trend is only going to become more complicated. We were talking earlier on about artificial intelligence and actually as algorithms become more complicated and more complex and clever, the reality is all of these things are going to have impacts on each other. And if you just do them separately, you're never going to realize the full potential of all these different channels. And we've spoken about it before, the idea that if you do some paid search, use some Facebook advertising and you do some gdn, some Google display network advertising, and you kind of do all these things separately, you'll get some results. But if you do them as one, you tend to get more than the sum of the parts. And this relates back to the user journey as well. In the user journeys are complicated, we probably don't fully understand them. So therefore this all kind of fits together. And I think at a very basic level, most organizations, their SEO team will not be speaking to their PR team. It's very rare for that to be happening and it should be happening all the time. So just making sure you've thought about actually how your organization works together, but also how it's structured. So you end up actually changing the structure. And I would always go back and think about agile working methodologies, take a look at some previous episodes for that. But what I'd also say is that, you know, this idea of cross disciplinary teams, the idea that when you've got a project, rather than going right, search are doing that project and PR team's doing that, you have people from different areas of the business working together on a particular project and that can really help with these kind of problems as well. And it makes you think about the structure of your organization differently. You have pots of people, you have a pot of SEO people and some PR people and some email people, but they don't just work in those silos, they're put into project teams and we can align the right people into different projects and one person could be on three different project teams, that's fine. So just think about how you structure and don't think about departments. I think departments is actually a really dangerous way of thinking because it naturally builds silos. So think about that agile methodology a little bit more.
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And that leads us nicely onto another trend that we've seen, which is the really important need therefore for omnichannel measurement.
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I think that most measurement techniques. We spoke about this again in A recent episode. Don't really take into account that they give you a dashboard at high level that allows you to see how a particular technique or channel is working, but whilst also be able to be visible of the other channels. And I always go back to this contribution idea of that. I have an end goal that I want you to achieve. I want to see how much this channel is contributing to that end goal. So use a report like multi channel Funnels from Google Analytics, but also bear in mind that you want to look at what's going on with the other channels at the same time. So if I do more display advertising, it's very likely that I'm going to get some more search traffic. You see my banners, you didn't click on them, but you went through and do a Google search. And I need some sort of dashboard that allows me to do that. So there's lots of ways to do it. You can use an Excel spreadsheet to just bring in your data from different channels. You can use one of the Google suite of tools for actually bringing all that data into one place and they're doing a lot more work allowing you to do that at the moment. But just make sure you've got high level, which you can look down and say, well, that went up, that went up as well. I wonder if it's connected. And you can start to explore that a little bit more as well.
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Which leads us onto the final trend that we wanted to share with you today, which is moving beyond the Omni channel experience. I think that just needs qualifying a little bit more. Daniel.
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So multi channel, let's just go through it. So multichannel was the idea that it was really annoying if I went to a website and I could get a special offer, but I couldn't get that in store. So the idea of multi channel is that it was a kind of unified experience, that you got the same prices or maybe you got the same special offers across channels. Omnichannel kind of went beyond that and said, omnichannel, I can move you between different channels. I can use the different channels kind of slightly differently. The idea that essentially they were working as a bit of a sum and that just meant you had channels. Now what we also need to think about is you could use gamification and we talk about transmedia storytelling. Transmedia and Omnichannel mean pretty much the same thing to me. I think the reality is, is that transmedia says you are moving between channels and there's a narrative that kind of does that. But one of the things I was talking about recently was the idea of experience and experiencing data and that having an impact on you. So let me just try to explain what I mean. There's a great app called Gender eq. Go off and take a look at this. So take the problem. What is the problem is that generally speaking in a meeting, men speak more than women. Okay. So what you're actually finding is that if men speak a lot, this is an issue around sexism is that if men speak a lot, they're seen as dominant and they're being powerful. Whereas if women speak a lot, they're bossy. And there's various other words, you know, people overly strident and all these kind of things as well. Now if you tell people that, we go, yeah, that's true, that's a terrible thing, we need to change that. And then people go into the meetings and act in the same way. So this great app, what it does is you put it down, uses a bit of artificial intelligence and it will just monitor your meeting and it will listen to people speaking. And by using artificial intelligence, it can kind of work out what's a male and female voice. And yeah, it struggles sometimes. Most of the time it's very, very good at doing that. And then it will just very much after the meeting say what percentage of the meeting of people there were male versus female versus what percentage of the time they spoke in that meeting. Now if you show people that data, that really gives people a wake up and they suddenly go, right, I've seen the data and I'm actually being presented with it immediately. That's not a cross channel technique or anything else, but it's kind of going beyond, it's using data or utility or functionality to achieve an end marketing objective to some extent as well. So as a trend, it's not an easy one to kind of nail down. But I would just think about the use of data, real time data, feeding that back into the loop and actually seeing what impact that can have on people as well.
- [24:38]
A
From a marketing perspective, there's some really exciting opportunity here. And certainly if you read around some of the predictions for Christmas this year, which is, as you know from a previous episode, we spent some time doing that. There was a lot in there about making retail experiences much more of an experience and much more digitally engaging. There's some fantastic case studies out there of, you know, innovative brands who've done this really, really effectively and definitely worth checking those out. But actually, you know, thinking about, you know, it's not just about getting our message out there. But about sharing our values and actually giving and creating experiences for the customer that help to share those values is just one, one example of doing this. But I think now, increasingly in a culture which is, you know, very much served by its technology and trended by the data and the overall trends, there's definitely going to be a move in the next year to 18 months for brands to really go beyond just simply selling through retail channels and making those channels actually engaging and entertaining to be in as a space. For years we've enjoyed the retail experience, but I think what digital technology and channels does is give you all sorts of opportunities to add a whole new level of experience there, be it through whatever technology you're using, virtual reality or enhanced visuals within the experience, the sky's the limit and it's only really limited by your planning and creative processes that come up with these ideas. Now, how can you make it more engaging and more fun?
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B
What I'd say with this as well is to be cautious because speaking at conferences a couple of weeks ago and everyone that came on went, oh, virtual reality is all about virtual reality. And everyone was sitting there by the end just rolling their eyes going, that's lovely. But what am I actually going to do with it in practice? You know, it's just I'm a B2B. How is it going to work now? There is lots of opportunity for maybe in the future that happening, but also thinking about how do you create an experience because people share experiences. So even in something very kind of dry and B2B related, maybe business to business, there is lots of opportunity for improving the experience and actually just making it more interactive, easier to do smoother, which we have friction. This technology, the technology doesn't get in the way. So the idea of just how could you, how could you change that user experience and talking, using the technology to do that and data is a good, good part of this. So we know when we've got this E learning platform, we had all this content and we stuck it in front of people and people went, that's brilliant. And then just felt a bit overwhelmed and didn't know where to start. Whereas actually you make a benchmark, you make it interactive, you show them what the next steps are, there's a guided journey to go through that was more of an experience. Suddenly it made all the world's difference with people adopting the content. So just thinking about how you can be a bit more experiential becomes important.
- [27:37]
A
Okay, so that pretty much rounds up the trends update we have for you at the moment. As always. If you'd like to get in touch. If you've got any questions, please do.
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Thanks for listening.
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Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to.