This Week in Digital Marketing - May 20, 2022

We're discussing a Google Search Console reporting update, how to establish a content marketing plan for small businesses, how to leverage social media to drive sales, and more this week in digital marketing.

Google Search Console Page Experience Report Now Tracks More Desktop Search Features
For the page experience report, Google has modified part of the data within Google Search Console to capture more desktop features. When the page experience report and performance reports are sorted by "excellent page experience," you may notice an increase in desktop impressions.

Those impressions have always been recorded by Google in various reports, but not specifically for the desktop page experience.

This is a Google Search Console reporting update that you should be aware of. Make a note of this change in your reports, and if you find major changes in your reporting on or shortly after May 13th, it could be due to this modification.

Content Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: Top 11 Tips
To attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined audience – and to generate profitable consumer action – content marketing entails developing and distributing relevant and quality information. The more content you produce, the more likely you are to succeed.

1. Mission: Create a clear aim for your content by defining your company's mission.
   
2. Audience: Know who you're speaking with so you may anticipate what they want to hear. It's critical to define not only the content of your purpose, but also the audience for that material.
   
3. Objectives: Create targets for each of your goals so you can see what constitutes success.
   
4. Goals: Make sure your objectives are measurable and achievable.
   
5. Resources: Determine how much time, money, or staff you have available to create and promote content. With your content plan, start with your budget, goals, and objectives.
   
6. Content Calendar: A content calendar is the most important tool for staying on track. If you don't have access to a project management tool, you don't have to do it that way.
   
7. Optimize Content: Researching keywords is crucial. Begin by looking for high-volume, low-competition keywords.
   
8. Repurpose Content: Examine your data (Google Analytics, YouTube, high-engagement social postings) to determine if you can recycle the material into new blogs, social media posts, infographics, or videos. Because the initial legwork has already been done, this strategy can save you a lot of time.
   
9. Update Evergreen Content and Pages: Make a note to check over previous material every quarter and identify what evergreen content needs to be updated. Although each industry is unique, many rules, regulations, and/or specifications will alter. Your content must be updated so that you do not appear to be out of current or uninformed about industry news.
   
10. Ongoing Content Promotion: Evergreen or popular material, like repurposed content, should be pushed not just once or twice, but as often as feasible. Make sure to distribute it evenly. You've put time, effort, and money into creating the material. Make the most of your time there.
    
11. Analyze: You can quickly tell what worked and what didn't if you know what you're tracking (see step four). Investigate ways to duplicate it. Maybe it's the theme, maybe it's the short-form content. If you keep an eye on analytics, you'll find new options to assist you achieve your objectives.
    

Vimeo Adds Structured Data to All Public Videos to Improve Google Search Visibility
Vimeo, a major video hosting platform (but clearly not as popular as YouTube), has incorporated structured data to all of its publicly accessible videos. The SEO tweaks Vimeo made to the videos will provide "your videos the best chance to appear for relevant searches," according to Vimeo.

If you choose Vimeo to host, distribute, and market your films, you can rest assured that the company is committed to SEO and Google rich results. If you've been using YouTube instead of Vimeo, you might want to give Vimeo a try now that Google has introduced video SEO suggestions.

Keep an eye on your video analytics to see if these modifications had an effect on any of your previous videos. It's feasible that Vimeo videos could acquire more awareness in the future, which will benefit Vimeo-hosted content while perhaps harming other video platforms. In any case, we know that YouTube and most SEOs use video SEO best practices, and Vimeo may now be added to that list.

10 Rules of the Road for Metaverse Marketing

1. Understand the true potential of the platform
   
2. Understand the technology and the terminology
   
3. Get smart on the benefits of immersion
   
4. Refer to your audience as residents or citizens instead of users
   
5. Understand the differences between consumption devices
   
6. Speak their language
   
7. Location, location, location!
   
8. Use the design thinking process
   
9. Prioritizing short-term economic gains sacrifices resident experience
   
10. Join an active community of virtual world explorers and pioneers
    

3 Challenges of Working with Influencers (and Solutions!)
Challenge 1: Using the wrong metrics to choose influencers
When it comes to picking an influencer, one of the most common mistakes businesses make is relying on analytics that disclose nothing about the influencer or their work.

Solution 1: Clear KPI definition
Every influencer campaign should have its own set of KPIs. It's exciting to work with influencers. However, there are a few things to consider to ensure that your partnership reaches real individuals rather than bots:

• Engagement Rate
  
• Follower Count
  
• Monthly Impressions
  

Although this is not a measure, it is usually a good idea to request a cooperation portfolio from the influencer. When an influencer approaches your company with a collaboration proposal, you might want to see how they interact with other brands.

Challenge 2: A result that does not bring value to anyone
A collaboration that concludes with a mention but no link will provide no SEO benefit to your company or brand.

You end up with a temporary tale that gets lost in the shuffle (on Instagram, Snapchat, or elsewhere) or posts that don't generate any traffic or engagement.

Solution 2: Clear goals and communication from the start
Determining your objectives allows you to select the types of influencers to work with, as well as the types of content and distribution platforms to use.

Your influencer campaign, on the other hand, will not achieve your wide marketing and business objectives.

Make sure your goals are campaign-specific when dealing with influencers so you don't under-estimate the success of your campaigns.

Challenge 3: Irrelevancy
When an influencer's audience does not find the topic of your partnership engaging, relevant, or beneficial, you have created irrelevant content. Most of their followers are unlikely to click on it.

You might obtain a short traffic spike even if your team secures a collaboration with a high-end influencer. Any traffic generated by the cooperation, on the other hand, is likely to bounce soon and not convert.

Solution 3: Choosing the appropriate influencer for your audience
The opinions of consumers on influencer material are crucial. The most relevant influencers for your campaigns and target audience are more useful than their number of followers.

Whether or not influencer work matches with brand values, the impact of their work should be evaluated based on quality by assessing how their audience interacts with the influencers' material to see if it helps shape customer opinions on a product or company.

Why We Care About Video Advertising
Brands have found video to be an excellent revenue generator, particularly on social media platforms. In fact, digital video ad expenditure in the United States is risen 50.8 percent year over year, totaling $39.5 billion. Every day, Twitter receives over 2 billion video views, and 91 percent of active Instagram users watch videos at least once a week. Having a video ad approach is clearly advantageous.

Customers respond better to video content than written material, regardless of the channel. This is due to the fact that video material creates an immersive experience by combining pictures, sound, and text. 

Meta’s New Recurring Emails
Meta has made it much easier for you to get into the DMs of your consumers. Recurring Notifications, an addition to the Messenger API that allows businesses to send proactive, automated messages to consumers who have signed in to receive them, was unveiled by Facebook yesterday.

Brands can use the capability to send personalized messages to their customers at a certain time, such as:

• Product recommendations
  
• Newsletters
  
• Sales & promotions
  
• Discount codes and more
  

This is a new premium function that the company plans to charge companies for in the future. It is now available as part of a free trial period for all Messenger Platform users. Meta also mentioned that the business function will be coming to Instagram in the fall.

Customer Service Chat Bots
Many companies are using chatbots to supplement or, in some cases, totally replace their human customer support representatives.

While there has been a lot of research into how consumers react to chatbot chats, there hasn't been much research into how the bots make individuals feel about the firm itself.

YouTube Shorts Get Analytics
For Shorts, YouTube is now providing brand analytics insights. YouTube Studio will now have distinct analytics for videos, the platform revealed yesterday. The "Reach" and "Engagement" pages will be replaced with a new "Content" tab, which will segregate data for your various content kinds, such as:

• Videos
  
• Shorts
  
• Live streams
  
• Posts
  

All previously available metrics will be available in the new format, according to the platform, but some may have been relocated around. You can also switch to "Advanced Mode" if you want to access more advanced analytics. In the coming weeks, YouTube will push out the upgrade to all creators on desktop and mobile.

Digital Marketing Snippets

• The key to improving your social media performance is putting out content at a variety of times to test what works. Different types of content work on different platforms at different times. Taking the time to figure this out will improve your social performance over time.
  
• 40% of marketers plan to add TikTok into their strategies in the next year.
  

Some of this information is relevant to your business, and some of it might not be. This is where we can help. We’re able to break down these updates and figure out which ones are most important for you and your business. Contact us for a consultation!