Digital Marketing News 05/31/2022 – 06/06/2022

Social

TikTok Allows Third-Party Tools to Manage Business Accounts

Now, brands can manage their TikTok business accounts using third-party tools such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and others.

TikTok is expanding its Marketing Partner Program by launching an integration with popular social media management platforms. Their Content Marketing Partners include Brandwatch, Dash Hudson, Emplifi, Hootsuite, Khoros, Later, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social. The initiative aims to make it easier for marketers to connect with users on the platform.

The integration allows marketers to manage their content using tools they’re already familiar with. There’s no need to leave your content management platform anymore as you can now organize, schedule, and publish TikTok posts directly from there.

Platform integration simplifies the asset repurposing process, as you can re-share video assets across different accounts. This helps ensure that brands remain consistent and active in each communication channel.

What’s more, brands will be able to use third-party tools to monitor comments and conversations on posts. This provides more opportunities for real-time audience engagement and metric tracking. 

The integration will allow digital marketers to monitor multiple social media accounts from a single platform, which will make it easier to pull insights on what type of content performs best on each social media platform.

By analyzing metrics and analytics, brands will be equipped to develop more effective social media strategies and content that accomplish their business goals not just on TikTok, but on all social media platforms.

Social

LinkedIn Data Reveals Which Type of InMail Gets The Best Results

LinkedIn analyzed data on their premium messaging feature, InMail, to determine what kind of messages get the best results.

The study analyzed tens of millions of InMails sent by corporate recruiters around the world between May 2021 and April 2022. Though it focused on recruiter messages, digital marketers can still glean valuable data from LinkedIn’s study.

The social media networking site sought to answer the following questions:

• Do longer or shorter InMails tend to get better response rates?

• Does it matter what day of the week you send an InMail?

• Are personalized InMails more likely to get a response?

Here are the takeaways from LinkedIn’s study:

• Shorter InMails get above-average response rates

Defining the shortest InMails as those under 400 characters and the longest as those over 1,200 characters:

• The response rate for the shortest InMails is 22% higher than the average response rate for all InMails.

• By the same measure, the response rate for the longest InMails is 11% below the average rate.

It’s also worth noting that only 10% of all InMails are under 400 characters, while nearly half (46%) of all InMails are over 800 characters. As LinkedIn observed, the effectiveness of shorter InMails might be coming from their brevity, which makes them stand out from 90% of other InMails.

• InMails sent on Friday and Saturday get lower response rates

The best day of the week to send an InMail is Monday, but those sent from Sunday to Thursday stay within about 1% of the global average. The worst day to send an InMail is Saturday, as you’ll get 8% fewer responses than average. It’s followed by Friday, which yields a response rate that’s 4% below average.

• Personalized InMails perform nearly 15% better than ones written or sent in bulk

InMails that are sent individually see response rates roughly 15% higher than InMails sent in bulk. Personalization goes beyond sending messages one by one. The content of your InMail should also show that you’re interested in the recipient as an individual.

LinkedIn’s findings serve as guidelines to keep in mind when executing an InMail campaign. Marketers are still encouraged to experiment and see what kind of executions yield the best results.

Social

Meta Brings More Transparency to Social Issue, Electoral, and Political Ads

Meta updates their ad transparency tools to provide more information about advertiser targeting choices for social issue, electoral, and political ads.

The updates to Meta’s ad transparency tools will apply for all countries where their ad authorizations and disclaimer tools are available.

Facebook’s parent company announced that detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral, or political ads will be made available to vetted academic researchers through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) environment. FORT was first launched on January 11, 2022 with the goal of providing a tool for researchers to understand Meta’s impact on society. It’s a cloud-based research platform that’s designed to be flexible for researchers and secure when it comes to data storage.

Detailed targeting information will be provided for each individual ad and will include information like the interest categories chosen by advertisers.

In July, the publicly-available Ad Library will also include a summary of targeting information for social issue, electoral, or political ads run after launch. The following are the targeting information that will be made available:

• Data on the total number of social issue, electoral, and political ads a Page ran using each type of targeting (such as location, demographics, and interests)

• The percentage of social issue, electoral, and political ad spend used for targeting

• Information on whether a Page used Custom Audiences and/or lookalike audiences

With these updates, Meta hopes to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters using their technologies.

PPC

Everything You Need to Know From the Google Marketing Live 2022

Google made major announcements in the recently-concluded Google Marketing Live, which includes changes and additions to Google Ads.

Video Ads Updates

Google will introduce more ads in YouTube Shorts. In fact, video action campaigns and app campaigns are now rolling out on YouTube Shorts worldwide. Later this year, product feeds will also start showing up on YouTube Shorts to make video ads more shoppable.

Another thing Google is exploring are ways to bring short video ads to Discover, ones that would fit in seamlessly with organic content.

Advertisers will also be able to utilize Display & Video 360 soon to create connected TV campaigns to reach affinity, in-market, and demographic audiences across YouTube and other ad-supported connected TV apps.

Automation Advancements

Performance Max campaigns will get a boost, which includes A/B testing, expanded campaign management support in Search Ads 360 and the Google Ads mobile app, support for store sales goals, new performance data, and optimization score and recommendations.

Google is adding three new reports to the Insights Page: Attribution Insights, Budget Insights, and Audience Insights.

They’re also improving Responsive Search Ads by introducing a feature that generates assets automatically based on content from landing pages and existing ad units.

For Responsive Display Ads, Google will push mobile-first layouts. This allows advertisers to showcase their brand on full-screen portrait ad inventory. For a “more engaging shopping experience,” Google will also introduce scrollable ads and videos based on the advertiser’s product feed.

Advertisers worldwide can now use the new account-level Asset Library to store and curate all their digital creative assets. And soon, they’ll be able to create video ads using YouTube-optimized templates.

Lastly, the Optimization Score is expanding to cover every campaign type within Google Ads for advertisers around the world.

Future-Proof Marketing Features

Google announced a series of features that are designed to build resilience for the future of marketing. It includes the following:

• Conversion Lift tests

  - Measure incremental conversions based on users and geography

• Search Lift tests

  - Measure the impact of YouTube campaigns on driving organic searches on Google and YouTube

• Google tag

  - The global site tag will become the Google tag and will get new capabilities that make tagging simpler and more streamlined

• My Ad Center

  - Google will allow users to select the types of ads they want to see more or less of

Read more details on the Google Marketing Live 2022 announcements here.

Web

WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” Has Been Released, Offers Nearly 1,000 Changes

WordPress content creators will enjoy a suite of new features geared toward improving writing and designing experiences.

Site owners and administrators utilizing WordPress are encouraged to upgrade to its newest version, 6.0 “Arturo,” to take advantage of the many stability, performance, and usability enhancements offered by the content management system.

Several notable updates include the following:

• Enhanced writing experience for brand new posts and existing pages

• Style switching - Block themes now include the option to contain multiple style variations

• More template choices - WordPress 6.0 includes five new template options for block themes: author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy

• Integrated patterns - Patterns now appear in popular features and functionalities, like in the quick inserter or when creating a new header or footer

• Additional design tools that give you more control over design functions

• Better list view - New keyboard shortcuts enable you to select multiple blocks from the list view, modify them in bulk, and drag and drop them within the list

• Block locking controls - Now you can lock your blocks and choose to disable the option to move a block, remove a block, or both

Perhaps the most important updates in WordPress 6.0 are its improved performance and enhanced accessibility. According to WordPress, “the enhancements cover a range of performance areas including improving the page and post-load speed, reducing the execution time of various query types, caching, navigation menus, and much more.”

WordPress 6.0 includes more than 50 updates specifically focused on enhancing the accessibility of the platform. You can read about these updates here.

You can also watch the brief overview video that highlights some of the major features debuting in WordPress 6.0.

What you can do next

• Utilize a social media management tool to manage all your social media accounts efficiently and pull insights from available metric data to improve your marketing campaigns.

• Use A/B testing when running campaigns to determine what kind of executions yield the best results.

• System/tool updates are meant to improve features and functionalities to produce better outcomes, so take advantage of their benefits by trying them out — at your own discretion, of course.

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