You can now compare yourself to competitors on LinkedInGoogle Ads: Ad Strength > Quality score
Admit it: You care about your competitors. Some days, they annoy you. Other days, they inspire you.
William Saulnier, LinkedIn’s account director, has announced a cool product feature that will support you either way: A LinkedIn tool for comparing your company’s page performance to competitors.
You can compare metrics such as: The number of total followers, new followers, total engagement and total posts.
Why do this: Many reasons. One of our favorite ones is to identify outliers. If one of your competitors suddenly gains lots of new followers or engagement, it’s likely that they’ve begun to do something right.
The choice is yours: You can get angry or get ideas (we recommend the latter). The next step might be to do more research and copy reverse engineer the process.
ADVERTISING
Want to do influencer marketing? Here’s how much influencers expect from you
When you survey 14,050 consumers from 23 countries on their social media ad perceptions, you’re bound to get some interesting data. Here are some of the findings:
TikTok Ads:
- 37 percent of consumers have seen TikTok ads. This is nearly double what was reported last year.
- Interestingly enough, many consumers didn’t perceive the ads as negative. They rated them as entertaining and fun.
Kantar, the company behind the survey, also asked consumers to rate the innovativeness and trustworthiness of all major social media platforms’ ads.
The most trustworthy platforms for ads: Spotify came in first, followed by Amazon and Google.
The most innovative platforms for ads: TikTok was first, followed by Instagram and Spotify.
Why we care about all this: If you’re promoting a serious product (like medical equipment) and aren’t sure where to start promoting it, a good idea might be to start with platforms where people perceive the ads to be more trustworthy (Spotify podcast ads, Google ads, and YouTube ads in this case).
If you’re promoting something interesting or entertaining (such as a cool futuristic fidget spinner), TikTok and Instagram may be a better place to start.
SPONSORED BY MAXWEB
Rub shoulders with million dollar super affiliates – even if you’re a newbie
Affiliate marketing courses, a forum, Facebook groups, and case studies.
It’s the MaxWeb Academy. A place created by affiliate marketing experts to help other affiliates earn big paychecks.
You can access it for free, and it includes:
- Course vault to fast track your way to super affiliate earning days.
- Case studies shared by other affiliates.
- A forum where you can learn directly from 7-figures per month affiliates and connect with them.
- 24/7 Affiliate Support: Gain a dedicated Success Manager who will help you become a MaxWeb high-earner.
First time you hear about MaxWeb? You can learn more about them here.
And Anna Gita, CEO of MaxWeb, will be a speaker at the 2021 Traffic & Conversions Summit. She’ll share the stage with Marie Forleo, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, Chip Wilson, and other elite personalities.
If you want to schedule a meeting with Anna at T&C Summit, you can get in touch with her right here.
Wait, we’re not done yet!
On their Facebook page, MaxWeb hosts an incredibly helpful podcast for affiliate marketers!
MEDIA BUYING
Performance marketing truths that sound like blasphemies
Michael Lorenzos shared what, according to him, are 5 marketing truths to challenge some of your instilled ideas.
Maybe you won’t like them. Maybe you already believe in some of them.
There’s only one way to find out…
1) The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) isn’t everything.
As a performance marketer, “lowering the CAC” is your mantra.
However, this can have some side effects:
- Not all customers are created equal: Optimizing for the right customer can increase your CAC, but your LTV will be higher.
- Increasing media spend can eventually increase the CAC. But it generates more revenue.
2) Don’t stress over your account and campaign structure.
If your campaign lacks the marketing fundamentals, even the most advanced setup won’t do you any good.
3) Don’t evaluate your marketing efforts solely on the last touchpoint.
You can’t get an accurate measure of channel performance by looking at your source report. This is because the last click attribution may not tell the whole truth.
The most classical example is when your social ads capture the interest of prospects, but then they buy through a Google brand search ad rather than the Instagram ad.
You might think that your branded campaigns are more profitable than Facebook Ads and allocate more budget to Google. Wrong.
The customer journey is far from linear. You can’t evaluate your marketing channels solely based on the last touchpoint.
4) Don’t rely on channel-level data.
Facebook Ads and Google Ads attribute conversions to their campaigns based on last interaction within their ecosystem.
They won’t split the conversion value between them if they both played a part in it.
And when you raise the budget, both channels will claim the same additional conversion.
You can use incrementality testing to work around this problem (and allocate more budget towards prospecting).
5) You need to lean on blended numbers rather than trying to measure everything.
It seems that we are going backwards in terms of tracking with the gradual loss of third-party cookies.
Your marketing engine is made up of many moving parts, but the result is greater than the sum of its parts.
Therefore, leaning on blended numbers is a better way to make decisions, especially considering the previous two points we made here.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
E-COMMERCE: Do you want to know how to really print money? Then you need a 3D printer. Members of the Trends community are making 7 figures per year with a $500 printer by surfing a new Reddit trend. Learn how to “3D-print” your salary for just $1.*
APPLE: There has been a lot going on in Apple’s App Store lately. This article summarizes the most significant policy changes.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Sometimes, it’s a good idea to zoom out. This App Annie report examines how social media has evolved over time.
GOOGLE: News and Discover. Danny Sullivan answers a few questions about how to make the most of these new Google features.
BUSINESS: No Code turns marketers into developers. Zapier is one of the leading companies in this industry, and this interview with their CEO goes into greater detail on the topic.
SEO: Google AMP is fading into obscurity. Users will soon be directed to publishers’ direct websites rather than their AMP equivalents by Google News.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
I have keys without key locks. I have space without rooms. You can enter but you cannot go outside. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Text-to-your-friend’s-voice
NVIDIA has some pretty impressive AI technology. One of them is called RAD-TTS, a text-to-speech tool.
Here’s how it works: To begin, you feed the AI audio recordings of the person whose voice you want it to sound like. Then, you type in what you want the program to say with that voice, and voila! The AI begins to speak exactly like that person.
Talk about taking creepy to a new level…
There are many potential applications for this technology. Someone’s voice could be “hired” and used in a commercial. You could create a movie trailer without spending money on a voice actor. You could even feed the AI some Luke Skywalker recordings and create your own fan-made Star Wars mini-movie.
You’ve been given the tools; use them wisely. And may the Force be with you…the AI Force that is.