MARKETING
It’s time to play a game
It’s an industry we’ve brought up before – gaming!
With the pandemic, the trend of gaming growth has only accelerated and there’s clearly going to be more opportunities for marketers for gaming-related content.
Luckily for us, Facebook put together a comprehensive report that goes into player behavior, demographics, motivations, preferences and even spending habits.
Just to be clear, “gaming” is not just FIFA and CS:GO. Mobile gaming is huge and it’s probably the more important segment for marketers.
Why is that the case?
Ad supported models dominate the space.
Check out Facebook’s full report here.
TIKTOK
“Ground Control to Major Tom”
TikTok announced that David Bowie’s music is now available for its users.
TikTokers will be able to use hits such as Space Oddity, Heroes, Starman, and more in their videos.
You might remember how Chris Hadfield went viral with his rendition of Space Oddity on the International Space Station or how Life on Mars? was used when SpaceX launched a Tesla Roadster into Space. Oh, and the name of the passenger was Starman…
We can’t help but wonder what the TikTokers will do with all these songs available now.
SPONSORED BY TBF MEDIA
Might this just be your 2021 dream job? Remote position. Salary starting at $120k + percentage of ad spend. Read on…
OK, we really don’t have the space to write all the awesome things about this job opening but we will try… You can also just look at the details and apply. It’s worth your time, we promise!
Let’s start with who is actually hiring, right? TBF Media is a direct marketing firm which produces its own industry leading brands and offers in skincare, immunity and infoproducts.
Their combined media spend is >$2M/month on Facebook, YouTube and native ads. It’s a well-oiled machine but they want more.
That’s why they are looking for a Media Director who will lead all media buying operations and answer directly to the business owners:
- Manage all internal, agency and ad rep relationships.
- Grow the internal team and/or build relationships with new agencies.
- Ensure all funnels are compliant and optimized for the networks they are running on.
- Do deep dives into campaigns, discovering opportunities for scale, and uncovering roadblocks.
The work environment is awesome too: 100% remote, ~25 people in the core team with an outstanding culture (only one person left voluntarily in the past 5 years), unlimited vacation as long as you get your job done… Just look at what team members have to say.
With a salary starting at $120k/year + a percentage of ad spend (based on experience and performance), we think it’s a no-brainer to check if you’re a fit.
Is this going to be your big step forward in 2021?
SEO
A smart internal linking tactic for better SEO
Keyword cannibalization and internal linking are two of the less glamorous aspects of SEO.
And while they’re not always as exciting as content creation, you can see immense ROI from just a few smart changes. To tell us what those smart changes are, Aaron Orendorff took to Twitter and outlined the process he’s been using at Common Thread Collective.
Here are the key pieces:
- Define which keywords you’re targeting. Then, type in your website and the keyword you’re searching for, in this format – site:yourdomain.com keywords. Here’s what that looks like in a Google Search.
- Divide the results that show up into two categories. Create one bucket for URLs that need redirecting, and one bucket for URLs that need interlinks. Aaron suggests putting them all into a spreadsheet.
- Unpublish the URLs you need to redirect, then 301 redirect them to relevant content. Make sure to reload the URLs to make sure your redirects worked.
- Link to the content you want to rank from high-authority pages. You can use an SEO tool to figure out which pages are likely to pass on the most authority.
That’s about it! This is a great strategy if you’ve just published a piece of content and are trying to give it a little extra boost in the SERPs. For full instructions, check out Aaron’s Twitter thread.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: Can blocking visitors from countries with slow connections improve your Core Web Vitals Score? The short answer is no, but you can check out a longer answer on SEJ.
GOOGLE: Without any official announcement, Google launched subtopics ranking all the way back in mid-November. Good thing Gleb Gabe asked Danny Sullivan (Google’s public Search Liaison) about it on Twitter.
SEO: There might be another search algorithm update rolling out. It’s not confirmed, but Barry Schwartz noticed a few fluctuations that typically happen during an update.
BRAIN TEASER
Walk on the living, they don’t even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and grumble. What are they?
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.
This neural network is trained to create images from text captions
OK, let’s just make it clear that while this is impressive, it won’t replace designers.
It might make it easier to create simple posts, though.
DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3, trained to generate images from text descriptions.
It’s just as easy as it sounds. You give it instructions, such as “an armchair in the shape of an avocado” and you will get a bunch of images to choose from.
And as you can tell from that example, the AI can create images of some strange stuff. Pretty neat!