When Good Buzz Goes Bad

Today In Digital Marketingis a daily podcast and daily newsletter showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• Why You’re (Probably) Wasting Money on Influencers
• P&G Backs UID 2.0
• Amazon’s New Logistics Service
• Meta Moves Out of Neighborhoods
• Social Media Content Marketers Want
• Dirty Alexa SEO

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

Why You’re (Probably) Wasting Money on Influencers

Are you wasting your money on influencer marketing?

If you're primarily using influencers to boost awareness organically, an interesting piece up at MediaPost today suggests you might be.

The article discusses three steps to getting the most out of influencer marketing:

1. Content creation
2. Amplification
3. The impact on sales

On content creation, quoting the piece:

Brands can take a strongly performing piece of influencer content and insert it into an ad unit, or put it on their website, and that content will outperform content that the brand creates for itself. Still, when brands just focus on awareness, they are not realizing the full value of that content and how it can impact sales.

📣 Amplifying content

The author reminds us that it's important to:

1. Negotiate rights to use the content.
2. Make it part of your media budget and push the content out.

The piece also notes that brands need to balance the influencer’s understanding of the audience with the company's objectives. The best influencers understand the brand's needs and how to portray them to their followers so that they can drive results.

💸 Impact of sales

Finally, brands are seeing more value in using influencers for ongoing campaigns rather than one-off campaigns.

Again, quoting MediaPost:

This can be even more effective when activating multiple influencers as part of the marketing mix, because they each have their own audience.
Conversations generated on social work in tandem with topline efforts to inspire action... Creating a groundswell of conversation helps support the brand message and leads to the third part of value: the impact on sales.
This strategy can take a brand from awareness to purchase in just one piece of content.

The article was written by Aliza Freud and you can find it at Mediapost.com — look for the article called How Brands are Wasting Their Influencer Marketing Budgets.

P&G Backs UID 2.0

In third-party cookie replacement news, a huge global advertiser has backed one company's replacement for the cookies, and it's not Google's version.

Yesterday, Procter & Gamble announced its support of Unified ID 2.0, the identity framework developed by The Trade Desk.

As cookieless environments, such as connected TV and mobile apps, become more prevalent, Unified ID is trying to become the framework of choice for marketers looking for interoperability.

The CPG giant joins a growing list of brands, agencies, streaming platforms, publishers, and ad tech companies supporting the identity framework, including:

• Disney
• Vox Media
• Amazon Web Services

Procter & Gamble throws support behind Trade Desk's Unified ID

Amazon’s New Logistics Service

Amazon recently announced a new resource to help sellers with supply chain challenges.

The e-commerce giant's new service, called Amazon Warehousing & Distribution, lets third-party sellers use its distribution centers for long-term inventory storage.

With the service, sellers can use dedicated, "purpose-built facilities" for bulk inventory storage and automated distribution.

Amazon says storing inventory at distribution centers will let sellers “seamlessly replenish” their inventory in Amazon’s fulfilment network. They will also be able to consolidate their global inventory to manage on the Amazon Seller Central platform.

Currently, this service is available to "Fulfilment by Amazon" sellers, but it will be expanded in 2023 to include wholesale customers and brick-and-mortar stores.

Amazon offers sellers long-term inventory storage with new service

Meta Moves Out of Neighborhoods

Another product is being sent to the Meta graveyard.

Today, the tech giant announced it's pulling the plug on Neighbourhoods, its clone of the Nextdoor app before most users even got to try it.

The community-based feature, which had been quietly tested in Canada and the United States since 2020, will be killed off on Oct. 1.

Neighbourhoods let users create special profiles that they could populate with custom bios and their interests. However, most users just opted to use Facebook Groups to post updates with their local community instead.

Now, the company has started notifying Neighbourhood groups that its test is coming to an end.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook said it originally invested in the project because it saw how popular local content was on its platform. But, Facebook realized the best way to move forward was to let people continue to use Facebook Groups as they had been.

Images: Facebook Matt Navarra via Twitter

Facebook is shutting down its Nextdoor clone next month, following tests in the U.S. and Canada

Social Media Content Marketers Want

Marketers and brands continue to spend more on influencers, but when it comes to types of content, brands have options. So, what do brands ask creators to post?

According to a new study, the top content types marketers say they hire social media creators to produce are:

• Educational content
• Unboxing or reveal content
• Testimonials

While the top content formats marketers partner with creators on varies by platform:

• Story posts for Facebook and Instagram
• Link in bio for TikTok
• Branded shoutouts for YouTube
• Branded tweets for Twitter

Where are creators posting brand partnership content?

• For maximum reach, nearly half of brands have the creator post on their own account
• Compared to about a third that post it in both
• And a quarter that only post it on their brand pages/accounts

(Data has been provided by Sprout Social's survey of over 500 marketers)

The Content That Marketers Want From Social Media Creators

Dirty Alexa SEO

If you're looking to capitalize through smart speakers, apparently all you need to do is record a brand jingle about poop and make it available for streaming.

BuzzFeed reports how a few search-savvy musicians figured out how to game smart speakers thanks to kids shouting the word "poop" into devices.

Several creators told BuzzFeed that their biggest source of revenue is Amazon Music, the default player for Alexa.

One group — the Toilet Bowl Cleaners — is from musician Matt Farley whose SEO-gaming song is called "Poop Poop Poop Poop Song.” He estimates it's been streamed 8 million times on Amazon music.

For many musicians, there's a very clear difference between the streams they get from Amazon versus other platforms.

Quoting Farley:

On Amazon Music, 80% of my earnings come from poop songs... Meanwhile, on Spotify, poop songs make up around 50% of my earnings.

Maybe I missed my calling.

When Kids Yell "Poop" At Alexa, These People Profit

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com