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Digital Download | 4.28.2021

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PAN Digital Team
digital marketing news for pr pros

The weekly Digital Download is out. Get all the Marketing hot news, quick tips, and highlights you need to get you through the week, rolled up into a five-minute read.

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In the News

Hot Off the Press

  • The State of SEO in 2021 [Infographic]
    • Whether mobile or desktop, global or local, Google is widely used by consumers. The search giant is the top referrer on the web, and search remains a reliable marketing channel for growing a business. Search overshadows the reach brands are able to get on social media platforms, by a significant margin. If you’re still not convinced about the value of investing in an SEO strategy for your business website, then the stats in this infographic may change your mind.
  • Review Your Social Media Etiquette
    • In an ideal world, your followers would think every photo, video or thought you post on social media is like a little gift to them. In reality, it’s hard to predict how posts on Instagram, Facebook and other social media will land, especially during the pandemic. After so much loss and isolation over the past year, people are on edge.

social media social etiquette

  • Clubhouse Is Now a $4 Billion Company
    • Clubhouse just announced it has closed its Series C funding round, which values the company at $4 billion. The round was led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with investors Tiger Global and DST Global joining for the first time. The social audio app has received plenty of hype in recent months, attracting an unending stream of press and mystique. It reports about 10 million monthly active users, but has experienced some significant fall-off in new growth this spring.
  • Facebook Plans to Go After Clubhouse — and Podcasts — With a Suite of New Audio Products
    • Facebook wants you to start talking, and listening, on Facebook. Sources say the social network is planning to announce a series of products — some of which won’t appear for some time — under the umbrella of “social audio” on Monday. They include Facebook’s take on Clubhouse, the audio-only social network that grew rapidly last year, as well a push into podcast discovery and distribution, aided by Spotify. Facebook’s audio plans include an audio version of Rooms, A Clubhouse-like product that will let groups of people listen to and interact with speakers on a virtual stage, and a product that will let Facebook users record brief voice messages and post them in their newsfeeds.
  • Gartner: 5 strategic priorities for CMOs in 2021
    • Chief Marketing Officers always have big plans to innovate and evolve their organizations, and in 2021, this is no exception. In fact, given the current landscape, of post-pandemic recovery, increasing competition, economic uncertainty and high customer expectations, CMOs are under even more pressure to deliver positive results. But what should they focus on? What priorities should they consider? And which strategies can wait and which are more urgent? Following Gartner’s inaugural CMO Strategic Priorities Survey 2021, to identify marketing trends, and assess marketing priorities and expected challenges, the international analyst firm reveals the five strategic priorities for Chief Marketing Officers this year.

Creativity

Out of the Box

  • There’s No Point in Teaching Advertising
    • Nowadays a ‘creative’ doesn’t have time to think, thinking just gets in the way. The planners have done all the ‘thinking’ so it’s cast-in-stone and must be obeyed. It might seem dull, formulaic, and boring, but it’s Gospel. Just do a punny headline and stylish visual, you’ve got until lunchtime when the client’s in.  Sound familiar? Keep reading.
  • How McDonald’s Social Media Director Uses Brand Power for the Greater Good
    • Closing in on eleven years at McDonald’s, Guillaume Huin has climbed within the company to now be their Social Media Director of Brand Content and Engagement. A lover of literature and philosophy, Guillaume shares with us how meeting with consumers taught him everything he needs to know. Discover his decade’s worth of work, how they’re innovating on social by going back to their roots, and why using the power of the brand for the greater good should be in every marketer’s agenda.
  • There’s a Black Market for Ketchup Packets Now
    • If you’re one of the fast-food aficionados left reeling from stories of the current nationwide ketchup shortage, then get a squirt of this. People are now putting their unopened packets up for sale across eBay and Facebook Marketplace right now, for prices ranging from $1 per pack to over $1,000 for just a few.

food marketing and nft tips

  • The Role of Branding in B2B Storytelling 
    • Scream it from the rooftop. Branding is more than a logo. Branding is not one single piece of the process, it is the entire process – from brand strategy, to brand identity, to brand marketing. Read more about the branding process.

Tricks of the Trade

Tips and Tricks

  • 6 Ways to Actually Track Social Media ROI
    • Despite how great the latest marketing tech stack gets, it always feels like there’s room for attribution improvement. We’d know exactly how someone went from finding out about your brand to becoming a happy customer in a perfect world. But it’s not that easy. You know this by now, having realized that tracking social media ROI can be really difficult. Can you confidently say that you know your social ROI? If you said no, you’re with the majority of marketers trying to figure it out (including us!). Learn how to track social media ROI and *attempt* to get the right attribution.
  • Facebook Adds Scheduling for Stories, New Ad and Business Discovery Options
    • Social media managers rejoice. Today, Facebook has announced the addition of some new features for its Business Suite management platform, including Stories scheduling for both Facebook and Instagram, along with a new business discovery process from the News Feed. Facebook is launching a new option in Business Suite, its newest business management platform, which will enable users to compose and schedule Facebook and IG Stories within the planning element.
  • Google Chrome now lets you link people to highlighted text on a website
    • Recently, Google Chrome unveiled some new features that can help boost your productivity — most notably including a way to link people to specific text from, say, an article or blog. When you create one of these links, clicking it highlights the text you want to emphasize so it’s obvious what you want the receiver to focus on, whether it’s a statistic or an alluring quote from your favorite actor. All you have to do is:
      • Highlight the text
      • Right click, choose the option “Copy link to highlight”
      • Send the link
    • It feels immediately like an extension of featured snippets, a type of Google Search result that works in basically the same way. When you search for something and get a featured snippet result, clicking that link (ostensibly) takes you directly to the text that applies, highlighting it in yellow.

video marketing tips and tricks for creative

  • Video Content: 5 Questions to Ask Before Starting Production 
    • Why do Brands, Businesses, Marketers and Audiences Love Video in 2021? In a landscape where marketers only have a few seconds to grab an audience, video is a powerful storytelling tool. Video marketing has been growing for years, but 24 percent of those surveyed by Hubspot used video for the first time in 2020 and 69 percent of marketers who did not use video last year expect to do so in 2021. Here’s everything you need you know before spending a dime.
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