The Daily Carnage

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Types of TikTok Ads & How to Use Them

JULY 6, 2021

Like it or not, TikTok is hot. For as large as it is as a platform, many brands are still hesitant about advertising on it. But it’s actually pretty rad. It’s popular af. It’s personalized for users. It’s interactive! So…why not TikTok? Just look at the ad options:

Branded Hashtag Challenges: This invites users to create and share videos of their own and attach the branded hashtag. Who doesn’t love some UGC love?
Top View Campaigns: This ad type displays on the screen of users when they first open the app for about 2 seconds with a “Skip” button at the top right corner before going to their feed.
In-Feed Videos: In-Feed ads appear alongside the regular content of TikTok on the “For You” page. A sponsored tag and CTA button will appear. There’s also an option to run a
One Day Max Ads: This is a 15 second (one day only) In-Feed Video Ad that appears in the 4th position on users “For You” page.
Branded Effects: Users love filters, stickers, effects to use. Branded Effects appear within the TikTok effects library and are customizable.
Affiliate Marketing: TikTok is super helpful in providing first party data to help you choose the best creator to partner up with.
Boosted Organic Posts: You can boost organic posts on TikTok to aid in growing your following on your page.
Collection Ads: Collection ads on TikTok provide clickable tiles at the bottom of your video and can integrate with Shopify.
Dynamic Product Ads: Ad templates are customized based on user preferences.
Shoppable Livestream: Community Commerce is customized by creators to build brand awareness and consideration.

TikTok is more than just dance challenges and memes now. Check out Seer Interactive’s full article for examples of brands crushing it!

Local SEO vs National SEO

JULY 5, 2021

Ah, SEO. Three little letters representing a BEAST to keep track of. And there’s not just one type. For today, we’re tacking “national” and “local” SEO.

What’s the difference between the two? Where do their results show up? How are they similar? What platforms do you use for each? How can you best measure performance? When does it all stop?!

Strap in, this is your crash course on both, but we’re gonna focus on local a lot.

What’s the difference between the two?

National SEO is reaching audiences on a national scale, usually with your website. You want everyone to find you.
Local SEO is reaching your local marketing and that often involves channels that aren’t your direct site.

Local Search 101: Sometimes search engines are all about confidence. How do you build up your confidence in their eyes? NAPs! Name, Address, Phone Numbers. Businesses with consistent listings across local directories tell search engines the same thing, making them feel good about showing you off.

Reputation is everything. Reputation monitoring, managing, and generating reviews on the various listings is essential to local SEO. The key players being Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp, in most cases. Obviously they boost overall reputation, but the more engagement your brand has, the more visibility it gets on search engines.

Now, with measuring your local SEO, you just have to remember to set up a UTM strategy, collect your GMB insights, and make sure your local directories are consistent (Yext and Synup are the go to for help doing this in bulk).

National SEO big takes: When you think of national SEO, think on-page. And your on-page SEO has to be bangin. Everyone loves to say “quality over quantity,” but what is quality content in the eyes of Google? They keep a lot of their requirements a little hush hush, but we do know a little of what they’re looking for. The basics are that top performing pieces of content are 1,500 – 2,000 words+ and on-page content optimization is key (title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, H2s, keyword density, internal linking).

Root & Branch Group are shaman in SEO teaching. Check out the rest of their post for tools, best practices, and insights specifically for local SEO!

How Organizations Can Instill Pride Year-Round 🏳️‍🌈

JUNE 29, 2021

Pride month, unfortunately, has sometimes felt like a marketing ploy for a lot of companies to flex values they otherwise don’t have outside of the month of June (especially internally). It’s actually a running joke. Here are some tips to help you be truly inclusive, all-year round within your organization:

Work without labels: Everyone is more than a label, and wants to be treated as such. As much as Pride month gives the LGBTQ+ community a chance to shine, it’s also great knowing that one’s orientation does not define them. Creating that environment of inclusivity without making people the token queer person is essential.

Have network visibility: Establishing LGBTQ+ network groups, role models, and peers, can go a long way. Seeing others expressing themselves throughout the company will encourage less confident employees to do the same.

Acknowledge and remove barriers: The first step is admitting, and change is not something done overnight. Leaders need to develop a space that addresses these underlying barriers and proactively supports people.

Adopt gender neutral language: Gender-neutral environments at work such as ‘partner’ or adopting the pronouns ‘they/them’ until someone self-identifies is becoming the standard. Everyday conversations, over email, and especially in a company’s policy is where it needs to start.

Other ways to continue being an ally:

Do your research on the history and types of orientations and identities.
Listen to your peers.
Speak out if you have a conversation with someone and it concerns you.
Role model behaviours of support and inclusivity.
Be honest and accountable about mistakes or not understanding.
Support local community events.

Chartered Management Institute has the full article on insights for a supportive environment that instills pride from the organization up. Check it out!

What Are the Main Drivers of Brand Trust?

JUNE 28, 2021

There are a lot of reasons that consumers trust and love a brand. In 2021, here are the biggie bigs that keep your customers coming back to you. Some of them are pretty obvious, some might make you wanna shift your strategy.

Brand Trust Drivers:

Privacy, people! Respect and protection for users’ personal data.
Good value and high quality, duh, but we’ve been seeing more and more importance on products being exactly as advertised (and even more brands being sued if that’s not the case).
Positive customer experiences, especially in tough times.
Reliability and responsiveness when customers are in need.

Brand Trust Breakers:

So take it in the opposite direction. If a brand had a data breach that compromised personal information.
Let’s get ethical, ethical. Responsibility to the environment is a big deal. Consumers have a hard time trusting brands that disrespect Mother Earth.
And another duh: bad customer service.

Now, trust is a delicate thing. A quarter of consumers from Marketing Charts’ survey sample can feel very strongly about never using a brand again, while another quarter will consider it someday. Marketing Charts asked all the big Q’s here, check out the full deets in their article.

Audio as Marketing’s Next Frontier

JUNE 27, 2021

We’ve touched on sonic branding here and there, but how important is it? It’s everchanging and users are continuing to consume audio in different ways. The Drum and podcasting platform Acast dive into all things audio on a panel discussion called ‘Hear me out: The future of creative is sound.’

Here are the big notes:

Choose Your Fighter: There are a lot of options out there for audio. Sponsoring a podcast or running an advert on a podcast is likely to raise brand awareness, but creating a podcast from scratch is ideal for changing perceptions around a brand given its high audience engagement and long listening times.

Strategize before entering: Sonic and audio branding is undeniably an important part of a modern media plan. But testing and learning are prerequisites. Creators need to have content their audience will value and actually deliver. It’s good to know what works in your other channels before taking on new content mediums.

Digitizing audio: Brands get more from audio, not only because of an uptick in listening habits but because analytics make audio more accountable and monetizable.

New branded format: With audio, advertising can shift instead into branded content spots. Making audio immersive and suggestive can end up being much more effective than an all talk ad. BUT directness has its place, too. It’s all about the content you can creatively bring to the audio table.

For the full scoop, check out The Drum’s panel.

The 10 Marketing KPIs You Should be Tracking

JUNE 23, 2021

(If you aren’t already.)

Sales revenue and leads are important data points to track. But where are they coming from? There are several other KPIs you should track to identify which campaigns and tactics have the greatest impact. This is gonna be a bit of a terminology review, but give these KPIs some tracking love:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Customer acquisition cost measures how much money it costs to convert a lead into a customer (including costs like manpower and software).
Customer lifetime value (LTV): Customer lifetime value indicates the total revenue you can expect from a single customer. If your CAC is higher than your LTV, then you should rethink your spending on getting new customers.
Marketing ROI: The marketing ROI formula is (sales growth – marketing investment)/marketing investment
Marketing qualified leads (MQL): An MQL is a potential customer who has shown interest and use for your brand and could become a serious prospect if you nurture the relationship.
Referral traffic: Referral traffic is a marketing KPI that helps you understand where your website visitors come from. It’s essential to track to understand where to put effort into a given channel.
Conversion rate: This is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, like signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase. Understanding where customers convert or if a conversion rate is low helps you optimize your CTAs and content.
Return on ad spend (ROAS): ROAS measures the revenue generated by advertising against your investment, usually expressed as a ratio and you can use it to determine the success of your ad campaigns.

These were our top 7 favorite KPIs. Check out MediaTool’s full list of 10 KPIs you should be tracking.

Trends are Your Friends: Video Responses to Social Media Trends

JUNE 22, 2021

We’re not saying you gotta hop on every bandwagon. In fact, some trends should be avoided at all costs for some brands. It all depends on what you got and what trend could be relevant to your brand. That being said, if you aren’t paying attention, you could be missing out on amazing opportunities.

Some places you should be tracking trends: Tik Tok Challenges, memes (all social media channels are gonna have these), YouTube, Twitter trending, Quora questions, and Subreddits.

The idea isn’t to directly copy any of these. The idea is that relating to them will in turn be relatable to your audience that is likely consuming the same content and culture. And since visual content is more noticeable, here are some tips if you make video responses based on a trending topic:

Flash me your brand: Many factors go into creating a successful post and few creators make it past 3 seconds, so at least getting your brand in there is a better chance to them making it to your call to action.
It’s all about you: The word “you” in the first 5 seconds of a video increases views by 66%. People like knowing it’s all about them!
Captions should be a given: More and more people watch videos with the sound off for the sake of convenience and privacy. Accessibility is also a huge plus!
The Remix: Making shorter versions of something can never hurt, especially if you only have so much time to grab someone’s attention.

Trends are useful for insights about what people like. Check out the full Business 2 Community article for more ideas on how to take advantage of them!

5 Q’s Startups Should Ask Before Making Their First Marketing Hire

JUNE 21, 2021

Hiring for a startup can be extremely daunting for both the employer and the applicant. You have to know what you need so you can tell your applicants what you need. Otherwise, things are bound to be a mess.

Here are the 5 questions to ask before hiring on your marketing team:

Which marketing channels have proven successful to date? If you find a promising area, find a candidate that has expertise in it. You want to support what’s working for your brand.
Where are the target customers? You’re likely going to have to look to competitor data for this one before you know your own. After seeing how/where your customers are, see the channels you would need to hire for most.
How competitive is the market? Speaking of competition, what edge do you have on the big players in your industry? Hire to cater to that strength (i.e. storytelling).
Where do the founder’s skills lie? Founders are often the brand builders of startups and have a vision in mind. BUT maybe you need a ground-up branding specialist first. Determine what founders bring to the table and see if their vision needs more support.
How important is trust-building? Trust-building is often very important to brands in new industries or very revolutionary products. Hiring for this often leans more in the realm of PR experts.

Once you have these five biddies, then you can get into some of the deets like years of experience and a salary to match it. Check out the full TechCrunch article by clicking below.

Hopefully this helps startups and established teams alike. Now, we’ve all seen it: the ridiculously overwhelmed marketing roles for ONE person. There are unicorns out there that can do it all, but those roles are not sustainable. This is when all companies need to consider hiring agencies (wink) or expanding their team.

3 Tips for How Brands Should Address Social Issues

JUNE 20, 2021

“Should brands get involved in social issues?” It’s a great question and there is no one size fits all answer. In an AdWeek discussion, brand leaders give some thoughts on it!

The main takeaways from it were:

Lead with listening: If a brand’s beliefs and vision don’t match a particular topic, it may be best to avoid it as opposed to forcing a connection that doesn’t quite feel right. From a leadership standpoint, this is why it’s important to hire with diversity in mind and provide opportunities for multiple perspectives.

Keep up with culture: Everything is changing – the world, marketing, customers, context. It’s not always easy, but keeping up with the shifting culture is essential to your brand authenticity. That means starting with your brand first, and understanding what values it has.

Expect difficult conversations: Messages won’t always come across as planned, initiatives won’t always gain traction as desired. Rolling with the punches and being open to suggestions are key here. There should also be caution to brands jumping in with a “huge bang” on their first attempt at taking on a social issue.

We know to get involved or not depends deeply on the brand. At the end of the day, though, brands are to be authentic and humble when facing real-life issues and values that they and their customers are upholding. To listen to the full AdWeek discussion, smash that button below!