Daily Minute Master Series – April 12, 2021

April 12, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Data Hacks at Facebook and LinkedIn Spark Concerns Among Users

Over the past week, you’ve likely seen reports of new data hacks on Facebook and LinkedIn, which have exposed the personal information of millions of users.

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New Research Provides Further Insight into the Potential Impact of Apple’s Coming IDFA Update

With Apple’s planned IDFA update set to be launched any day now, the digital marketing industry is preparing for the worst, with the up-front prompts that will be displayed in all iOS apps expected to see many users switch off data tracking entirely, limiting audience targeting options.

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How To Use Promotion Extensions In Google Ads Campaigns

Promotion extensions in Google Ads are specifically designed to promote special sale events, but they’re often overlooked and undervalued by advertisers.

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Marketing Budgets are Growing Again, Say CMOs, and Marketing’s Standing as Well

The CMO Survey, a biannual poll by Christine Moorman, a senior professor at the Fuqua School of Business, polled 356 marketing leaders in January 2021. Roughly 95% of respondents hold the title of vice president of marketing or above. About 65% of respondents come from B2B companies, including both product and services organizations.

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10 Tips for Cleaning up After a Google Ads Account Takeover

Congratulations, you’ve landed a new Google Ads account! You’ve closed the sale and are ready to dig in. Your very first step for cleaning up after a Google Ads account takeover should be a thorough audit of the account.

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How to Use Google Search Console for SEO: A Complete Guide

This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know about the key sections of Google Search Console, as well as tips on how to use it.

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Daily Minute Master Series – April 9, 2021

April 9, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

New Data Reveals the Latest Social Media Usage Trends, Including the Rise of Reddit, TikTok and Snapchat

Despite seemingly losing some of its shine as the leading social platform of choice, Facebook continues to see the most daily usage, according to the latest findings from Pew Research. For its 2021 social media usage survey, Pew interviewed 1,502 US about their social media habits, providing an overview of key trends and shifts in social media platform adoption and usage. Which, given the events of the last 12 months, has been impacted significantly, with most platforms seeing a rise in usage – but as noted, Pew’s data reveals that the big players remain in charge, even with other apps gaining some ground.

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Twitter Re-Brands its Ad Options to Simplify its Promotional Offerings

In an effort to provide more clarity around its various ad offerings, and make it easier for brands to find the right promotional option/s for their needs, Twitter has announced a re-branding of its ad products, which essentially streamlines its different options into fewer, grouped segments.

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TikTok Adds New Music-Triggered Visual Effects Tools

TikTok has added a range of new visual effects that are triggered by sound, providing new creative options within your TikTok clips.

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Are You One Of The 533 Million Facebook Users Who Had Their Data Stolen?

Facebook calls recent data leak ‘old news.’ Discover why the information is still valuable to cybercriminals and whether your data was stolen.

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Why Are Search Rankings On My Keywords Changing So Often?

There are many reasons why search rankings fluctuate. Read about why it happens and why it’s a good idea to focus on other metrics, too.

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Five Marketing Mistakes To Avoid While Growing Your Audience

Marketing is constantly evolving, and the strategies you use to promote your business must evolve as well. Something that was wildly successful for you a few years ago may fall flat today. You have to update your marketing mindset and approach to fit an ever-changing environment, without getting pulled in so many directions that you lose sight of your goals.

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Daily Minute Master Series – April 8, 2021

April 8, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Facebook’s Testing QR Codes as a New Funds Transfer Tool in the US – The Next Push for QR Code Tools?

After years of being heralded as the next big thing in connection, then failing to see user take-up, over and over again, QR codes have had something of a resurgence over the past year, with COVID-19 tracing apps re-introducing people to the convenience and capacity of scannable codes as a simple, connective option. And that could open the door for a new push, with Facebook currently experimenting with a new process that would enable users to transfer funds via personal QR codes in the app.

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50 Questions You Must Ask to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website

Does your website follow SEO best practices? Here are 50 questions to ask yourself to evaluate the quality of your site and improve rankings and traffic.

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Yahoo Answers Shutting Down May 4, Content Will Not Be Archived

Yahoo Answers comes to a close on May 4 with no plans to provide an archive of the website’s 16 years of content.

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Giving CFOs More Power in the Marketing Ecosystem

The advertising ecosystem is changing rapidly. Back in the Mad Men era, marketing departments could trace only tenuous relationships between campaigns and sales. Today, an abundance of data and powerful technological tools afford marketers the ability to discern direct attribution links and quantifiable return on investment. An executive can track just how many direct sales of a wrap dress a Twitter ad campaign produced, how many of those buyers were new customers, and how the spending affected the margin on each product sold. In theory, marketers can prove in great detail, to the satisfaction of the most exacting financial minds in their organization, precisely how they contribute to the top line.

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Marketing With Cultural Intelligence For Growth And Good

Over the past two years, Procter and Gamble (P&G) has released groundbreaking advertising that provides mainstream audiences with perspective-taking on the societal struggles of racial identity (The Talk, The Look, and The Choice) and LGBTQ+ identity (The Pause). Recognizing the power of advertising in shaping cultural norms and attitudes, the company has increased visibility for historically underrepresented consumers in its advertising and digital media. In 2020, it launched a program called #talkaboutbias to increase the cultural awareness and knowledge of US consumers to reduce societal bias. It works diligently to represent those consumers authentically rather than perpetuating stereotypes that negate the gains of visibility. It has tapped into how it can help consumers through the pandemic with everything from the Clorox Safer Today Alliance with the Cleveland Clinic and the CDC Foundation to the star-studded Can’t Cancel Pride virtual LGBTQ+ Pride party. This year, P&G committed to 2,021 acts of good for the year 2021 as part of its “Lead with Love” campaign that includes a call-to-action to make 2021 the year we all come together to support our communities, accelerate equality, and protect our planet.

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Creative Performance Marketing: Party Like It’s 1999

The 1990s may have given us neon windcheaters, denim on denim and Rachel cuts, but they weren’t all bad. The decade can also lay claim to being the heyday of television ads — when commercials were often more entertaining than the main show itself. The rise of digital media since the turn of the century has gradually eaten into TV’s dominance. Zenith Media forecasts that this year, more than half of the global advertising budget will be spent on digital channels. This is a watershed moment. This shift hit warp speed with the sudden onset of the pandemic.

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Daily Minute Master Series – April 7, 2021

April 7, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Clubhouse Adds Creator Payments as it Seeks to Keep Popular Hosts Aligned to the App

After launching its Creator Accelerator Program last month, in a bid to keep top broadcasters aligned to the app, Clubhouse has now launched its first direct payment process, which will enable users to transfer funds to their favorite hosts.

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TikTok Launches New Support Resources as Part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month

TikTok has announced a new set of support resources as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which is an important initiative for the app, given its reach to younger, more socially active audiences.

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TikTok Launches New Video Editor to Help Brands Create More Native-Looking TikTok Clips

This could be handy – TikTok has launched a new video editor tool which is designed to help marketers create more effective, native-looking TikTok video clips for their channels.

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Microsoft Ads Rolls Out a Slew of New Features

Microsoft Advertising has been rolling out new features left and right. In this article, we’ll walk through the highlights of what you need to know.

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Why Are Search Rankings On My Keywords Changing So Often?

There are many reasons why search rankings fluctuate. Read about why it happens and why it’s a good idea to focus on other metrics, too.

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Marketing Attribution—What Is It And Why Does It Matter?

Long gone are the days of blindly spending marketing dollars without a data first mindset to clearly calculate and prove you are driving a return on your marketing investment (your “ROMI”). This previously linked post demonstrates how to track your ROMI at the 30,000 foot view, based on your overall business revenues vs. costs, or at the unit level of an average transaction. But if you want to really fine tune your efforts to maximize your ROMI, the best marketers turn to marketing attribution tools to help optimize marketing across every sub-channel of their business.

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Daily Minute Master Series – April 6, 2021

April 6, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

6 Content Marketing Trends for 2021 You Should Know

As technology and your audience’s interests change, your content marketing needs to change, too. Especially after the events of 2020, we can expect significant changes in how people communicate and how businesses create content and marketing strategies that reflect people’s needs. Here are the top content marketing trends you should be aware of in 2021. When you’re in touch with important trends, you can develop strategies and leverage tools to connect with your audience better.

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Volkswagon Name Change Was Marketing Stunt

On Tuesday afternoon, a source at Volkswagen of America confirmed to Motor Authority that the planned name change to Voltswagen of America was an elaborate April Fools Day stunt to drum up attention for the automaker’s turn toward electric cars. “It was a bit of fun to highlight what we are doing in the e-mobility space,” the source said.

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“If you’re still marketing to white cis males, you’re alienating more than half your players”

“Women don’t sell video games.” That’s one of the attitudes allegedly expressed by Ubisoft’s marketing department and management on 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, mandating the game needed a playable male as an alternative to Kassandra. But Kulpreet Virdi, founder of the fan movement Assassin’s Creed Sisterhood, is urging games firms to move beyond this outdated perception — and she believes the way new releases are promoted is crucial.

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Four Alive-And-Well Marketing Predictions To Consider In 2021

As the saying often attributed to American author Mark Twain goes: “It is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.” At the onset of 2020, very few of us would have predicted the year we had in front of us: a global pandemic of unprecedented proportions — at least for our times — as well as forced work-from-home, stay-in-place measures and the ubiquitous use of masks. So long, handshakes, and hello, fist or elbow bumps. 2020 has definitely shaped the days we’re living in now and will likely shape the road ahead. We’ve seen monumental shifts in our professional and personal lives and have spent time reflecting on how those changes have impacted the way we communicate.

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YouTube Tests Hiding Dislike Counts On Videos

YouTube is testing the removal public dislike counts on videos, but will not be getting rid of the dislike button altogether. As part of the experiment, users will start seeing a few potential new designs for the like and dislike buttons that appear below videos.

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Accelerate Your Organic Marketing Success with Consulting

What makes the difference between good and great organic marketing? Experience working with hundreds of customers across dozens of industries says: an agile and highly cross-functional team. An organic marketing team is made of anyone that has a hand in your website or digital content. They may come from different teams, but it’s how you bring different functions together that determines your success. It’s about seamlessly integrating your SEO, content, and web teams so they can get more done – faster.

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Daily Minute Master Series – April 1, 2021

April 1, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Snapchat is Developing New, AR-Enabled Spectacles

Snapchat is reportedly developing a new, fully AR-enabled version of its Spectacles smart glasses, which would be a major advance for the product, and for Snapchat’s broader plans with augmented reality. As reported by The Information, Snap’s currently developing a more advanced version of Spectacles, which will include in-lens AR displays.

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Google Enhances Business Profiles For Stores With Delivery & Pickup

Google is adding more information to Search and Maps about businesses that offer options for grocery delivery and pickup. The information is getting added to search automatically, which means there’s no work needed on the part of businesses, but it’s an update worth being aware of. This addition to Google Search and Maps is rolling out as part of a larger update which includes a number of other useful features.

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Is It Time to Switch to a New SEO Tool?

The SEO industry is constantly changing and evolving. Your SEO agency’s needs also change as your business grows. The tools you use will shape how you direct your growth. So it’s important to stay up-to-date on what’s new in the space to decide whether adopting a new tool would benefit your business. Yet, it’s always a question of prioritizing what’s critical for your business requirements.

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How to Use Categorical Keyword Research to Plan Your Content Strategy

Gone are the days when you could pick any keyword, write a 500-word blog post, and show up in the search results. As search engines have evolved, algorithms have prioritized content based on intent, website authority, and what is going to most sufficiently satisfy their searcher’s needs – even if that means answering the query directly in the search engine results page (SERP).

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How to Stand Out in a Crowded Content Marketing Space

For more than a decade, content marketing has been a favorite marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes in nearly all industries. It’s straightforward, it’s cost-efficient and it has the potential to scale almost indefinitely, so its popularity is neither a surprise nor a secret. Entrepreneurs and marketers are often eager to begin a content marketing strategy, especially because it often takes years to see the full fruits of your labor. But there’s a problem. Content marketing’s popularity has turned into its greatest weakness — or rather, its most challenging aspect. When you enter the content marketing field for the first time, you’ll be directly competing with brands that have spent years, or even decades, cultivating their reputation, dominating the search engine results pages (SERPs) and cementing their authority and thought leadership.

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Three Content Marketing Trends To Watch Out For In 2021

For any area of marketing, it’s crucial to pay attention to annual trends. Marketing trends come and go, and if you’re able to keep up with what your audience wants, you can put yourself ahead of the competition. Content marketing is crucial for any business or brand to succeed and build the right audience. Without it, it’s much more difficult to increase conversions, boost sales, generate leads, grow an email list and more.

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Daily Minute Master Series – March 31, 2021

March 31, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Has COVID-19 Made Marketers More Creative?

COVID-19 has had us all taking on new projects and hobbies while being locked away in our homes. Some of us have become expert knitters, bakers, and photographers. According to a recent survey from Bannerflow and Digiday, creativity is also spiking in our work, at least among in-house teams.

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TikTok Launches New ‘Playlists’ Feature to Group Clips into Themed Collections

This could be a great way to boost engagement with your content on TikTok. Late last week, TikTok began rolling out a new ‘Playlists’ feature with selected creators, which enables users to group their TikTok clips into themed collections.

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How to Target Multiple Language Audiences in One Country

Want to target a specific, smaller second-language audience in a dominant-language country? Learn this SEO strategy for international business success.

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Clubhouse Shows Us How Businesses Can Save Millions on Marketing

After launching in April 2020, Clubhouse has already been downloaded 10 million times and has around two million weekly active users. In the grand scheme of things, this might sound like a small amount — especially if you consider that Facebook has 2.7 billion active users on its platform, Instagram 1 billion, Twitter 330 million, and Snapchat 301 million.

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Eight Marketing Strategies Every Startup Or Small Business Can Afford

“How can we effectively market and scale with a tight budget?” It can be challenging to decide where to invest your time and limited resources in marketing. Should you invest in the top of the funnel or the bottom?

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How Digital Marketing Is Transforming The Music Industry

In today’s competitive music market, there is no shortage of creativity, opportunity and innovation. Because of setbacks in touring and shutdowns of concert venues, the music industry took a big hit in income from tour merchandising, live appearances and ticket sales. All of these factors typically make up a sizeable portion of revenue in the industry. As a result of the current global venue restrictions, first movers in various markets are innovating and envisioning a bright future ahead for the entertainment industry. Marketing professionals, labels, distribution companies and artists are pivoting to new methods of distributing and marketing.

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Daily Minute Master Series – March 30, 2021

March 30, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

The Latest Hearing of Big Tech CEOs Was Another Missed Opportunity for Real Progress

So what did we learn from the big tech CEOs’ appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this week? Not a lot. As with most of the other, similar hearings we’ve seen, where Government officials get a chance to publicly question the leaders of the major tech platforms, most of the queries devolved into over-simplifications of process, which served no real purpose and seemed to get us no closer to advancing the key focus on improving how social platforms, in particular, address the spread of misinformation and the facilitation of hate speech.

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Twitter’s Developing New ‘Community’ Tools to Share Tweets with Selected Audiences

Back in February, as part of its Analyst Day presentation, Twitter previewed a new, groups-like option called ‘Communities’, which would enable Twitter users to share their tweets within selected sub-groups of users, as opposed to sharing with everybody.

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Google: Fine If AMP Page Has More Ads Than HTML Page

Google’s John Mueller says the search engine’s recommendation to maintain parity between AMP and canonical HTML pages does not apply to ads.

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Google Says There’s No Limit on Title Tag Length

Google’s Gary Illyes says that industry standards on title tag lengths are externally created and not Google recommendations.

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How To Implement An Effective Email Marketing Strategy

The first email management system was created in 1972 and email marketing came soon after. Since its initiation, entrepreneurial types have used email to market and sell products. But more recently, some marketers have set email campaigns aside in favor of other digital channels such as social media and mobile messaging. While a multichannel strategy should embrace new channels to boost sales opportunities, marketers who deprioritize email should proceed with caution.

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Outsourcing Pros And Cons For Your Digital Marketing

Businesses today are so lucky. Technology has made it easy to hire a freelancer or connect with an agency to help with their digital marketing. Most of these freelancers or consultants can work on SEO or Google Ads without ever stepping foot in the office. (We’re now living in an age where, according to Upwork, 22% of American workers are expected to continue operating remotely by 2025.) Here’s the big question for your business: When is the right time to outsource? Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

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Daily Minute Master Series – March 29, 2021

March 29, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

The State of SEO a Year Into COVID-19: What’s Changed

The pandemic has changed many things, especially how much we view the internet, online resources, and SEO. Read about how SEO has fared so far.

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Twitter Expands Test Pool for Spaces on Android, as Clubhouse Falls in Daily Download Rankings

Is Clubhouse, and audio social more broadly, a genuine, lasting interactive trend, or will the app simply fade out, like many other fad platforms before it? It’s impossible to know of course, at this early stage of the game. But the challenges are rising for the first breakthrough app of 2021, with Twitter looking to expand its audio Spaces tool, and latch onto the momentum of Clubhouse’s initial push. And this won’t be good news for Clubhouse’s prospects – today, Twitter announced that it’s boosted the amount of users that can now access Spaces via Android.

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Twitter Previews Potential New Account Safety Tools, Launches New Update for Birdwatch

Twitter’s looking to provide more options and transparency over its rule violations and moderation processes, with a range of new tools currently in consideration that could give users more ways to understand and action each instance.

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Snapchat’s Working on a New ‘Remix’ Feature for Snaps

We’ve already seen various apps try to copy TikTok’s key features, and various others looking to add in similar UI and other elements. And now, Snapchat is testing out another TikTok-inspired option, with the addition of a new ‘remix’ option on user Snaps.

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5 Big Content Trends You Need to Know Now

Content marketing and SEO have been hitting some awesome high notes. We’re careening toward a bright future of more useful, helpful, technically amazing content that aligns with user habits, preferences, and search needs. Content is getting better because we’re getting smarter about how we strategize, research, create, and publish it. And as a result, content marketing is no longer some type of marketing experiment, but a proven strategy that can work for any brand.

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Old Truths And New Marketing Truths After The Pandemic

Given the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, and especially forced lockdowns, many behaviors have changed for good – from the rise of eCommerce, to the shift to smart TV, to localization and digital transformation. Marketers will need to think hard—and differently—about what the consumer in the new normal will think, feel, say, and do.

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Daily Minute Master Series – March 26, 2021

March 26, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Twitter’s Assessing the Potential of Emoji-Style Reactions and Up and Downvotes on Tweets

This will no doubt be welcomed with open arms by Twitter users, and will see no negative over-reaction whatsoever in response. According to TechCrunch, over the past month, Twitter has been surveying users about the potential of adding a broader set of emoji-style reactions on tweets, giving people more ways to quickly engage in the app.

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Google Shares Technical SEO Best Practices For Ecommerce Sites

Google provides guidance to SEOs and ecommerce site owners on best practices for providing the search engine with accurate information about products. When Google has timely and accurate product data it can apply special formatting in search results to assist shoppers with their buying decisions. Additional data that Google can display for product pages includes ratings, pricing, and stock levels. When product pages can display this information in search results it has the potential to increase traffic from Google to ecommerce sites.

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State of Email Marketing 2021 Benchmark Report

Email marketing remains a crucial channel for many organizations due to its accessibility, ease of use, and effectiveness in reaching target audiences. Since 2018, Validity and Demand Metric have researched email marketing to examine which tactics marketers are using, how well they are working, and what challenges prevent greater success with email. Although the use of email continues to evolve, this study’s purpose remains the same: to help companies understand what separates high-performing email marketers from the rest of the pack. This report summarizes the latest survey results and shares insights from more than 450 study participants.

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Why It Makes Sense To Merge Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing

Is the design of your sales and marketing organization dysfunctional? If so, you probably already know it. Most organizational structures aren’t designed with a slide-rule to use after months of contemplating their design. Instead, they form organically over time. Few business leaders do anything but follow the traditional model of creating “departments” around any functional need they see as vital to their business activity.

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New SEO Tool Gathers Google Search Insights From 60M Queries

A new, free tool for SEOs provides insights about Google search features from an analysis of 60 million US queries. Developed by Local SEO Guide, the Local-Pack-O-Meter tracks data for ten different types of Google search features such as local packs, knowledge panels, shopping, job postings, ads, and more.

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Pinterest Search Trends Show All-Time Interest in Travel

Pinterest’s latest report on recent search trends show that people are more interested in travel now than they were before the pandemic. According to Pinterest’s data, people are searching for travel-related topics more now than at any point in the site’s history.

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