Marketing Scoop Podcast: Top Digital Marketing Stories in 2018
Did you miss the Marketing Scoop Podcast last December 12? Don’t worry, I made this blog post to summarize what was discussed on this podcast so you can read what each expert defended on this Digital Marketing Battle. Guests in this episode shared what they think was the number one digital marketing story in 2018. David Bain and Judith Lewis reveal the latest digital trends and technologies that impact your marketing strategy. Together with industry experts, they dove into SEO, advertising and content marketing to uncover the ultimate recipe for digital marketing success. The guests in this episode are: The European Search Personality of 2018, International SEO Consultant, Speaker & Author and Founder of Orainti – Aleyda Solis A writer on conversational AI and digital marketing, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft – Purna Virji Passionate of unicorns, he sold his last company (Wordstream) for 150 million dollars and has turned his attention to Facebook Messenger Chatbots, Founder of MobileMonkey – Larry Kim Self-proclaimed search geek, US Search Personality of 2018, Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and News Editor at Search Engine Land – Barry Schwartz [joli-toc] #1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 – Aleyda Aleyda thinks that the search impact of the mobile-first index was the most important change this year and picked it as her story of the year from an SEO perspective. Although there were many changes and updates in SEO like the Medic Update, mobile-first is a change in the way that Google works because mobile content is taken into consideration. Aleyda says that it hasn’t been as huge as everybody expected because they have done it in stages to avoid a negative impact on websites but it has impacted the way of doing audits, verifying rankings and overall SEO activities. We now should prioritize mobile crawling, mobile indexing, mobile relevance, mobile searches and search behaviour along with mobile rankings. The impact of the mobile-first indexing depends on the business, for example, in B2B where some industries have a low percentage of searches from mobile devices because of the business model or target market the impact is not as big. For most B2C and many B2B businesses, it will mean that the users accessing their website through mobile devices will be a priority in order to have an optimized mobile website. #1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 – Larry Larry chose Cambridge Analytica to be his top story of 2018, the impact on Facebook was huge and caused some questioning in the safety of our data. Larry points out that the number of active users on Facebook in countries like Canada, Australia and the UK is in decline as well as the time spent on Facebook. As a result of the decline in usage and time spent, ad prices (pretty important for marketers) have doubled in the last 12 months making Facebook Ads extremely difficult. Facebook Analytics or the audience analytics capabilities for analyzing the performance of social campaigns have been totally neutered. These are all global issues impacting marketers and individuals but the biggest impact is actually that Facebook’s posture has been put on the defensive. In summary, Larry thinks the biggest marketing story of 2019 is the Facebook news armageddon and all the collateral damage that it has created for marketers and for the world in general. #1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 – Purna Purna picked the launch of the Microsoft Audience Network because it covers all the way that search is maturing and they´re back with the AI dominance and growth in innovation. It was announced in May and it’s a product that’s been in pilot but what it’s doing is it’s allowing advertisers to really go from this whole “keyword dominated industry” to not thinking about the customers and intent. Now that it is powered by AI we can understand all of these different intent signals without any identifiable information. Signals like browsing history, preferred websites and even data points from LinkedIn profiles such as industry, job function and the company you work for. These things can be used to really target the person to reach them at the right time and the right place. #1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 – Barry Barry thinks the other guests are all wrong. He argued to Larry that Facebook is a tiny player compared to Google in terms of reach people can get in general to their website. He also said that the mobile-first index was probably 2017 leaving into 2018 and it didn’t really have that much of an impact because people who were ready for it because of 2017 and all the things Google has said for the past 5-10 years around mobile they took action and also because mobile-first indexing didn’t fully roll out. The most important thing obviously it’s Google-related because Google is the most important thing out there for digital marketers. Thinking about voice assistance, Google assistant, voice search and Google slipping into zero results are crucial because they are everywhere even into your thermostats. Now, this is where the interesting part begins, Barry began determined to start a fight because that was what David wanted to see and now Aleyda started to express herself about voice search and zero results. Aleyda thinks that these changes are a predecessor of a conversational journey because Google said on their 20 year anniversary that at some point they want to predict the searches, to advise and recommend stuff with the assistant. However, she agrees with Barry that it is a good story and it is the first step of a bigger paradigm but what she didn’t like about it is that a lot of people thought that everything was going to go voice and voice will kill SEO. The searches for which Google, and any search engine, can realistically provide one answer or zero results without damaging the user experience are very limited and they can’t do this when trying to compare products or prices. Barry said that…
