I admit, I use hyperbole quite a bit, but I also religiously try to stick to the data, and the data is saying that nearly $770 million will be spent on podcast advertising by 2020, which suggests a massive trend towards user attention being on audio, podcasts, and Alexa-enabled devices, and there is data to prove it. 22% of Americans have smart assistants in their home, up from less than 1% a year ago. That’s huge, people. This is the next way to get your audience’s attention. Amazon’s Alexa (Echo Device) holds 71% of the voice market, followed by Google Home at 18%, Microsoft Cortana at 10% and Apple HomePod at less than 1%. 88% of 12-24 year olds listened to online audio in the last month. Estimated hours of weekly online audio that will be consumed in 2018: THIRTEEN HOURS AND 40 MINUTES PER WEEK. That’s insane. Name something else other than sleep or work that you do that often each week. And now, just like you can target your exact customer personas and demographics and interest groups on Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and Google Ads, you can also target them via Audio Podcast Advertising, thanks to Anchor.fm. Not only is this something that Small Business Owners and Marketing Directors at emerging brands need to look at as part of their paid advertising strategy, but it's also something that those same people can look at as a monetization strategy for their content. To learn more about how it works, watch the video on this page, click here, or submit this form.

Data Driven Daily Tip 234 - What if I told you you could, for around $1-$2 per person, get qualified real people to "follow your business." If I said, hey Small Business Owner or Director of Marketing for X, Y, Z brand, I'll get thousands of new people that are interested in your products and services to follow your blog or subscribe to your e-newsletter for $1-$2 or sometimes less, so that you can always send them messaging that they will engage with (as long as it's quality content) and your audience will only grow, widening the top of your funnel and eventually getting them to purchase your product or service? You know, in simple terms - what if I said I could "get more people who are interested in your product or service to walk into your store, look around, and allow you to send them promotions all the time to get them to keep coming back and looking?" Great right? Now, what if I told you that you didn't have to pay us to do it for you, all you had to do is take our word for it and learn how to do it yourself from right here? Lastly, would you still be interested if I told you it had to do with Facebook? Say what you will about all the Facebook news related to privacy and scandal, etc. The reality is that it's one of the top two marketing platforms in the world. The other, debatably, depending on your business' target audience, is also owned by Facebook, and is known as Instagram. In this Data Driven Daily Tip video, I go further into why this is and how to do it. How to run a Facebook Page Promotion (Like Campaign). If you truly care about growing your business, you'll leave your personal opinions on Facebook at the door, and you'll listen to the data and run Facebook Ads and Page Promotions.

Data Driven Daily Tip 233 - It's actually super convoluted to use Facebook Business Manager to manage your Facebook Page(s) and Facebook Ads Account(s). But as a social media marketing agency and digital strategists that manage accounts for several clients and are constantly requesting access and navigating the process, we also understand the value of using Facebook Business Manager. It allows brands to have multiple employees or agency strategists play a role in collaborating on Facebook and Instagram Ads. You may have one person or agency be in charge of determining an ad objective strategy or budgeting optimization strategy. You may have another person managing overall spent and ROAS. It would also make sense to have another producing creative and A/B Testing. Facebook Business Manager not only allows for this type of collaboration between brands and agencies, but it also protects the brands from who can access their data and control their assets. Because it's super hard to type out the process of adding a Page Admin and even harder to type out the process of adding an Ads Account Admin, I've created this video for anyone needing help, and for current and future clients. :) Welcome. Remember, while this process may seem annoying at times, before Facebook Business Manager existed, there was no way for two Facebook users to collaborate within the same Ads account. So unless you want to waste your time using multiple credit cards for spend and manually adding together budget and performance numbers from multiple Facebook Ads accounts, just get into using Facebook Business Manager. And once you're set up, life is super easy.

This is one of the more utilitarian Data Driven Daily Tips, but it's a super important one. Many Small Business Owners and marketing directors don't ever log into Google Analytics, so they don't even really know how to manage the users on their account.

B2B Marketing Begins on LinkedIn, and to do it really well, including running targeted ads to the companies you want to win business from, or the employees you want to hire, installing the LinkedIn Pixel helps you get the frequency you need from the audience that is most interested in you and qualified to become a true lead or eventual customer. Step 1 is to visit - https://www.linkedin.com/ad-beta/accounts Step 2 is to click on Account Assets Step 3 is to click on Conversions, then grab your pixel code snippet into the global header of your website.

Marketers and Small Business owners, you know what Remarketing and Custom Audiences ARE, you just don't know how to implement them. You know, what they DO, you just don't know how to make it happen for your business. We do. When a visitor comes to your website and shows interest in a particular product or service, then leaves, comes back, leaves, comes back, sees an ad for you, comes back, leaves, sees another ad, comes back and FINALLY purchases. You've seen the ad for the service or product that you visited the specific landing page for just days earlier. You've seen the ad on Facebook, and you've seen it on Websites. How does it get on Websites??? Through Google. This video explains how to set up Google Ads Remarketing Tags on your website and Configure Custom Audiences to bring interested, qualified visitors BACK to your website to convert. After all, the data shows it takes a user 3-5 times seeing a product/service before they actually fill out a form to get more information (aka, become a lead) or buy a product.

Data Driven Daily Tip 229 - Marketers and Small Business owners, you can put your ads EXACTLY where you want them. Want your ads to show in front of the most popular YouTube videos? Want them to show before "The Ellen Show" or "Dude Perfect" on YouTube, or even those weird ones with people opening up toys (I know, they're called unboxing). Know that your audience views particular websites like the Wall Street Journal or CNN.com? You can use PLACEMENTS in Google Ads to run your video, contextual or display ads through the Google Ads Display Network. This audio explains exactly how this works; oh, and yes you can combine your PLACEMENTS with CUSTOM INTENT AUDIENCE TARGETING. Badass.

It's super easy to send an email marketing campaign. But it's not super easy to be really strategic and maximize the value you get out of sending said email. The perfect example is a mistake I see marketers make all the time, and talk about them potentially making a lot more. Don't skip over the opportunity that Mailchimp gives you to A/B Test the Subject Line of every single campaign you ever send. Seriously. It takes a few extra minutes out of your day, it costs you no additional money, it increases your open rates and click through rates, and it gives you valuable data to shape your brand messaging. Case in point, an email that I just sent to 43 attendees of an event we recently held. I've shown you HOW to A/B Test the subject line of a Mailchimp Campaign here, and now I'm going to show you how to read the data and the results in this video. Use one subject line that is very standard and utilitarian, then test that against one that's more what you'd actually say to a friend that you wanted to open the email. Write them both out, send the campaign, and view the data. The data will tell you if the utilitarian one was more effective than the friendly one. If it was, it means data saved you from yourself and you need to keep trying and testing your company's playful voice, AND that this particular audience didn't resonate with said playful voice. If you choose not to test, you risk super low open rates, click throughs and even worse, you get no extra collateral value out of your campaign - like "did this tone/voice work for this audience?" Always take the opportunity to let data help you convert and craft your next marketing actions.

Do you have a Shopify Store? If so, I've got some good news that you might not know about. It's super easy, AND FREE, to drive a few extra conversions this month. The data shows that when you re-market to people who have abandoned their shopping cart, but haven't purchased, they're 65% or more likely to convert, especially with a personalized email of some sort. Most eCommerce Web Developers and Marketers think so much about marketing automation and fancy tools that they forget the simple stuff. Look into your Shopify backend, and click on "Customers" and "Abandoned Checkouts." If your store has a ridiculous amount, pull this down into a CSV file and upload it to Mailchimp or your EMail Marketing Platform and send a less personal but more efficient call to action/reminder to come back to your store and purchase their items. You can even link directly to their cart, and likely their browser cookies will remember them and still have their items on board and ready to checkout. If you have 100 or less abandoned carts, we recommend just a real personal 1:1 email offering amazing customer service in the form of personal help from the owner of the company. "Thanks for shopping, sorry you haven't found what you're looking for yet, but let me know if there's anything me or a member of my team could do to help you out" would go a LONG way towards a conversion.

Data Driven Daily Tip 226. So I know that if you're a marketer or small business owner running any kind of Facebook Ads, using the Facebook Pixel, you're confused AF by this email you just received sometime around October 5, 2018. The email references the fact that starting October 24, 2018, Facebook will be offering businesses the ability to use First-Party Cookies instead of Third-Party Cookies, but WTF? It doesn't explain the difference, and it doesn't tell you that if your Facebook Pixel is associated with a Facebook Ads Account, it doesn't matter, you HAVE to use the Third-Party Cookies, but now you also have the option to use First-Party Cookies. So in essence, NOTHING REALLY CHANGES. All things stay the same for Advertisers using the Pixel. You don't have to do anything, but according to the Facebook Help Center link in the email they sent you, you can do something if you want. The options for using cookies with your Facebook pixel are: Use the Facebook pixel with both first and third-party cookies Beginning on October 24th, 2018, this is the default option for Facebook pixels. With this option, you will use first-party cookie data with your Facebook pixel, in addition to third-party cookie data. This option is recommended if you use your Facebook pixel for advertising, because using both first and third-party cookies will enable you to reach more customers on Facebook and to be more accurate in measurement and reporting. Use the Facebook pixel with third-party cookies only You can disable first-party cookies and use the Facebook pixel with third-party cookies only. With this option, your Facebook pixel will be less effective in reaching customers on Facebook and less accurate in measurement and reporting. Here's HOW you can make your change... How to check your pixel and cookie settings Log into your Facebook advertising account, and goto Events Managerlocated in the main menu under Measure and Report. Select your pixel, then click onto Details button on the top right-hand corner to check its settings. Under Pixel and Cookie Settings, edit or confirm your preferences. If your pixel is associated with an ad account you will not see Pixel Usage settings. If you choose to edit Pixel Usage, you will have two options: Advertising and Analytics, and Analytics Only. But if you run ads, you have to use Third-Party Cookies, so you can't really make any changes. So now that we know the email can be disregarded, what do we do with the fact that we now feel the burning need to know the difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies? Well, I'll break it down for you, but I assure you it's really not that exciting. First-party cookies are owned by the website a person is currently viewing, while third-party cookies belong to a website other than the one a person is currently viewing. Compared to third-party cookies, first-party cookies are more widely accepted by browsers and stored for longer periods of time. First-party cookies allow you to do things like place multiple items in a shopping cart on an eCommerce website. Third-party cookies allow you to do the things within Facebook Ads like use your Facebook Pixel to run re-marketing ads to people who have v