SCG Trendwatch: MarCom Industry News & Insights – June 2021

Welcome to your monthly round-up for busy MarCom professionals. Each month, we share the latest news, strategies, tools and trends affecting the industry landscape. Check-in for the latest updates from all over the web.

Marketers take advantage of out-of-home as people get back outdoors 

You’d have to figure that a marketing channel called out-of-home would be forced to transform when the pandemic forced consumers to, well, stay home. The quarantine period, in fact, led to a nearly 30% drop in OOH spending in 2020, according to one survey. But with 2021 almost at its midpoint, the OOH industry has made significant changes to connect with homebound customers through digital channels. 

“We’ve been able this past year to connect all the pipes, the DSPs and SSPs, the connected programmatic out-of-home pipes,” said Barry Frey, President and CEO of global digital out-of-home marketing association DPAA.  Read more…

Victoria’s Secret is (finally) trying to get women’s attention 

It took a while and steady losses in market share. But, ahead of its departure from L Brands — its home for four decades and the incubator of its once hugely successful, man-pleasing marketing campaigns — Victoria’s Secret has let go of its angels. 

They are being replaced with a group of influential and powerful women, who will help shape the brand’s merchandising and messaging, L Brands said in a press release Wednesday.  Read more…

As SEO changes, so do the tools that serve practitioners 

Search engine optimization remains the stalwart mainstay of digital marketing, with search driving around 50% of website traffic on average, according to an analysis of SimilarWeb data by Growth Badger. The average top blog, the company found, “gets 66.47% of its traffic from search, of which 99.77% is organic and only 0.23% is paid.” 

But the practice of SEO has become more complex and it involves more considerations than SEOs enjoyed in the “ten blue links” era. Today, SEO includes everything from content marketing and distribution to user experience, and even the core job of gathering and interpreting search intelligence has become more challenging as the search engines continually change their display of results and port them over to other media like voice assistants.  Read more…

User experience is the difference between mediocre and next-level search marketing 

SMX Advanced generally features all the latest in SEO and PPC marketing techniques, strategies, and news. However, this year we decided to add a brand new track focused on user experience in search marketing. 

It’s no secret that search engines are moving toward finding ways to measure this experience. Google’s page experience update (which is now officially rolling out) and the introduction of Core Web Vitals are a move in that direction, for example. We now have numbers behind the ways that searchers experience our websites: how fast does it load, how quickly can they actually interact with it, and does the page shift around annoyingly before they can use it?  Read more…

Rethinking multicultural marketing, Gen Z privacy views: Thursday’s daily brief 

Salesforce’s recently announced roadmap updates, which you’ll find below, are a good example of the new capabilities marketers have to reach the right person at the right time. 

Younger generations, especially, are listening. With the right messaging, more Gen Zers are willing to continue the conversation over email and text than some older consumers, according to a new study from performance marketing company Fluent that caught my attention. There’s more on that below. 

Trust in brands also comes from transparency. More transparency means consumers are paying closer attention to brand values, which requires marketers in the organization to expand their thinking, according to Adriana Waterston, SVP of Insights and Strategy for Horowitz Research. See more from her below as well.  Read more…

Facebook testing virtual reality ads in Oculus VR 

In May, Facebook announced that it would begin testing advertisements in virtual reality. Those tests are now about to go live. “The company revealed it’s going to begin experimenting with the ads in the Oculus Quest title Blaston from Resolution Games. The experiment will also expand to two other unnamed developers in the coming weeks,” said Michael Tan for PCMag. 

In-headset ads. The advertisements, deemed “in-headset ads” by Facebook, are part of the company’s exploration of ways for developers to generate revenue: “This is a key part of ensuring we’re creating a self-sustaining platform that can support a variety of business models that unlock new types of content and audiences,” the company said in the announcement blog.  Read more…

How Social Listening Speaks to Brands and Improves Consumer Targeting 

Canned tuna has been a pantry staple for generations. So when StarKist introduced it in a pouch after nearly 100 years in a can, sales stagnated. The company lowered the price and reduced the pouch size, which helped, but didn’t fix its image problem.  

To solve the dilemma, StarKist turned to social listening. It’s an increasingly popular marketing tool that uses artificial intelligence to scrape publicly available social media chatter and information—Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news outlets and Reddit, for instance—for keywords directly and indirectly related to a brand.  Read more…

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