Podcast 1
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. I'm PIP from Seymour digital media. You're listening to know how marketing lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, cyber punk geeks marketing mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk [00:00:20] about something. Search marketing, like Google.
Or SEO, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing. If you're a marketer or aspiring marketer, a business owner, or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're gonna share the best SEO search, social and website strategies. We share tips and [00:00:40] hacks, Google ad strategies what's going on in the current market.
Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome. In marketing. We are here today to talk digital marketing. Will I fix Greg's name? Yeah, we're here to talk digital marketing on PIP, Seymour, digital media, Greg, who are [00:01:00] you? Original 72 creative. Phelan. I'm Phelan. I work with Pip at Seymour digital media.
And we're missing and I'm flanked by the SDM team. Yeah. I'm sandwiched . Yeah. So cuz you know, search social and websites. We're missing the social element right now, but we have lots to talk about [00:01:20] today. There's lots going on as usual failing. Do you wanna start us off with what's going on in the world of marketing?
So one of the big ones that came out is there is the new rollout that just got announced today for the July update for the Google core. So everyone put a little marker and watch what the rankings your [00:01:40] rankings do. Ah, Yeah. Over the yeah. Over the next week. Definitely keep an eye out for that.
That's a big one that just literally came up today. Last update was in may and we're seeing the results now. like where it's stable, the end of the results where people can actually [00:02:00] analyze and be like, oh, Hey, it looks we went, we did lose it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's every two months usual pace that they do it at these days.
And yeah, that's a big one. That's come in. Another one that's been interesting, especially for any new people with Google, my business or Google business profile is that they're doing video verification of the [00:02:20] oh, that. Yeah, which is gonna be interesting to see how they what that looks like. If I'm sure like anything, somehow people are gonna manipulate that and be bad.
I we have, we do have the articles that will link in the bottom after, after this, but that was in an article out of search. No land [00:02:40] the Barry Schwartz's forum land journal, yeah. , it's hard to keep track. I'll give it to Barry Schwartz says search engine land has been around since before 2000, so it's, he's.
Okay. Definitely. Yeah, he's definitely, it's one of the two main ones that I use for a lot of the news. So if you're out there and you wanna know who [00:03:00] we listen to, Barry Schwartz on YouTube, that's one of the places we go for our SEO news, cuz they keep us in the loop and he talks about everything. Greg, you got any what's going on in the land of website.
Not a whole lot on the WordPress core front things had been pretty quiet. Their [00:03:20] last release was. Pretty stable. I think there's only been one update since then. So they're probably at 0.0 0.1, but there's been some big news from the theme development community. Two of the larger themes, the one I use, which is cadence [00:03:40] theme to build all my projects and also Astro theme, which I know is, could be the number one theme.
Currently, I can't remember. That's, there's a couple that are really high up there, but they just released a new a new update for their theme, which has really heavy integration [00:04:00] to WooCommerce. So you can be able to do. A lot more styling for a WooCommerce store. So it should be quite flexible to be able to modify your layout somewhat with a bunch of settings.
Just if you're familiar with Astra, everything basically is in the [00:04:20] customizer and you just go through the sections, toggling things on or off or changing font, sizes, colors, all that kinda goodies. And the experience for customizing your WooCommerce store is heavily integrated into that customizer to be able to do tons of different layouts for your product pages.
And [00:04:40] I think even your cart pages and things like that. So that was released, I believe earlier this week. And then the cadence I, as we were getting ready to do this live today, I was actually in a live webinar. For the cadence shop kit 2.0, which [00:05:00] is officially released as of today. And they were just showing how their shop kit works.
So shop kit, unlike the Astra theme, which everything built into the Astra theme and in the customizer shop kit is a plugin that you add into cadence theme. That [00:05:20] extends the functionality that you have to be able to customize your WooCommerce store, to the point where you can basically build your own product or archive layouts themselves.
Unlike the Astra, where you go through settings and, toggle [00:05:40] things. On and off, or I want this look or I want that look, which are all predefined. The cadence shop kit goes further in that you can actually develop and create your. Templates for the products and archive pages to the point where you can specify this category.
I want [00:06:00] this looking product page and that category, I want a completely different product layout. So it's I think while the Astro one is probably easier for the daily. Hacker that does their own theme and likes the customizer and just plays around and makes tweaks [00:06:20] the shop gate one, for me as a, as more of the developer side is better so that I can actually be able to design and create.
My own custom layouts for the archives and for the product pages. So it's, I'm [00:06:40] excited for it because I do quite a few product sites or e-commerce sites. So it'll be fun to start experimenting and getting a little bit more creative. The. From the product view than just the default, what the default has been for this long forever.
Yeah. That'll be nice because there isn't much give when it comes to your category pages or [00:07:00] product page and you could do customization to the product page, but it was basically coding new templates, to replace the old templates and writing your CSS and writing your code to do what you wanted.
Whereas the shop kit option everything. Your customizing and building is using the block, the [00:07:20] WordPress block editor. So you're basically going into a page and design. Through the block editor, what you want your pages to be, and then specifying, okay. Pull in the product image here, pull in the product title here, pull in the price here.
And you just set you, you just create your own custom layout without coding. You need to know how to. [00:07:40] Use the block editor quite sophisticatedly, but, and how would one go about learning that if they were gonna learn, call me for tutorials. I dunno. , I'll do a live tutorial with you. I think that's awesome and people can go to YouTube and get the gist of it.
I, to be honest, you start out in marketing, you're like, yeah, [00:08:00] I can build a website. And then you figure out what you're good at and you stick to that. And then, you can't build websites necessarily. maybe that's just my story. It's true. Anybody can build a website. Not anybody can build a specific looking website.
Yeah. Yeah. It takes work in practice. So I it's [00:08:20] good. You keep up to date on all of this and I did check you are. I do not say that often, but ha you are . You are right that it's WordPress 6.0 0.11. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting about all the plugins. We found a really good plugin.
We love, what was it? [00:08:40] Failing? It speeds up your sites. Gorgeous. Oh, WP, rocket. It's definitely. For a plugin is probably the best one for speeding up your site for page speed insights and all that. It's paid. There is no free tier to it, but I can firmly say that it's probably easily one of the best ones that I've seen.
Yeah. So if you're having real issue with it, [00:09:00] it does suppose I use hummingbird hummingbird is a free and paid tier option, but the free option is crazy. Good. I haven't. Really ever come into any conflict issues with it, with any themes or plugins, which is one [00:09:20] thing that happens quite often is you'll go to optimize the site with the plugin and it'll cause some type of conflict within your site theme or other plugins that you're.
But yeah, hummingbird's really good too. Ah, yeah. I don't know why we didn't [00:09:40] try that one, but it's good. Free for mostly the main reason why we didn't try that one is cuz it was part of the, I thought it was more suited to the divvy theme since it's made by the same company, elegant themes.
Oh, interesting. Interesting. I know. Yeah. Yeah. That was just my own interpretation, but definitely very content with the WP rocket. anyway getting [00:10:00] back to some more of the news search news, more search news. What yeah, there's gonna be. So there's lots of things that happened with YouTube and Shopify connection there.
And I've seen it myself in the wild where your Google merchant center account now can connect to your YouTube account. And so what so it's going on and watching video [00:10:20] and. So you're watching a video and it's, if you've ever looked up the video what it looks like in the Chinese TikTok.
So the original version, they have a full e-commerce integration. And what it looks like is that in the bottom right hand corner, you'll see view the product. And the video is about in this case, it was like ch cheeseburger. Like I didn't pick it. It just randomly showed up on my feed.
And, [00:10:40] but it would have in the corner a little, a button that says view product. And then when you do that, it takes you to. The Google merchant center checkout page. So it has details about the product and then says, Hey, do you want to go purchase this product? And then he click that and it takes you to the Shopify store.
Oh, interesting. That's gonna be a good one to measure. And that's a sort type of ad inside Google apps. [00:11:00] Nope. No, the, they can be both. So this is where you're looking at your shopping ads and you'll be able to do some placements there. I'm guessing it's gonna count as a placement. And then from there, you're also because they now integrate your Google merchant center account with your Google analytics and Google analytics for you'll probably be able to measure [00:11:20] where that traffic's coming in to even just onto those landing pages before they even make it.
Your store. So it's becoming much more cohesive ecosystem for you to do measuring on. When we were talking about, when we met on Tuesday, we were talking about Netflix and TV screens in Google ads. The TV screen portion is getting [00:11:40] conversions now. So people are converting. Through bigger screens now, which is very interesting to see.
It's gonna be amazing to see where things go in the next 10 years with marketing. I think we'll all be pretty tired by then because it's a lot of change, to, imagine being able to pick up your converter and click and buy something right there. Oh my God. Is that you [00:12:00] guys know from the the TV platform you're using how handy that little remote is, like it's a full keyboard in the Palm of your hands, right?
Yeah. And there's no reason why, if we, if TV's move in that direction where you can have some type of a. Of a remote with a [00:12:20] keyboard like that. It's so it's the same as being on the computer. Yeah. You're literally looking at a screen with a mini mini keyboard and you could do whatever you do on a computer.
Yeah. Yeah. Or, and even alternatively the, from that like same concept, but one that I [00:12:40] had heard for doing even direct mail ads is that now? Yeah. You can tie that in with an Alexa or a Google home. So you get a direct mail or say you see an ad on the TV and it says, Hey, if you wanna learn more, tell Alexa tell me more about blah, blah, blah.
And you can have that as a set command as a skill, but then that triggers. And so that [00:13:00] way you can do directly tying it to the ad because you could have it specific to what they see and the command. And then that is only visible on the TV or in direct. Oh, the Fu is, we always picture like a total recall is a total recall in the scenes.
There's a couple that are yeah. You futuristic and yeah. And then [00:13:20] I'll do the ads. So I think, we just anticipate, I didn't realize it'd be oh, do you mean minority report? There's the one you're thinking about there minority report. And there's also the one with Arnolds when he goes to.
Mars. No, it's very old. Yeah. It's it? It, yeah That's a great movie at that one. The one that people really take away from that is [00:13:40] the Johnny cab, right? Like a fully automated vehicle that you tell it where to go and oh yeah, we're almost there. We're almost there, almost. Want to know more about SEO.
We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses. Using the most up [00:14:00] to date search engine, marketing optimization, techniques and tools. Find out more at knowhow marketing lab com. So screens are growing in conversions.
We talked about website. The social element is that Facebook keeps calling us. Yeah, the they've reported [00:14:20] in their Q2 filings that they put out yesterday. They had their first reported quarter of lower ad revenue. Then expect it. So they actually had their ad revenue decrease, which is meant that their stock took a hit.
Yeah. That was it's bad news all around for most tech companies to be entirely honest, like most of 'em are down, did not hit their quarterly [00:14:40] targets and Shopify even laid off 10% of its staff. Yeah. There are some changes happening in the marketplace. Meanwhile, grocery stores are record profits. Yeah.
Yeah. And even though the inputs haven't gone and Amazon bought a hospital. Or hospital system. Apologies. Yeah. Yeah. Don't it's it's [00:15:00] interesting out there with all this. So Amazon is gonna have a system that will be implemented in hospitals for them to use, to do.
Is that what this system? I just Amazon, what system? Meaning like software system? No, like a hospital network. Yeah. They're like, you go to visit the doctor, like we're in Canada, so it's a [00:15:20] little different for us, but and a medical system will have your primary care physician and then they also have their own.
So that's when people say oh, you're in network. It's because they own a variety of these in, so they bought a primary care network. Okay. Interesting. It's not the first time that they've gotten into medical fields. They tried to be in OBN a little while ago, which basically is the [00:15:40] person that buys they're the purchaser for companies to buy medication and supplies and stuff like that.
And they're basically like a distribution point and they did that with Warren buffet and it completely failed and they had to sell it a couple years later. Oh, interesting. The, yeah, so they're not, they have tried to come at medical before and they [00:16:00] haven't been successful. Are they doing food as well?
They own whole foods. Yeah. Maybe able to go in the app and get a bandaid delivered by drone or something. Maybe you got a little scrape on. Yeah. Or like an appendectomy. You could just have one ordered off of there. They're just like, oh yeah. So the reason Facebook is calling us is [00:16:20] to increase revenue and yeah.
The other aside of Amazon doing crazy things, the world is we, as we know, it's different. So it's really weird though, in marketing because we're seeing all. Big movements. Some marketers are suffering because they worked in Facebook. And as we see Facebook add revenues [00:16:40] down because of the big change that.
What five, six months ago. Yeah. And generally as well, that they've ha been fighting. It's the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. And it's just a, it's a phenomenon that happens over time. And these guys need to keep finding new avenues, new ways to do advertising. And they're just hitting hard limitations on what's [00:17:00] actually possible for them in their advertising space.
And so as well as Right now everyone is leaving pretty much all the meta platforms in like the Instagram user, I think was also down as well back. Going hard on, on reels now, cuz they're trying to keep up with TikTok, but most people on [00:17:20] TikTok have a, another channel. That they go to and they do additional or other content.
Like they either send you to YouTube usually, or to Instagram. I don't see the getting sent to Facebook very often if ever. No. It's usually the pairing is usually your TikTok with your Instagram. Yeah. It's usually the or YouTube. And the [00:17:40] YouTube shorts work really well as TikTok and actually stories on Facebook work, work really well.
The, because the format's the same, yeah, I think Facebook just started getting better or more music so they can use, the same kind of music TikTok can use. So yeah it's a doggy dog world out there for the marketing channels. [00:18:00] Snapchat's down, twitter's down in revenue.
And Rena was saying, I'm sad. She's not here, but she was saying that it's a good time to spend because it's gonna be cheaper on those platforms. The audience is gonna be smaller and so maybe more engaged. And the ad cost will be lower yeah. And the other thing to do as well is this is a really good [00:18:20] time to start learning how to do server side setup so that because as we're moving to a cookie list future you're gonna wanna learn how to do set up a server side, Google tag manager.
Ooh, because that. That's interesting. Yeah. Cause then it would a first party cookie. And so you a lot a topic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It [00:18:40] sounds intense topic though. So that's something Greg here could do as well as yourself, but as a marketer, I might not have the skill set to go server side. It, it depends.
There's a really good plugin. That's free. And your first account, if you're only having one website, they give you one for free. And their pre [00:19:00] that's called sta S T a P E. Okay. Not share that after. Yeah. I'll share a link to, yeah. I looked it up. It was looked pretty reason. All things consider that a marketer could learn how to do that and just follow a guide or is it, do you think it the depth?
Yeah, it's right now it's about [00:19:20] a year old, I would say server side rendering. Okay. And in that time there's been a lot of people that are built tools and abstracted away, the really complex things. And so you, if, for you, it's as simple as like you go to WordPress, you get a plugin and then you like tie it to your speaker.
Oh no, I, I wanna go server side. If I wanna [00:19:40] server side, like getting a plugin, that's not going the other side. Yeah, it is. You think so? I don't think so. A hundred percent without a doubt, it's is very much going to the server side, my skillset I'm in Google, ADSS and SEO. I don't do this other stuff.
Crazy stuff. Y'all do. So speaking of that do you have any news from Google ad side? I do [00:20:00] actually. There's new the new ad creative hub. So we've got a lot of change over the last while all the old text ads that are in the accounts are still running, right? The extended expanded text ads that they got us to do in five years ago or something.
They're all still running, but you can't make. So [00:20:20] now you have to make responsive search ads, right? So we've we all knew that for a year. So I thought they were just gonna turn off the old ads cuz I was being paranoid and no, the ads are still gonna run. You only have one choice now, so there's a lot more automations and they now have this ad creative library hub, which is super interesting.
We're gonna, I think spend some more time in [00:20:40] there and that's gonna be to. Do better things with video and stuff like that. The other news is that Google business profile. Which you know, is like all for SEO, local SEO is really pushing that you interact with it on the search engine results pages now.
So you don't go into the [00:21:00] back end. If you type in your business name or Google business profile into Google, basically they're pushing you to do all your edits to your Google business profile in inside the search engine results page, which is really neat. I'm wondering if that's for trying to grow the time on page.
Because on Google, you go to Google, you leave [00:21:20] and Google hates that Facebook gets users and they stay. So I think, I don't know if they'll count that as a measurement of sorts. I don't know. I don't know about that part, my guess is that they are trying to cut down on costs so that they would rather, instead of having.
The spun up server time dedicated to actually having a dedicated website and [00:21:40] dedicated app. They just like, why don't we just move that all into the maps and then save the money from having this separate department. And then you guys are just part of the maps team and they did change it. So there's no more of the Google business profile app.
Yeah. It's now it's got, yeah, everything's done Google maps on your phone. If you were to like respond to [00:22:00] users, anything like that. And I don't know if any of you have seen it, if you use directions, on your phone and you're, you use Google maps and you go somewhere, it'll show you the reviews right in there of the actual place you're going to.
It's it's they push you business owners to get reviews. So I think that's another way to push people to leave reviews [00:22:20] right now. Do y'all leave reviews? No, not very often, but if I feel really compelled to I, I will. Yeah. If I had an extremely good or extremely bad there's no I do ones in five general. When people do three, three stars, I'm like what was the point of that? Thank you. You just told me it was meteor over. Yeah. The [00:22:40] other thing that's happening is Google search console is now indexing video. Yeah, and I've even seen that out in the wild one of the clients that we onboarded had that plugin, but you could see it in their search console that video showed up had, I didn't get a chance to dig interest yet, but it's cool that, more schema is getting indexed and properly sorted.
As Google [00:23:00] wants to expand the search engine results. It's gonna be really interesting to see what goes on because now they have what YouTube. Shorts. Is that what they're called? Yeah. So maybe those will end up showing up in the search engine results pages as well. It's possible that I, yeah I'm interested to see what they're gonna do with that information.
Is there [00:23:20] any other news that we need to know about besides that it's topsy turvy out there and marketers, some are really busy. Some are staying where they're at and others are a lot. So it, it's definitely crapshoot with what's everything that's going on out there right now. I feel like next month, [00:23:40] because it's like August, I feel like it'll be slower in new things at least from my point of view.
Like when. I know a lot of business owners they tend to choose late July and August to take their couple of weeks away from their stores or businesses. So [00:24:00] things tend to slow down for me to catch up, which is nice. So nice. That is nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I we're. Are we're not experiencing slow down.
It would be nice to take a couple weeks. We are at Christmas though. Planning. We are already planning because if you look at the dates, just for anybody out there from the 23rd [00:24:20] to the third, whoa. Yeah. All that time off because of the way the holidays work. Oh, it's gonna be, you're gonna go to your timeshare finally for the first time in ever 10 years.
No. We're not, I have too many dogs in, we don't travel right now. We're our home is a vacation spot. yeah. There's no a [00:24:40] real upside to travel. Everybody. That travels seems to get sick when they get back. That's true. Yeah. So I, and I'm a little, trepidacious I don't wanna get sick anyway.
We're not talking about now we're talking marketing and we're outta time. Y'all know who. and what we're talking about next week. I do who and [00:25:00] what? Oh, what is it? Oh, it was the one that Fen and I were gonna switch with re so it was gonna be Rena and me, but I think it's gonna be re and Fen now talking about blogging breakdown for best results.
Ooh, that should be really interesting. So that's gonna be. How to [00:25:20] do blogging and incorporate it with your social. Gosh, that's gonna be brilliant. And and content distribution kind of something that we touched on and how you can use all these things together. Yes, that's true. Now we have to go teach.
We're gonna teach some schema today. Woo. That sounds so fun. Its fun. Its, if you've [00:25:40] joined us today, its the most fun you can have most right. If you've joined us today and you know anything that we didn't talk about, please leave us a comment. We'd love to know what we might have missed. And we will see you next week.
11:00 AM. Pacific time in cyber punk geek marketing mixer. Okay. Bye bye. Everyone.[00:26:00]
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