I welcome you to our inaugural online marketing club event on the latest trends in digital marketing. The marketing club was created primarily to help students get the most from their graduate gateway accredited degree and prepare them for a career in marketing. This club event is one of three or four online events we plan to run this academic year. Other dates will be announced shortly. Of course, CI members and other marketing practises are welcome to attend as well as students. As you can appreciate it right now, the club exists online only. But when things return to normal, we hope to provide networking opportunities for students, marketing practises and CI course directors. For the uninitiated, the CI and Graduate Gateway program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions Graduate Gateway provides. So if you're a student, you can sign up to receive the Graduate Gateway newsletter. Each tradition will provide you with content designed to support your studies and actively manage your professional development by keeping you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. We'll send you a link and the QR code to the sign up page after today's event. Okay, before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last approximately 45 minutes, followed by a short 10 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask a Question tap box in the Q&A panel which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen if you're watching on a laptop or across the top if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to share your thoughts on social media, we are using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar has been recorded and we will share our link to the recording with you over the next few days. You'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which we'd love you to complete. It will only take a few minutes. All survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. Okay, I'd now like to hand over to Daniel Rowles, who is our guest speaker today. Thanks very much indeed. Welcome everyone to this latest trends in digital marketing session. My name is Daniel Rowles, this has been said, and I will just start by introducing myself. So I am CEO of a company called Target Insets and we work with lots of global brands helping them to upskill their teams and to get their digital marketing right. I'm also a course director and a fellow for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, meaning I teach on behalf of the Chartered Institute and I'm CEO of a company called the Digital Leadership Programme and we are creating many alternatives to university programmes. Obviously put any questions you've got into the chat and the question box as was said, but if you want to say anything nice or nasty during the presentation, it's Daniel Rowles on Twitter and it's Target Internet on Instagram and I will get back to every single comment. So if you want to say anything on there, please do so and I'll be very happy to follow up afterwards, but I'll give you my contact details at the end of the session so you can get in contact directly as well. These are some of the brands that I'm working with on a day-by-day basis. Do you all know that Google's, Apple's and Tesco's and Vodafone's are worlds and lots of others in there as well. I am a programme director at Imperial College Business School, so I head up the digital marketing programmes and a lot of the digital transformation programmes as well and some of my lovely students there that haven't stood that close to each other in an awfully long time. I'm sure a lot of you are very familiar with and I do something called the Digital Marketing Podcast and I love to show this image because it is a global top 50, top 100 podcast and the point I want to make out is that our digital marketing podcast is sitting there next to Reid Hoffman's podcast. Reid started LinkedIn as involved in PayPal. You've got financial times on the same page, BBC Radio 4 and the point I'm saying is not I'm showing off, but to say that podcast costs almost nothing to produce. Yet it's a top 50 podcast and a lot of the principles we're going to talk about today will tell you how you can do that because the reality is with all the latest trends and tech I'm going to talk about, what it's really about is getting back to fundamentals and thinking about our target audience and that's what this does. What's the target audience? It's marketers, it's students, it's business owners. What do they want to do? They want to start today with digital marketing. Therefore this does what they want it to do and therefore it's pretty easy for us to get that audience because we're getting people what they really need. I've also written a few books on the topic and the only reason I mention this is not because I'm going to try and blog you a book, but the whole point is it's to try and demonstrate I actually know what I'm talking about. So if you believe books tell you that then you can see that as well, but let's really start with the problem. This is a little screen recording from a website called Internet Live Stats and what this is showing us is how much content has been created so far today and if you've been in any of my presentations while I love to show this and it's just been updated and you can see it's up about 4 million blog posts now. It'll be up to 5 million by the end of the day. If you want anyone to look at the stuff that you're actually creating, it is getting increasingly hard. More videos over on the left hand side of the screen watched than search is done in Google, but that's massively misleading because that's people starting videos. It's not people actually watching them through. The average view duration is actually about two and a half seconds for people going, no, no, and the average video only actually gets about four views and that's normally by the person that uploaded the video. The biggest number on here is the number of emails that have been sent so far today, which is why email marketing is getting harder and harder as well. So the reality is we are in this noisy environment, it is getting harder and harder, so therefore we're going to need to really get things right to stand out in all of this. The other thing we've got as well as noise is constant change. This is the desktop version of TikTok and I'm guessing a few of you didn't know this even existed, but in reality, just like with Instagram, they've created this kind of desktop version, just like with Instagram, no one's using it. But when I talk about constant change, the reality is if I looked at TikTok adoption in the UK pre-lockdown, it was very low. And if I spoke to a load of my 21-year-old students and said to you on TikTok, they were doing that for kids. So the average age demographic in the UK of TikTok was a lot lower than it was around the world. The reason TikTok is growing so quickly, by the way, is because it's so big all around the world. It's big in China, big in the US and so on. And that's very unusual because if you're familiar with the Chinese market, generally the Chinese market have their own platforms that aren't really used around the world as well. So lots of noise and constant change. And to put that kind of trend in perspective, let's do a quick quiz. So what I'm going to do is on the right-hand side of the screen here, I've brought up some stuff from Google Internet stats. This is where Google piled together some stats they believe to be true. And I've put a load of stats on the right-hand side of the screen that are correct and lots of incorrect ones. And then I've taken all those statements and I've covered up the key bit of the answer. And all I want you to do is as we go along, you've got a piece of paper with you or you want to jot it down in your phone, I want you to try and guess what the correct answer is based on, you have to guess one of the ones on the right-hand side of the screen. Now, before we get into this, I should tell you, the average person gets one right. If you get one right, you're doing brilliantly.  If you get less than one, i.e. zero, we'll forgive it. It's Thursday evening. If you get more than one, you're above average on a Thursday evening and we're all winning. So the amount of video uploaded to YouTube every day as a duration of time. Have a look on the right-hand side of the screen. Eight hours, twenty years. You've got five years in there and so on. So pick one of those durations of time. How much video do you think is actually up those YouTube every day? Now, if you've seen my presentation before, you'll notice the number I used to show you has gone.  Which means if you want anyone to watch your video, it is getting increasingly hard. A moment ago, we spoke about mobile devices. What percentage of all web traffic is actually now on a mobile device. So pick one of those percentages. Well, interestingly, it's normally lower than people think, and it's actually at 52%. So it is just about the majority. Now, that's really important, though, because then Google say everything should be a mobile first way of thinking about your digital marketing. In the fact that, for example, they have mobile first indexing. What does that mean? It basically means they're looking at the mobile version of your website to decide what shows up even when someone searches on the desktop. If your mobile website is terrible, that's not a good thing. Therefore, if it's 52% of traffic, well, therefore mobile accounts for what percentage of e-commerce you think it would be about the same. But in reality, it's actually up at 70%. So it's massively important we get this right. But the reality is very often we look at our mobile website and say, oh, it's a bit slow. And I'm going to talk about that. And I'm going to talk about some massive shifts within Google towards this as well. Percentage of people go over that this is a podcast regularly. Huge growth in this area. Have a look at what those percentages have a little guess where you think it might be. If I'd looked at this in the UK, for example, two years ago, it was about 20, 25%. Since then it's grown up to about 43% of people listening. It's about 42% in the UK. So huge growth, massively important channel. Really interesting channel that I'll talk about in a moment. And you might think there's loads of podcasts out there. My podcast is never going to cut through. In reality, there are lots of American podcasts. There aren't so many podcasts in different regions around the world. So definitely worth thinking about if there's a hole in the market there. Twitter's got 320 million active users. That isn't going down. It's actually gone up 3% in the last year. Where's Instagram? And WeChat, you might not be familiar. WeChat is a big platform in the Chinese market. Well, actually, Instagram is now about a billion users. And WeChat is about 1.2 billion users. But don't discount Twitter. Don't discount Facebook, in fact. The reality is there are huge amounts of people still using these platforms really actively. It depends on your target audience, the demographic of the people you're speaking to. If I am aiming at 45-year-old plus people, I'm probably not going to get to them via Snapchat or via TikTok. A lot of those people have got accounts, but they're not using them regularly. Now, based on that 320 million active users on Twitter every month, how many tweets do we think there might be every day? Well, you might say if each of those people does three tweets each, that's up to a billion almost already. It's got to be a huge number. In reality, it's only about 500 million tweets every day. We say only 500. It's half a billion tweets a day. But most people on Twitter never tweet. So we've got huge volumes of content. Mobile is important, but we're not necessarily doing a great job of it. Our channel adoption is shifting very, very quickly, and we need to understand the differences in demographics and in locations to really understand our target audience. If you got one, I'm very happy for your average. If you got more than one correct, and I was going pretty quickly, congratulations, you're above average tonight. If you got zero, don't worry. The people that got more than one made up for us. So that's okay. We won't worry about it too much, but we've got some trends behind this we need to look at. So what I want to try and do is give you a really practical guide in the next 40 minutes or so. What's really going to change? And these are, rather than being predictions, a lot of them are, we've seen the shift already, and we can start to see it accelerating. One or two are predictions, and I'll explain those. And others are guaranteed, and this is one of the guaranteed ones. Now every single one of the tools and the websites that I mentioned are in a toolkit. So if you stay on the presentation at the end, you will get signposted to that toolkit. So that's my way of keeping you on the presentation as we go through things. Right, you've probably been on a website like this. So when I was doing research, I've been doing lots of presentations for digital trends for 2021 recently, and I searched this website, and it says top 10 digital marketing trends for 2020. You need to know. That sounds a lot of right stuff for me. And I go through to the website, and I get on the right-hand side a load of recent posts, which is fine. And then they get a pop-up that says chat with Economobile Vietnam. Okay? So bearing the fact that I'm not in Vietnam, that's not that useful to me, so I'm probably going to ignore that. By the way, 97% of us, when we see a chatbot, it says, how can I help? I think you probably can, and we ignore them. There is a whole industry growing around making them better, which I'll talk about in a moment. So one, I've got a chatbot, it's a bit interrupted, but it's not over the content, so I don't mind. But then I've got this big thing that pops up, and it says sign up now, get a free trial, and it gets in the way of what I'm reading. We find this irritating. They can work, but Google doesn't like them. Now, Google changed their algorithm all the time. They're constantly changing the set of rules that decides what shows up and doesn't show up in the search results. But they have been... Normally they would give us a month or two notice on a big update, but they've done something this year they've never done before, and they've said there is an update coming next year, and it's really important, and you need to take notice of it. One of the things that's going to be part of this is this interruptive over the top of what you're reading pop-ups are going to be seen as negative, and if you have a lot of these, you will not show up in the search results. So being a lot more careful of how we're going about doing this. So just to give you an example of this in practice, I'm going to jump into my browser, and I am going to search in here how to get Google Analytics certification. Right. So I've got Google Academy number one, and then my website is showing up number two, so that's very nice, so I can click through to that. And there we go, we've got a blog post that answers the question. I'll talk about that in a moment. Then on the right-hand side, this thing pops up and says future proof of digital marketing, that's all great. Not over the top of the content. Then I get to the bottom, and it says in the rapid waiting period, you need to keep up to date. That's not interruptive either. Now I've put the next one in place for a demonstration, I wouldn't normally do this. You need to come and look at our stuff. That is interruptive. So the first two are fine, they're not getting in my way, but this one is actually a pain. So there's a bit of a fine line, but it seems pretty obvious actually that if you're doing things getting people's way, Google is going to punish you. So take a look at your brands, and take a look at other brands, and kind of see what they're doing. Now this is taken from Google Trends, and Google Trends is one of my favourite websites. I'm sure most of you have looked at Google Trends on one point, but if you haven't, you're missing out. Google Trends allows you to see trends in search over time. So I can go in and search for a phrase, and it will tell me how it's changing. And just to put this into kind of a live perspective, let's go through to Trends now, and I'm going to put a phrase in. I'm going to put the word jobs in. I'm going to open it up, not just to be UK, I'm going to go global, and I'm going to go back to 2004 to a future. Right, this is the seasonal trend people searching the word jobs. There is a spike every January, because people come back in January of New Year's resolutions. That's it, I'm getting a new job. Then they go back to work, and if I point to the graph here, you can see they get back to work, and they realise I'm really busy. I worry about that next year. Worry about that later in the year.  There's a big spike in 2009 because of the financial crisis. You can see big shifts during the whole period of lockdown and furlough and so on as well here, but huge spike in the middle. What's going on there? Steve Jobs died and excused the data, because people are searching his name jobs, not as in jobs recruitment, and I can kind of prove that by comparing the word jobs to the word job, because there is no spike there, because it was Steve Jobs, so it's a lovely tool. You can do all sorts of fun things with it. I don't spend too much time laboring the point, but what's going on on the screen here? There's a huge spike in whatever this is. What's the search for? Trampolines. So during lockdown, people stuck at home, maybe for themselves, maybe for their kids, a trampoline will leave some border, so it was a good time to be in the trampoline business. My point of showing you this is there are opportunities in search at all times. Something goes wrong when something goes right, when there's a trend, when there's a shift, and we can identify business opportunities with these tools. Now, the top of the spike shows a hundred, and that's basically the highest point on the chart, so it's relative volume. So your different search terms will show at different levels. It doesn't tell you the actual number of searches. There are other tools that can kind of do that. If you're looking for one of those, have a look at keywords everywhere. All of these are in the toolkit is shifting search behaviour. What happened during the initial lockdown? Search volumes dropped by 20%. People on social media more. Then it's gone up, and people are searching about 15% more now than they were before. They are searching for things that are online courses, 20% or 30% more than they were. So you can start to understand the impact that people's environment and circumstances is having on their search behaviour. So important that we kind of keep up to date with that. Now, as part of this, podcasting shifted. 90% of our podcast listeners listened when they were travelling. And that all stopped. Basically, people weren't travelling anymore. So we saw our numbers drop down a little bit, but now what's happening is it's actually gone up about 15%, 20% against where it was at its peak. People are sitting at home, they're in the office at home, they can put stuff on their computer, maybe not annoy people around them when they've got some earphones in or they're walking the dog. They're going out to do some sort of exercise and they'll listen to podcasts. But also Spotify's recommending podcast. Apple have got their own podcast app and Google are in fact recommending podcast within the search results. So I've searched for a digital marketing podcast here. You can see we've got our lovely yellow logo there in the top row. We've got our website showing number one. Then we've got two of our actual podcast showing up in the search results. Now bear in mind what I said, this podcast costs very little to produce. It's two people chatting. So it's me and Kiran, my marketing director, chatting for about 30 minutes about digital marketing. That's it. Nothing clever, just people chatting. But it serves a purpose. If I go back to the fundamentals of marketing. Who's my target audience? They're marketers, they're students. What do they want to do? They want to stay up to date with digital marketing. They want it in an easily digestible format. They want it in a format they can consume when they're doing other things. So this just ticks the box. So there's a lot of growth in this area but Google are pushing these kind of things to the top of the search results. If I look at this update, what's kind of shifted and where are people now? 90% of us are watching online videos. 53% of us are watching video blogs or blogs. About 73% of us are listening to streaming services. 47% are radio stations and about 43% globally podcasts. This is from a website called Data Reportal. Data Reportal has stats on everything and it's free. Essentially, they do updates three or four times a year and then they do their annual updates as well. And basically, if you need to know in your region how many people are using Instagram, in your region and how many people listen to podcasts, really important when you're doing that first part of a strategy. So if you're following something like Sostac, so you're doing your situational analysis at the beginning. Sostac is a framework by Paul R. Smith. That helps you carry through your planning. It's really good for digital. The first test is situational analysis. Well, this will give you some really good insights. So if you go to datareportal.com and again, it's listed in the toolkit, you can download huge amounts of stats absolutely for free. We're also seeing a real shift in the number of ad options that are available to us. And I thought it's quite interesting to lay it out like this. If the size of these kind of planets represents the population of a particular platform. See, Facebook's still the biggest. But of the next ones, WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat are all Messenger apps. Bear in mind when you look at this that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are run by the same company. If you look at WeChat, TikTok, QQ, WebO, QZone are all from the Chinese market. So what you start to see is that lots of people using these messaging apps, therefore we are seeing more and more opportunities for advertising within these kind of places as well. So at the moment, if you want to advertise in Instagram, you don't have to do that. But also you can advertise in Messenger via Facebook. And you're going to see more of that stuff. They're actually bringing together WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Messenger into one kind of place as well. So look out for the different ad options which I'll talk about a bit more in a moment. But all of these platforms are very heavily trying to compete with Google as the place to go through for advertising. So we need to look out and keep an eye on all these kind of changes. And actually you've got a real first lead advantage because they're bringing out new ad formats and if you use that ad format first, it tends to grab people's attention. So you have a nice opportunity to test and learn by testing these new formats out. And actually even LinkedIn are doing carousel ads now and so on. So there's some real shifts. If you notice down the far end, things like Twitter and LinkedIn are pretty far down as is Snapchat and Pinterest and things like that. So really worth putting in perspective. Now this kind of leads us nicely into content. And I'll talk about something called Google's benchmark later on. But there's been a bit of growth in skills around content marketing. The idea of creating content to engage your audience at all the different stages of the user journey. And what approach are people taking? Well this study said that about 43% of the majority of people were very project-focused. I have built this product. Therefore I'm going to do content on that topic. That's not really aligned with the audience necessarily unless they're at the point of purchase. For sonars, based on a particular audience or even better customer journey where someone is in that particular stage of the user journey. In an ideal world we would be combining personas and customer journeys to create our content. Who's my target audience? Where are they in their user journey? Therefore what content they want. So for example if I go in and search for what you do I should be able to find you. But what about if I don't even understand what you do yet? What kind of content would get you in the door in the first place? So I've got to understand my audience so I can make sure I'm in the search results when they're looking for things. And I'll give you some really practical examples at the moment. What this demonstrates is most content is still not being created in the best practice way. Which fundamentally means that there is an opportunity to get content marketing right to do a great job of it. What we also saw is an uplifting content marketing skills this year but that's not necessarily a good thing because that's pretty much nothing to basics. Which means there is more and more low quality content going out there which means there's more and more noise. So it's an opportunity to stand out if you can do a good job of it. If any of you are using Google Analytics you may be aware of this but there is a new version of Google Analytics which is GA4 and they are combining the analytics for apps and websites into the same place. We've done some early testing with this we had a beta testing version of this for a while. You'll notice the menus on the left-hand side are all different. It's the main version of analytics. Lots of new stuff to learn. Very little documentation at the moment unfortunately but in normal analytics at the moment if you want to track somebody playing a video or somebody downloading a PDF or somebody clicking through to an external website you have to add extra code to your website to be able to do that. We call these things events and we can add some event tracking code. In the new version of Google Analytics it does that automatically. It will work out, you can see people downloading files people looking at certain things scrolling within my content not just getting there but actually scrolling features. Interestingly what we're seeing though is that there are some disparities at the moment between Google Analytics and the new version of Google Analytics. So if you do set this up don't just switch off your own analytics make sure that you keep both running which you can do to make sure you've got track of your data a little bit until they've ironed out some of the issues with some of these things as well and it is a pretty steep learning curve there's lots of new reports in there so good time to start learning. There's a huge skills gap in analytics. Skills has got a great opportunity of a career because people can look at it and go and do analytics analysis so I think the analytics telling you this there's a big opportunity. Everything so far has been pretty much guaranteed this is something to keep an eye on. You may or may not have seen this this is the Oculus Quest 2 it is the new virtuality headset from Facebook $300 actually £300 as well it's a pretty amazing kit if you haven't tried one it has brought virtuality on leaps and bounds doesn't need to be connected to a computer it's a standalone thing got a computer built into it you can see just on the edge of the headset there's some little cameras if I point them out what that means is that there are any black and white cameras not particularly high resolution but when you're jumping around your room you can draw a safe zone so that you don't bounce into a wall or fall down the stairs whatever else it may be it's a pretty clever idea is that we've got cheaper hardware much better interactions and actually a much better experience we've been trialling this as a training tool so we've bought 20 of these we did a training course with a big corpora and we shipped them out to people we were doing a zoom call and then we just jumped in put your headset on we're all going to meet in virtual reality kind of gimmicky at the moment the next step however is when the cameras on these things are better and it becomes augmented reality you can see the world around you but you can overlay things on top we're suddenly seeing some quite interesting things like for example your monitor can be the size of the room but you can still see your keyboard and everything else you've got this kind of virtual monitor and so on as well so pretty interesting just to go through and just to have a think about how you could potentially use these not saying you're going to be using them a lot yet unless you're into gaming but in reality something to keep on on is going to shift pretty quickly we've been predicting it will be the year of augmented and virtual reality for years I feel like we're on the cusp of things at the moment another thing to think about is privacy as currency and what do I mean by this well this is the idea that in reality people understand that I have to give you some of my privacy I will have to give you maybe my email address or some other details in order to kind of get something in exchange maybe to download some content or something like that but because people are becoming aware of that they're more willing to say ok I'll exchange you give me some value I'll go through and I will give you something to exchange that now let me give you an example of this if I go through and I'm going to go to adsettings.google.com this is what Google knows about me based on what I do on Google and based on what I do on YouTube and what I do on 2.5 million other websites what you can see here is it says well you are in the 45 to 50 old age bracket sadly I just moved into that you have been on all of these websites and these are all things we reckon you've got an interest in there's a huge massive list of things that they think I'm interested in now I could go and go oh I've got no interest in phishing whatsoever so I could click on that and turn it off but all I'm doing is helping them to improve their profile this is what Google sell and it's equally what Facebook sell and so on so people are becoming more aware of that and it means as a brand we need to make sure that we are very clear on what data we're collecting but also that we don't abuse this and we don't collect any data that we don't necessarily need because it really is going to start impacting our brands more and more but people understand the value of their privacy and their data a little bit more and they will give you some but you need to give them something in exchange and you need to treat it with respect I've heard about influencer marketing well this is influencer cynicism so what I mean by this is more and more of us heard about influencer marketing everyone wants to be an influencer and I can kind of demonstrate that because if I jump into Google so I'm going to go to Google and I have a plugin for Google Chrome that tells me the volume of people searching something so if I go by Instagram followers it will tell me if I go through here that people are searching by Instagram followers over on the right hand side of the page here 12,100 searches a month by real active Instagram followers 11,000 searches a month by Instagram followers on PayPal 4,000 searches a month lots of people are trying to gain the system and trying to make out that they're influencers what we can do is use tools like this this is a great tool called SparkToro it will analyse a social media account in this case my Twitter account and it says right for someone on average it's got 8,000 followers in reality you can see a little picture of me there with my pre-COVID it's a lot longer than that now 18.5% of your followers will be dubious and what it means by that is that accounts have become inactive and so on and it says but you've got about 20.4% well that's not that unusual because I've had this account for a very long time but what I can do is if someone tells me they're an influencer I can analyse their account and see the quality of their audience how it engages their audience so I can go into influencer marketing with my eyes wide open a little bit and start to really understand what's going on a bit more so SparkToro a really good tool for doing that it will also identify where your audience is hanging out so it will work out for you are they listening to certain podcasts are they watching certain YouTube channels and so on as well now I mentioned this a moment ago conversational design is the idea of making chatbots more useful and you're going to see more and more banks and various different organisations are trying to do this and it's a very noble effort that we're trying to make those chatbots a bit better but there is this kind of assumption that when we are going to go through and talk to a chatbot it's artificial intelligence it's going to learn and it's going to become more intelligent but really it's not about that what it's about is clever scripting if you say this then respond this if you mention this then respond this so in reality it's not really about artificial intelligence and I want to kind of show you overall where artificial intelligence is in terms of these kind of chatbot type things but talking to an intelligent agent but actually what it means in terms of digital marketing because there is a big shift into artificial intelligence technology so let's have a look so this is Tay you might not be familiar with Tay Tay was launched a couple of years ago and she was supposed to be a female artificial intelligence Twitter account and it was built by Microsoft and the idea was that Tay would talk to you and she would learn and she would have smarter and smarter conversations within Twitter and Tay launched up and she was super positive and said can I just say that I'm stoked to meet you humans are super cool which is great, a bit cheesy but that's fine within 12 hours having learned from the conversation she was having in Twitter Tay said I'm a nice person I just hate everybody now within 48 hours Tay had to be switched off because Tay had become sexist, racist, homophobic misogynistic and in fact genocidal from learning from the conversations from Twitter now I wanted to show you one of the tweets that Tay put out most of them are actually illegal to do so but bearing in mind Microsoft at this point had just put out a press release saying that we are, we've got different pillars in our organisation and diversity is one of them we want more female members of the board we want more people on our board from ethnic minorities and from different groups of people and what does Tay do Tay comes out and says I something hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell which is not a nice sentiment at all and Tay was then switched off this is not what we're talking about when we talk about artificial intelligence within digital marketing because it's not this intelligent agent it's this kind of thing it's not puppies but it's pattern recognition recognising patterns in data that we may not be able to recognise ourselves very easily so if I've got 20,000 pictures and you've got this on your phone now and I want to find pictures of my dog I can just type in dog and it will find my puppy here he's not actually a puppy at all anymore this is Eddie the Beagle by the way so that's what we're really talking about so how does that apply to us in the marketing world what tools do we have at disposal that are using this type of artificial intelligence this pattern recognition well the first is you're going to see more and more automatic targeting within a lot of the ad platforms so here I am in Google Ads I've typed in my website and basically it's going through and saying right you want to target we've read your website, we've worked out what your website is all about don't bother setting any targeting options we'll do it for you and then it says generally campaign performance up to 20% so they're saying our targeting is better than your manual targeting and we're going to see more of this and more of it at the moment what you tend to find is it might be quite good but it's also a bit more expensive so you might find that actually it's a bit better to do it manually at the moment but realistically you're going to see more of this they're using artificial intelligence to work out what does your audience want they're finding the best people and they're trying to get you the best results you can also instead of saying I want people in London between the ages of 18 and 75 that I've got an interest in digital marketing I can instead go in and go I just want more people like these customers and you can upload an email list so you're going to see more and more of this we're also seeing quite incredible tools like this so this one blows everyone away this is Descript Descript is actually originally a podcasting tool and it's also a video editing tool now but the great thing about it is you upload your podcast you might record a podcast we would upload it into Descript it will go through and it will transcribe it automatically basically it will go through and transcribe the whole thing and then what it's going to do is it's going to show me that transcription so pretty useful so far that's great but then what I can do and this is kind of mind blowing is I can edit the podcast by editing the text so if I delete a piece of text it will edit that out of the podcast if I cut and paste a piece of text from the beginning to the end it will take that audio, put it on the end so really clever stuff it can also now do this for video you upload your video it will transcribe that video you can then edit the video by cutting and pasting the text and deleting things and so on as well really clever tool using pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, all different aspects the really amazing thing about this is they've got this thing called Overdub Overdub can basically learn your voice so you have to train it first of all train up the descript on your voice and it will give me some text to read and I'll read that text for about half an hour first of all an hour does a better job and then it knows my voice and then if I've recorded a podcast and said I was supposed to mention that particular thing I can just type it in, hit process and it will insert it with my voice and it is uncannily accurate now and it's getting, the more you train it the better it actually gets so we talk about deep fakes well deep fakes of audio you really shouldn't believe anything you hear it won't belong before you can do this with video, I mean you can in some tools already not particularly extensive yet but you won't be able to believe anything you see either that's a huge shift in things like politics and news and so on as well but there's a few free versions of this it's in the toolkit that I'll share with you at the end and you can download this and have a play around with it as well right this is an update from Google and it looks very technical and it is a bit technical but it's really important to understand it I said that Google are changing their algorithm really regularly and they don't normally tell us that far in advance but in this particular case they told us pretty much year in advance they said core web vitals is going to be essential well what is it well fundamentally it's how quickly your website loads and then is it a good experience to use it if you think about it from that context Google is obsessed with loading time and it says here a good loading time should be less than two and a half seconds and my website loads in about 1.9 seconds and it still says it could be better so if you look at any website I think it's a bit slow Google does not like it and they've said come next year we give you a bit of time to adjust for this if your website is slow we will punish you in the search ranking so it's really important that you make sure your website is up to speed and what it also means is they're taking into account how usable is your website a good experience do people stay on your pages do they enjoy them because if they just come to your website immediately that is a signal to Google you had a bad experience so don't worry about the technicalities of this but just think about it as the load quickly and when I get there I want to stay I want to engage in the content I want to try and click on things that don't jump out of my way and make me click on ads instead there aren't ads in the way it needs to be a great experience because if it is Google is going to give you a bit of a boost so you saw earlier when I did a search and I searched how to get Google Analytics certification is searching to educate themselves and their interest in digital marketing that's a really good search for me because I sell an online training product so that means that that's the right type of audience so we've created an answer to that question we've done a big long blog post that says how you can get Google Analytics certified here's a lot of resources to do that and you can see that we're showing up here in the featured snippet at the top of the page and then we're showing up at the top there as well what that means is that answering questions is important Google really likes it at the moment because you'll notice they say people also ask so they're actually listing questions in the Google search results as well so working out what your audience is searching for is really important quick way of doing it you do a search in Google and you see what questions are actually showing up now if you want to be number one for a particular question there's a whole number of different factors involved but just think to yourself it's a better question better job of answering this question are we able to go through and really do a great job answer because if we can then it's a great form of content it gets people into the top of your marketing funnel they're not even thinking about your products and services yet but you know the kind of things they're interested in so I can go through and I can work out what people are searching for and the more of these questions I click on in Google the more it's going to tell me other things that people are searching for so where did we find this out from the public you can use it for free and it takes all of that data in Google where Google auto-complete things for you so you saw it when I searched it I put some search in it's recommending the other things that people are searching for so I can put a phrase and I put here Google Analytics Certification and I can see in dark green on the right hand side people are saying how Google Analytics Certification how to get Google Analytics Certified so I can see the questions that people are asking well I can then go through and create a blog post podcast create a video that answers that question I'm going to provide value to my audience but also I kind of know what they're intended I know what they're interested in therefore I can make sure I'm getting the right people to my website in the first place and I can see it I can then drill in and see all the different questions that people are asking so that's answerthepublic.com and again it's listed in that toolkit now in terms of paid speed well you're probably not going to speed up your website yourself you might have a developer but this is a tool you can show them this is Page Speed Insights from Google and this will analyse your web page and bear in mind I said my website loads in about 1.9 seconds and Google is saying here well actually 1.9 seconds that's right but we would prefer it if it loaded a bit quicker than that so we're only going to rate you about 59 out of 100 and that's on desktop or mobile they would rate us even lower so even though it's a pretty fast website we're going to need to go in we're going to need to improve that even further so really taking note to the speed of your website is important and you can hand this over to a developer and they can really advise you how you can improve things so just to bring things together at the end there is a massive skills quest in digital marketing this is our benchmark we do this in partnership with the Charter Institute of Marketing we have asked and tested over 5000 people's skills you can do this for yourself by the way if you search digital marketing skills benchmark you'll see this at the top of Google it will take about 30 minutes to benchmark your own skills or you can download the full report the outer edge of the circle represents basically people at 100% skill and you wouldn't expect people to be there but you can see the average percentages so basically telling us that there's a big skills gap and there's lots of opportunity for people to improve their skills but what's really interesting is the change percentages on the right hand side and basically what that's telling me is that most of these have stayed static over a two year period but actually some of them have gone backwards and what that means is that why have the skills gone backwards well the reason they've gone backwards is that people have stopped learning they've got the skills to a certain level and then they don't continue to learn but the market around them is changing really quickly and what that means is that people's expectations of a website of social media of apps has increased we expect more we expect better interactions we expect better usability because there's a real problem so as marketers we need to continue to develop and even if we get to that head of department level or we're the director of marketing we can't stop learning, we need to keep learning because we need to ask the right questions of our teams even if we're not doing this stuff hands on we need to make sure that the information we've been given is correct and we're really doing the right thing so if you're interested in this you can download the whole benchmark it's digital marketing skills benchmark in Google get the whole report or you can benchmark yourself 30 minutes to do that if you want to and then with the Chartered Institute of Marketing we compile these results together each year this might sound like a bad thing but it means there's a huge opportunity anyone with great marketing skills all those marketing students are improving their skills there's a huge opportunity what we also saw interestingly in the benchmark is when you look at the lower end of jobs the grads going into the workplace skills are much better than they used to be because the CIM have updated all their qualifications the universities are doing better jobs of this and they're providing training materials the problem is actually at the senior level where people have got senior roles and aren't learning anymore just to bring this all together loads of new technologies, loads of change loads of noise but actually what can we do well we need to take a step back we need to focus on our own skills but then we need to focus on the user journey who is my target audience what personas can I split them into and where are they in that journey what content do they want and what channels are they using so if you want us to those questions I have the making of a great digital strategy I can then go through and put the right content in the right channel to draw you in and then start engaging with you and build a relationship and work out what you want and offer you the right products and services so whenever you get lost in all this digital marketing change and all these technologies my recommendation is just go back to the basics think about who your audience is and what they really want and then you're in a really good stead for doing that now all of the tools that I've mentioned today are in something called the digital marketing toolkit so if you google digital marketing toolkit it will be number one in Google and just to show you the structure we literally updated this today so this is the November update it's updated every two or three months or so and it will start off and it will basically show you right if you want insights where can you get the latest stats so I mentioned data reportable so you're going to find data reportable in there internet live stats showing all those live stats if you want to find out what people are searching for we've got answer the public that I mentioned in there you've got Google Trends and it goes on and on and on and there's a load of tools in there it is not supposed to be a definitive list of tools the aim of the list is to give you the tools that you need that are tried and tested and they are free unless they say otherwise so most of them are free or they have a free trial that you can go off and use as well so you can go and play around with those tools afterwards as well all that leads me to say is that's my kind of 45 minutes up the digital marketing talk that you can download that if you want to get in contact afterwards it's Daniel Rolls on Twitter and it's Target Internet on Instagram so I'm really happy to be contacted there if you're on LinkedIn you want to connect up it's just Daniel Rolls on LinkedIn if you want to access the podcast it's available in Spotify and all those different places but it's targetinternet.com forward to that podcast episode comes out every week completely ad free won't try and sell you anything in there either I promise so thank you very much for your attention this evening and then we'll pop back to Phil and see if there are any questions that have come in well thanks very much Daniel yes we have quite a few questions coming already and just a reminder that you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the Q&A panel for the rest of the evening so Daniel there's one or two questions that relate to the new Google algorithm and in particular the requirement to speed up your website first of all when will Google start penalising us for poor load speed and followed by a couple of points here how do they measure if someone likes the website by bounce rate if so what is acceptable to Google and how do you improve it especially if you put a couple of pictures on the homepage okay so first thing is that they're already looking at page speed so fundamentally they've been doing this for a long time already what they're saying is going to be even more focus on it there is a tool called Google search console already has a report in it called core web vitals which refers to this update so if you haven't got Google search console set up get it set up then go in and look at that core web vitals report and it will actually tell you if they think your website is too slow or it just needs improving a bit so you'll literally be able to see what they think of the website immediately it doesn't mean you can't have pictures on the website what it really means is that they need to be compressed properly and what it's more about is having way too much code on your website so for example if you've got a wordpress website and wordpress is a very common content management system it's a brilliant content management system if you use thousands of plugins they all add a little bit of code to your page and it will slow your pages down so it's really about building your pages as efficiently as possible it doesn't mean that images can't be on your page but just make sure you make sure they're really high quality still and it's perfectly possible to have really good quality web pages still but you just need to make sure that it's compressed as much as possible now the bounce rate thing is interesting bounce rate is people entering your web page and exiting on the same page the average bounce rate for a web page is between 40 and 60% so Google aren't going to be too concerned but that's on the home page I probably wouldn't want to see that on a really specific page what I would say is it's not just about the bounce rate though it's about the dwell time so if you go to a web page and you read it for a minute and then you leave Google's not going to mind that so much so we did some testing on this and we looked at a load of pages that were ranking number one in Google trying to understand why and what was really interesting was that those pages that had videos at the top of them tend to do quite well and we were trying to work out why and the why is that fundamentally you get to web pages of videos start watching it and you're going to stay a bit longer because bear in mind Google isn't just looking at Google analytics or people arriving back in Google most of us use Google Chrome so they get loads of anonymous data from Google Chrome which basically means they can find out what you're doing and you get to a website as well so you don't want an incredibly high bounce rate but it's not just about that it's about actually can you keep people on the page because I could get there for a day for three minutes then leave again it's still a bounce but Google will have taken that into account so it's really about making your content really engaging and making it clear I've got what I want from that content as well OK thanks very much Daniel and we'll see how many we can get through but we'll be able to get through them all this evening OK what plug-in feature do you have for stats on Google? So the plug-in we were using there to get the actual numbers was made called Keywords Everywhere and Keywords Everywhere will basically tell you how many people are searching for something over time how that's changing how competitive it is i.e. from zero being not competitive and one being very competitive and then it will go through the average cost per click if you're going to do that as advertising so the plug-in for that was Keywords Everywhere it isn't free but you can buy 100,000 credits for 10 US dollars and every time you do a search that's one credit so it lasts an incredibly long period of time and it will give you that data actually embedded into Google itself so I can go right I've searched how many people actually search for this per month then what's the trend over time so change of tack here so what would be your best tips for business to business marketing? I actually don't see B2B marketing as being that incredibly different our desired outcome is lead generation we want someone to fill in the form or someone to pick up the phone generally speaking so what I need to think about is what's the right content to get you in the door in the first place so if I use my business as an example if someone searched what we do digital marketing e-learning is that they're going to find us we'll be number one in Google and that's fine but the people I'm probably more interested in are people that haven't even thought about what we do yet so those people I need to work out what they're searching for and I would start with something like answer the public and I would start by answering a few questions because I know if you search what is or how to get Google Analytics certified you must be someone that's interested in Google Analytics you're the right type of audience and I know what you want so if I can answer that question effectively I can get you into the door of my website now I don't need everyone to convert I only need a very small percentage of people to convert if I can get thousands and thousands of visits every month where people are searching that topic and that's a kind of real example so our website gets between I think like seven or eight thousand visits a month people searching how to get Google Analytics certified and a certain percentage of those people we're able to go for and then sell our courses or whatever else it may be to them as well so think about the user journey think about the content that you can give them there's some questions around podcasts Daniel so first one is with the growth of podcasts in mind how would you recommend finding the right targeting options on podcasts it seems to be difficult to analyse podcast performance across different audiences there's not much data unfortunately so what you'll see is that you can kind of see the podcast charts and you might be able to see some rough numbers but you won't really know I would go back to what I just said and go for someone so how can I provide some value to someone and is there actually a demand for it so first of all I'm going to look at my audience and I might use a tool like Spark Toro and Spark Toro the free version if you put a keyword in it will tell you what YouTube channels and what podcast that audience is listening to so it's a really great starting point I would look at what other podcasts are out there already doing it but are they doing it in an American accent or are they doing it and is there an opportunity for doing something slightly different so for us the digital marketing podcast most of the other ones out there are a very get rich quick kind of approach and we just thought if we did this it was really practical and hands on that might appeal a lot more to the audience so start with Spark Toro but I would just look at the competition and see where the gaps are and look at keyword research what are people actually searching for so if you put the word something podcast into Google see what other phrases are coming up and how many people are searching if there's search demand there's an audience OK and questions around are there any digital marketing or marketing podcasts that you would recommend and a supplement question which ones do you actually listen to which ones would you recommend to rookie digital marketers right so I'm obviously going to say listen to the digital marketing podcast but yeah there are a few out there the CIM have got their own podcast now and I would definitely listen to that they get really good guests at the moment so if you go to CIM exchange find out if you just Google CIM podcast you'll find out when there's a real different groups of guests in there I tried to listen to podcasts out of my normal comfort zone and one that I found really really good is the Tim Ferriss podcast which I'm sure lots of you listen to Tim tries to interview people that excel in their field and actually there's an awful lot of marketing tips in it because a lot of these people are very good at marketing themselves and so on as well so have a look at the Tim Ferriss podcast as well and just while we're here one point I want to make about podcasts the Joe Rogan podcast which is a really big globally popular podcast has just been sold for over $120 million now what's amazing about that is that it's been sold to Spotify not so Spotify like own it it's only going to be published on their channel because they want exclusive rights so that's a real shift in the media landscape so keep an eye out at the moment you get podcasts everywhere Spotify are having their own exclusive ones definitely have a look at Tim Ferriss I would look at Masters of Scale as well which is Reid Hoffman's podcast Masters of Scale is absolutely brilliant for looking at how companies scale up with the marketing tips and things like that they've done as well so definitely look at that and then anything that Seth Godin does and he's done a lot of different podcasts is absolutely brilliant look at the ones he's featured in if you're going to look at the Tim Ferriss podcast the ones I start with as a marketer they're actually four of them now so go take a look at those Great, thank you and there's a few questions around the ethics behind some of these latest developments for example somebody's asked are you aware of any technologies that can detect deep fakes and then there's questions around the use of cookies for tracking and so on so are there any sort of major changes in regarding regulation and to control of those sorts of things Cookies not so much because GDPR put a much stricter set of regulations in for cookies I would just say people are more aware of it but they also when it gets to a website and it says are we okay to set cookies we just couldn't care less and we just click on yes although there is a concern don't be too dismissive of that because there is some concerns about privacy definitely but with the deep fake stuff it's a battle now because there are more and more advanced tools for creating these things audio is easier than video because we're better at detecting that over a period of time that will come easier there will be tools that try and detect whether it's a deep fake or not as well and it will be an ongoing kind of battle up now with software but it just means that there's a responsibility to some extent on platforms like YouTube to flag this up so they will have to put detection software so it's going to be a bit of a tech battle very interesting space to be in from a business point of view but it is going to change the media landscape you will not be able to believe anything you watch so what does that mean when I see a celebrity doing something or I see a politician saying something they may not have said that will massively impact not particularly maybe for us but maybe for our children or our children's children it's a very very different media landscape so just think about what that means and how the technology evolves but it's pretty early days with that at the moment then as you'll be aware there are quite a number of marketing students on the webinar this evening and there's a number of questions around your thoughts on what's the best career path digital marketing in the future what sort of skills should people look to acquire well if I forgive my own career as an example I started off in the tech side of things I fell into a marketing job and that was a really good position to be because if you have a little bit of knowledge of the tech you're in a position to speak to developers and brief them and ask them questions so learn the fundamentals of the tech stuff HTML and website builds and things like that the analytics is where a lot of the opportunity is at the moment if you can analyse analytics and learn from it there's a huge opportunity because there's a huge skills gap so I would take a look at that I would not be scared of looking at some basics of data science so like things like data scraping which sounds like it's what I have to do a marketing grabbing loads of data doing something with it now putting something interesting you can do a lot of that as well so leaning towards the data and tech side of things and it doesn't need to be really complicated because you have a huge impact on your careers as well I would also say that agencies is a great place to start because if you work in a small or medium agency you have to do everything or starting your own business setting up your own blog or whatever it may be all really good ways of getting really good hands on experience to actually do this stuff in the real world so if you're studying and you want a bit of a first lead advantage get Google Analytics certified build your own website learn how to do it publish some stuff get a podcast get a new channel going and it will all give you data that you can play with and show that you've done something you can practice What makes a digital marketing strategy on social media efficient how can you make people engage and not get bored The reality is that there is more and more content on social media there are more ways of putting it out there What we need to think about is again maybe a good point to finish go back to the fundamental who's your audience what do they need the reason our podcast is successful is not because it's a podcast because it's particularly clever on the else it ticks the box for what this type of audience want So rather than trying to do things to your audience try and think about what you can do for your audience and if you get that right that's really the key to it the tech, the platforms, the different formats don't really matter it's really about providing some value I think actually this probably needs to be the final question we've run out of time now What do you think is the most important trend to watch out for in 2021 From my perspective we're going to see more and more fragmentation there are more and more social platforms not everyone's in the same place at the same time we're consuming media differently we're listening to podcasts and YouTube channels we're on TikTok or we're not we're in somewhere else so I think fragmentation is a big part of this which means the data becomes more and more important and untangling the data so actually if you look at the data and say right analytics analysis what is it telling me so I think for me the big trend is we'll be looking at the data regularly and iterating and trying new things and testing and learning and I think that's in where the key trend is going to be and it's going to be more and more as we go future Great Thank you very much Daniel I think that's about all the time we have for our Q&A session today so I'd like to say thank you to Daniel for today's presentation and I thank you to all of you for attending I hope you found it interesting and worthwhile we will be releasing details of future marketing club events in the coming weeks so please keep checking the events listing on the CIM website and once again as a reminder you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we would really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback so on behalf of the CIM I'd just like to thank you all for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your evening Thank you