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TECHNOLOGY

The rise of AI in marketing technology brings ethical questions to the forefront. This article sheds light on how marketers are considering ethical principles when handling data.

HOW TO GENERATE BUZZ AT BIG EVENTS WITHOUT OFFICIAL SPONSORSHIP

This article contains 28 ‘attendee journey’ hacks and 2 real examples from Zendesk and Brex on how to generate buzz around your brand at big events. Zendesk created branded experiences instead of directly sponsoring events. It flew an army of drones to form a QR code near a show venue. Brex partnered with a strategic hotel to make its room keys look like Brex cards.

MARKETING STRATEGIES TO MAXIMIZE BLACK FRIDAY/CYBER MONDAY RESULTS

This guide breaks down strategies to use for marketing around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These include offering hourly deals, curating gift ideas, offering a free gift with purchase, extending sales, and making gift cards printable. Additionally, marketers should ensure the website and checkout are conversion-optimized to avoid lost sales.

UCSD LECTURE ON INFLUENCER MARKETING

A marketing professor at UCSD shares a lecture on influencer marketing via a LinkedIn carousel. It’s a step-by-step guide on how to approach influencers and build long-term relationships that drive growth.

PLANNING

YouTube has announced new analytics features that can help with video content planning. These include greater insight into subscribers, such as new subscriptions by video and cancellation reasons. Additionally, view counts can now be broken down into new vs. returning viewers, which helps you understand what acquires users best.

20 BOOKS EVERY CREATOR SHOULD READ

Whether you’re a new creator or seasoned veteran, this is a list of books that teach you how to build systems, create content, and make money online.

This guide walks through the appropriate marketing budget to meet your brand’s revenue goals. The process starts with setting a clear revenue or growth goal and calculating customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and funnel step conversion. With this data, you can work backwards from your goal to identify how much marketing spend is needed.

THE 5 BRASS BULLETS OF SUBSCRIPTION GROWTH

There are no ‘silver bullets’ for a subscription business, but one can grow by getting 5 core things right: paywall and pricing, initial purchase journey, ratio of short to long-term plans, payment processing, and churn appeasements. B2B subscription businesses are able to grow more quickly than B2C but might feel more pain when a single account churns.

19 COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID IN YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

Mistakes include reporting too many metrics to executives, promoting features instead of benefits, and using hard CTAs on top of the funnel.

THUMBNAILS THAT INCREASE VIEWS

12 ways you can create attention-grabbing thumbnails include using big numbers in the description, doing a before/after, and asking a question.

MOST UNPOPULAR PRODUCT MARKETING OPINION

An enlightening LinkedIn thread of the pain points of being a product marketer.

REDDIT FORCES PERSONALIZED ADS, STARTS X-LIKE USER PAYMENT PROGRAM

Reddit is removing the option for users to opt out of personalized ads based on their activity, sparking privacy concerns. Additionally, it launched the Contributor Program, enabling users to earn money based on their karma similar to X's ad revenue sharing program. This has raised concerns about encouraging lower-quality content.

MEDIUM HINTS AT A NASCENT COALITION TO BLOCK AI CRAWLERS

In a move against AI bots, web publishing platform Medium joined other media outlets in blocking GPTBot. It is also working to form a coalition with other platforms to address the challenges posed by AI crawlers.

HOW DUOLINGO USED GAMIFICATION TO IMPROVE NEXT-DAY RETENTION

Duolingo improved next-day retention from 47% to 55% by using challenges and other gamification features. The app packages accomplishments as a “challenge”, which is either a high-level goal (e.g. "Learn Vietnamese") or a smaller goal (e.g. "study Vietnamese 7 days in a row). Duolingo provides visual motivations to show daily progress and uses external reminders to drive users back to the app.

This is a case study on how Ryan Serhant used YouTube to scale his brokerage firm. It shares tactics on how to win clicks via eye-catching thumbnails and maximize retention within the first 30 seconds of a video and highlights the importance of having an intentional content mix.

CREATION PROCESS

TikTok’s new AI-powered “Creative Assistant” tool exists within its ad tools and guides marketers through the campaign creation process. It can show you top-performing ads in your niche and produce ad scripts. These options have been available in TikTok’s Creative Center for some time, but now they’re built into the app to streamline the process.

LITMUS: HOW TO CREATE & ADD AN ANIMATED GIF TO AN EMAIL

According to Litmus’ 2023 State of Email Design Report, 43% of marketers said there was an improvement in email performance when GIFs were used in their marketing emails. This guide provides GIF examples from brands, a list of considerations to think about when inserting GIFs into emails, and the steps in creating your own animated GIFs via Adobe Animate.

SALES

Merge, the G2 Leader for Unified APIs, started out with two founders encountering a huge problem. They decided to talk to 100 different companies to understand how prevalent the problem was before they reached any sort of solution. In doing this, they understood customer pain points intricately, which ultimately informed their messaging strategy and equipped them to grow through founder-led sales. This article contains more details about their journey to date.

THE MISALIGNMENT OF B2B MARKETING AND SALES

Marketing can only generate an effective pipeline if it targets the same buyers as sales. However, a recent analysis from LinkedIn that measured the targeting overlap between sales and marketing across 7,000 B2B companies found it to be only at 16%. In theory, this number should be 100%. In addition, the average overlap between brand and demand marketing is only 6%.

THE MAJORITY OF YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER RESEARCH SHOULD BE QUALITATIVE

You don’t need to achieve statistical significance for qualitative research. Instead, you merely need 12-13 respondents to achieve ‘saturation’ in your study.

HOW 404S IMPACT ORGANIC RANKINGS

404 errors are not a direct ranking signal, but they do have a negative impact if valuable backlinks are pointing to them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS OF FORBES TOP 50 CREATORS LIST

This post provides a quick summary of Forbes’ 2023 Top 50 Creators list—46% are women, 28% are people of color, and MrBeast is the reigning top creator.

DEVICES

Meta’s push on generative AI was ever so evident at its 2023 Connect conference. The company unveiled several new AI and VR tools, including an AI chat assistant available in different celebrity voices, new AI image editing tools on Instagram, generative AI stickers, and a new AI studio that allows businesses to create their own AI engagement systems to reflect their own branding.

PACKAGE

X may soon charge a different rate for users to remove ads from their main timeline entirely. The app currently generates around $12 USD per user per month based on ad exposure alone. This means an ad-free tier would likely be more expensive than the current $8 X Premium plan. 0.5% of X’s user base is currently paying to use the app.

9 ULTIMATE GROWTH HACKING STRATEGIES + EXAMPLES

Growth hacking involves quickly testing various marketing techniques to identify opportunities for rapid expansion. This article contains 9 strategies for growth hacking, including referral marketing, content marketing to convey product value, influencer outreach for brand awareness, and building pre-launch email lists.

UNIQUE VALUE

Most positioning exercises focus on the functional advantages of a particular product vs. the competition. The T-Shaped framework goes further. It expands the concept of advantages into 3 buckets: unique functional value, added convenience, and brand value. This post explains each element in more detail and provides examples of how all 3 together translate into a stronger strategy.

GROWTH EXPERIMENTS: A SIMPLE FRAMEWORK TO BUILD THEM

Conducting growth experiments without a clear structure and process can get messy. This guide covers a framework for planning, executing, and learning from growth experiments. A “Growth Hacking Process” Notion template is available.

SPOTIFY: INTRODUCING VOICE TRANSLATION FOR PODCASTERS

Spotify has started piloting Voice Translation for podcasts, a feature powered by AI that translates podcasters’ voices into Spanish, French, and German. It's aiming to expand access to more creators and languages in the near future.

IS YOUR INTERNATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGY A HOT MESS?

Companies see internationalization as an exciting growth initiative, only to receive a disappointing lack of impact from it. This is often due to a lack of adequate preparation and not fully understanding the new markets. This guide includes several best practices for international growth, including rethinking product-market fit in each new market, building a cross-functional team that owns multiple levers along the user journey, and starting with a small set of tier 1 markets before expanding further.

TOP 5 GAME-CHANGING INFLUENCER CAMPAIGNS

This article analyzes 5 great influencer campaigns from Toyota, McDonald’s, Hilton, Essence, and TIAA. It brings a detailed behind-the-scenes look into what made them successful, looks at key metrics, and shares best practices from the campaigns.

BEST PRACTICES FOR OUTSOURCING CONTENT WRITING

The Content Marketing Institute shares that 57% of the top content marketing performers rely on content outsourcing. However, 65% of B2B marketers struggle to find partners with adequate topical expertise. This guide covers platforms to source content partners from, best practices for onboarding, and how to provide feedback to ensure high quality of work is maintained.

26% OF THE TOP 100 WEBSITES ARE NOW BLOCKING GPTBOT

At least 26 of the top 100 most popular websites—and 242 of the top 1000—are now blocking OpenAI’s web crawler, including Stack Exchange, Pinterest, and Indeed.

PROS/CONS OF WHITELISTING

This post shares 5 different types of whitelisting for direct-to-consumer brands and provides the pros and cons of each option.

IMPACT OF META BLOCKING NEWS IN CANADA FOR 1+ MONTH

Meta’s usage numbers have not been impacted by the blocking of news in Canada. However, publishers are seeing a decline in referral traffic and revenue.

SOCIAL APPS CONTINUE TO FACE CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING SHOPPING

TikTok hasn’t yet been able to gain traction for its in-stream shops and sales promotions in Western markets. Despite promising growth in Asian countries, the app now faces challenges due to the Indonesian Government moving to ban the sale of goods on social media. If this trend continues, it could limit the ambitions of TikTok as well as Elon Musk’s “everything app”.

X IS WORST FOR DISINFORMATION, PER EU ANALYSIS

The European Union has criticized X for having the worst ratio of disinformation to legitimate content among mainstream social networks. This assessment was made during the testing phase of a new methodology aimed at combating disinformation. X has faced criticism for facilitating the spread of Kremlin propaganda and removing labels denoting state-affiliated media accounts, leading to a surge in propaganda. In the past, toxicity and harmful disinformation on X encouraged an advertiser exodus.

MACHINE

This guide includes 13 high-priority items to include on your brand’s use case or feature pages. The author used this structure to scale a SaaS from 100k users to 250k users within a year. The framework includes items such as breadcrumbs, an above-the-fold positioning statement, and an internal linking module to other resources/tools.

HOW TO ADD AWKWARD KEYWORDS TO YOUR SEO CONTENT

Sometimes you run into awkward keywords or phrases that may be challenging to integrate naturally into a sentence. This guide provides 6 tips on how to work with awkward keywords without negatively impacting the human readers’ experience and affecting SERP results.

AI EMAIL SUBJECT LINE GENERATOR

Vibetrace has implemented an email subject line generator into its website, powered by OpenAI. It evaluates the length of subject lines and provides suggestions for subject lines and preheaders. The more details you feed into it, the better the suggestions will be.

HOW TO FIND AND EVALUATE TIKTOK INFLUENCERS ON BUZZSUMO

Buzzsumo’s TikTok Influencer Search tool allows you to find accounts based on keywords in recent posts or their bio, follower count, like count, and more. This is valuable when seeking out potential influencer marketing opportunities. Additionally, BuzzSumo's Chrome Extension enables you to see stats for the TikTok account you’re viewing.

SURVEYMONKEY LAUNCHES NEW TOOL TO CREATE WEB FORMS

SurveyMonkey Forms allow users to create web forms using pre-built templates, customizable fields, and integrations with Zapier and Mailchimp. It also supports web embedding and workflow automation. Forms will be available in all paid SurveyMonkey plans at no extra charge and will also be offered as a standalone tool.

TEXT

This meal-kit subscription service decreased its drop-off rate by 18% by making its CTA button text specific to the trial offer. The team had noticed a drop-off rate of 49% at the final step of their paid traffic funnel where the user confirms their order. They changed the CTA from “Confirm order at a discount” to “Confirm trial box order,” which removed hesitations about getting locked into a fixed period or subscription. This ultimately reduced the drop-off rate to 40% and in turn reduced CAC.

UNINTENDED LESSONS FROM MASTERCLASS

This article discusses the challenges faced by MasterClass, an online learning platform. Even though MasterClass excels in marketing and content production, drawing in high-profile instructors and delivering engaging lessons, it is having trouble sustaining growth and lowering its high churn rate. Despite having a good product-market fit, it was not successfully transitioning from B2C to B2B.

HOW CODEACADEMY BOOSTED LTV WITH A SIMPLE PRICING TRICK

You can boost LTV with minimal effort by pricing your 12-month plan slightly more than your average LTV for monthly users.

HIGH-CONVERTING COPY IS SIMPLE, NOT EASY

5 visuals that’ll teach you more about copywriting than your college writing class ever did.

OPENAI GIVES CHATGPT A VOICE FOR VERBAL CONVERSATIONS

ChatGPT’s new voice feature will be powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate human-like voices from text using a few seconds of sampled speech. This opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. It is set to roll out to paying Plus and Enterprise users in the coming 2 weeks.

EXCLUSIVE TO X PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS

X plans to introduce audio and video calls to its platform. These features will reportedly only be available to X Premium subscribers. Users will be able to receive audio and video calls from Verified users, those they follow, or contacts in their address book.

GETTY IMAGES LAUNCHES AN AI-POWERED IMAGE GENERATOR

Getty Images launched Generative AI by Getty Images, a tool powered by Nvidia's AI model that can create images from text descriptions or prompts. Users will receive Getty's standard royalty-free license, which includes indemnification against copyright lawsuits. The tool has safeguards to prevent it from being used for disinformation or replicating the style of living artists. It also adds a watermark to identify AI-generated images.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY IN 4 STEPS

Powerful content builds brand awareness, creates demand, and closes deals. This guide contains 3 underutilized sources of content ideas, 4 key ingredients for excellent content, and tips for surfacing the right content at the right point in the customer’s journey.

HOW CONTENT AGGREGATORS CAN HELP YOUR BRAND

A content aggregator, such as Google News, funnels content into a platform and uses algorithms to decide where it should be distributed on other websites around the web. Brands can use these services to extend the reach of their content and engage with a broader audience. Marketers can also use these tools to compile outside content for research and idea creation purposes.