Building anticipation before a product or service launch significantly increases customer enjoyment and satisfaction. In one study, people who savored an upcoming experience remembered it as 9.6% more enjoyable. Watching related previews made customers enjoy content 8.6% more, and expectation-building increased video game enjoyment likelihood by 21%. The effect is weaker if quality is poor or if delays or unmet expectations create negative feelings.
RXBar launched a Google Chrome extension that filters out corporate jargon from social media as part of its “Proud Sponsor of No B.S.” campaign. The tool highlights and blocks phrases like “disruptor” and “move the needle,” reinforcing the brand's focus on authenticity. RXBar encourages users to submit more buzzwords to expand the extension's codebase. The effort follows other bold marketing moves, including a B.S. Blocker Truck in New York, as RXBar competes in an increasingly crowded protein snack market.
TikTok for Artists provides marketers with a centralized view of music-driven engagement, revealing what songs are gaining traction and who is interacting with them.
Instacart's latest campaign leverages '90s nostalgia and inflation-era pricing to boost summer sales, with ads styled after vintage commercials running across TV and digital platforms.
Delve ran 4 placements across 2 TLDR newsletters and brought in 66 leads, with a meaningful chunk from enterprise. The result: $1M in attributed pipeline and a 52x ROI.
Meta plans to automate ad creation and targeting with AI by the end of 2026. Brands will only need to provide a product image and budget, and Meta's AI will generate the ad content, suggest spend, and determine targeting across Facebook and Instagram. The platform will also offer real-time ad personalization based on factors like location.
Bluesky saw a sharp rise in adoption by news influencers after the 2024 election. The platform's growth is driven largely by left-leaning influencers, 69% of whom now have a Bluesky account, compared to just 15% of right-leaning ones. Despite Bluesky's rise, X remains dominant, with 82% of the influencers still using it and 83% of those posting there 4 or more days a week. In contrast, only 31% of Bluesky users posted that often in early 2025, and 48% posted irregularly or not at all. Most influencers on Bluesky also maintain an X account and few have left X entirely.
Lead generation should prioritize quality over quantity. For broad appeal, attract a wide group through multiple channels and incentives, such as charity runs that engage hundreds of millions of runners worldwide. For niche segments, use insider language to build a strong connection with a specific group, like campaigns aimed at dedicated running enthusiasts. For the most exclusive approach, avoid promotion altogether to create intrigue and status.
Product bundling groups related items at a discount to encourage larger purchases and reduce decision fatigue. Shopping cart and checkout suggestions surface add-ons when shoppers are already in buying mode. Threshold-based incentives, such as free gifts or shipping when spending reaches a certain amount, drive higher-value orders.
Instagram is expanding its comment filtering tools to creators with over 100K followers. These tools let users sort comments by top engagement, newest first, or commenter follower count. Creators can also filter to show comments only from people they follow, verified users, or subscribers. These features help large creators focus on key interactions and boost engagement.
B2B buyers purposefully integrate influencer content into every major step of the purchasing journey. LinkedIn's recent guide outlines that credibility and subject-matter expertise are more effective in converting leads than broad appeal in B2B creator partnerships. It also highlights that video leads all other formats in engagement and performance.
Threads now has over 350M monthly active users and is available to all advertisers, but most brands remain in early testing phases. Media buyers see it less as a place to drive conversions and more as a platform to explore brand voice and tone through organic posts. Limited standalone ad options and uncertainty around platform strategy are keeping investment conservative for now.
Strong leadership requires fostering a culture where failure is embraced as a path to learning, not just tolerated. Over 60% of experiments in a typical B2B SaaS setting fail, so leaders must set clear, early expectations that define success by learning, not just positive outcomes. To keep morale high, leaders should balance big, risky goals with achievable wins using a 70-20-10 mix of safe bets, incremental gains, and moonshots. Risk conversations must be ongoing, and leaders need to model vulnerability and failure openly to earn trust. Organizing learnings in accessible, well-maintained repositories ensures insights from failures are retained and used.
Google has repeatedly used privacy as a pretext to restrict competitors' access to valuable user data while continuing to collect and exploit it through its own platforms. In 2011, it blocked access to search keyword data, crippling tools used by rivals like Facebook for ad targeting. More recently, it announced plans to end third-party cookies in Chrome and eliminate Android's Advertising ID, moves that weaken independent ad networks while preserving Google's dominance through its first-party data. These actions reduce competition and innovation in the tech industry, concentrating power and data within Google.
AI-native businesses are outpacing legacy companies by building faster, using real-time feedback, and embedding AI at their core. As AI lowers the barrier to product creation, the focus is shifting to growing engaged audiences and communities. B2B creators with niche followings will gain influence, often earning equity in exchange for audience access. The most effective approach will combine high-quality content at scale, buyer intent tracking, and warm outbound outreach. Strategic thinking, video, and creativity will become more valuable as AI agents take over much of the execution.
Push and pull forces drive product adoption, while inertia and anxiety often prevent conversion. Jobs-to-be-done interviews help uncover how these forces influence customer decisions by mapping the timeline of events leading to adoption, stagnation, or churn. Speaking with power users, recent adopters, and those who left reveals actionable patterns in motivation, hesitation, and unmet expectations. This approach surfaces gaps in perceived value and misaligned messaging, helping teams focus on what actually moves users through the decision funnel.
Spray and pray not working out for you? Unlock hidden pipeline by alerting reps when target accounts are browsing your company's website. Default [9] tracks high-intent browsing signals, enriches the account data in real time, and lets you build smart workflows that put
This webinar will focus on tailoring reporting, telling a compelling data-driven story, and building trust with cross-functional teams by connecting marketing performance to business outcomes. It is free and will take place on June 4 at 12 PM CDT.
Even though 85% of product leaders believe customer-focused companies perform better, most companies struggle to act on customer feedback because it is hard to organize. AI can streamline this process by helping teams collect, tag, cluster, and prioritize feedback from multiple sources like surveys, reviews, and support tickets. This article presents a 3-step framework focused on collecting, organizing, and acting on feedback by linking it to business goals and customer insights. It includes templated AI prompts to carry out the framework.
Substack has surpassed 5M paid subscriptions, adding nearly 1M every quarter. It now supports over 50K income-generating publishers. Substack succeeds where traditional social media fails by giving creators direct audience relationships, no algorithmic interference, and built-in monetization. Writers typically grow through 3 stages: foundation, acceleration, and exponential "hockey stick" growth. The top 10 earners collectively make $40M annually. Tools like Notes and A/B testing drive engagement and retention, with 72% of subscribers staying past 90 days and only 8% actively churning.
Branded searches make up 45.7% of total Google search volume. 36.9% of unique queries include a brand name. Users aren't just looking for a homepage, they're seeking specific content like support pages, product comparisons, reviews, or local listings. If these results aren't optimized, it can lead to a poor experience or even competitor visibility. Branded search isn't just about ranking, it's also about shaping how people engage with your brand once they already know it.
71% of consumers regret purchases made through influencer recommendations, with only 33% believing influencers actually use the products they promote. The trust gap stems from inauthentic engagement, lack of transparency, and overly polished content. 40% of consumers say relatability is the top reason they trust an influencer. While 81% of influencers use AI in content creation, 35% of consumers distrust AI-generated posts, and 61% want AI use disclosed. 56% of influencers admitted to promoting products they don't like, and 33% have bought followers or engagement. Consumers now favor creators who feel genuine and share real, personal stories.
More than half of customers who consider a low-price option ultimately trade up when offered clear, tiered choices that differentiate value. This underscores the effectiveness of good, better, best pricing strategies, which highlight product value and allow businesses to serve price-sensitive customers without undermining premium offerings. During periods of economic uncertainty, marketers can use this structure not just to defend margins but also to influence buyer psychology, emphasizing long-term value and giving customers a sense of control without defaulting to broad price cuts.
To minimize cart abandonment, offer transparent pricing, guest checkout, and a streamlined, mobile-friendly checkout experience. Use progress indicators, trusted security badges, and multiple payment and shipping options. Prevent errors with regular site testing and speed optimization. Encourage purchases with working promo codes, wishlist features, and automated cart recovery emails. Send emails within 1-3 hours, follow up within 24-48 hours, and always personalize content. Cart recovery automation can improve conversion rates by over 2,300% compared to manual campaigns.
Tractive uses rapid experimentation to scale 1:1 personalization. It starts with small tests like swapping hero images with breed-specific visuals, then expands to fully personalized email templates. This approach boosted click rates by up to 82%. The company also tailors winback emails based on cancellation reasons, offering targeted incentives that led to a 30% reactivation increase. Testing showed customer testimonials drove 100% higher engagement than celebrity content. Secret Escapes collaborates with data scientists to build behavior-triggered, AI-powered journeys. During Black Friday, it used dynamic content blocks to show users previously browsed hotels at discounted rates, increasing click-throughs by 23%.
The average user spends less than one second deciding whether to engage with content, making clarity more critical than creativity in social feed environments. Clever writing often delays understanding, while direct, benefit-led messaging improves retention, engagement, and action. Marketers should treat clarity not as a compromise but as a competitive advantage and focus later on making it more interesting.
brings clarity by tracking calls and forms to the campaigns that drove them. Go deeper with AI: Get call summaries, lead quality insights, and buyer intent to help convert more leads.
Click-through rate and average view duration are the two most important indicators of video performance on YouTube. Leading brands optimize these by investing time to create strong titles and thumbnails, studying what holds attention, and aligning video concepts with proven emotional drivers. High-performing content is often rooted in formats that are already familiar to viewers, adapted to the brand's voice and audience insights uncovered through extensive customer research.
Wondercraft produces podcasts, audio ads, and audiobooks without the need for traditional recording equipment or voice talent. Users can generate scripts from text inputs, select from over 1,000 lifelike AI voices (including voice cloning options), and customize delivery with features like tone modulation and pacing adjustments. The platform also offers a timeline editor, royalty-free music, and sound effects, and supports more than 50 languages.
Brands should consider blocking competitors on social media when those competitors use comment sections to attack or undermine them. For example, Lingoda, a smaller language-learning app, publicly criticized Duolingo after Duolingo announced an AI-first approach, sparking a viral comment with over 17,000 likes. Although this likely didn't harm Duolingo's subscribers, it increased awareness of Lingoda among Duolingo's followers. Deleting hostile comments and blocking competitors helps protect the community and brand presence. While some fear blocking looks insecure, this concern is not strong. Brands should stay ready to act when competitors cross the line but don't need to block proactively.
Brands should not avoid negativity in advertising, as embracing honest flaws can make campaigns more memorable. Classic ads like Buckley's “It Tastes Awful. And It Works” show how acknowledging imperfections builds stronger connections with audiences. Today's safer, bland ads often fail to capture attention, wasting marketing budgets. Research shows ads evoking negative emotions are almost twice as memorable as dull ones, seen in campaigns like Sky Stream's “End the ehhh” and Burger King's Mouldy Whopper, which increased positive brand perception despite unappetizing imagery.
Rather than spreading sponsorship across multiple sports, TCS chose to focus exclusively on marathons to build deeper, more personal relationships with customers and employees. With a third of its 600,000 employees identifying as runners, the company activates hospitality, tech tools, and branding across 14 global races to turn each event into a brand experience. The approach drives both emotional relevance and business value, with up to $20 million in media exposure per race and a significantly higher brand lift among marathon participants.
YouTube has proved its dominance in living rooms and its value to advertisers by remaining at the top of Nielsen's rank of media companies based on TV viewing by media companies.
Default analyzed 51,219 inbound demo requests from 100 B2B software companies [4]. In a challenge to conventional attribution wisdom, it turns out only 4.8% of demo requests have UTM parameters.