Today's Guide to the Marketing Jungle from Social Media Examiner... | Presented by |  |
It's International Sweater Vestival Day, Alluser! We did not know this was a Thing.
In today's edition:
-
Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for content curation
-
How ⚙️ AI is changing content strategy
-
Creating Instagram Stories for 🛒 conversions
-
A proven Facebook ads 🌱🌳 scaling strategy
-
Google's Bard 👓 watches videos for you
-
LinkedIn's 🆔 ID verification expands to more 🗺 regions
-
Snapchat launches 🙌 self-serve advertising feature
-
TikTok to showcase 🤳 AR effects
-
LinkedIn ad 🎯 targeting and 📐 measurement updates
-
🧵 Threads expanding to 🌐 Europe
-
🔎 Search opens up on Threads
-
TikTok Artist accounts for 🎤🎸 musicians
-
Options for 🖱 media embeds from X
-
New YouTube 📉 analytics and 🛒 eCommerce enhancements
Need a way to stay on top of industry news to share with your audience?
Combine AI with RSS
Feedly has an AI assistant named Leo you can set up to constantly scan news sources and content related to your topics of interest across the web.
As you use Feedly, you can give feedback to Leo on the articles and sources you like/dislike. Leo then learns to refine and filter the content it shows you so you see only the most relevant items.
Today's tip is inspired by Matt Wolfe, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.
Do you need to revamp your content marketing strategy? Wondering how AI will alter content marketing?
As artificial intelligence capabilities advance, content marketers must reevaluate their strategies to remain effective. Robert Rose, leading thinker and author of "Content Marketing Strategy," shares his insights on developing smarter approaches to engage audiences in this new landscape.
Embracing Strategy Over Tactics
Many content marketers overly fixate on tactical details. They may obsess over how many blog posts to publish, debate listicle formats, or try to increase organic reach. However, Robert emphasizes that strategy is the critical ingredient:
"The job of a great strategic content team is not to be good at content; it's to make the business good at content."
An intelligent strategy aligns people, workflows, governance policies, and supporting technologies. It coordinates activities to maximize competitive advantage. Robert draws inspiration from renowned business strategist Michael Porter's approach of either performing different activities than competitors or executing similar activities differently to pull ahead.
For content marketing, this strategic perspective means operating your content with the discipline of a media company. This includes establishing defined roles, workflows, resource allocation processes, and performance dashboards. The focus should be scalable, consistent execution of content activities across teams over time.
Pitfalls of Misunderstanding Strategy for Tactics
Many people conflate "strategy" with "tactics." Tactics are the specific activities and campaigns that each team carries out to move the content marketing needle. Strategy is the overarching plan that coordinates teams and tactics harmoniously.
A common downfall is teams competing for the same audience. The social media squad may create video content, while the blogging team targets the same personae. They work at cross purposes instead of strategically complementing one another. Even good tactics fail to generate cumulative business impact without an intelligent strategy tying everything together.
So, who should determine strategy? It depends on a company's size and structure. Smaller organizations may have a single strategist, while large enterprises manage it collaboratively. Cross-functional buy-in creates the strongest strategies. But ultimately, someone must be the decider to spearhead planning.
Rethinking Content Marketing For The AI Age
"The first step is making content an official strategic activity," Robert suggests. Explicitly empower someone to develop the content strategy. Define the guiding purpose and priority business objective the content must achieve.
Various strategic models exist—from becoming an authoritative, owned media producer to optimizing content primarily for SEO traffic or directly aligning content to support sales. Choose which approach best matches your business needs and constraints. With the end goal clarified, map out your operating model—detailing how all activities and individual content types will fit together into a scalable system.
This unified, top-down perspective is vital as AI impacts multiple areas simultaneously. Companies without clearly defined content strategies and measures struggle to assess AI's impact accurately. They cannot plot detailed adoption roadmaps. However, organizations doing the preparatory strategic alignment work have greater clarity. They better grasp the realistic opportunities along with tradeoffs and process changes needed to harness AI's exponential powers.
A Core Content Strategy for Building Subscriber Relationships in the Age of AI
Central to most content strategies is the mandate of deliberately building ongoing audience relationships, not just attracting anonymous traffic. Content should convert visitors into "subscribers" who voluntarily engage with your brand over time. This cultivates trust and perceived goodwill.
Potential types of subscribers expand far beyond email lists. Podcast followers who access new episodes via audio apps demonstrate similar sticky behavior. Conference attendees who return annually to in-person events reflect the same dynamic at play. Other examples are community memberships, ebook downloads in exchange for contact info, webinar signups, etc.
Platforms like YouTube provide immense reach but don't confer true audience ownership to brands. Relying completely on third-party networks carries risks. The goal is intentionally driving pockets of followers into stable owned properties you control off the big passive distribution hubs. This powers the flywheel effect, continually enriching lifetime customer value. It also incrementally decreases customer acquisition costs and sales friction through positive brand associations.
Migrating visitors into voluntarily subscribed, addressable audience micro-communities—who receive communications on the brand's terms—boosts marketing productivity and performance regardless of company size. The beauty lies in the recurring value realized over months and years.
Adapting To AI's Impact On Search Behavior
Consumer search behavior and expectations shift as AI permeates digital experience landscapes. Where people previously sought search engines to receive lots of information pages to filter and select the optimal result, AI delivers single authoritative answers.
Many content creators targeting search traffic are noticing pronounced declines. AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT are siphoning users by delivering immediate responses to queries instead of lists of links. To stay visible and competitive, brands must provide the context, references, and details AI recommendation systems synthesize when formulating responses. This necessitates even greater insight into customers' needs and intents to continually fuel relevant, meaningful content development.
The impacts of these trends should not be underestimated. Many brands today face existential crises analogous to companies debating whether to let Google's spiders index their websites back in the late 1990s. Allowing access correlated directly with discoverability and survival. Similarly, blocking AI analysis risks irrelevancy. Publishers like Disney, who are stopping content indexing, are making shortsighted decisions, in Robert's opinion.
Significant mindset and strategy shifts must emerge across the marketing spectrum to address this new era of assisted customer decision journeys. Solutions will combine machine precision with human creativity.
Clarifying AI's Optimal Role In Content Creation
While AI promises to enhance many aspects of strategic content marketing, Robert believes fully automated content creation has limitations. The most advanced systems, like GPT-3, produce derivative content. They recombine existing information patterns to generate new compositions. The outputs may constitute quality writing in isolation but lack deeper meaning.
Robert divides content into two categories—created and constructed. Created content holds inherent value and resonance for audiences regardless of its purpose. Humans crave stories, opinions, and creativity for the experience of consuming them. Constructed content serves purely utilitarian, logistical needs. Manuals, legal forms, and explanations represent constructed content.
In Robert's view, AI excels most with automating the production of constructed content. But human creativity, emotional expressiveness, and imagination remain unmatched for creating subjectively compelling reading, audio, or video content. Here, AI functions more as a production assistant—facilitating ideation, saving research time, and suggesting angles writers can choose to incorporate.
The adept integrator of both approaches—augmenting AI-streamlined content operations with authentic, human-crafted creative voices—will define future best practices. For now, maintaining realistic expectations about capabilities and limits is advised over hype-driven AI zealotry. These tools should amplify rather than replace human communication skills.
The Future Belongs To Strategic Risk Takers
Marketing faces an inflection point. As AI permeates customer experiences, strategies must evolve to deliver relevance matched to rising expectations. However, certain fundamentals like directly addressable audience micro-communities, value-focused content, and coherent coordination of tactics to overarching business objectives will thrive regardless of technology shifts.
AI should be seen as an optimization opportunity more than a threat. Into each transition, some firms crater while others ride waves of change to unprecedented heights by embracing innovation. With openness, agility, and vision, content marketers can harness exponential intelligence gains rather than become victims of disruption. The future remains unwritten—what role will you play?
Today's advice is provided with insights from Robert Rose, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.
What are You Waiting for, Alluser?
Just a quick reminder! Today is the last day to save $600 on your On-Demand ticket to Social Media Marketing World.
With your On-Demand ticket, you'll get access to every keynote, every session, and all the workshops, for a fraction of the price of attending live.
Imagine the convenience of experiencing this event from your home or office. Save time, save money, and discover the newest marketing strategies that work!
"Social Media Marketing World is the best thing that I've ever done professionally," said Scott Duehlmeier.
YES! I want to save $600.
Many marketers overlook Instagram Stories as mere ephemeral vanity fare. However, properly embracing Stories builds community and drives conversions through casual authenticity that fosters relationship-building beyond traditional posts.
What Makes Instagram Stories Uniquely Valuable?
Stories disappear after 24 hours, causing confusion around their marketing utility. But their ephemeral nature enables real-time connections impossible elsewhere.
Followers anticipating updates check your Stories throughout the day. So, when you publish a story, you drive immediate commenting and participation, unlike scheduled feed posts. Frequent participation forges community, strengthening bonds between creator and audience.
Additionally, Stories gain elevated visibility beyond committed followers. Instagram prominently features them via profile bubbles and directly in the main feed, bypassing the algorithm limiting feed posts. This expanded reach means visitors completely unfamiliar with you often discover content in Stories first when randomly exploring profiles in their network.
Showcasing authentic personality and behind-the-scenes transparency offered by Stories humanizes brands in ways basic bios or magazine-style photo streams cannot. Dropping some marketing polish to reveal real personalities builds trust and familiarity with cold traffic, encouraging following, engagement, and conversion over time through relationship-building.
What Compelling Story Content Looks Like
Stories uniquely spotlight personality, lifestyle, insights, and developments instead of polished marketing messages. This demands reconsidering traditional commercial creative approaches.
To enlighten and engage, craft Stories letting followers learn about, from, and with you:
Stories About You: Share personal tidbits, behind-the-scenes footage, passions, backstories, and vulnerabilities viewers can relate to. This perspective fosters emotional investment by demonstrating your "why" in an accessible way.
Lessons From Your Past: Broadcast industry insights, innovative tactics, unconventional ideas, and lessons from experience to position your expertise and unique worldview.
What you're Learning Now: Document developing offerings and solicit feedback so followers learn alongside you while directly influencing the creative process.
Finally, avoid overly manufactured posts that reveal too much. Embrace imperfections because psychological research indicates they boost your likability by increasing perceived humility and approachability when expressed.
How to Maximize Stories Engagement
Creating phenomenal content means little if nobody sees it. Proactively engaging community members increases visibility while forging bonds, yielding higher-quality followers.
Comment thoughtfully on peers' Stories instead of mass-spamming emoji reactions. Thoughtful comments spur increased replies in return through reciprocal goodwill. This builds awareness and relationships while elevating your content's algorithmic reach.
Leverage interactive stickers like polls and questions to effortlessly involve audiences. Simple binary polls provide easy commentary fodder, while specific questions invite opinions or enable anonymous lead generation by welcoming emailed signup requests.
Don't expect others to initiate reciprocal value exchanges, however. Regularly contribute, congratulate, thoughtfully discuss, and celebrate community successes without expecting applause for your work in return. This generous mindset earns compounding returns over time by winning hearts through selfless support, not calculated pandering.
How to Optimize Stories For Conversions
With followers invested thanks to engagement efforts, thoughtfully incorporate strategic selling elements without excessive promotional tones.
First, ensure your profile fully conveys your brand differentiation and industry expertise. Strong, benefit-focused bios drive exploring visitors to convert into followers quickly while clearly explaining how you can help them specifically.
For major launches like online courses or challenge programs, you can seed interest by documenting their development behind the scenes. Let audiences influence final products through solicited feedback while building eager anticipation of release deals.
Describe exactly how you solve specific problems for ideal customers. Outline what is included, why your approach works, and what tangible results to expect. Weave in anonymous positive DM testimonials to further demonstrate credibility.
Finally, incorporate occasional motivational calls-to-action driving traffic to your website for sales. Instagram now enables links in Stories—use them. Also, promote email opt-in offers to retain casual visitors as ongoing subscribers and nurture them over time.
Remember—not all followers see every Story. Consistently rotate different CTA elements across posts at strategic intervals so each viewer receives targeted exposure during their viewing session. This maximizes conversion rates by relentlessly covering your entire audience with diverse value stream access points.
3 Tips For Stories Success
Beyond core content best practices, these tips further channel refinement strategies:
Enable Captions: Boost accessibility, context, and viewership duration by incorporating text captions for those sensitive to audio-only information. This also effectively doubles communication bandwidth through parallel delivery mediums.
Save Stories to Highlights: Curate evergreen highlights, gathering your most impactful Stories into categorized "pages" atop your profile for visitors to self-navigate. Treat this space like a supplemental website articulating your brand visually.
Go Live Often: Schedule frequent casual live broadcasts, allowing truly raw connection in the authentic moment. Transparency and vulnerability foster intense loyalty that is unreplicable otherwise.
The ephemeral Instagram Story uniquely bonds creators and communities through vulnerable conversational intimacy impossible on polished feeds. But achieving this requires bravely embracing discomfort around overexposure or oversharing fears. Those committing fully realize the rewards of amplified emotional engagement and accelerated growth over time.
It's your choice. Cling to slickly packaged perfection or courageously reveal your humanity? One sustains the status quo while the other transforms businesses and lives. What feels right for your business?
Today's advice is provided with insights from Chelsea Peitz, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.
Despite economic turbulence, savvy advertisers still harness Facebook Ads' immense reach. However, complicated account structures inhibit performance. Enter Charley Tichenor's streamlined "One Campaign" methodology—the secret of his clients' explosive revenue gains.
Why Facebook Ads Remain The Ultimate Force Multiplier
Many write off paid social currently. Charley strongly disagrees. Of all the options, only Facebook rivals television's targeting scale combined with direct response metrics. No other platform beats Meta's audience size and behavioral data depth.
Astute managers recognize Facebook's vast options. With intent creation powered by robust analysis and machine learning, outcomes depend purely on the quality of your business model.
This meritocracy rewards great partnerships through lower ad costs and heightened visibility.
Those complaining need more perspective. Significant and lasting gains await those who view Facebook objectively and embrace its framework.
Scaling Facebook Ads for Massive Growth: One Campaign Strategy
The "One Campaign" structure underlying Charley's success consolidates all efforts into a single Ad Account containing one Campaign with multiple Ad Sets for specific objectives.
This streamlined architecture simplifies management while benefiting the algorithm. The more focused the data, the better Facebook's delivery and optimization performs.
Performance correlates strongly with simplicity at massive spend levels. Rather than outsmarting the machine, avoid introducing friction through micro-management. Instead, supply the ingredients for the platform's algorithm to function freely, and the results may shock you.
Step 1: Embrace The Power Of Broad Targeting
The first mistake most marketers make is overcomplicating their targeting parameters. Broad targeting trumps narrow options.
Despite common perception, broad targeting simply targets by gender, location, and age rather than by stacking an expansive list of interests atop one another. The latter introduces premature bias by restricting reach despite higher costs.
Each ad dynamically finds appropriate audiences through performance. Let the algorithm test different segments' responses at mass to identify the most relevant groups based on conversion actions. Avoid manually inhibiting this marketplace exchange through assumptions.
Step 2: Dial In Dynamic Creative With 'Three Two Two' Testing
With targeting set, focus efforts on creative testing to ensure message relevancy. Charley prescribes using solely 'Three Two Two' Dynamic Creative for ongoing optimization:
Combined, these individual parts will assemble 12 responsive component permutations finding the highest performing creative for your goals. Optimize for engagement, click-through rate, or conversions by adding the post IDs of winners into new Ad Sets for further enhancement.
Video and images both prove successful—consistency matters most. Maintain visual styles matching existing aesthetics that viewers recognize and expect. Rely on historic high-performing content as a source of inspiration to increase odds of success quickly.
Step 3: Cement Gains Through Scientific Advertising Principles
The final phase entrenches measurable gains through a scientific advertising approach analyzing creative performance and audience targeting in a continuous improvement loop.
Ad Sets contain the current best performers as "control" while new creatives undergo challenges in separate Ad Sets simultaneously. Facebook's optimization determines optimal asset allocation based on results. If new entries surpass existing benchmarks by the chosen metric, they shift into control rotation for the next round of testing.
This process systemizes promotion through accountability metrics tied directly to overarching business objectives beyond typical vanity social metrics. Maximizing profitability or volume requires distinct strategies—both remain possible through thoughtful and neutral process execution.
Many marketers underestimate Facebook Ads management complexity. Truly mastering their nuances demands both scientific and creative aptitudes. Luckily, every marketer possesses strengths suiting different roles across testing cycles. Could your greatest breakthrough emerge from properly channeled collaboration? The future remains unwritten—seize the moment and define your destiny!
Today's advice is provided with insights from Charley Tichenor, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.
🗞 Bard Improves YouTube Integration: Google's AI chatbot, Bard, is getting an upgrade that allows it to analyze individual videos and surface key information without needing to watch them. While very useful for consumers, there is a potential downside for publishers. By using Bard, the value normally gained from viewers watching ads and seeing recommendations is lost. Currently, this feature is limited, but if integrated into YouTube directly it could greatly impact creators without providing them clear benefits. Source: The Verge
🗞 LinkedIn Expands ID Verification: LinkedIn has partnered with Persona to broaden availability of its in-app identity verification option. Users in Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates can now confirm their ID through integration with Persona's third-party verification system. To utilize the expansion, members in these regions must have an NFC-enabled passport. The integration enables more LinkedIn users to verify their identities, further establishing the authenticity of profiles on the platform. Source: LinkedIn
🗞 Snapchat Introduces Snap Promote: Snapchat has launched Snap Promote, a new self-service advertising feature that lets users promote content from their Public Profiles to reach more potential customers. Users can promote Spotlight videos, Public Stories, or Saved Content by tapping a "megaphone" icon, setting targeting, then publishing the ad in just a few steps. Snap Promote gives creators and businesses the ability to expand their reach, drive traffic to their Profiles to gain followers, and direct viewers to external websites. By putting promotion controls directly into users' hands, Snapchat aims to make it easy for anyone to boost their content as an ad and grow their audience. Source: Snap
🗞 TikTok AR Development Event: TikTok is hosting a virtual "Openhouse" event on December 12th to showcase the latest developments with its Effect House augmented reality (AR) creation platform. The event will provide an inside look at recent advances in Effect House and detailed overviews on utilizing the new features to build interactive AR effects. As described by TikTok, "In this virtual event, we'll show you around Effect House—its latest and greatest features and how to use TikTok effects to create, tell interactive stories, and reach millions around the world." Whether you're an enthusiast, marketer, or designer, TikTok promises an exciting event to highlight evolving tools for AR creation. Source: TikTok
🗞 New LinkedIn Ads Features: LinkedIn is launching several updates to boost precision in advertising including a new Conversions API (CAPI) to track both online and offline actions while maintaining data privacy; Website Actions to automatically capture button clicks, page visits, and data without complex event tracking required; and three enhancements for Document Ads such as retargeting, website conversion objectives, and increased distribution for higher delivery. Source: LinkedIn
🗞 Meta to Launch Threads in Europe: Meta plans to expand its Twitter-like microblogging service Threads to Europe in December, according to sources familiar with the matter. This will be Threads' largest market expansion since its initial launch in July. Source: Wall Street Journal
🗞 Threads Search Feature: Instagram's Adam Mosseri announced Threads is "expanding keyword search everywhere Threads is available. This feature is supported in all languages.' Source: Adam Mosseri via Threads
🗞TikTok Introduces Artist Account for Musicians: The platform has introduced a new Artist Account specifically for musicians and artists, providing them promotional tools to better connect with fans on the platform. The Artist Account offers features like the Artist Tag to identify official artist accounts, the New Release tool to highlight the latest music releases, the Music Tab to curate an artist's song catalog, the By Artist feature to pin preferred TikTok videos, and Behind the Song for artists to share inspirations behind their music. Source: TikTok
🗞 X/Twitter Media Embeds: The platform now allows you to "embed videos & broadcasts from X as a standalone" or as part of a tweet embed. Source: Twitter
🗞 YouTube Announces New Features for Live Shopping, Community Posts, and Memberships: YouTube is introducing several updates including enhanced product drops to allow more creators to generate excitement by announcing new products during live shopping streams, with increased flexibility to drop products spur of the moment; a refreshed simplified post creation flow for Community posts to more easily share quick updates and engage fans; and new analytics providing total members count and details on recurring memberships, where members joined from, and reasons for membership cancellations. Source: YouTube
Did You Know?
The world's largest functioning guitar amp is a scale replica of a Fender Princeton. Built by a team from Full Sail University, the amp measures 10' long and 8' tall and can reach volumes of 110 decibels at a one-meter distance.
Michael Stelzner, Founder and CEO
P.S. Add
michael@socialmediaexaminer.com into your contacts list. Use Gmail?
Go here to add us as a contact.
We publish updates with links for our new posts and content from partners. Your information: Email:
tukangpostemel@gmail.com Opted in on: 2021-09-06 17:03:43 UTC.
