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  • Digital Davids vs. Giga-Goliaths 💥 5 Hottest Trends in Content Marketing 📈 Get Your TikToks Ranking in Google SERPs 📱

Digital Davids vs. Giga-Goliaths 💥 5 Hottest Trends in Content Marketing 📈 Get Your TikToks Ranking in Google SERPs 📱

Also: Midjourney drops a magazine, like, on paper.

March 01, 2024

Happy Friday Marketing Engineers!

It's Marketing March! If you're new, welcome aboard 👋 And if you're feeling lucky ☘️ you've come to the right place. This week we've whipped together news and editorials pulling back the curtain on the marketing machinations of behemoths like Google, Midjourney, and TikTok.

Is there something else you'd like to see in here? Got a hot tip? Don't be afraid to hit reply and let us know what you think. 🧠 (Replying with a quick "hi" is also a good way to make sure our emails make it through the spam filters.)

 🚀 Adam

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🗞 Weekly Marketing News

CPMs Are Back Up! AdRoll's Q1 2024 report reveals a 7% increase in CPM, signaling a recovery in digital marketing costs. This uptick is crucial for marketers, indicating a shift towards stabilizing online ad expenses, essential for budgeting and strategy planning in the evolving digital landscape. 📈🚀💰

5 Billion Friends and Counting. The surpassing of 5 billion global social media users marks a pivotal moment for the marketing industry, highlighting the expansive reach and influence of social platforms. This milestone underscores the critical importance of social media strategies for brands aiming to connect with a vast and diverse audience worldwide, urging marketers to adapt to evolving platform preferences and leverage data-driven insights for targeted engagement. 🌍📈🔍

Digital Davids vs. Giga-Goliaths. HouseFresh critiques Google's algorithm favoritism towards big media's lackluster guides over genuine sites, illustrating a modern battlefield in SEO. It highlights the struggle for visibility and the importance of reliable product review content in a landscape dominated by major publishers' subpar "best of" lists. With this piece HouseFresh pulls back the curtain on the unfair advantage and unreliable content that threatens the survival of genuine independent reviews. This also explains some of the motivation behind Google's recent algo updates. 🌐🚫🔍

🤖 The Week in Artificial Intelligence

AI Copilot Takes the Wheel. Windows 11's update introduces Copilot with plugins for apps like OpenTable and Instacart, improving interactivity. New AI features include Generative Erase in Photos and Silence Removal in Clipchamp, alongside significant accessibility improvements. This rollout enhances marketers' toolkit for creative and accessible content creation, offering novel ways to engage audiences. 🧑‍✈️ 🤖 🛫

The Terminator is Back. Crafted by a collective of 50 AI artists, "Our T2 Remake" is a first of its kind feature-length AI parody of Terminator 2. It merges satire and commentary on the AI landscape, and provides a blurry glimpse of cinema's future. This non-profit project showcases the fast developing artistry in AI filmmaking, and challenges the notion it's not a tool for creativity. Attend its Hollywood premiere for a unique cinematic experience. If full features films are a possibility, what does this means for your basic commercial production? 🎬🤖🎥

Midjourney Magazine. Midjourney has announced a campaign utilizing AI to transform user submissions into a tangible magazine. The print and digital publication is designed to foster unique engagement and community loyalty, and showcase the innovative AI creativity of its users. It exemplifies Midjourney's capabilities in enhancing brand-user interaction through digital artistry. In a world of newsletters 😉 this is a beautiful and unique way to keep up with the capacities of one of the main players in image generation. 📰🤖🎨

⚙️ The Machine Shop

Turn Creator Trends into Content Triumphs! Our friend, Katie Salcius, highlights 2024's hottest creator marketing trends, noting the creator economy's robust growth. Key trends include UGC creators turning professional, a shift towards authenticity, the preference for creator-led campaigns over paid ads, brands internalizing content creation, and enhancing ambassador/affiliate programs. These trends signify a strategic pivot towards genuine, engaging brand-consumer relationships in digital marketing. 🚀🎨💡

Outsmart Bias and Design Like a Pro. Adri Mukund dives into how our brains play tricks on us during design, making us favor familiar over fresh. For marketers, it's a heads-up: our biases can mess with creating truly user-friendly designs. Let's outsmart our brains to better connect with everyone. 🧠🖌️😉

Learn New Magic Tricks for TikTok SEO. Backlinko's guide on TikTok SEO is a goldmine for marketers aiming to boost their brand's visibility on the platform and beyond. It's not just about making viral dances; it's about strategic content optimization to gain higher visibility in TikTok searches and even Google's SERPs. For marketers, mastering TikTok SEO means tapping into a vast, captivated audience, and transforming views into valuable engagements and conversions. 📈🤳💡

Display Ads, Find Your Ideal Partner. Following criticism for placing ads on inappropriate sites, Google enhances Search Partner Network (SPN) control, offering advertisers more insights and the ability to manage ad placements effectively. These changes (effective March 4) aim to improve brand safety and transparency. With Google's new controls, advertisers can finally stop their ads from 'accidentally' ending up where they don't belong. 🔍💡🛠️

🧠 Hacks of The Week

Speak AI, Create Wonders! Sofiia Shvets, a.k.a. "the prompt whisperer," cracks the code on AI text prompts at HackerNoon, showing marketers how to boss around AI for spot-on visuals. Whisper creative secrets to your computer and watching it spill out Instagram-worthy content. A game-changer for crafting those pixel-perfect campaigns that scream "click me!" 🗣️🎨🤖

Domain Authority Checker [cool tool - you'll lose hours in there]

Are You The Master of Your Domain? The PrePostSEO Domain Authority Checker is a tool for marketers to gauge a website's strength and credibility online by analyzing its Domain Authority. It offers insights into a site's potential for ranking on search engines, providing a clear metric for SEO planning and competitor analysis. We've been using it to track the growth of our newly launched website and have no complaints! 📊🌐🔝🚀🎯

🔮 Future Upgrades

Algo F*ck Yourself! As Google's search quality dips, marketers face a new SEO battlefield. This Gizmodo study underscores the rise of low-quality, affiliate link-stuffed content dominating search results. For product marketers, this signals an urgent need to refine their SEO strategies, focusing on genuine, high-quality content to stand out in a sea of spam. It's a wake-up call to adapt or sink in Google's evolving search landscape. 📉🔍💡

Rub that Marketing Lamp! Google has introduced a groundbreaking AI that creates interactive, controllable environments from images or sketches, harnessing the vast potential of Internet videos without requiring action labels. This innovation opens new avenues for virtual world creation and AI agent training, offering marketers unique opportunities to craft immersive brand marketing experiences and narratives. It's a game-changer for interactive marketing strategies, encouraging exploration and creativity in digital spaces. 🧞🧑‍🎨

Is AI Cannibalizing Your Skills Premium? This article explores AI's impact on the job market, emphasizing that while AI won't eliminate jobs, it will challenge the ability to charge a premium for specialized skills. It discusses how AI affects job task bundling, skill commoditization, and the erosion of skill premiums, urging professionals to adapt by identifying skills that maintain value in an AI-augmented world. It's a call to action for marketers to innovate and remain competitive. 🤖💼

Small Businesses Doing Big Marketing! In this article Rob Garner details how SMBs are navigating digital marketing in 2024, focusing on revenue growth, increasing ad spending, and addressing pain points like lead generation and budget constraints. With insights into content marketing trends and strategies for overcoming common challenges, it's vital for marketers seeking to leverage digital channels effectively for business growth. 📊🚀💡

📺 Flashback Friday

Want to submit your favorite ads from days past? Just hit reply and send us a link.

It's been a topsy-turvy weak for the working class marketing engineer, so we decided to send you off with a laugh. Enjoy the GOAT for Internet ads 🐐 this 2010 classic from Dollar Shave Club.

Feeling sufficiently nauseated by the tech industry hokey pokey? Or are you invigorated to try new strategies in what is potentially a goldilocks window for content arbitrage on search and social media??

PS: We're having a great time bringing this news to your inbox and we'd like to know what you think. Let us know by replying to this email, or just share us with your marketing friends, colleagues, or ocean of Linkedin connections that you've never met IRL.

Happy Marketing in March!

✌️ Team Marketing Machine

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