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LinkedIn Testing Personal Post Boosts 🚀 2025 SEO Trends 🔎 Most Overhyped Marketing Trends Of 2024 🤔

Also: Does Google Penalize AI Content?

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🗞 Marketing News

LinkedIn Tests Personal Post Boost Option [2 min read]

LinkedIn is testing a new paid feature that allows individual users to boost their posts' visibility, expanding beyond business pages to offer Premium Business subscribers the ability to amplify various content types including text, images, articles, videos, and newsletters. While this feature democratizes content amplification and could help with personal branding, there's significant frustration from users about LinkedIn limiting organic post visibility, forcing people to pay for reach that many feel should be organic. The feature marks a shift toward a "pay-to-play" model similar to Facebook's approach, with concerns about broken content distribution and the disconnect between engagement and visibility, with a wider rollout expected in 2025.

2025 SEO Trends [18 min read]

As AI continues to transform search through features like Google's AI Overviews, SEO professionals will need to adapt their strategies to optimize for AI-generated responses while ensuring their content remains visible across multiple AI platforms. The experts emphasize that success in 2025 will require significant diversification beyond Google, with brands needing to build presence across social search platforms, multiple formats, and direct community engagement channels to reduce dependency on a single traffic source. Finally, content strategy will need to evolve toward more human-centered, authentic material that showcases real expertise and experiences, moving away from mass-produced content in favor of genuine brand storytelling and community-focused approaches that AI cannot easily replicate.

2024's Most Overhyped Marketing Trends, According To CMOs [4 min read]

Traditional celebrity endorsements and influencer partnerships are increasingly ineffective unless they demonstrate authentic connections and genuine brand affinity, with multiple CMOs emphasizing that superficial endorsements don't resonate with modern consumers, especially Gen Z. Performance marketing and metrics like ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) are called into question, with some executives explicitly describing them as overhyped and misleading about true business impact. Also, while AI-generated creative content has garnered significant attention, particularly in fashion and marketing, industry leaders remain skeptical of its current capabilities, suggesting that traditional creative approaches are still more reliable despite the surrounding hype.

🤖 AI

State Of The Art Video And Image Generation With Veo 2 And Imagen 3 [7 min read]

Google DeepMind has announced Veo 2, an improved video generation model that achieves results with better physics understanding, human movement rendering, and cinematographic capabilities at up to 4K resolution. The company is also releasing an enhanced version of their Imagen 3 image generation model, now rolling out globally in ImageFX, which creates brighter, better-composed images across diverse art styles with improved prompt accuracy and richer details. Also, Google Labs is launching Whisk, a new experimental tool that combines Imagen 3 with Gemini's visual understanding capabilities, allowing users to remix subjects, scenes, and styles by inputting and combining images in novel ways.

Ilya Sutskever Says The Way AI Is Built Is About To Change [3 min read]

He predicts traditional pre-training methods for AI will soon become obsolete due to data saturation, likening available data to a finite resource similar to fossil fuels. He envisions the development of agentic and reasoning-based AI systems that operate autonomously and can solve problems step-by-step, making them more unpredictable and capable. Also, Sutskever suggests that the scaling of AI will draw inspiration from evolutionary biology, leading to innovative approaches beyond current pre-training techniques.

Does Google Penalize AI Content? [11 min read]

AI-generated content can effectively rank on Google, often appearing in top search positions and performing comparably to human-written content. Google does not directly penalize AI content; instead, it prioritizes high-quality, valuable content, using tools like SynthID to detect AI-generated material. To achieve optimal SEO results, marketers should combine AI tools with human expertise to create unique, well-optimized content and diversify their traffic sources across multiple platforms.

🧠 Hacks & Tactics

How To Keep Email Audiences Engaged In Seconds [9 min read]

Micro-content is important in email marketing to capture the fleeting attention of busy audiences by providing brief, easily digestible elements such as infographics, interactive games, short reviews, videos, and bullet lists. By effectively using various types of micro-content, including animated visuals and emojis, marketers can enhance engagement and drive interactions within seconds. Also, implementing strategies like crafting clear and truthful subject lines, optimizing content structure, and regularly conducting A/B tests ensures that the micro-content resonates with subscribers and maximizes the success of email campaigns.

Mention A Rival To Get More Engagement [8 min read]

Referencing rival brands boosts engagement, with social media posts mentioning rivals receiving nearly twice as many likes as those that don’t. This effectiveness stems from the compelling narratives and reinforced brand identities that rivalries create, making audiences more likely to interact with the content. However, brands should implement this strategy thoughtfully by selecting true rivals and maintaining an appropriate tone to avoid potential long-term branding risks and ensure it aligns with their overall marketing goals.

Elevating Your SEO Career And Team In The AI Era [5 min read]

Implement the SOAR framework by streamlining processes, orchestrating teams, and automating repetitive tasks to enhance efficiency and collaboration. Aligning SEO efforts with broader business goals and establishing regular communication ensures stakeholder buy-in and seamless integration with other functions. Also, leveraging AI for data analysis while maintaining a focus on human creativity and strategic innovation allows SEO teams to concentrate on high-impact activities, driving both business success and career growth.

⚙️ Machine Shop

How To Write A Social Media Policy [10 min read]

A social media policy helps organizations manage their brand's reputation, avoid potential crises, and maintain consistency across online platforms. Key elements of an effective policy include clear expectations, role-specific guidelines, and practical examples to help employees understand and follow the rules. Various organizations, such as Massachusetts General Hospital and The New York Times, provide successful examples of tailored social media policies that address their unique needs.

Why Campaign Assets Underperform [7 min read]

A flexible and audience-focused approach to social media is essential as traditional playbooks have become outdated. There are distinct roles within marketing, with freelancers executing tasks, consultants crafting strategies, and advisors providing high-level guidance. Many brands today struggle with blindly following trends and misusing content creators, while the quality of thought leadership on platforms like LinkedIn has notably declined.

10 Behavioral Principles And Dark Patterns In User Onboarding You Need To Know [7 min read]

Companies face significant challenges in product growth, particularly in monetization, activation, and user onboarding, underscoring the need for a deeper understanding of user behaviors. A holistic approach to user onboarding is important, encompassing stages from product search to habit formation while addressing dark patterns and applying behavioral principles to enhance user engagement. Examples from Dropbox, Figma, and Grammarly demonstrate how principles like Hick's Law and the IKEA Effect can be effectively implemented to improve onboarding experiences and drive user activation.

🔮 The Future

10 Charts That Capture How The World Is Changing, Part 1 [8 min read]

We're seeing the rise of prediction markets and shifts in venture capital. Consumer behavior continues to transform, with spending remaining robust despite inflation concerns, particularly in the experience economy where travel and events are seeing substantial growth. Perhaps most notably, Gen Z is reshaping traditional notions of financial success with dramatically higher income expectations than previous generations, while simultaneously displaying strong confidence in achieving these lofty goals and driving trends in entrepreneurship and alternative career paths.

11 Years Of Trends And Insights From 1000+ Bloggers [18 min read]

Over the past 11 years, bloggers have faced increasing challenges in driving traffic, leading them to prioritize creating longer, more in-depth, and visually engaging content while adopting advanced strategies like original research and multimedia integration. There is a strong correlation between the effort invested—such as time spent, word count, and collaborations with influencers or professional editors—and the success of blog posts, with higher investment typically resulting in stronger outcomes. Also, the adoption of AI tools has grown significantly, aiding bloggers in various aspects of content creation, though the impact on success remains mixed, highlighting the need for strategic and balanced use of AI to enhance productivity without compromising content quality.

Snapchat Is Overhauling How Influencers Earn Money On The Platform [2 min read]

Snapchat is introducing a unified revenue program that combines monetization for both Stories and Spotlight content, replacing the previous system where these were handled separately and allowing creators to earn money from ads placed in both types of content. The new program comes with stricter eligibility requirements, including the need for 50,000 followers, either 10 million Snap views, 1 million Spotlight views, or 12,000 hours of watch time in 28 days, plus creators must post at least 25 times per month and be active on 10 out of 28 days. This change aligns with a broader industry trend where video platforms are streamlining their creator monetization programs, similar to recent changes at TikTok and YouTube's approach to Shorts monetization.

🔡 Vocab

Target Audience: The specific group of consumers most likely to want your product or service. These are the people you aim to reach, defined by characteristics like age, income, interests, and behaviors. Your target audience shapes every marketing decision you make.

Example: A luxury gym's target audience might be "health-conscious professionals aged 30-50 with high disposable income living in urban areas."

Customer Data Platform (CDP): A software system that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single database. CDPs help businesses create detailed customer profiles by combining data from websites, apps, emails, and other touchpoints, enabling more personalized marketing strategies.

Example: When Jane visits an online store, adds items to her cart, opens promotional emails, and finally makes a purchase, the CDP combines all these interactions to create one complete customer profile.

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