Reddit Launches Lead Gen Ads 📢 Perplexity To Launch AI Search Ads 📢 The Rise Of Social Media Commerce 💸

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🗞 Marketing News

Reddit Launches Lead Generation Ads Powered By Zapier Integration [3 min read]

Lead Generation Ads, now in public beta and available globally, allows businesses to collect high-quality leads from Reddit's engaged users efficiently. Integrated with Zapier, an AI automation platform, these ads enable advertisers to seamlessly send leads from Reddit directly to their CRM, enhancing lead management and follow-up processes. This new format offers benefits such as easy and secure information collection, lower cost per lead, higher submission rates, and a mobile-optimized design, with businesses experiencing significant improvements in lead quality and campaign performance during beta testing.

55% Of Gen Z Have Made An Online Purchase While Browsing Social Media [3 min read]

A Walmart and Morning Consult survey reveals that 55% of Gen Z shoppers have made online purchases while browsing social media, highlighting a significant trend in social commerce. Walmart's report emphasizes personalized retail experiences, stating that retailers who can predict and meet individual customer needs will thrive. To engage younger consumers, Walmart is introducing innovative digital shopping platforms like Walmart Realm and enhancing its product offerings with new brands aimed at Gen Z and millennials.

Perplexity Will Start Selling Ads Within AI Search Soon [2 min read]

Perplexity will allow brands to buy "related follow-up questions" that appear below initial user queries and are clearly labeled as sponsored. To compensate publishers whose content is used in its AI search answers, Perplexity will share a "double digit" percentage of ad revenue and offer additional benefits like free access to its language models and Pro service tier. In response to backlash for scraping content without permission, Perplexity is updating its processes and collaborating with publishers to ensure a sustainable business model and improve its indexing and citation practices.

🤖 AI

Meta's New AI Model Can Segment Anything - Even Video [2 min read]

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) is the first unified model capable of identifying and segmenting target objects in both images and videos, consistently following them across all frames in real-time. SAM 2 can segment any object in video, overcoming challenges such as fast movement and occlusion, which opens up new possibilities for video editing, mixed reality experiences, and faster annotation of visual data for applications like autonomous vehicles. The research on SAM 2 is being shared openly to encourage the AI community to explore new capabilities and use cases, fostering innovation and collaboration.

Canva Acquires Gen AI Startup Leonardo AI [4 min read]

An acquisition to enhance Canva creative hub offerings by leveraging Leonardo.AI advanced image and video generation tools. This is part of the broader Canva strategy to expand its suite of creative tools, complementing previous acquisitions like Affinity, Flourish, Smartmockups, and Kaleido.ai. By integrating Leonardo.AI technology and team, Canva aims to strengthen its position as an all-in-one platform for individual creators and businesses, competing with Adobe by providing powerful, user-friendly tools for professional-grade visual content creation.

🧠 Hacks & Tactics

Improve Growth Mindset In Your Company [10 min read]

Companies often face a perception-reality gap where decisions are intuition-driven and lack proper data support, leading to ineffective outcomes. Emphasizing the importance of a growth mindset, businesses should view failures as learning opportunities and shift towards embracing and analyzing these failures. Implementing a structured experimentation program, with dedicated channels for updates and a weekly meeting to review experiments, helps bridge this gap and enables data-driven decision-making.

3 Ways To Improve Any Ad In Minutes [5 min read]

To create more effective ads, incorporate scarcity by limiting availability, which can increase perceived value and drive sales. Also, ask questions in ad copy to make the ad more engaging and connect with the audience and increase effectiveness.

2 Letters That Make People Click And Buy [3 min read]

Identity Marketing involves adding "er" to words to transform actions into identities, leveraging a powerful psychological motivator. This technique shifts the focus from one-time actions to ongoing identities, significantly increasing engagement, as evidenced by studies showing higher participation when people are addressed by their identity, such as "helper" or "voter." Also, using emojis in social media names can foster a sense of community and shared identity, a tactic that holds potential for enhancing group cohesion, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn for B2B marketing.

Acquisition Channel That Works In 2024: Discord [3 min read]

New founders should prioritize marketing channels that are less saturated and more cost-effective, such as Discord, instead of older and more expensive options like Facebook Ads. Discord offers a fast feedback loop, enabling founders to quickly gather user responses, which aids in refining product and achieving product-market fit more swiftly. Effective engagement on Discord involves subtle and respectful participation in communities, seeking direct promotions from admins, and contributing to discussions before promoting one's product.

⚙️ Machine Shop

Is Optimizing For One Specific Keyword An Outdated SEO Practice? [9 min read]

A detailed shift from an outdated single keyword focus to a more modern, intent-based SEO approach that aligns with current search engine behaviors and user preferences. In some scenarios a narrow keyword focus is still beneficial, particularly for niche topics or local SEO where detailed expertise or geographical relevance is crucial. Overall, a broad, comprehensive SEO strategy should cover a wide range of topics and user intents. This will help attract more qualified traffic, build authority, and enhance user engagement.

The Ultimate Guide To Performance Marketing: Timothy David From Shopify [ 1 hour 42 min listen] 🎧

We think you should listen. To start and scale performance marketing, begin with Google Search ads for their high user intent, then expand to Meta and YouTube if you can create video assets, reserving LinkedIn for targeted B2B campaigns. Avoid common mistakes like relying on a single campaign or platform by building a versatile team that includes a data-driven generalist, a creative expert, and a specialist data scientist. Optimize campaigns and leverage AI to enhance strategies and efficiency, and continually refine your approach based on real-time feedback and engage with platform representatives for competitive insights.

Engaging Narratives That Highlight Your Differentiators & Drive Qualified Leads [12 min read]

Disruption stories are narratives that explain why a business, product, or service exists by highlighting the problem it was created to solve, effectively capturing the attention of potential customers who face similar challenges and driving conversions. These stories serve multiple purposes: acting as sales tools, aligning company teams on core value propositions, and building awareness for new products or services through social media and paid ads, with potential long-term SEO benefits through organic backlinks. To create successful disruption stories craft a clear overarching narrative, an attention-grabbing title, and a compelling introduction, consistently relating back to the identified problems and solutions to ensure the story remains engaging and persuasive. {m}

Do People Still SEO? [6 min read]

An exploration of the differentiation between SEO strategy and execution. Strategy development should remain in-house for better alignment with core business objectives, and execution can be effectively outsourced. Also, the impact of AI and technological advancements on SEO practices, and the need for integrating modern tools.

🔮 The Future

The New Internet [16 min read]

Modern software development faces challenges with complexity and scalability requirements leading to inefficiency and overhead. One solution is to create a "New Internet" that provides every device with an IP address, DNS name, and end-to-end encryption, eliminating unnecessary complexity and enabling direct communication. The vision is to make this simplified connectivity accessible to everyone, fostering innovation and efficiency by moving away from centralized cloud services.

YouTube War On Ad Blockers Continues [4 min read]

YouTube is now showing unskippable blank or black screens to users with ad-blockers, making them wait the same duration as a typical ad before viewing their desired content. To counteract ad-blockers and increase revenue, YouTube is promoting its ad-free YouTube Premium service, which costs $13.99 a month and has already gained over 100 million subscribers. Also, YouTube has implemented server-side ad injection, integrating ads directly into the main video stream, making it more difficult for ad blockers to distinguish between the ad and the video content.

Attribution Is Dying, Clicks Are Dying, Marketing Is Going Back To the 20th Century [8 min read]

Digital marketing dynamics have shifted significantly, rendering traditional metrics like clicks and attribution less reliable due to changes in platform algorithms, privacy laws, and user behavior. Attribution is increasingly challenging because of privacy regulations, ad blockers, multi-device usage, and in-app activities that obscure tracking data. To succeed in this new landscape, marketers must focus on understanding where and how their audience is influenced and invest in tactics that contribute to overall success, even if they cannot be directly attributed. {m}

50 Social Media Job Descriptions And What They Say About The State Of Social Careers [5 min read]

Social media roles are becoming increasingly specialized and sophisticated, indicating that future positions will require higher levels of expertise and specific skill sets. There is a significant lack of standardization in career levels and compensation within the industry, affecting career longevity and clarity for professionals. Also, there is a growing demand for video content creation skills, with roles requiring expertise in platforms like TikTok and YouTube commanding higher salaries.

🗳️ Feedback Dept!

That's it for this week! See you next week. 😎

✌️ Team Marketing Machine

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