I’m always looking for ways to do keyword research “better,” so I like this

A simple technique for more search traffic:

• Find a subreddit related to your business.
• Pop the subreddit link into Ahrefs (our go-to keyword generation tool) and look for the keywords that the page ranks for.
• Take the list of keywords and use them to optimize your content.

If a jacket is made by Patagonia or a piece of hardware is made by Teenage Engineering, you can probably tell who made it the first time you see it, even without a logo.

When your brand has fingerprints, don’t do things that require you to wear gloves.

-Seth Godin

Build a brand that doesn’t need explicit branding.

From Forked Lightning:

the U.S. economy added 19 million total jobs between 2013 and 2023 but lost 850 thousand retail sales jobs.

Retail sector employment is shrinking.

Based on the two graphs below, I’m guessing e-commerce is a big reason why. Along with in-store automation.

This quote from Ben Thompson triggered a thought

distinct nation-states, with their own languages.

This is basically what fandoms are.

The nation-state of Taylor Swift.
The nation-state of Formula 1.
The nation-state of Tolkien.
The nation-state of Star Wars.
The nation-state of Disney.
The nation-states of sports.

In line with people “adding luxury and indulgence around the margins,” the self-gifting trend is forecast to grow this year.

Most holiday shoppers (83%) plan to buy themselves a gift this year, up from 76.2% last year, according to JLL’s holiday shopping report.

Survey says…

69% of consumers worldwide say email is their preferred communication channel with brands

Brands need to be cautious about sending too many emails, because 25% of consumers worldwide unsubscribe from brand email and texts at least once per week

The bonus for brands is the first-party data email sign ups collect.

The bigger your list, the smaller your ad budget can be (depending on your business goals).

If you don’t schedule time for maintenance, your equipment will do it for you.

-Deb Chachra

via A Learning A Day

• Consumers continue to focus on value, and are responding to price reductions

• Smaller form factors — minis — also drove growth, “with travel on the rise and consumers looking for a little bit of affordable indulgence for at-home, too.”

These insights are from Target’s Q2 earnings call.

This was the trend of the summer: reining in COVID revenge spending but still adding luxury and indulgence around the margins, just downsized.

This holiday season projects to be a value bonanza

Video is the most compelling form of content: 63% of B2B buyers say that short-form social video content helps inform buying decisions, with 80% of those who consume video content saying that video-focused influencer content is one of the most trusted forms of content in B2B.

B2B buyers, they’re just like us!

Short form video has taken over. (Of course, this also means a new format / medium is next.)

• When you are running prospecting ads at a large scale, you often need to “over explain” the benefits and value props in your ad.

• If this isn’t a retargeting campaign, then it’s considered cold traffic. For this audience, simplifying the product and re-iterating all of the key value props is a must to get the most out of your media at scale.

• My favorite framework is to first write out how you would explain what you’re selling to a friend over text. Then write out the answer to, “Why did you buy this”, but think of someone asking that in a condescending tone. Combine that and you have an amazing prospecting ad.

I love a question that makes you alter your perspective, so the “why did you buy this” idea above is right up my alley.

Fun listen about Formula 1 as a brand and it’s accidental rise in popularity.

Pandemic + Netflix doc + TikTok + creator economy = Formula 1’s (American) ascension

Doc popularity was a surprise to Netflix.

Now there’s a major sport with a differentiated audience demo compared to the legacy leagues.

We study the macroeconomic implications of narratives, defined as beliefs about the economy that spread contagiously. In an otherwise standard business-cycle model, narratives generate persistent and belief-driven fluctuations. Sufficiently contagious narratives can "go viral," generating hysteresis in the model's unique equilibrium. Empirically, we use natural-language-processing methods to measure firms' narratives. Consistent with the theory, narratives spread contagiously and firms expand after adopting optimistic narratives, even though these narratives have no predictive power for future firm fundamentals. Quantitatively, narratives explain 32% and 18% of the output reductions over the early 2000s recession and Great Recession, respectively, and 19% of output variance.

For all our advancements, we’re still a storytelling species subject to animal spirits. Interpreting the shadows cast by the communal fire and sense making through story.

Narratives matter.

Glamming up a robot risks overpromising what the robot as a product can actually do.  That risks disappointing customers. And disappointed customers are not going to be an advocate for your product/robot, nor be repeat buyers.

Replace “robot” with whatever you sell.

Marketing and selling is a series of promises made to a potential customer. The product better keep—or better yet, exceed—those promises.

The spectacle should be ancillary to the product—an attention magnet. The spectacle shouldn’t be the promise.

This post combines two things I like: Dracula and AI.

as a rule of thumb, in most companies if one type of information “belongs” to one C-level executive and another type to another, the chances of the company building an AI that takes advantage of both is quite low.

If you’re at the cutting edge or attempting to get there, if you’re doing new things in new ways, you aren’t fighting a war, you’re dealing with a vampire. What’s worse, it’s the beginning of Dracula and you have no idea what they look like.

Any new AI that’s more than an iterative improvement of a previous one will need not new algorithms but new questions, not bigger data but stranger combinations of data sets.

There’s always a vampire waiting to suck the life out of your business.

Convergent thinking helps with normal problems.
Divergent thinking helps with vampires.

🧛‍♂️

AI will turbocharge contextual capabilities, and the most important piece of content these days is impressions.

Enter Integral Ad Science:

The tool, called Quality Attention for Publishers, uses machine learning to gauge how much attention readers might give webpages.

The next wave of measurement?

In recent years, attention metrics, which aim to estimate the quality of content adjacent to ad inventory, have become all the rage as advertisers and publishers continue to shift away from more traditional metrics like viewability.

Attentive impressions > impressions

Every platform is a video platform these days (at least that’s what it feels like). That coupled with the growth of video in B2B marketing means you might be starting to develop a LinkedIn video strategy.

Here’s what you need to know before you turn the camera on:

Best Practices

Show what you want your audience to see in the first 10 seconds of the video. (Later they say to Establish your point in the first 5 seconds, then drive it home.)

Think like a silent film director: a large portion of LinkedIn members will watch your ad with the sound off.

Keep videos under 30 seconds for brand awareness and brand consideration goals. A study by LinkedIn* found that videos under 30 seconds reported a 200% lift in view completion rates (Source: LinkedIn internal study, 2018).

Test longer videos for demand generation.

Specs

• Format: MP4 (max 200mb)
• Length: 3 seconds - 30 minutes

Multiple aspect ratios supported:

• 4:5 - 1080 x 1350 pixels
• 9:16 - 1080 x 1920 pixels
• 16:9 - 1920 x 1080 pixels
• 1:1 - 1080 x 1080 pixels

Custom thumbnail is optional - 2mb max, match video dimensions

When a potential customer visits your site, they aren’t trying to talk themselves out of becoming a customer. They’re trying to talk themselves into it.

They have a list of objections they are just waiting to raise and run.

Your job is to answer each one. And even then they still may not convert.