COMING AT YOU 5.23.23
Every single night I make dinner, I have to fight for my life to find the actual freaking recipe behind the gazillion ads that hide the actual effing content in my Pinterest recipe links.
So when I decided to run ads here in the newsletter, I took a vow that the ads could only be here if they gave value. I was inspired by Josh Spector who shared an ad in his newsletter that brought me to a resource I loved and needed.
So I wanna know, what do you hate about ads (in newsletters)? What makes an ad helpful to you?
Hit reply and let me know.
— Hayley
PS. Reply to this email and let me know if you want to run ads with us. I can charge $300 for partnerships set up this week. (We have 10,806 friends subscribed and our open rate is 54%.)
PPS. This 👇 is what I’m talking about!!!
THIS WEEK’S MOST IMPORTANT MARKETING NEWS
NEW CUSTOMIZATIONS AVAILABLE FOR GA4 AUDIENCE BUILDER
Building out audiences in GA4 lets you track subsets of your website visitors. Google added new dimensions and metrics you can use to customize your audiences, like:
- Items added to cart
- Item brand, and
- Items viewed in list
META AD LOCATION TARGETING REMOVES OPTIONS
Meta’s default target location setting is “ living in or recently in this location.” Previously, it also provided four other options: 1) people living in or recently in this location, 2) people living in this location, 3) people recently in this location, and 4) people traveling in this location. Now, those four other options are no longer available. Search Engine Land reports this change is only appearing in some, but not all, accounts.
BARD IMPROVES CITATIONS
Google Bard now shows numbers to indicate where citations are quoted or paraphrased. People aren’t crazy impressed with how often queries show citations or the UX of the citations. But we recognize the step in a good direction. Citations are important, please keep improving them.
THIRD PARTY APPS CAN SCHEDULE INSTAGRAM STORIES
Meta updated the Instagram Graph API to allow Story scheduling for business accounts.
YOUTUBE SELECT ON CONNECTED TVs WILL SHOW 30-SECOND ADS
These ads won’t be skippable. YouTube said, “YouTube Select is now landing over 70% of impressions on the TV screen, so we’re making it easier for you to use existing assets in front of the most-streamed content.”’
4 NEW LEAD GEN TOOLS ON FACEBOOK ADS
1) When someone clicks on an ad promoting a discount, FB will apply that discount in the checkout process (and tell the person that they’re doing that). If the user doesn’t complete checkout, then FB will send them a notification before the sale ends.
2) A dynamic lead gen form that adjusts the questions based on previous answers. Like if they answer A in Question 1, then they see Question 2 next. But if they answer B in Question 1, then they see Question 3 next.
3) You can create a contact form that appears on your FB Business page, once someone fills it out, it gets sent to your business messenger.
4) You can also have the contact form appear when people navigate to your website through FB’s in-app browser.
TOOL OF THE WEEK
This is a new section. Reply and tell me your favorite marketing tools 🫡
Flourish helps us out with data visualization
This is a sweet tool with a pretty robust free tier for creating charts and cool visualizations with your data.
USEFUL LINKS
Hubspot’s 2023 State of Marketing Report
Hubspot used the results of multiple surveys with a total of 1200+ marketers to share these trends, like:
- 92% of marketers expect their 2023 budget to stay the same or increase
- Web traffic was overall down over 6% in 2022 compared to 2021.
- Web conversions saw a nearly 11% increase
Write on newsletter
Joe curates useful resources for copywriting and storytelling, if you’re trying to get better at that. Peruse the newsletter using the link above or sign up now using the link below.
Entity SEO: The definitive guide
Over a decade ago Google began teaching that Google understands things and is no longer a simple keyword detection algorithm. But so many marketers are still focused on keywords more than anything. This guide shows you a different way.
Amazon Insider’s newsletter
Amazon is its own beast. If you already know that and are looing for beast-taming tips so you can make Amazon work for you and bring you in millions and billions of sales, then this is a nice newsletter all about that. Peruse the newsletter using the link above or sign up now using the link below.
THE MAN, THE BOY, THE DONKEY, AND YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY
One of these ends up drowning 😬 and we’re trying to keep your content out of the deep water.
A man and his son went off to market walking beside their donkey. Soon a countryman passed them and said: “You fools, what is a donkey for but to ride upon?”
So the man put the boy on the donkey and they went on their way. But soon they passed a group of men, and one said: “See that lazy youngster, he lets his father walk while he rides.”
So the man got on himself and his son walked. But they hadn’t gone far when they passed two women, and one said to the other, “Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along.”
The man didn’t know what to do, but he brought his boy up on the donkey with him. Yet again passers-by began to jeer and point at them. The man asked what they were scoffing at. Someone called, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey of yours?”
The man and boy got off and tried to think what to do. They thought and they thought. At last they cut down a pole, tied the donkey’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the donkey to their shoulders. They went along amid the laughter of all who met them till they came to the market bridge.
Suddenly the donkey got one of his feet loose, kicked out, and caused the boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle, the donkey fell over the bridge and was drowned.
“That will teach you,” said an old man who had followed them, “Please all, and you will please none.”
This is one of the tales we believe came from Aesop who was a Greek slave from waaay back around 500 BC. Like many of his fables, the moral here is familiar to us: don’t try to please everyone.
The other day John Bonini decided in his newsletter, “The worst advice in marketing is to listen to your audience.” He was saying how people don’t write about their own opinions and personal experiences because they try to write about what their audience wants. He says you should stop caring about what your audience wants and just start writing what your passionate about.
I agree with what John says. But I don’t think using that strategy means you’re ignoring what your audience wants. I think it’s giving your audience exactly what they want. They want *original* content. They want to hear from a person who can speak from experience. They want true stories and tips they can trust because it’s a process the author has been using for the last year.
You know what they don’t want? They don’t want you to rewrite the same three identical articles that appear in the top three search results for a topic.
So when you lean into your idiosyncrasies, the pieces that sets you apart, the topics that individual writers are passionate about, then you are giving your audience what they want.
AI TIPS
Chat GPT Prompt:
Give me a script to use when I ask my boss over the phone for more budget to spend on [insert marketing channel here]. So far, [explain your success or struggle with this channel or if you’ve never tried it before].
Use the information in this article to convince my boss to give us an increased budget for [insert marketing channel].
[copy and paste article on the pros and cons of the marketing channel]
INTERESTING STUFF
🤱 IKEA ADMITS IT’S ONLY SECOND BEST IN SWEET CAMPAIGN CELEBRATING THE PARENT-CHILD BOND
☀️ SUNSET | GA4 PARODY TRAILER | GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4
📱OPENAI LAUNCHES AN OFFICIAL CHATGPT APP FOR IOS
🚫 MONTANA SAYS 1ST-IN-NATION TIKTOK BAN PROTECTS PEOPLE. TIKTOK SAYS IT VIOLATES THEIR RIGHTS
📈 NETFLIX STOCK JUMPS 9% AS IT BOASTS AD-TIER GROWTH
⌚ VISUALIZED: THE DAILY ROUTINES OF FAMOUS CREATIVES
🎙️ WHY COMPANIES STILL SHY AWAY FROM PODCAST ADS