Doing Sales as a Marketer

Wake up at 3 AM, take a bath and drive to an empty park to sell stuff.

Yes, Every once a month. I go to work with my father helping him with his business.

He runs a clothing business here in germany and once every month. We go to this famous marketplace to sell more than we usually do.

For that weekend, I go from typing online about marketing to selling products with zero marketing. Only sales led growth.

And it feels better. Marketing sometimes feel like one-sided love, no one listens.

Here are two lessons I learned while talking to over 400 different customers this weekend.

Don’t ask, Show them

Customer is looking at a product, they are trying to find the sizes.

You opt-in for help and they say I’m just looking. No need for help.

This happens a lot. I ask “What size are you looking for?”. They leave.

And these are german consumers. Direct questions are bad for sales.

Because you are the selling character in the scene and many have your image in mind as someone trying to oversell.

That is why either be indirect or show.

What I did was simple, tracked what sizes they dropped and what were left. I decided to take the size they wanted and indirectly said, What do you think about this one?

I didn’t pitch that I have their size. I pitched I have what interests them and asked for their permission.

What I learned was consumer wants control of their decision. Respect that and take the permission.

What Brought them

Last year, The owner of that marketplace sold the space to a new individual and he changed few things around impacting all businesses, including my father.

We saw a 30% sales drop even with additions of a new product line. The same situation with other businesses, but what increased was amount of people visiting the marketplace.

The number of people visiting increased by 15% and he did OOH Ads in the city for the weekend market.

More marketing ≠ less sales.

Teaching me again that, chasing more brand awareness isn’t going to help a business. It is all about reaching the right customer and bringing them to your business.

Bringing wrong audience online costs mostly money. On ground, talking to them as a salesperson can be exhausting and sometimes can make you angry.

That is why be precise with your marketing.

Find what brings the best one to the market.

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How To Scale Original Content on Search & Social

With AI-generated content taking a bigger space on the Internet, creating compelling content is crucial for businesses and individuals alike.

However, the pursuit of originality can often be daunting and challenging to scale. This is where creativity comes to the forefront, enabling us to take risks and engage with audiences in unique and impactful ways.

In this blog post, I try to explore the importance of creativity in content creation, drawing inspiration from insightful experiences and valuable lessons.

By embracing creativity and leveraging existing frameworks, we can develop personalized content that not only resonates with our target audience but also achieves scalability and success.

1. The Relationship Between Originality and Creativity

While originality can be elusive and difficult to replicate, creativity allows us to approach ideas and topics from fresh perspectives.

The insight you shared, emphasizing the creative aspect of content rather than its originality, holds immense value. Creative content can be born from original ideas, but it doesn't necessarily have to be completely new.

By leveraging existing concepts, frameworks, and successful campaigns, we can build upon them in innovative ways to captivate our audience.

Creativity is sparked by taking risks and exploring topics that others might shy away from. Those taking the risk are original creators & writers. It requires a willingness to push boundaries and challenge conventional thinking.

By infusing our content with creative elements, we can attract attention, evoke emotions, and generate a deeper connection with our audience. We don’t have to be originators to build a trustable business through valuable content.

That is why the next point showcases an example of what businesses & creators can do to leverage original content created by others.

2. The Impact of Silent Storytelling: IKEA's Marketing Campaign & Originality

The recent marketing campaign by IKEA serves as an excellent example of the power of storytelling & originality. Many marketers have been discussing its impact and breaking down the techniques employed to connect with the audience.

While the initial person who pointed out the campaign may have gained less direct benefit from the subsequent trend. The act of breaking it down showcasing creative skills helped other businesses to benefit more from the trend. This highlights the potential for scalable content that arises when we creatively analyze and adapt existing successes.

Silent storytelling, as demonstrated by IKEA's campaign, allows for a deeper emotional connection with the audience. By using visuals, music, or other non-verbal elements, brands can evoke powerful emotions and create a lasting impression. This type of storytelling sparks the imagination of both the audience and other creatives, leading to further exploration and discussion.

But often this type of storytelling gets unnoticed because we remember bad campaigns more than the good ones. To increase remembrance and scalability, you have to show more than a point.

And be creative with what you share. In this case, the original distributor of the Ad (excluding IKEA) isn’t getting the most benefit & scalability. The creative taking origins and making it connect to a broader audience is benefiting the most.

You have to be that, to use original content concepts and blend them with creative strategies to get major scalability. Across Google, Social Media & other platforms.

3. Sparks of Originality and Unnoticed Brilliance

Your observation about the reader missing the origins of a statement due to the multiple sparks of originality resonates strongly.

Original content often goes unnoticed because it creates only fleeting sparks. However, when we infuse creativity into our ideas and statements, they become catalysts for further exploration and engagement.

By focusing on creative execution, we increase the chances of our content reaching and resonating with our target audience.

To overcome the challenge of unnoticed brilliance, it is important to find ways to capture and retain the audience's attention. This can be done through compelling storytelling, visual appeal, interactive elements, or thought-provoking insights.

By weaving creativity into our content, we create an experience that not only captures attention but also leaves a lasting impression.

4. The Challenge of Adapting High-Quality Content for the Web

A recent statement made by Google's John Mueller, though harsh, reminds us that high-quality content alone does not guarantee success on the web. It highlights the necessity of adapting to the online landscape and audience preferences. (more…)

How Future of Content Marketing is Changing?

In 2023, Content marketing is breaking down and businesses are having a hard time growing their business through content. And It is not AI.

It is because content systems and formats are changing at a fast pace and the impact is on direct marketing.

First: Change In SEO

The data from sparktoro shows that almost 50% of Google searches end up as zero-click searches. And the user never clicks through to visit your website.

This number is increasing with Google evolving its SERP with new UX additions & updating the old features. More and more Google searches will be answered without making users visit a website.

Costing businesses using content marketing. And the impact is expected to increase as Google’s new chatbot will be integrated into search. To answer your queries based on the data you have on your blog or website.

What are the solutions to this SEO problem?

The importance of branding identities and personalizing your content will increase.

For Google SERP, brands will need to include elements like Insights from their teams, names of those experts, and better branding integration.

Even though recent trends show that many websites have stopped adding their Sitename at the end of Blogpost Titles. The trend is expected to change. As when the information is shown on SERP, not your website. You need to highlight your name to make people connect that value they got with your own business.

The second is brands will start to do limited SEO.

Meaning showing up for random searches won’t help. Better tracking of where your brand shows up will get more important.

Start Targeting long-tail keywords that are lookalikes and identical. Because it will help brands keep the target audience in the loop.

When you go broad with SEO and spend more time. It will still work for brand awareness. But the demand for better content structuring will increase.

It will be less about

How to write a blog ~ How to design a blog ~ How to monetize a blog ~ How to sell a blog

More about

How to write a B2B blog ~ What to include in a B2B blog post ~ Best B2B blog categories ~ B2B content template ~ B2B blog post length - …

Trying to keep the one ideal searcher within your loop to convert them with your content. Because when SERP shows previewed content at the top. Maybe for the first or second time, that user won’t visit your website.

But with them seeing your brand associated with the last two posts and the value. They will visit the site to check more of your work.

Second: Change In Social Media

Even though now we have 5 links in our Instagram Bio. The traffic to websites from social media platforms is decreasing.

Similar web’s latest research suggests social media referral traffic is declining for most publishers and businesses too. Vice and BuzzFeed did not suffer alone to die.

Traffic is down for most of these publishers. And it is because of a few different reasons.

First is Twitter & Pinterest. After Elon Musk’s takeover, Link sharing took a dip and Elon was even blocking links to a few publications and substack.

And then Pinterest went through a policy and alleged algorithm changes. After it was revealed few people were using the platform to target young users. That shift to make the platform more secure affected a lot of bloggers making their pins go down in rank. And users also complained about the changes.

Second is the consideration change. The video marketing push on social media has changed the behavior of online users. Impacting their decisions like leaving the platform to read the content.

When they are getting the same content on Tiktok or Instagram in a different format more consumable format.

Third is content distribution. Old distribution strategies don’t work. Reposting your blog or event content will not impact your social media traffic. You need to recreate the blog post into the optimized format of that social media channel to get the most out of it.

What are the solutions to fix the social media problem?

The first is to think of social media content distribution strategy as a content recreation strategy.

Understand the formats of that platform and the nature of the audience. Pick the parts of the content that will be most relatable to the audience.

For Tiktok & Instagram, You have to dumb down the complexity of the post.
For Twitter, you need the structural flow in the thread.
And for LinkedIn, you need a thought-provoking element in the content.
Pinterest or Tumblr needs the visual element of your content.

All these needs might shift based on what type of audience exists on these platforms. But adapting to them is more important than ever.

What content adaptation can do is easy to catch on social media. Washington Post’s Instagram account grew to 6.5 million followers in the past few years with the adaptation to Instagram carousels. They used trending IG format + storytelling to build that audience and derive traffic back to the website using CTAs at the end.

While BuzzFeed News copy-pasted most of their blog content & statements onto their Instagram handle. And many businesses are doing social media content like that!

Please don’t do that, to make social media users visit your business or publishing site. Try to adapt to their needs on IG, Tiktok, and other channels before you complain.

Third: Growth of Personalized Content

The age of private communities and channels is here. Many Brands like Ahrefs & Sprout Social have started their private communities for customers and community members.

These communities provide personalized content for the user's needs. No need to target 1000 different user identities on the Internet. You only have to fulfill the needs of your community members.

And provide structured value in conversations, AMAs, Group meetings, and other community elements. These eventually help everyone get the most out of it.

And Gen-Z users are loving this idea as they want their own privacy-focused curated content space.

For businesses, this is not a problem. But a new part of content marketing.

Earlier it was the goal to make people sign-up for your mailing list. In the email, the control is over the audience, not the deliverability of your content. That is why:

Personalized content spaces like chat groups, WhatsApp broadcasts & private communities will help brands reach their audience even better. Even with all these marketing changes coming to Search & Social Media.

How Burger King Used Netflix’s Show “Beef”

The new Netflix show "Beef" is making a huge splash with its great storyline, depicting how anger is an emotion caused by our own desires.

At times when we feel depressed or unfulfilled in our lives, certain life moments can cause us to show our anger in different ways.

I could go on about defining anger and the Netflix show, but what I want to talk about is the genius emotional marketing from Burger King.

Brand integrations in movies and TV shows offer opportunities to connect brand values to different stories.

In Netflix's "Beef," both of the main characters are seen eating Burger King's chicken sandwich.

In both scenes, they are at their lowest point in life. In another scene, a side character named Paul talks about how Danny, the main character, feels fulfilled and loves eating that sandwich from a Burger King franchisee that takes an hour and a half to visit from his house.

Both eating scenes connected Burger King to emotions that regular people go through in everyday life, and their favorite burger and place to eat is an escape.

It allows them to feel fulfilled with eating and get a break from their fast lifestyle. This makes people connected to the Netflix show try that sandwich when they feel low.

Brand integrations in movies are normal, but only a few have mastered it because it costs.

Nike is running its own animation studio with sneaker integrations in every movie they release. Apple Originals also feature their products based on the role of characters in the movies.

It's a long-term strategy to shape their brand image and remind consumers of their purpose.

Don’t talk to Your Consumers

You may have heard of this marketing line: 95% of consumers are not actively looking to buy in any category. There are almost 138+ reports mentioning this same insight.

In these reports, Marketers suggest people need to be reminded about their needs. Taking this advice, I see many startups go do marketing like they are reminding people about their needs & how their life could be better with their products.

A consumer in need of X doesn’t want you to chant. How better, faster or sustainable your business is compared to others. They want to know if your business fulfills their need of X or not.

But in a competitive market, When everyone fulfills the need of a consumer. The behavior of a consumer changes.

The next most common advice is to do market research & survey your ideal consumers. To figure out how you can differentiate yourself from others.

You hire people to survey the consumer and find their opinions on the industry and competitors. That is where you have to remain silent.

Why Silence? Because you should not let your own bias come to the market research or the consumer. It is your time to let experienced people do their job.

They don’t do magic. Market researchers have the job to ask the same questions you have but without letting their bias come to their job.

Many take inspiration from Steve job because he told don’t ask people what they want. That does not mean, he did not do market research.

Apple spent millions on market research in the early stages but that was 90% indirect market research. Making sure the brand names don’t play a role in getting answers out of people. And they understood consumer minds through other research.

To build businesses that people want and do marketing that works.

Eliminate Bias when studying consumers and doing business research. And ask indirect questions that bring people to answers that they won’t give. When asked directly.

To learn more about studying your Ideal Buyers, I wrote a new guide on creating buyer personas that don’t fail.

Creating Buyer Personas: What Matters In Creating them?

I work in social media and I don’t usually see people in Social use “buyer persona” enough. But I’m always using “Buyer personas” because it makes social media strategy planning & content creation very easy. Another reason is I love studying people.

That was the first reason I pursued marketing as a career. Since the start of my career, I’ve seen marketers struggle with buyer psychology & building personas. Probably because there's a lot of outdated & scattered information on creating buyer personas.

How I learned about buyers at my previous jobs was through real-time surveys, using Google Scholar & accessible qualitative/quantitative data to find relevant information on the potential buyers. And tracking the progress of big brands in my free newsletter.

My process isn’t enough to teach you about creating buyer personas. That’s why I have tried to curate all my favorite guides, insights & practices to help you.

This is a typical Buyer Persona building guide

It starts with an explanation of what a Buyer persona is. A buyer persona represents your ideal buyer and you gather characteristics & data about a persona that mimics a real-customer. And after that you will build your campaigns & do marketing focusing on that single persona. In hopes of converting the real customer.

After that the guide to build a successful persona starts at the advice of gathering data about your target audience. Any data that is available in the market or you can get your hand on is extremely valuable.

Then the guide advises you to work on understanding that audience & finding the common grounds. And then use those common beliefs in product marketing to achieve success.

Most of the guides tell you to do the market research & you will eventually find the best buyer personas. And I say that is a mediocre advice to give because that’s just saying data is buyer persona.

No, Every piece of data that you get from market research & knowing your audience doesn’t help you to convert that buyer. If you understand the personas well enough, you will know what pain point to target and what to not.

That’s what the focus of this writing is helping you understand what matters & what doesn’t matter in building buyer personas. If you are completely new to building personas, I recommend you to read this guide from Hubspot & come back.

Jaskaran’s Insights on Creating Buyer Personas

We need to stop chasing Audience demographics in dreams of creating buyer personas. Especially as the Generative AI wave is growing within marketing. Curating & Extracting audience demographics is something AI will do in a matter of seconds. That’s why I want marketers to drop the ball on this way of creating buyer personas.

First, To create buyer personas that help you build products & brands that people love. You need to master the art of asking questions that get people out of their mold.

For years, I’ve been seeing marketers push traditional questions & run surveys that are too oriented and simple. That what consumers might answer is very much predictable.

For Great Surveys that help you create buyer personas. There are two possibilities, either you give them an abundance of context about your vision, competitors & Industry or you give them 0 context and let them share what they know at the starting phase.

In both scenarios, you are giving the person more than a question. It’s an opportunity to either express or share their insights.

Don’t build personas from numbers only, build them from conversations. Data helps you to identify the ideal buyer & analyzing them in real-time helps you to confirm the best buyer persona to target.

Take Ron Johnson as an example, his time at JCpenney. He came and looked at numbers & data only. He failed to understand the buyer persona, he tried to build a great customer experience like Apple at JCpenney. When the ideal buyer wasn’t looking for experience, they were looking for better deals & products at JCPenny.

A lot of marketers end up making this same mistake at companies. Many work in the same industry jobs & take what they learned about X buyer to the next company job. And use that persona, Like Ron Johnson.

Yes, 90% of the characteristics of buyers are the same, but to do great marketing. You should care about the minor characteristics of a buyer.

And those characteristics & identities are learned through real-time engagement & interactions with your potential buyers.

Why Most Buyer Personas S**k

I love this guide from Ramli John explaining what buyer personas aren’t and what most people neglect.

One of the points he mentioned was most personas don’t focus on what the buyer is doing during the buying process

For Context, Most B2B purchase decisions for marketing are made with help of teams & the process is longer than B2C.

The importance of understanding how your potential buyer moves is important. What are they doing after the first interaction, how do they move toward an end-decision? You need to understand the buyer journey to improve the sales & marketing process.

You can grab the free cheatsheet from Ramli John & Adrienne Barnes about understanding buyer journeys.

Using Limited or Industry Qualitative Data isn’t Bad

This insight comes from Bonnie Chiurazzi, Head of Market Insights at Glassdoor. She mentioned that using qualitative data from reports, industry leaders & previous campaigns isn’t bad. If you’re on a limited budget, lack the technology or may be the potential buyer is too hard to reach (like industry professionals).

Even though both of the insights above suggested that use of real-time insights & customer journey is the best way to go. Gathering these insights & data isn’t easy.

That’s why in some cases, you need to rely on limited insights to create personas & have to test & experiment consistently to find the ideal persona. The important part is identifying your objectives with every persona from the beginning to have a great product-led growth.

Don’t be Direct in Your Surveys about Product

The worst mistake you can make while creating buyer personas is being too direct about your product and competitors. That creates immediate bias in the mind of interviewees.

And the next worst mistake is choosing the wrong person to write & ask those questions. A person too optimistic about the product will always ask questions that deliver predictable answers. Because they also have bias towards products and their questions often have predictable results.

I can’t teach you how to ask great questions that deliver the best insights. Because that is a creative marketing skill and you need to understand the business & think outside the box. Then never allow bias to come in your way.

The skill of asking right questions is now even more important as AI also gives you the best answers when the prompt is right.

Define how much context the buyer holds

To successfully move your potential buyer to an end-decision. Understand how much context they have about different things in your industry & about similar products.

For Example, Successful dictators in the past used the power of context to influence people. They started limiting the context people had about certain elements of society, to share their own vision. That helped them maintain control over the people.

In understanding personas, you want to identify their knowledge & context, some of the common characteristics of buyers (based on context) in every industry are:

Observers: People who are observing the market & just want an overview to make a buying decision.

People who do fast fashion, observe & adapt.

Fans: These are People connected with an element of the brand & they have more context about competitors & market through that specific brand

People who choose Brands like Tommy Hilfiger and stick to them.

Customers: These are people regularly in the market for products & know the ABCs of how to find a better deal.

People who try to find a new fashion brand for the sake of experience or a better offer.

Commentators: These are Industry representatives sharing their insights & have an influence over other decision-makers.

People who share their fashion reviews & insights on Brands recent look books. Affecting other buyers in the market.

Collaborators: These are People who get involved in major buying decisions. In scenarios like B2B partnerships, house purchases & Art buying.

When Brands like Nike & Tiffany work together to target two personas together: sneaker collectors & Luxury lovers.

Now, You will find these 5 types of personas in every industry and their decision making is reliant on the context they hold. That’s why finding how much context a customer holds is not negligible.

Social Media Data to Create Personas

With the help of advertising networks like Facebook & TikTok, you can easily find a lot of information about your ideal buyers & use that data to create buyer personas that will convert.

But the reality is you have to create different personas first and test them. To have a final persona that will convert on through Social Media Ads & creatives you are currently running.

Social Media Analytics dashboards & Tools like Facebook Audience Insights will never help you create the ideal buyer personas. They will serve you demographics only.

How successful brands use social media to create buyer personas & then create content for them is through direct brand partnerships with these platforms.

Take Pinterest for example, Every year they launch various content deals with brands. Take their partnership with Tastemade last year.

These content partnerships are made after Pinterest analyzes the user personas on the platform. How they(users) are interacting, what are they saving & the conversations, all these factors to identify the persona. Then, the platform advises Tastemade and other brands on what type of content to create to reach that audience.

The Big Agency campaigns on other platforms are also successful because many have API access. They tune into the conversations happening on that platform & analyze the user behavior before crafting the buyer personas to create content for!

In Future, this will happen a lot as many will use AI + Social Media APIs to build personas using real-time conversations happening on the platform.

For now, you have to settle for social media analytics data & analyzing the conversations that take place around your brand.

Innovation Persona can make or break your business

Innovation persona exists when CEOs & businesses feel like they have a similar persona to their ideal buyer. Why? Because they themselves had a problem and built a product around it. Now, it is a business & they are getting sales. 90% of Shark Tank stories are a great example.

Is there a problem with the Innovation persona? No, if the sales are great. But even if Sales are great, you should always test different personas and try to learn about new characteristics of customers because you might discover some new opportunities.

That’s why never take a working buyer persona for granted. Always try to find a persona to upscale your business.

A great example is In starting of his career, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc for years never identified that his ideal buyer needed better locations more than any other element that he provided. Because the potential buyer of a franchise was already in love with the idea of the franchise and ready to deal with employee training fees & paying for food costs.

He was unknown to an element that could make the buying decision faster and easier. And that was choosing locations and leasing them to franchisee owners.

That taught me the importance of being open to adapting to new buyer personas & exploring new customer data to craft better marketing strategies.

The Show don’t tell Framework

You leave a kid in a room with an unknown object for 30 minutes, you will see him trying to figure out what it is & after that visit him in the room. He will have questions for you.

That’s what brands are doing to understand the buyer personas without having to do extensive research.

In SaaS, free Trials are one of the best ways to identify the personas. Using Trials, you will identify what users are utilizing within the tool & what breaks them to leave the platform. These free tryouts are the best.

In Digital, Using tools like Microsoft Clarity & Hotjar help you capture the engaging elements of your website. And Tracking Pixels & Abandoned purchases tell you a lot about the buying process and the regular buying behavior. You are highlighting your business & using copywriting in the Ads & website. Then how they react is tracked by these tools leaving with a better overview of the customer journey.

On Social Media, You share the content & brand messaging after a single post you get the data about how people interact. Also get to listen to real-time conversations.

In an established business state, all of these things might need to be done after identifying the buyer personas. But just starting out as an early-age startup or small business “Show, don’t tell” framework is one of the best. As you learn from experience & interactions with your audience.

Earned Vs Borrowed Buyer Insights

There is no doubt in my mind that earned buyer insights are more valuable than borrowed insights. But you can’t earn buyer insights at most marketing jobs, first I believe marketers need to be rewarded whenever they work on gathering real-time Buyer insights. It isn’t an easy task, that’s why most marketers rely on borrowed buyer insights.

Gathering insights through Industry benchmark reports & surveys conducted by Big Firms. And that isn’t bad but you should identify trusted sources & compare data to other sources.

For Instance, Deloitte in the latest marketing trends report published data about Metaverse marketing trends while this year so far the pioneers of Metaverse: Google & Meta have cut down their budgets for metaverse.

Not only that, at the time this report came out many marketers were also disappointed with the data. Proving that data sources also don’t create a huge impact. What really matters is you try to compare & analyze as much as possible to gather buyer insights that actually help you target ideal customers.

Understanding Hard to Reach Personas

In B2B & Enterprise-Level B2C, you might’ve a hard time reaching the potential buyers & getting them to answer in surveys or attend interviews.

And in some cases, you can’t get the answer out of them in that state.

To fix that put them in different group settings like a get together or workshops where they might be more open & sharing some thoughts. I recommend this guide from Hubspot to understand the importance of running workshops to understand your business & customers better.

In certain scenarios, you might need to put your potential buyers in these type of situations occasionally to better your understanding of their general buying behaviors, preferences & pain points.

Many Companies don’t create Buyer Personas

This comes from Patrick Campbell, CEO of Profitwell. On Lenny’s Podcast, He mentioned that only 1 in 5 companies create buyer personas or work consistently on Ideal customer profiles.

First, I advise you to listen to Lenny's podcast. One of my favorite podcasts to learn about business & product marketing.

Patrick also mentioned that qualitative market research isn’t conducted on a quarterly basis in most industries. First these are Patrick’s personal beliefs & there isn’t data to back his findings.

But I agree with Patrick, companies aren’t working on gathering buyer insights & data consistently. Because the reliance on data sources like Meta, Google & Microsoft is increasing. And companies are scared to spend time on real-time research & experimenting with their consumers to learn more.

This needs to change as third-party data is a dying breed & companies need to get back to gathering first-party data & buyer insights to do better product marketing.

Not only marketing, these insights help product management, developers and other members to work with a better understanding of the market & business.

The last Insight from McKinsey

One of the marketing trends mentioned in McKinsey’s latest report was Personalization.

Consumers in most markets are expecting brands to show a sign that they know them on a personal level. Likelihood to purchase, recommend & repurchase is now more reliant on how you personalize the average buying experience.

To do that, you need to understand your buyer, not buyer personas. Try to understand a single individual buyer & personalize the experience for them. If there is a market for that buying experience & product. You will be great at marketing.

This is what is happening in Social Media Marketing, everyone is creating content for mass personas, to convert the viewers into buyers. And they are failing, You need to create for a few or just one.

Bryan Cranston’s insight on creating for people

In one of his golden interviews, he explained the difference between acting in a comedy show vs Saturday night live.

He says people get to enjoy the comedic act more at SNL because they know the characters are having fun & even when they break characters people like it even more.

On other hand in a comedic movie or show, the character needs to be in the role & shouldn’t find it funny, to make sure the audience gets most out of it. Similar situations with movie characters not crying easily in movies, to make the audience cry.

To understand your buyers better, you shouldn’t be too direct because that takes a lot of material out of the conversation. The bias kicks in, they are afraid to answer and much more.

But most guides tell you to be so direct and ask the majority of questions that don’t matter. Be precise with what you choose to build these buyer personas.

What Changed In Marketing & Advertising Q1 2023?

This is Jaskaran, And today I’m bringing you a quarterly review of what changed regarding marketing in the last quarter.

Every week a lot is going on regarding marketing & some updates impact your business & some don’t. And I want to look back at what happened and share some insights on social media and marketing. If you're curious about how I know everything about recenr changes. I share the weekly recaps of marketing industry in my free newsletter.

Instagram

We kicked off the year with Instagram’s CEO sharing his vision & revealing in an interview that Instagram will be back to prioritizing every single Post format equally. And since then many users have been seeing an increase in organic reach for photos. Then we had the “+” posting button come back to its old position confirming that IG isn’t only pushing reels in 2023. Overall content posting is a part of the new strategy.

After that, we saw Instagram test “lead capturing” action buttons in profiles & official launch of Instagram broadcasts. The test feature & launch of broadcasts leads us to Instagram trying to make the platform more engaging & connecting. This is Instagram realizing that if they can’t attract new users like Tiktok. They can make users stick for a longer period. For businesses, this is great news as more features to connect with your followers is a great opportunity to build long-term brand engagement.

Then, the launch of Meta Paid subscriptions in New Zealand, Australia & US. A recent survey shows that businesses & creators will pay for subscriptions to have account security and protect their brand image. As many businesses feel like bot accounts & getting in contact with Instagram is hard and this subscription might help them. The promise of more organic reach in NZ & Australia isn’t what businesses love the most, it's just the cherry on the top.

Some other things going at Instagram are “reels editing tools'' might get a makeover soon & new features to help creators. Monetization features on Instagram are currently on hold. For example Reels bonuses & Revenue from Profile Ads. And at last

Adam Mosseri, Instagram CEO is working on providing more of his insights through his account.

Tiktok

The most downloaded app of Q1 2023 & also the most controversial due to the latest US ban issues.

Policy Changes: First they increased enforcement of nudity & NSFW content for teen users in January and also partnered with Meta & Bumble for a project to protect teens. After that InMarch, amid US Ban Tiktok introduced a new set of community guidelines to restrict adult content & tightening the guidelines to shadowban content that is too political and can harm the audience.

Content Systems: Tiktok launched a “Refresh” feature to provide users access to start a new feed if the content on their feed is too repetitive. The focus of this feature is to make sure users find more original and unique content. With the same approach, Tiktok launched “Creativity Program Beta”, a new creator Fund where creators earn more money from creating original content with a minimum length of 1 minute.

With the launch of both of these updates, we are seeing TikTok creators facing low reach on short content under 30 seconds & long-form content with over 4 seconds to 1 minute is getting rewarded more. The new content systems want users to stick for a longer period and that’s why we are seeing a push of long-form content on Tiktok.

Attracting Advertisers: Tiktok is expanding access to keyword-oriented search Ads to more advertisers & attracting advertisers. This showcases the importance of building a presence on Tiktok, many brands are still nowhere to be found when we search their names on Tiktok. The growth in more people searching for products on Tiktok was seen this quarter, that’s why after optimizing for Google search, try to do the same for Tiktok.

Other news regarding Tiktok, The US Ban seems unlikely to happen from my POV. Tiktok also introduced an Instagram-like promote button for businesses to run Ads in a matter of time with a few clicks. This can attract new advertisers & SMBs to test run ads quickly to get started with Tiktok marketing.

Ecommerce Marketing

I don’t cover the latest e-commerce marketing news & data but people at Insider Intelligence do. They recently released a new free report about the latest e-commerce & retail marketing trends. The data is completely updated, unlike other reports.

You can find the report available to download for free + you might receive more data & insights from Insider Intelligence after the first report. Why? To help you more with doing data-backed marketing.

Youtube

The trend of Youtube Shorts is growing faster than Instagram reels & Tiktok now. One of the reasons behind that is creators & businesses focused on Youtube shorts can easily repurpose long-form content as short-form content by chopping up the content. And that short-form content leads the audience back to long-form content. And this element is lacking on IG & Tiktok, Youtube is providing a better loop.

Creators: Youtube started sharing Ad revenue with Creators from Youtube Shorts. And the new CEO said they are focused on sharing more rev with creators in the future.

Advertising: Music Marketers are also utilizing

Shorts are more than Reels as they can run Music-focused CTAs like “Create a video with this audio” through Youtube Short Ads. And that is not possible for now with reels.

Youtube got rid of Overlay Ads but Introduced a new format of Ads where marketers can run Ads on YouTube's Homepage for a specific time to capture attention during events.

Others: This quarter Youtube provided podcasts a push by bringing Podcasts to Youtube Music. And also added the ability to create a podcast in YT studio.

Twitter

The year started with Twitter renaming their home feed to “For You” and that feed only included recommended content for a while & that backfired. And now it serves 50% recommendations & 50% of the content you signed up for.

Advertising: In January partnered with Double-verify to fix Ad targeting issues & after that launched “Search keyword Ads” to attract targeted advertisers. Elon promises more Positive Ad changes in February to attract back the Top advertisers that stopped advertising. And still, the Advertising platform is in emergency & needs to be fixed for better Ad targeting.

Twitter Blue: First Twitter said Blue creators will receive a share of Ad revenue. And after that Blue subscribers get access to create 4,000-character tweets. Then a major change was where 2FA access was limited to only blue subscribers. And now we have reached a peak where earned/legacy blue badges are no longer available & Twitter blue is the way to get verified, regular users. While big brands will pay a hefty amount to get blue badges.

Overall: The past doesn’t matter now as after making the Twitter algorithm source code public. Now everyone knows how the algorithm works. We can no longer blame Elon or algorithms for organic reach. You need to nail your content to make sure you are creating content for your circle of followers.

Snapchat

The daily usage growth was there for Snap but the platform failed to reach revenue goals in 2022 as revealed by their earning report. But to keep users more engaged, They launched “Snapchat AI” for premium subscribers and that feature is keeping teenagers and especially Gen-Z attached to the platform.

Snapchat is the home of Gen-Z audiences and also creators. Many creator interviews revealed that Snapchat is paying them the most amount of money to stay on the platform.

Snapchat Influencers are sharing more than regular videos on the platform & which is resulting in better ROI for Brands when they work with Snapchat-only influencers.

The platform also reached 2 million+ paid subscribers & growth in UK teenage users.

The CEO revealed that Gen-Z is adopting Pinterest and half of the video content on the platform was pinned by Gen-Z. With that Pinterest focuses on making video content shoppable this year.

And Pinterest Collage App “Shuffle” was already capturing young users & now they have introduced the ability to tag products. Also, Pinterest introduced a premium Ad Spot that stays pinned to the Pinterest search tab for 24 hours.

With all these features, Pinterest’s focus remains on making social commerce more accessible to its users. And making the user experience better.

Pinterest is becoming an even better place for retail & DTC brands + the platform reached 450 million monthly users.

Reddit & Live Audio

For the first two months, we didn’t get any major changes to Reddit.

But in March, Reddit announced the End of Reddit talks, expanding further on the that “Live Audio” is dying. As Facebook got rid of Audio Channels & Spotify also gave up on “Spotify Live”. No one talks about Clubhouse anymore. The Era of Live Audio is almost ending with major platforms burying their audio features.

Back to Reddit, The most recent update banning users & communities on a large scale is going on at Reddit. The platform is tightening the policies & banning users to promote transparency showcasing to users in real-time that we are working toward making Reddit a safer place.

Others: Reddit is testing a Tiktok-like feed called “Watch” for video content. In 2020, all platforms jumped on live audio & now which is short-form video.

Advertising

Obvious: The involvement of AI in Microsoft & Google Ads is increased. And now you can automate asset creation In Google Ads & Bing AI may start serving you Ads from Q2 within the chats.

Silent Winner: Amazon’s Ad business saw the most growth in the last quarter Q4 2022 with a 19% increase.

Google: The Ad policies are getting stricter at Google & also the platform is getting transparent. Recently revealed the platform removed 5.2 Billion Ads in 2022. And now Google launched an Ad library to promote transparency regarding Ads & also to help Advertisers to discover competitor Ads.

Microsoft: The Ad network introduced a lot of new Ad targeting features to improve the Ad network. And now Bing Chat is helping them understand their users better. Bing AI Ads will not only reward Advertisers but the platform is also focused on revenue sharing with creators. They are currently a step ahead of Google.

Walmart: They partnered with Innvoid to provide first-party data to CTV advertisers, improving their Ad Business. Walmart is successfully scaling its Ad business, last year it reached more than $2.7 billion in Ad revenue.

Amazon: The platform is earning more revenue from its Ad Business than from Prime subscriptions. And the profit margins are amazingly high. Why is Amazon Advertising growing so much? The answer is that improvements in the Advertising network system & targeting are very easy. The Amazon Ad marketplace is structured better than any other platform & also the Amazon advertising data helps marketers a lot. In a few years, Amazon’s Ad business is expected to reach the $100B mark.

Marketing

AI: Some are afraid, many are passionate & few are stressed about AI. Usage of AI in marketing is increasing faster than ever and now we are also seeing Marketing roles requiring AI & promoting skills. The best lesson many marketers have learned from AI Trends is AI can make a selective amount of marketing work easy, which allows marketers to focus on elements & Ideas that require human skills. Adapt to AI & Scale your real-time skills to be a better marketer than ChatGPT or Bard.

Ads: New Heinz Ad campaign was one of the best of Q1 2023 because it captures the emotion of consumers about the brand & product.

Social Media: This Brand “Ovira” is the highlight of Q1 2023. The Brand successfully scaled its whole business with help of edutainment content on Tiktok.

Branding: The new Pepsi rebrand was the highlight of this quarter, a bold move from the brand to recapture nostalgia & also share a new vision for the next Era of Pepsi.

Influencers: Heavily promoted Products by Influencers are now being exposed by Tiktok & Instagram users with #deinfluence. Products that don’t hold value but are constantly praised during the influencer-brand deals.

Design: Marketing Design tools like Canva & Adobe Introduced major AI updates to help marketers create better designs with their tools. Also, Microsoft AI Designer is available to access for now.

Marketing Data

84% of consumers say they have received an SMS from businesses they don’t remember signing up with. (Validity)
Most Mobile users are consistently spending more than 6 hours on social media apps. (KI)
Gen-Z will lead to massive growth in the second-hand sales & resale market. (Vogue)
Instagram reels lead the race with more reach than Youtube Shorts & Tiktok. But Youtube & Tiktok lead the engagement race. (Dash Hudson)
How Google’s March Brand Core 2023 Update affected various websites. (Lily Ray)

Thanks for reading this quarterly review of marketing & advertising industry. You can subscribe below to my weekly newsletter to receive alerts regarding marketing changes on time.

Most Valuable Marketing Resources Launched in - Q1 2023

Hi, My job is to curate best marketing resources and reports every week to help marketers. Here’s what I have found that might be helpful for you to get better at marketing.

1. TikTok & Twitter’s Content Calendars To Help you with Content Scheduling in 2023

Both of these platforms launched content calendars to help social media managers & marketers with scheduling the content more easily for upcoming events. And also highlighted the best practices for campaigns during these events. It’s a free resource to help you make your job easier.

Here's TikTok's calendar and Twitter's calendar. I hope it helps in content creation!

2. Facebook’s Widely Viewed Content Report for Q4 2022

The platform published its quarterly report on what type of content gets seen on Facebook. This report is valuable to understand how Facebook is moving in terms of promoting content & moderating what doesn’t deserve to be seen on platform.

3. Twenty-Three’s The state of Webinar Report

This report helps you understand how advertising budgets regarding webinars are changing, how B2B is using webinars to increase customer engagement & trust. The platform “Twenty-Three” recently published their new edition of this report. It’s a must read.

4. Adobe’s report on how retail market is changing & how consumers are interacting.

This report talks about how inflation is affecting consumers & how they reacted during holiday season. This report is an index on how pricing changed during the shopping season to impact consumers. This is a great read for retail marketers.

5. A Free Report on State of Marketing In 2023

This report requires no-sign up and talks about different marketing channels from email to influencer marketing. This is a great read for marketers who look for data backed insights only, no BS. It’s also updated quarterly to help marketers find more relevant data.

6. A Guide on What to do when someone steals your Blog Content

The chances of your content getting stolen are increasing, especially with Generative AI. Content stealers can give your content to ChatGPT to revamp & post on their blog. This is a guide on how to send a DMCA notice in case someone stole your content.

7. Tiktok Added 1,000+ New Insights to it’s free Tiktok Insights Dashboard

In case you didn’t knew, Tiktok have an Insights platform for advertisers where you can find insights & data on how other advertisers run their campaigns on Tiktok & what results they are getting from Ads. Recently they added 1,000+ insights to the platform. It’s a bookmark worthy resource!

8. McKinsey’s report on how Personalization will impact Marketing in 2023

This is my favourite out of all these resources, personalization is a growing trend in marketing. And McKinsey published one of the best & most insightful report on how to use personalization to make consumers buy more easily. This report will help you out throughout the whole year.

9. Hivestack’s Free Library filled with Advertising Terms & Acronyms.

This is a free library to help newbies in advertising & marketing understand the use of different terms, abbreviations & acronyms in the industry. And what they tell about a campaign. It’s another bookmark worthy resource for new marketers.

10. Litmus’s New Report on Email Marketing

This Report talks about email engagement trends that took place in 2022 & what we can predict regarding 2023 email trends. It’s a must read report to find best email sending times, how Apple Mailing system impacted marketers & much more details. This report is a great resource for email marketers.

11. Google’s Updated Guide on Link Building

In February, Google updated their guide on link building to provide marketers & SEOs better insights on how to use link building practices to rank better on Google Search. If you haven’t read the guide. You should check it out.

12. Galactic Fed’s Report on Digital Marketing Trends 2023

The Report talks about what you can expect from marketing in 2023. These type of reports are launched by every single marketing company but they have some data bites to help you reach more consumers this year + I have the report attached with no-sign up required to make sure you read only value.

13. Facebook’s Report Culture Trends Report 2023

This report launched last week (march) with this 50+ pages long report you can read about different cultures on social media and how brands are adopting those cultures to make sure the brand messaging resonates with their target audience. With that factor, this report is a nice read!

14. Google’s Marketing playbook on First party data

The usage of first party data will increase this year and this new playbook by google can help marketers understand first-party data more easily & how they use it to understand their consumers & website visitors. It’s another bookmark worthy report to help you with marketing.

15. A Report on How decision-making in B2B is impacting marketing

This report surveying 1,100+ business leaders helps you to understand how B2B industries are making decisions that impact marketing. And also you can find insights on how marketers can use these learnings to do better at B2B marketing.

Thanks for reading and it takes time to curate these resources, I Will appreciate you subscribing below to receive marketing resources once a week with news regarding marketing.

The Marketing Genius of Rihanna At Super Bowl

This is what I’m hearing about Rihanna not getting paid and sneaking a product placement during her super bowl performance.

A lot of marketers on twitter, IG & Tiktok are coining it as Rihanna will benefit a lot from this marketing move. Marketers with real experience know that this won’t benefit Rihanna as much as Tiktok marketers are estimating.

But I believe this is a great time to explain how Buyer psychology works.

Not a single potential buyer of yours is just going on google or social media and buying from the first brand they see.

In my open-report earlier this year, where I found out that:

95% of potential buyers aren’t actively looking to purchase. They need to be informed about their needs.

That’s why your brand needs to create enough awareness around your business to make a potential customer consider buying from you.

Brand awareness can be generated through content, Influencers, events and many other channels.

And that’s the first reason why Rihanna’s sales might go up. As the people were already aware about her products from different channels, they were in their journey to buy her products.

Another awareness generating event made the potential buyer reach the decision of making a purchase.

Like I mentioned that, they needed to be reminded of their need. How gorgeous was she looking during the event?

That look boosted the desire of her average buyer to buy more products from fenty beauty to look that good.

Power of Influencers

Another research finds that 32% of consumers trust celebrity backed brands more. But now celebrities roles are also being replaced by Influencers.

And now Adobe’s Creator report shows only 14% of creators are influencers. So, you need to choose influencers instead of creators & celebrities

Now Rihanna’s music gives a brand messaging of strong women and that’s another factor influencing the decisions of buyers.

When working with creators or Influencers, you need to study their content first to understand the messaging because number of followers won’t help you get more sales.

Just like 100M viewers won’t buy Rihanna’s Product, buyers will be the ones connecting with brand messaging.

Less focus on numbers, more on messaging.

Product Photography

Fenty did well at nailing the product imagery & visual content before the super bowl to make the feels of their product more relatable.

Why this worked is also backed by data, As 89% of consumers agree that product imagery is important.

I don’t need to tell more about this because image is art that speaks thousand words. And if you can nail your Ad creatives to make users connect. The conversions will eventually come.

But you also have to nail the messaging & awareness as I mentioned.

The End move

I don’t know this was intentional but she did many interviews where she kinda gave the impression that musical guests will be joining.

But in the end, she decided to stand alone & announced pregnancy too. Making sure the camera captures her using fenty beauty & looking good.

She didn’t do that alone, there is marketing team behind her that understands marketing. Fenty Beauty’s marketing team is doing well at email marketing too.

You shouldn’t just talk about her super bowl genius, try to study her brand well enough. It doesn’t end at sneaking your product in super bowl performance.

This was my analysis of how marketers & businesses copy what Rihanna did at super bowl but in the correct way. Study Fenty Beauty’s marketing or may be spy on it to learn more.

Best Marketing Courses, & Certifications, According to Reddit for New Marketers

I scrapped this list of recommendations from different reddit post. This took a while to curate because there were a lot of people defending some courses as the best & few saying they don’t hold any value.

1. Hubspot Inbound Certification

Recommended by u/analyze on reddit, This course is an introduction to Inbound Marketing and will help you understand how to build buyer personas. You will learn how to craft your business goals with the right KPIs. Additionally, this course will make starting with content marketing easier!"

2. OMCA Digital Marketing Certification

recommended by u/intjonsteroids, This course is more in-depth and highly recommended as the certification you will receive holds more value than Hubspot Inbound Certificates. It covers more aspects of marketing and provides more than just certification and knowledge. Additionally, there are other benefits you can gain from passing the exams with this course. This is why this course is considered to be very good

3. Marketing Plan Formula

recommended by u/frontdoormedia, This course is for amateur marketers who already have some knowledge of marketing and want to advance to higher roles. The course focuses on helping participants improve their marketing skills and qualify for CMO positions.

4. mMBA by Mark ritson

There were a lot of redditors recommending his course. His Blogs are good too. This course, by Mark Ritson, is designed for marketers who want to learn more about marketing in a shorter period of time. It is called the "Mini MBA in Marketing." The course will assist participants in learning the principles of marketing and how to apply them in 2023. Mark Ritson is a highly renowned marketer and has been conducting this course for a long time. In my opinion, it is worth taking.

5. Google Analytics Academy

recommended by u/RawketTK to another user in a thread. To gain a thorough understanding of how Google Analytics works and its most important features, Google's own analytics course is the best option. However, the course has not been updated to teach about Google Analytics 4 and, with Universal Analytics being phased out this year, it is recommended to take the course once updates have been made to include this information.

6. Semrush Academy

recommended by u/Jade_Jaded in a thread about marketing courses in 2023. Semrush is one of the leading SEO marketing tools and they also offer their own courses to help new SEOs improve their search engine marketing skills. Their courses cover basic knowledge of On-page SEO, basics, and other elements to get participants started in this marketing channel.

7. Meta’s Blueprint Course

Recommended by u/LoveFightWrite for Instagram. This course, by Meta, is an introduction to paid marketing on Instagram and Facebook. It is a must-take course for those looking to begin a career in social media marketing. You will learn about managing paid campaigns on Facebook and running ads in different formats. They will also come to understand that Instagram paid marketing is more than simply clicking the "Promote" button

8. Fundamentals of digital marketing

recommended by u/cryptoderelict. This course is part of Google's Digital Garage and helps individuals learn the basics of digital marketing. It is designed for people who are relatively new to marketing and are not familiar with how social media and brands work to market products. Participants will learn more about the basics of marketing. The course holds value because of the Google certificate that is earned, which will make a better impression on recruiters when applying for internships.

9. Story Brand

recommended by u/RedWritingHood76 not basically for course but regarding a resource + they have a good course too. Storybrand is a marketing publication where one can learn more about marketing storytelling and branding, even without taking their courses. However, they do have marketing storytelling courses that will teach more about understanding consumer behavior, the art of storytelling, and market research. This goes beyond what is offered in other courses mentioned.

10. Udemy Digital Marketing Course

recommended by u/ONNEAPP for beginners. Udemy's Digital Marketing course is often praised and criticized by new marketers because it can be too basic or advanced, depending on one's current marketing knowledge. The course covers all aspects of marketing. However, Udemy features a lot of other marketing courses, so if this one is deemed too basic, you can find others on the website. And there are courses with certification & without them.

11. PPC University By Wordstream

recommended by u/alphatrixdigital. This course by Wordstream takes you through the basics of PPC marketing and how to manage your ad placements, spending, and other aspects of PPC marketing. It's one of the first courses to take if you're just starting with PPC marketing. After completing this course, you can also take courses in Google Digital Garage about Google Ads specifically. However, I believe this course is ideal for beginners to start with PPC marketing.

12. Hubspots Email Marketing Course

Recommended by most email marketers on reddit to begin with because email marketing is too niched and there aren’t good ones to recommend. Besides this course, email marketing courses are not highly recommended by marketers. This is because email marketing varies greatly from industry to industry and the basics of an email strategy change depending on different buyer personas and niches. That's why only Hubspot's email course is recommended to take in order to learn the basics. After that, the most valuable lessons come from working in email marketing.

13. Tiktok Ads Academy

It’s not that famous but extremely useful to get into paid Tiktok, recommend by u/lazymentors. The TikTok Ads Academy was released last year and is not widely known, but the course is highly effective in helping with TikTok paid marketing. You will learn about the differences between TikTok ad formats and how they compare to each other. TikTok paid marketing is currently cheaper than other platforms, which is why there is a high demand for TikTok marketers. For these reasons, I recommend taking this course.

State of Marketing Courses in 2023

First, Most Redditors believe that courses don’t make huge impact on hiring and aren’t loopholes to get into marketing. But are always recommended because they are short and you can improve your skills from time to time.

Second, Most Redditors have recommended the same courses over and over:

There are few others but these were mentioned more than 30 times in the comments I scanned through!

Third, Courses by Udemy, coursera and few other publications are valuable but aren’t respected among marketers. There were various comments mentioning that the efforts in few of the courses are low.

Last, For Small Businesses any of these courses can open their eyes to a new way of marketing this business. It’s always better to take these type of courses than getting scammed by online gurus.

Bonus, To educate businesses & marketers about new marketing solutions. All these platforms: Tiktok, Instagram & Pinterest launch new educational resources to learn but they aren’t heavily marketed but I can make your job is easy. You can subscribe here or below to receive those resources for free when they launch!