AI MARKETING
A deeper look: New tools, old tools, and the future of AI
AI is starting to look like a Clint Eastwood movie, with the good, the bad, and even the ugly…
The good: Meta launched Voicebox, a text-to-speech tool that should help you edit, sample, and style your audio.
Apparently you can also clip or edit existing sounds—like removing car horns, for example—and even voice virtual characters. Super sweet.
Oh, this is good too: OpenAI introduced function calling to its GPT-4 model, which means GPT can now pull from external codes or APIs when it needs to.
For instance, if you ask about the weather in your city, the AI can “call out” to a weather app’s API to give you precise information.
… Which could make it significantly more powerful in the future.
Still good: According to Microsoft’s corporate VP of advertising, Kya Sainsbury-Carter, the new Bing was launched to “succeed where traditional search results fail.”
And so far, Bing has a 70% thumbs-up from users when it comes to the accuracy of answers.
Kya also claims conversational AI will change the future of search in a few ways, namely:
- Keyword targeting will shift-toward a topic-centered approach. If you look for a wedding dress in Chicago in July, AI can piece together different bits of data. For example, “it’s hot and humid at that time in that location, here’s a sleeveless, lightweight dress.”
- Visual ads are becoming a priority. Bing Chat ads already show visual ads that are relevant with the current conversation, such as multimedia vertical pr product ads.
- It can help with the ad quality, matching ads with higher intent users.
- It could help small businesses. People could write queries three times the length of traditional search, giving out more details—allowing smaller niche brands to shine.
Bad and ugly: On the flip side of all this, a group of researchers warned that if AI trains on AI-generated content, the entire model could collapse.
Turns out models quickly forget the original data they learned from, causing outputs to deteriorate and eventually produce more errors and irrelevant content.
Guess we humans aren’t getting replaced any time soon after all…
Notifications get a much-needed update, and more
LinkedIn is like one of those people who don’t talk about themselves much unless they’re asked.
… And while we didn’t ask, exactly, it turns out LinkedIn has a lot to say…
Testing, testing: It seems LinkedIn is planning to test a streaming placement that would put your ads in front of people watching TV shows and movies on streaming platforms.
We don’t know which partners LinkedIn is working with yet, but this seems like a big move.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn has also been making tweaks to its own platform…
What’s been added: Two new notification tabs, “My posts” and “Mentions,” that help you sort notifications more easily and reduce some of the noise.
Not only that, you can also sort notifications more easily based on Comments, Reactions, and Reposts.
If LinkedIn is willing to add tabs like this, maybe it will add additional tabs in the future, like notifications from top creators and influencers. Fingers crossed…
What’s been taken away: Profile videos, clickable image links, and LinkedIn’s native carousel feature are being deprecated June 26.
Apparently users weren’t that interested in profile videos, and most prefer attaching PDFs to uploading images.
Who knew?
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E-COMMERCE
How to build small habits around your product and boost retention
If your product becomes as essential to your customers as that morning cup of coffee, you’ve hit the jackpot.
This is what a solid retention strategy does. To achieve one, you must nudge your users into building daily habits around your product.
For some consumer products, like learning and health and wellness apps, users want to use your product, but they need help to create space in their life to do so.
… And helping them will help your retention rate.
Reid from Growth Croissant says there are three ways to help your customers create a habit of using your product:
- Getting them to participate in challenges.
- Setting goals and tracking progress.
- Rewarding users when they hit certain goals or maintain a streak.
These features make the user experience better and make them come back for more.
Let’s see a few examples from some companies that use them to improve their retention.
Challenges and rewards: Strava, a fitness tracking app, uses challenges as a central part of their product. And they do it in different ways:
- Users can set personal challenges, for instance run 200 kilometers in a month, and get trophy badges when you achieve them.
- Users can create group challenges with friends, to add a healthy peer pressure to their fitness activities.
- Users can create and join “Clubs”, which group people with similar healthy goals, creating a healthy competition between strangers.
The power of streaks: If you’re on day 29 of your meditation habit, are you going to miss day 30 and break that streak? Heck no!
The meditation app Headspace employs this trick brilliantly. They show users how many days they’ve been meditating, coupled with badges, and even enable sharing milestones on social media.
Duolingo does something similar. They, too, count days but with a twist—the Streak Wager. Users can bet in-app currency that they’ll keep the streak alive.
The Weekend Amulet is another nifty trick Duolingo uses to help users maintain streaks during weekends, which are typically when people are less likely to engage with the app.
The takeaway? Habit forming features can improve retention.
But to have a big impact, you need to make these features so ingrained in the product, that without them, the user experience would drastically change.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
How to grow your newsletter from 0 to 1,000 subscribers
Maybe you started a newsletter, and are now staring at a big fat “0” on your subscriber count.
How do you get those first 10 subscribers? And then your first 100? Or 1,000?
Here’s what Manu Cinca, the founder of this newsletter, recommends:
- Talk to friends and industry acquaintances. Reach out and let them know you’ve started a newsletter.
- Ask them for feedback on your writing.
- Implement their feedback and show them. At this stage, ask them to share your newsletter with their audience. They’re more likely to do this after you’ve asked for feedback.
- Swap with other newsletters. The Lettergrowth community is a pretty good spot for this.
Simple, right? Yeah. But it works. If you ask someone for feedback, implement their feedback, and show them, it’s hard for them to say they won’t recommend it.
We got our first 1,000 subscribers like this—talking to people and making improvements.
But it’s surprising how few people actually do this.
Many jump straight to paid ads and expensive sponsorships.
Instead, try growing your audience organically, making improvements, and seeing where it goes.
There’s a second benefit to all this, which is that your newsletter is probably not very good from day one.
You might feel like it is, but in reality, there’s a lot of room to grow. These early stages of feedback can help you make improvements that help you exponentially in the long run.
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GOOGLE: Heads up… Google is making changes to Merchant Center product data specification, expanding the list of countries where shipping costs are required, automatically extending expiration dates of products based on website crawls, and more. Definitely worth looking at.
E-COMMERCE: … Is struggling. Chinese platforms are apparently “offering steep discounts” to incentivize shopping, and even luxury companies like Burberry and Balenciaga are softening their stance on price slashing. Will this trend make its way west, too?
TIKTOK: More like cha-ching. The platform’s mobile app became the first ever to surpass $1B in worldwide consumer spend across iOS and Google Play in one quarter. The biggest revenue driver? One-time purchases for friends and family. Hmm…
GOOGLE: Squarespace is taking over Google Domains. The chic .app, .dev, .cafe and 300 other domains Google brought out of beta last year are already being sold as a part of the company’s cost-cutting process. Meaning it may cost more, among other things.
REDDIT: Did the blackout make a difference? Yes, according to Similarweb’s data. Reports show that Reddit saw a 6.6% decrease in traffic during the peak of the protest, and a “dramatic decrease” in how much time users were spending on the platform. Ouch.
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BRAIN TEASER
I reach for the sky, but clutch to the ground; sometimes I leave, but I am always around.
What am I?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Geography finally became interesting…
Did you know that 60% of Canadians live south of Seattle?
… Or that Canada extends as far south as California, Barcelona, and Rome?
It’s OK, we didn’t, either.
So if you want to brush up on your geography, these maps will change how you think about geography forever…
And some facts will leave you quite shocked. Like how the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal is actually farther west than its Pacific entrance. What??
This map would have been useful for surprising our geography teachers back in high school…
