The Daily Carnage

The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.

Today’s Issue

Your Brain on AI 🍳

This is “AI Brain Fry.”

Issues

View All

5 Whitelisting Strategies

APRIL 8, 2024

Jake Abrams shared these 5 whitelisting strategies with Buyology:

Post Boosting: Boost a post in which an influencer organically mentions and tags your brand. This tactic offers instant social proof, but limits your control over messaging.
Traditional Influencer Whitelisting: Run ads directly through an influencer’s own social platforms. This enables you to control content, targeting, and iterations, but you’ll need to align with the influencer’s brand.
Branded Content Site Whitelisting: Run ads through a publisher’s social platforms and website for ease of tracking. Use sparingly or risk losing credibility.
True Publisher Whitelisting: Drive ads to sponsored content on a genuine publisher’s website. This lends credibility and authenticity to your brand.
Brand-Created Publisher Whitelisting: Develop a publisher persona with social profiles and a website, creating the perception of third-party endorsement. This is time-intensive but enables full creative freedom.

Check out Abrams’ LinkedIn post for more.

LinkedIn Benchmarks for 2024

APRIL 7, 2024

SocialInsider has compiled some 2024 stats to guide your LinkedIn strategy. Take a look:

Engagement rate has increased by 44% YoY, reaching 3.85% in 2024.
Multi-image posts get the most engagement (6.10%), followed by native documents (4.70%), and single image (4.35%) and video posts (3.85%).
The engagement rate for external link posts is 3.40% on average.
The median engagement for LinkedIn posts amounts to 45 likes and 4 comments.
Posts published on personal profiles get up to 561% more interaction than company page posts.
Videos generate the highest number of shares.
Brands have increased their posting frequency on LinkedIn by 10% in 2024.
In 2024, the average impression rate has reached 9.50%, mostly credited to polls.

The sweet spot? Multi-photo posts with captions under 19 words generate the highest engagement rate (over 5%).

How to Build a Manageable B2B Blog Strategy

APRIL 3, 2024

Define your B2B blog strategy by addressing these 4 strategic decisions:

Strategy Decision #1: Will you prioritize traffic or leads?
You can’t do both. Most B2B companies want more leads, based on the assumption that thousands of visits will result in conversions over time. But just because a user is reading something related to your industry doesn’t mean they’re in the market for your product. And you can’t manufacture or force buying-intent with email marketing. So, if your goal is more leads, focus on high-buying intent topics rather than traffic.

Strategy Decision #2: Will you do SEO or non-SEO content?
With non-SEO content, you aren’t limited by keywords or what’s already ranking. That said, you need to be consistently original or provocative to drive viral traffic. With SEO content, you get compoundable results that continue to generate month over month, even if it takes a while to build.

Strategy Decision #3: What are the pain points of your audience?
If you can identify pain points, you can write content that catches people who are in the exact moment where they’re ready to buy — without having to invest in nurturing leads. Work with your sales team to illuminate these insights.

Strategy Decision #4: Who will create the content?
If you choose an SEO strategy, you’ll need more than one or two people to keep up with keyword research, content writing, technical SEO, analytics, and web development. And outsourcing writing to non-SMEs results in content that doesn’t reflect the voice of your organization. The best way to generate content is to have writers interview SMEs within your company.

Head to Grow & Convert for more.

How Are You Targeting Your LinkedIn Ads?

APRIL 2, 2024

Are you targeting your LinkedIn Ads based on job title?

The folks at Cognism suspected this tactic was limiting their reach by excluding relevant job titles. So, they pivoted to targeting job functions instead.

Here’s how:

First, they started with refining their ideal customer profile (ICP).
Next, they created a process to identify exclusions based on industry, job title, etc.
Then, they monitored their demographic reports for irrelevant job titles.
They adjusted their internal definition of enterprise to target more relevant companies.
Finally, they added exclusions to their ads, much like negative keywords in Google Ads.

Did it work?

At first, their LinkedIn Ads did hit irrelevant job titles. But with continual optimizations, they doubled their reach, boosted engagement 3x, and saw growth and pipeline increase by 26%.

8 ChatGPT Alternatives

MARCH 31, 2024

OpenAI’s ChatGPT isn’t the only generative tool on the market. Other frontrunners use different large language models (LLMs), offer video translation capabilities and prompt assistance, and have superior document organization features. Experiment with these 8 alternatives:

Google Gemini (Bard) is free, allows for unlimited questions, and has the unique advantage of being integrated with Google search.
Microsoft Copilot integrates well with Microsoft products. Image generation is available to all users.
Jasper.ai is designed for business use cases like marketing and sales.
Claude is based on Anthropic’s research into training AI systems to be helpful, honest, and harmless.
Perplexity is designed to understand user queries through follow-up questions, summarize findings, and reference diverse sources.
Elicit is an “AI research assistant” that provides summaries from relevant research papers and documents related to your question.
Learnt.ai helps education professionals generate learning objectives, icebreakers, assessment questions, and more.
Otter.ai records and transcribes in-person and virtual meetings.

Head to Search Engine Journal for the scoop on each tool.

4 Marketing Headwinds to Watch in 2024

MARCH 27, 2024

Forrester Research has identified four key challenge areas that marketers will need to navigate carefully during this U.S.-election year.

Media costs continue to rise. Advertising costs are predicted to increase 13% from 2020, according to AdImpact. Not to mention the expense of media placements during the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Political allegiances will challenge brand loyalty. Purpose-led campaigns have backfired on brands like Bud Light, despite data suggesting consumers expect brands to weigh in on social issues. Success depends on understanding exactly what your audience will tolerate.
Evolving AI regulations keep us on our toes. As governing bodies struggle to keep up, guidelines and policies for rapidly developing technologies have been left up to platforms, resulting in inconsistencies.
Deepfakes are about to have a moment. Tech for spoofing and deepfakes is more widely available than ever. Social listening is critical for preparing to respond should your brand get targeted by bad actors.

Take a closer look at the Forrester report for more.

Google Search Operators to Know

MARCH 26, 2024

Ahrefs has compiled a list of Google search operators: those that work, those that yield unreliable results, and those that Google has deprecated. Do you know these reliable search operators?

Search operator	What it does	Example
“ ”	Search for results that mention a word or phrase.	“steve jobs”
–	Search for results that don’t mention a word or phrase.	jobs -apple
*	Wildcard matching any word or phrase.	steve * apple
( )	Group multiple searches.	(ipad OR iphone) apple
cache:	Find the most recent cache of a webpage.	cache:apple.com
filetype:	Search for particular types of files (e.g., PDF).	apple filetype:pdf
OR	Search for results related to X or Y.	jobs OR gates
\|	Same as OR:	jobs \| gates
site:	Search for results from a particular website.	site:apple.com
related:	Search for sites related to a given domain.	related:apple.com
before:	Search for results from before a particular date.	apple before:2007-06-29
after:	Search for results from after a particular date.	apple after:2007-06-29

Check out the complete guide at Ahrefs.

How are agencies using AI?

MARCH 25, 2024

Creative Boom spoke with agencies that have embraced the power of AI to enhance projects, teams, and processes.

Here are some of the ways agency creatives are using AI:

For translating visual ideas.

Agencies report using AI as a generative partner for the creative process, not so much the final deliverable. It’s especially useful for translating ideas and visual concepts to both designers and clients.

For demonstrating art direction.

AI mock-ups and mood boards can speed up communication, excite the client, set expectations, and enhance creative briefs.

For storyboarding.

Teams can be more agile at the scripting stage, experimenting with camera angles and frames without the need for adjustments by a storyboard artist.

For research.

AI can quickly process complex sources and provide synopses, identify salient information, and fill in knowledge gaps.

For consistency.

Passing collaborative copy through ChatGPT to optimize copy for consistent tone is a massive time-saver.

Drill down into each use case at Creative Boom.

How to Conduct a TikTok Audit

MARCH 24, 2024

In true SMM fashion, we’re forging boldly ahead despite ban threats. 💪

TikTok isn’t such a new frontier anymore. It’s time to check in and audit your performance. Here’s how:

Do some profile housekeeping. Create consistent branding between your profile picture and bio, drive traffic to a relevant page of your website, link your social profiles, pin top-performing posts, and set up playlists.
Audit your followers for engagement and authenticity. Use native analytics or a third-party tool to measure follower growth rate, weed out bot accounts to keep your engagement rate healthy, and identify any influencers engaging with your content for opportunities.
Evaluate your publishing strategy. Do carousels or trending filters perform well? What video length is optimal? Does your audience respond well to memes? Promotional content? How do trending sounds perform? What’s your publishing cadence and how is it affecting growth?
Analyze competitor strategies and positioning. Identify 3 to 5 competitors. How many followers and likes do they have? How often and what do they publish
Synthesize your findings. TikTok performance can illuminate more than just your social strategy. Highlight key findings in a deck and share anecdotes with cross-functional partners and leadership.

Check out SproutSocial for the whole scoop.