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.”

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Which comes first, the copy or the design?

MARCH 20, 2024

It’s not a chicken-or-egg dilemma.

At Carney, we think of the relationship between copy and design as similar to electromagnetic waves, or “electric and magnetic fields dancing together in a pas de deux, (…) each field bootstrapping the other forward, propagating together” (Infinite Powers, Steven Strogatz, p. xi).

The key to forward motion? When both the copywriter and the designer have constraints and objectives in mind, they can retreat to their respective corners (diverge), create ad concepts, and then come back together (converge) to bounce those ideas off each other, repeating the process.

Take website design for example. Our discovery phase examines key questions:

Who are the intended audiences? Which one takes priority?
What are the intended goals for each audience? Which one takes priority?
What style of website will best serve the website’s true priority?

The answers are critical to setting up copywriters and designers for a productive collaboration.

Head to the Carney blog for a closer look.

Why Advergaming Wins

MARCH 19, 2024

Advergaming is the integration of branded content into games to promote a product, service, or brand message. The tactic has a long tradition—from Atari in the 80s and CD-ROMS in the 90s to flash web games in the 00s and smart phone apps today.

It’s more than just slapping a logo on a game. It’s about creating an opportunity for players to connect with a brand story.

Advergames work because they are:

Interactive: Participation leads to deeper engagement and retention of the brand message.
Immersive: Players are focused on the content and receptive to advertising.
Lasting: Good advergames have a long shelf life.
Targeted: Advergames can be tailored to a specific audience.
Nostalgic: Cultural references and elements from older games create positive emotions, forming immediate bond with players.
Habit-Forming: Compelling game mechanics, reward systems, daily challenges, or competitive leaderboards keep gamers coming back.

What kind of advergame will work best for your brand?

Product Placement / In-game Advertising
Branded Games
Interactive Ads
Sponsorship Games
Social Media Games
VR And AR Games
Mini-Games

Level up with more intel from Brame.

Boost Your Traffic 20x With Pinterest

MARCH 18, 2024

Pinterest is a powerful channel that can drive major organic traffic to your site with little additional investment in content creation.

Instead of churning out content for pins, think of Pinterest as the ultimate channel for repurposing what you’ve already built to drive web traffic.

Here’s how:

Don’t reinvent the Reel. Repurpose older social media posts, blog content, freebies, and even emails to create pines that drive traffic to new offers on your site.
Use keywords to expand reach. Type your keywords into Pinterest’s search bar and take note of terms and phrases that auto-populate to inform your keyword strategy and reach more users.
Let your pins do the heavy lifting. Challenge yourself to create 10 pins that point to a single piece of content and split-test different promotional assets without risk. Use Canva templates to streamline the process.

Check out the HubSpot blog for more.

New Thought Leader Ad Feature on LinkedIn

MARCH 17, 2024

Later this month, LinkedIn will expand the Thought Leader Ad format so that advertisers can sponsor content from members that aren’t necessarily employees.

This means you can showcase voices outside your organization—from industry experts to customers themselves—to serve as influential and trusted brand advocates.

Here’s how:

Login to Campaign Manager to set up a Thought Leader ad for a page that you manage.
Search for a first- or second-degree connection by name or by post URL.
Select a post from a list of content published by the user.
The user will then be prompted to approve or deny your request.

Discover more about Thought Leader Ads at LinkedIn.

Should You Be Measuring Share of Model?

MARCH 13, 2024

As large language models transform the search experience, negative reviews about your brand may be repeated in answers to queries.

Marketers will need to measure and track how AI perceives a brand and compares it to competitors, as well as why and how it suggests products and services to customers. But how?

Review creative assets from the perspective of LLMs. Consider Gemini, Copilot, GPT4, and Llama like a concentrated, powerful focus group. Ask each model questions about audiences, markets, and proof points, and compare answers.
Once you understand prevailing AI perceptions of a brand, you can optimize them to double down on the preferable sentiment and match the most effective content to each model.
Review outputs and recalibrate briefs regularly as new models are introduced and existing models continue to learn and develop.

Check out AdWeek to learn more about establishing share of model as a metric to watch.

How To Speak Like a Customer—Not Your CEO

MARCH 12, 2024

Why it matters: Copy that caters to the C-suite rather than your customer-base undermines all of your marketing efforts.

Why it happens: Immersed in their own expertise, internal teams begin to think and talk in ways that just don’t connect with an external audience.

How to fix it: Study your customers and analyze how they actually speak.

Shadow your sales and customer service teams. Dealing with customers all day long, your team mentally “autocorrects” customer-speak to company-speak all day long. You want to learn what the uninitiated, non-expert audience calls your products and services.
Audit your internal site search. You may be surprised at the terms your audience is looking for on your site. Look for terms that they are using but you are not.
Reference ratings and reviews. Customer reviews are a rich source of data about the language customers use to describe your products and services. The same applies to customer comments on your social channels.
Leverage search trend analysis tools. Use Google Trends or KeywordTool.io to expand your view beyond existing customers to the language of your potential customers.

Now, you have a bank of customer language. Next, you’ll need to analyze your findings.

Check out the Carney blog to learn how to put your insights into action.

Increase Conversions on Your Booking Page

MARCH 11, 2024

Ariyh uses peer-reviewed research to answer the question: How should we improve our demo booking form or page to increase the conversion rate?

Add a review. Choose a short testimonial that addresses how your solution met their needs in present tense. Include the reviewer’s name, role, picture, and star rating.
Make it feel personal. Add the names and pictures of 1 or 2 salespeople that will be joining the demo call, if possible (ex: “Chat with [Name]”). Add their titles for credibility as experts.
Focus on the reader’s needs. Address benefits directly in the second person, i.e. “Let’s talk about what [product/service] can achieve for you.”
Adjust the demo call’s time. Shorten the demo time to accommodate busy schedules, and use precise time estimates for credibility, i.e. “Book your 50-minute call.”
Reduce the number of fields in the form. Require less mental effort from your users so they’re more likely to complete it. Collect only what you need and enrich data yourself using automated tools.

Take a look at the research behind the insights at Ariyh.

MrBeast’s Impressive Email Strategy

MARCH 10, 2024

MrBeast, popular YouTuber and entrepreneur, boasts some impressive email marketing stats:

200,000 subs
2,000,000 total clicks
10 average clicks per recipient
+100% higher click rate (vs 180-day average)
+200% higher CVR (vs 180-day average)

So… what’s this guy putting in his “Feastables” emails anyway? And how can you replicate it? Here’s what Marketing Examined learned:

Use an email engagement tool to build custom elements that engage subscribers right in the inbox and collect loads of data on user preferences.
Include a survey in your welcome flow, since subscribers are highly likely to open welcome emails.
As always, segment, optimize, and personalize based off the data you collect.
Consider email like an engagement channel. Subscribers look forward to contests, games, and giveaways.
Incentivize clicks to improve deliverability and engagement.
Create opportunities for fans to engage with your brand in order to boost affinity.

Check out some examples of “Feastables” emails in action.

Build Trust with LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads

MARCH 5, 2024

The tradition: Run interruptive ads that aim for maximum reach.

The new tactic: Take a more targeted, long-term, personal approach to reach ideal buyers. LinkedIn Ad data reveals that waiting until a post begins to perform well organically is a cost-efficient way of running a marketing campaign.

Try this:

Create an email list and outbound campaign targeting contacts that are likely to be interested in taking your desired action.
Post informative, interesting, and unusual zero-click content on your personal LinkedIn.
Boost successful LinkedIn posts to your hand-picked list of people for better performing ads.

Build trust, create awareness, and drive engagement through familiarity. Check out the tactic in practice at CXL.