Presented by

Tomorrow is National Cashew Day, Reader... … I’ll cashew later! 😆

In today’s edition:

• Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for Instagram

• ⚙️ A marketing system that delivers results

• 📝 Claude.ai gets an upgrade

• Hobbies data will be ❌ removed from Facebook

• Meta releases its 🔎 content library with API access

Did you know that over 25% of people on Instagram have accessibility needs or use accessibility features to interact with your content? It’s easier than you think to make your Stories simple to read and watch. 

Create Accessible Instagram Stories

Making your stories accessible only takes a few minutes of thought but it can bring your content to a much bigger audience.

• Always share information in multiple modes. For example, if you talk about key information in a video, make sure there are subtitles to match. If you share an infographic feed post, make sure you add alt text.

• If you use text overlays on your stories, don't create endless paragraphs! Keep it short, simple, and easy to read.

• Use strong color contrasts and plain fonts for video subtitles and text overlays. Instagram's default suggestions are often the easiest to read.

Follow these tips and your followers will appreciate the care and effort that you put in.

Today's tip is inspired by Chelsea Peitz, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.

Want to grow your business? Wondering how to set up a marketing system that delivers consistent results?

The most successful businesses on social media didn’t get there by following fashions or through luck or intuition. It might seem that way but in fact, everything they do is grounded in strategy. They’ve picked their platforms, content formats, and messaging—strategically. 

Here is a plan to help you do the same.

The 5-Step Marketing Machine

Forget the latest tools and marketing tactics. Forget A/B testing and metrics. Let’s talk about the basics: doing the right thing, in the right place, for the right people. That’s how you get better results with less effort. That’s the digital marketing master plan.

We’re going to build a social marketing machine that sells one offer to one segment of your market at a time. It’s all about focus and differentiation.

Define Your Business Model

The very first step is defining your business model and finding your unique sales proposition. Ask yourself: What does this business do? How does it provide value for customers? Why should those customers care?

Distill your model down to just one or two key revenue drivers. They could be hero products or your most valuable services. Once you know what to focus on, think about how to differentiate your business from its competitors. 

Don’t worry about minor products or fringe benefits just yet. They don’t bring enough value to your strategy. It’s better to excel at one thing than to have a mediocre offer on five different things. 

Identify Your Market

When you’re defining your market, you’ll need to consider three different aspects: demographics, geographic location, and psychographics.

Psychographics are subjective information such as your consumers' attitudes, values, beliefs, lifestyles, affiliations, challenges, worries, and pain points. 

Create the Right Message

This stage of the process deserves the most time and effort. You need to come up with a compelling, convincing, and absolutely clear message that taps into your customers’ highest hopes and deepest fears; their pain points and problems; and their desires, goals, and aspirations.

The right message will bridge the gap between negatives and positives. It will guide your market from their problems toward a solution—in the form of your business.

Choose Your Media

In the end, the pros and cons of different platforms are irrelevant. Trends are irrelevant. Anecdotal wisdom about the most effective social networks is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is where your audience hangs out. That’s where you need to share your message. 

If you did the work to define your market, you’ll already know exactly where to find them. Of course, there’s more to media than just selecting a platform. You also need to think about details such as whether paid or organic content is more effective for your market. What kind of content do they enjoy most: video, images, text, or podcasts? Does long-form or short-form content work better for your message?

Build Your Marketing Machine

You’ve got your model, your market, your message, and your media. Now it’s time to put all the pieces together.

Start by deciding what you want from customers. Then, reverse-engineer their journey to create a marketing funnel. Let’s say that you want people to sign up for a masterclass. That’s going to bring in some money and give you opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, or get referrals. 

Now take a step back. How do people get to the masterclass? Maybe they had to go through a sales call. How did they schedule that? They clicked a link from a webinar. OK, how did they find the webinar? Keep following the steps back until you have a complete customer journey. 

In 9 cases out of 10, you’ll end up with a pretty classic marketing funnel that starts with social media, offers a lead magnet, and ends with owning the lead. But the key difference is that it’s been designed with the customer journey and end goal in mind. It’s not just a standard template where you’ve slotted in different scraps of content. 

Today's advice is provided with insights from Adam Erhart.

Special Offer for Newsletter Subscribers Only

Thanks so much for being a loyal reader of our newsletter. We revamped it recently and I hope you're finding it helpful. 

As our way of saying thanks for sticking with us, we’re extending you extra savings on an All-Access ticket to Social Media Marketing World.

These tickets are $650 off right now. But if you use the link below you will save an extra $100 at checkout. 

This offer expires on Friday, November 24th at 11:59 PM Pacific. 

Don’t Miss This Offer to Save Big!

🗞 Anthropic Releases Major Upgrades to Claude AI Assistant: Anthropic has released Claude 2.1, the latest version of its AI assistant, with several major upgrades. Claude 2.1 now supports a 200,000 token context window, enabling users to upload long, complex documents like codebases, financial statements, and books for Claude to summarize, answer questions on, and more. The model also demonstrates a 2x decrease in false statements and 3–4x lower rates of mistaken conclusions compared to Claude 2.0. Developers get new features like tool use to integrate Claude with APIs and products, as well as a streamlined workbench to iterate on prompts faster. System prompts also allow custom instructions to Claude to improve performance for specific user needs. Claude 2.1 brings more accuracy and reliability through reductions in hallucinations and misunderstandings especially for lengthy, technical documents. Source: Anthropic

🗞 Meta Removes Hobbies: Beginning December 13, Meta is removing Hobbies from Facebook profiles. Source: theahmedghanem via Social Media Today

🗞 Research Tools from Meta: Meta has launched new research tools called the Meta Content Library and API that provide access to public content from Facebook Pages, Posts, Groups, and Events as well as Instagram creator and business accounts. The tools allow researchers to view near real-time content along with engagement details like number of reactions, shares, comments, and, for the first time, Facebook post view counts. Researchers can search, explore, and filter Facebook and Instagram public content through either a graphical user interface (UI) or via API access. The goal of the tools is to aid research using insights from public posts and engagement on the Meta-owned platforms. Source: Meta

TOGETHER WITH YOUR BRAND

Want to get your message in front of more marketers? 

Do you target marketers working for smaller businesses? If so, consider adding your offer to our newsletter. We know how hard it can be to get your brand in front of a valuable audience. That's where we can help.

Let us help you increase your brand exposure or bring in qualified leads for your team. Why not chat with us?

Contact Emily to place your ad here.

Did You Know?

The pointer that casts the shadow on the face of a sundial is called a gnomon.