Presented by

It’s National Lemon Cream Pie, Reader! Now, where are my 🍋 lemons?

In today’s edition:

• Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for content strategy

• Creating Instagram Stories for 🛒 conversions

• LinkedIn's 🆔 ID verification expands to more 🗺 regions

• Snapchat launches 🙌 self-serve advertising feature

• TikTok to showcase 🤳 AR effects

There’s no denying that consumer trust has eroded. As marketers, our job is to rebuild that trust with content.

3 Tips for Optimized Trust-Building Content

First, talk to your sales team or client-facing staff about the common objections and concerns they hear from prospects. For example, if you often hear "How do I know this will work for me?" or "Can you prove you get these results?", create demonstration content like testimonials and transformation stories to overcome those objections.  

Second, strategically map content to different stages of your sales funnel. For example, educational content tends to work well at the top of the funnel when people are just learning. Comparisons, checklists, and other demonstration content may convert better further down the funnel with leads who are evaluating solutions. Corroboration from enthusiastic customers can give that final credibility push before a prospect converts to a buyer.

Finally, remember that the types of content you produce should shift based on your current credibility and reputation. If you are introducing an entirely new product or service you may need to lean more heavily on outside experts and various demonstration tactics before you have a robust customer base to draw from. The trust factors you emphasize should evolve alongside your business growth.

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

Many marketers overlook Instagram Stories as mere ephemeral vanity fare. However, properly embracing Stories builds community and drives conversions through casual authenticity that fosters relationship-building beyond traditional posts.

What Makes Instagram Stories Uniquely Valuable? 

Stories disappear after 24 hours, causing confusion around their marketing utility. But their ephemeral nature enables real-time connections impossible elsewhere.

Followers anticipating updates check your Stories throughout the day. So, when you publish a story, you drive immediate commenting and participation, unlike scheduled feed posts. Frequent participation forges community, strengthening bonds between creator and audience.

Additionally, Stories gain elevated visibility beyond committed followers. Instagram prominently features them via profile bubbles and directly in the main feed, bypassing the algorithm limiting feed posts. This expanded reach means visitors completely unfamiliar with you often discover content in Stories first when randomly exploring profiles in their network.

Showcasing authentic personality and behind-the-scenes transparency offered by Stories humanizes brands in ways basic bios or magazine-style photo streams cannot. Dropping some marketing polish to reveal real personalities builds trust and familiarity with cold traffic, encouraging following, engagement, and conversion over time through relationship-building.

What Compelling Story Content Looks Like

Stories uniquely spotlight personality, lifestyle, insights, and developments instead of polished marketing messages. This demands reconsidering traditional commercial creative approaches.

To enlighten and engage, craft Stories letting followers learn about, from, and with you:

Stories About You: Share personal tidbits, behind-the-scenes footage, passions, backstories, and vulnerabilities viewers can relate to. This perspective fosters emotional investment by demonstrating your “why” in an accessible way.

Lessons From Your Past: Broadcast industry insights, innovative tactics, unconventional ideas, and lessons from experience to position your expertise and unique worldview.

What you’re Learning Now: Document developing offerings and solicit feedback so followers learn alongside you while directly influencing the creative process.

Finally, avoid overly manufactured posts that reveal too much. Embrace imperfections because psychological research indicates they boost your likability by increasing perceived humility and approachability when expressed.

How to Maximize Stories Engagement 

Creating phenomenal content means little if nobody sees it. Proactively engaging community members increases visibility while forging bonds, yielding higher-quality followers.

Comment thoughtfully on peers’ Stories instead of mass-spamming emoji reactions. Thoughtful comments spur increased replies in return through reciprocal goodwill. This builds awareness and relationships while elevating your content’s algorithmic reach.

Leverage interactive stickers like polls and questions to effortlessly involve audiences. Simple binary polls provide easy commentary fodder, while specific questions invite opinions or enable anonymous lead generation by welcoming emailed signup requests.

Don’t expect others to initiate reciprocal value exchanges, however. Regularly contribute, congratulate, thoughtfully discuss, and celebrate community successes without expecting applause for your work in return. This generous mindset earns compounding returns over time by winning hearts through selfless support, not calculated pandering.

How to Optimize Stories For Conversions 

With followers invested thanks to engagement efforts, thoughtfully incorporate strategic selling elements without excessive promotional tones.

First, ensure your profile fully conveys your brand differentiation and industry expertise. Strong, benefit-focused bios drive exploring visitors to convert into followers quickly while clearly explaining how you can help them specifically.

For major launches like online courses or challenge programs, you can seed interest by documenting their development behind the scenes. Let audiences influence final products through solicited feedback while building eager anticipation of release deals.

Describe exactly how you solve specific problems for ideal customers. Outline what is included, why your approach works, and what tangible results to expect. Weave in anonymous positive DM testimonials to further demonstrate credibility.

Finally, incorporate occasional motivational calls-to-action driving traffic to your website for sales. Instagram now enables links in Stories—use them. Also, promote email opt-in offers to retain casual visitors as ongoing subscribers and nurture them over time.

Remember—not all followers see every Story. Consistently rotate different CTA elements across posts at strategic intervals so each viewer receives targeted exposure during their viewing session. This maximizes conversion rates by relentlessly covering your entire audience with diverse value stream access points.

3 Tips For Stories Success 

Beyond core content best practices, these tips further channel refinement strategies:

Enable Captions: Boost accessibility, context, and viewership duration by incorporating text captions for those sensitive to audio-only information. This also effectively doubles communication bandwidth through parallel delivery mediums.

Save Stories to Highlights: Curate evergreen highlights, gathering your most impactful Stories into categorized “pages” atop your profile for visitors to self-navigate. Treat this space like a supplemental website articulating your brand visually.

Go Live Often: Schedule frequent casual live broadcasts, allowing truly raw connection in the authentic moment. Transparency and vulnerability foster intense loyalty that is unreplicable otherwise.

The ephemeral Instagram Story uniquely bonds creators and communities through vulnerable conversational intimacy impossible on polished feeds. But achieving this requires bravely embracing discomfort around overexposure or oversharing fears. Those committing fully realize the rewards of amplified emotional engagement and accelerated growth over time.

It’s your choice. Cling to slickly packaged perfection or courageously reveal your humanity? One sustains the status quo while the other transforms businesses and lives. What feels right for your business?

Today's advice is provided with insights from Chelsea Peitz, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.

Does Your Marketing Need an Overhaul?

If conference travel is not in the cards for you this year, don’t worry. There's an easy way to get the latest marketing strategies.

Choose an On-Demand ticket to enjoy ALL the benefits of Social Media Marketing World… from the comfort of your home or office!

You’ll get access to EVERY keynote, session, and workshop for a fraction of the price of attending the conference in person.

Register by Friday to SAVE $600 during our Cyber Week sale.

I wanna learn… and save!

🗞 LinkedIn Expands ID Verification: LinkedIn has partnered with Persona to broaden availability of its in-app identity verification option. Users in Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates can now confirm their ID through integration with Persona's third-party verification system. To utilize the expansion, members in these regions must have an NFC-enabled passport. The integration enables more LinkedIn users to verify their identities, further establishing the authenticity of profiles on the platform. Source: LinkedIn

🗞 Snapchat Introduces Snap Promote: Snapchat has launched Snap Promote, a new self-service advertising feature that lets users promote content from their Public Profiles to reach more potential customers. Users can promote Spotlight videos, Public Stories, or Saved Content by tapping a "megaphone" icon, setting targeting, then publishing the ad in just a few steps. Snap Promote gives creators and businesses the ability to expand their reach, drive traffic to their Profiles to gain followers, and direct viewers to external websites. By putting promotion controls directly into users' hands, Snapchat aims to make it easy for anyone to boost their content as an ad and grow their audience. Source: Snap

🗞 TikTok AR Development Event: TikTok is hosting a virtual "Openhouse" event on December 12th to showcase the latest developments with its Effect House augmented reality (AR) creation platform. The event will provide an inside look at recent advances in Effect House and detailed overviews on utilizing the new features to build interactive AR effects. As described by TikTok, "In this virtual event, we'll show you around Effect House—its latest and greatest features and how to use TikTok effects to create, tell interactive stories, and reach millions around the world." Whether you're an enthusiast, marketer, or designer, TikTok promises an exciting event to highlight evolving tools for AR creation. Source: TikTok

TOGETHER WITH YOUR BRAND

What makes for a great newsletter ad? 

Do you have a useful resource for marketers? For example, a report, guide, or ebook? Is it gated behind an opt-in form so you can collect leads? If so, you might be a perfect candidate for a newsletter ad in this very publication. 

If you want more brand exposure OR to bring in qualified leads for your sales team, why not chat with us and see if you're a good fit?

Contact Emily to place your ad here.

Did You Know?

On this day in 1072, Atari released Pong.