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It’s Tim Tam Day, Reader! Have you ever done the 🥤 Tim Tam Slam?

In today’s edition:

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

• 1️⃣ What to do before you bring 🤖 AI in-house

• Instagram DM and comment 🔎 filters

• YouTube 🛍️ product tagging expands

• 📣 Additional industry news from X/Twitter and YouTube

Do you need to improve conversions but don’t know where to start? If your target customer profile, value proposition, and communication channels are solid, you might not be looking in the right direction.

Reverse Engineer the Customer Journey

By designing your marketing funnel around your customer’s journey rather than the default templates other businesses are using, you will convert more leads to customers. 

Start by defining the outcome you want from your campaign, then reverse-engineer the steps consumers need to take to reach that outcome.

Finally, map your content to that newly defined customer journey.

Today's tip is inspired by Adam Erhart.

How to Become More Valuable 

Imagine acquiring specialized marketing knowledge that allows you to get a raise, improve your rates, or bring in more revenue for your company. That's what happens when you attend Social Media Marketing World 2024—taking place in just 2 days! 

You'll walk away with new ideas that you can put to work right away for your business or clients. 

Can’t attend in person? We've got you covered. 

Get the recordings of everything with an On-Demand ticket. Or stream the keynotes and sessions live, with a Streaming ticket.

Get your ticket now.

Key Mindsets and Practical Steps for Embracing AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers numerous possibilities for marketers, businesses, and agencies to operate more efficiently while delivering higher-quality products and services. However, successfully adopting AI requires thoughtful planning and a willingness to adapt. 

If you’re interested in or leading the adoption of AI for your work, these tips will help you adjust policies and collaborate across teams while harnessing AI to unlock sustainable competitive advantages. 

Adopt an Open and Driven Mindset  

The most fundamental requirement is cultivating an openness and hunger to explore how AI can transform your business. While change can feel intimidating, resisting progress in AI virtually ensures leaner, tech-savvy competitors will gain an advantage and eat your market share. Maintaining curiosity, vision, and initiative is essential even during periods of economic turbulence or confusion surrounding new technologies.

Leaders must be driven to research AI, listen to experts, and experiment with tools even if teams are not actively asking for these solutions. Complacency will lead to gradual irrelevance. In contrast, those who confront their fears of the unknown and run toward understanding AI’s possibilities will unlock growth. They will also build critical knowledge to guide their organization’s adoption strategy.  

Educate Yourself and Experiment   

Leaders should dedicate consistent time to hands-on self-education about AI capabilities. Reading articles, listening to podcasts, and experimenting with different tools build intuition and spark ideas for applications tailored to one’s business. For example, leaders might explore use cases such as automated meeting note transcription, data-driven personalized marketing content, predictive analytics, and more.

Early experimentation also enables leaders to showcase examples of what is newly possible with AI when communicating its potential value to stakeholders. Demonstrating how an initial manual task can now be completed in 2% of the original time makes the benefits tangible. This builds excitement and belief in AI’s possibilities.

Involve Other Stakeholders Collaboratively

Rather than directives handed down from the top, successful adoption requires two-way collaboration across departments. For instance, product managers, financial officers, and frontline staff all offer valuable perspectives when assessing AI integration. They can identify the highest potential use cases and roadblocks specific to their work.

Fostering healthy debate ensures the best ideas elevate based on merit rather than title. Create safe spaces for both senior executives and lower-level team members to exchange feedback and concerns. This prevents you from neglecting blindspots or innovations that might originate from unexpected sources. Overall, distributed participation in shaping AI adoption strategies boosts alignment and belief across the organization.

Set Guidelines and Governance Structures

Unbridled experimentation by undisciplined early adopters risks harming productivity, compromising sensitive intellectual property (IP), and degrading service quality standards customers rely on. Establish oversight structures like an AI Council with representatives from different divisions to centralize learning and formalize procedures around tool evaluation, data privacy, security, ethics, and oversight of production systems. Such forums enable ongoing oversight as new use cases emerge while ensuring the evaluation of innovations remains aligned with business objectives.

Start Small, Learn and Scale Incrementally 

The most complex multifaceted business challenges become manageable when broken down into smaller milestones. Target low-risk pilot projects to validate capabilities on non-essential tasks, rigorously analyze the outcomes, and scale successful applications incrementally across the business based on lessons learned.  

For example, an initial project might focus on using AI to optimize subject lines and send times for a low-volume email campaign. Results could then inform guidelines for integrating AI optimizations across higher-stakes email channels.

This step-by-step approach allows organizations to build critical knowledge before disrupting mission-critical functions. Patience and discipline will be essential, as AI adoption is an ongoing journey rather than a single transformational initiative. Leaders must resist the temptation to scale rapidly at the expense of robust testing and validation steps.

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

It’s Happening This Weekend 

Last Sunday may have been the Superbowl, but this Sunday something even bigger is happening. Thousands of marketers will gather in San Diego for the 11th annual Social Media Marketing World… where they’ll discover marketing strategies that can transform their value in 2024. Will you be there?

Attending in person is the best way to experience the conference. But if you can't get there in person we offer 2 virtual options. 

1️⃣ Stream the keynotes and sessions live 

2️⃣ Get recordings of ALL of the content from the conference 

Yes, I want to experience the conference!

🗞 Instagram DM Filters: The platform’s CEO shared that it is adding a filter to show only direct messages from People You Follow. Source: Adam Mosseri via Instagram

🗞 Instagram Comment Filters: The platform is testing a filter to show only comments from Meta-Verified users. Source: Lia Haberman via X/Twitter

🗞 Pinterest Business Manage Updates: Users can now create and share assets, like ad accounts and profiles, across their organization and invite employees and partners to access these assets. Users can assign specific permissions to employees and partners to control their access. The ability to reuse existing ad audiences between different ad accounts, new Asset Groups to allow more segmented audience targeting, and enhanced network security with the option to require two-factor authentication for staff accounts are also included. Source: Lindsey Gamble via Threads

🗞 X/Twitter’s Explore Page: The platform is revamping its Explore page to feature AI-generated summaries of trending topics. Source: X News Daily via X/Twitter

🗞 YouTube Mobile Uploads, Affiliate Product Tagging, and More: First, creators can now directly upload videos and shorts from the YouTube Studio mobile app by selecting a file from their phone gallery. Second, YouTube launched a posts-only feed on mobile to make it easier to discover community posts. Next, affiliate product tagging is now available on live streams, allowing creators in the YouTube shopping program to tag and promote products from participating merchants. Additionally, eligible creators with channel memberships under $5 per month will receive 10 free memberships to gift monthly during premieres and live streams. Source: YouTube

Did You Know?

The first Disney animated feature movie not based on an already existing story was The Lion King.