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Today is the Day of The 😎 Dude, Reader! The Dude abides… 

In today’s edition:

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

• 🎯 Fine-tune your top-of-funnel prospecting

• Post-send 💬 Instagram DM editing

• 📣 Additional industry news from Anthropic and Threads

Want to build awareness of your business on LinkedIn? If you’ve got a company page and you are a super or content admin of your LinkedIn Page, there’s an easy way to grow a targeted following of customers and prospects without spending money on ads.

Optimize the LinkedIn Invite Connections Feature Results

This feature is available on desktop and mobile; you get 250 invites monthly. Use them wisely, but use them because they disappear at the end of each month. 

To make the most of this tool, you’ll want to make use of the filters to find and invite any of your 1st-degree connections who fit your target customer criteria.

Today's tip is inspired by Michelle J. Raymond, a featured presenter in the Social Media Marketing Society.

Want the Latest Social Marketing News? 

If news is your thing, check out the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. Hosted by Jerry Potter, it’s the longest-running weekly talk show dedicated to social media marketing. Each week, Jerry covers the latest news across all social platforms. Discover what’s happening now in social marketing so you can boost your reach, engagement, and sales. 

I want to hear the latest social marketing updates.

3 Ways to Research Your Target Customer Psychology

If your business depends on generating leads, you need a high-converting funnel. Without enough qualified leads entering your sales pipeline, closing deals and driving growth becomes an uphill battle. However, many businesses struggle to generate enough high-quality leads to fuel their growth consistently.

While many business owners downplay the idea of “funnels,” seeing them as overly salesy or better left for scammy internet marketers, the reality is that every business has a funnel, whether they realize it or not. 

Your funnel encompasses each touchpoint and micro-interaction a prospective customer has with your brand—from initial ad exposure to booking calls and browsing your website. It’s the sum total of their journey with you.

The first step in building an optimized lead gen funnel is proper research into your target customers' psychology and what motivates them. If your marketing isn’t working, you likely don't understand your target market's language and what they want.

Successful brands research extensively to understand their target markets deeply. While research can seem tedious, it allows you to speak directly to customer motivations. Your copy should feel like you've ripped a page out of your target’s diary. 

Here are three sources for learning about your target market, without dipping into your marketing budget:

Conversion Surveys

Well-designed conversion surveys uncover why customers purchase, what else they’ve tried, and what outcomes they seek. For example, a question might be, “How would you describe our company to a friend?” These insights can help you with ad angle ideas, split test ideas, landing page headlines, etc.  

To understand your existing customers’ experience, create a survey that captures both quantitative data like Net Promoter Score and qualitative feedback. When customers rate the company a 9 or 10, invite them to provide testimonials you can use in your marketing.

Surveys work best when you provide an incentive for people to complete them. How you frame the questions also matters—ask in a way that makes people want to give their opinions. Combining an incentive with thoughtful framing results in quality feedback businesses can act on.

Third-Party Platforms

Mine sources like YouTube, Amazon, and top-performing social media posts and comments for buyer insights. This information provides raw data in customers' own words about their struggles and desired outcomes. By analyzing multiple sources, such as online reviews and testimonials, patterns emerge around customer pain points and goals.

For example, you could read Amazon book reviews on topics related to your product or service.

Internal Feedback Loops

Your sales team, account managers, customer support reps, and social team often have invaluable insights into customer psychology from being on the frontlines. Create systems to channel these insights to marketing, then schedule regular meetings for teams to report on customers’ common questions and needs. 

This feedback helps improve marketing to generate better leads. It also provides market insights so you can adapt and shift messaging to match current customer interests.  

With this understanding, you can create marketing content, like sales pages, that directly speaks to your target customers’ needs and interests—you can craft messaging that describes their problems accurately and in their own words. This builds trust and credibility that you grasp their challenges and can provide solutions.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Alisha Conlin-Hurd.

🗞 New AI Models From Anthropic: The company is launching three new AI models: Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. The new versions of Claude are designed to address the issue of "hallucinations," where chatbots generate untrue statements. Claude will soon start citing sentences from reference materials to support the responses they generate, and the new models will be capable of analyzing images, enabling them to perform tasks such as identifying dog breeds, comparing images, and describing artwork. The company's middle-tier model, Sonnet, is now powering the publicly available version of Claude online, while the most powerful version, Opus, is available to Claude Pro subscription users. Source: Bloomberg

🗞 Instagram DM Enhancements: Instagram has announced several new features for direct messages (DMs) to enhance user experience and communication. These updates include new chat themes as well as the ability to edit messages within 15 minutes of sending them, pin up to three group or 1:1 chats to the top of the inbox for easy access, choose to turn read receipts on or off for all chats or specific ones, and save favorite stickers in DMs for quick access. Additionally, stickers, GIFs, videos, photos, and voice messages can now be used when replying to a message. Source: Meta

🗞 Threads API: Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has announced an update to their Threads API, which aims to empower creators, developers, and brands to efficiently manage their presence on the Threads platform using third-party applications. The API currently allows users to authenticate, post Threads, and retrieve their posted content through these tools. Soon, Meta plans to introduce reply moderation and insights features to the API. The company is currently testing the updated API with a limited number of partners before a wider rollout. Source: @0xjessel via Threads

Did You Know?

The person who voiced Mickey Mouse from 1977 to 2009 and the person who voiced Minnie Mouse from 1986 to 2019 were married to each other.