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It’s Name Your PC Day, Reader! Our Director of Editorial named hers Deep Thought.

In today’s edition:

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

• ✔️ ❌ Customer-backed value positioning

• Perplexity enters the shopping game

• 🗞️ Additional industry news from Instagram Meta, and more

Is your Instagram account bloated with inactive accounts? Are you worried these accounts may be skewing your metrics?

There's a quick way to clean up your followers list! 

Check Your Deactivated Accounts

Open Instagram, view your profile, and then tap Followers. 

Under the categories section, tap on Deactivated accounts to see a list of accounts that are deactivated.

Here, you can choose whether to remove each of these accounts or keep them on a case-by-case basis.

While you’re at it, take some time to review those Flagged for Review accounts, too!

Today's tip was inspired by Social Media Examiner’s Editorial team.

FINALLY…Learn in a Supportive Environment, Reader! 

Want to discover what’s working in social media and marketing without feeling overwhelmed? When you attend Social Media Marketing World, you’ll experience a welcoming atmosphere for marketers at ALL levels.

"Great information; some of it was advanced for my own experience, but the speakers didn't make me feel lost. It was easier to follow than other events," shared Carlin Guidi.

If you’re ready to level up your marketing in a judgment-free learning environment, get your All-Access ticket today.

I'm ready to learn and grow.

The Strategic Value Framework: How to Use AI to Analyze Product-to-Market Fit Through Value & Defensibility

Do you know what people really think about your business? Wondering how AI can help you determine your real value so you can stand out in a noisy marketplace?

In this article, you'll discover how AI can help you make data-driven marketing decisions that resonate with your audience. And find a tool that makes the process easier!

This framework emerged from decades of experience across multiple technological transformations. It has proven its durability through these technological inflection points, making it particularly valuable for navigating the current AI revolution.

NOTE: This framework requires data collection, formatting, and anonymization to protect your brand and customer's details.

Use AI to Establish Your Value Dimension

You can't out-campaign a bad product-to-market fit. 

If you don't have a good product-to-market fit and then infuse AI into your campaigns, you'll end up with something similar to executing an all-out campaign for snowblowers in Florida. You will have essentially amplified a path to campaign failure.

This is where the value dimension that establishes your product-to-market fit comes into play.

The value dimension examines how an organization's offerings compare to competitors. 

Liza Adams breaks this analysis down into measurable components rather than relying on gut feelings. The scale includes three distinct levels.

• Base Level: You provide the same value as your competitors.

• Middle Tier: You are delivering incremental improvements.

• Top Tier: You offer order-of-magnitude improvements in price, unmet needs, scalability, and business transformation potential.

To understand which of these tiers your business occupies, you must define clear parameters for value based on differentiators such as:

• Price competitiveness

• Ability to meet unmet market needs

• Scaling capabilities

• Business transformation potential

• Market-specific metrics

• Customer service

The key is to uncover what your customers and target audience truly see as valuable by gathering customer data and pasting it into a spreadsheet or another format so that your AI can work with it: 

• Customer reviews from online platforms like Amazon Reviews, Google Reviews, Facebook, and Gartner Peer Insights

• Customer surveys or interviews

• Slack conversations

• Excel spreadsheets

• HubSpot records

• Email communications

• Sales transcripts

The collection and formatting will take time, but the result will be a customer-supported value proposition.

When your data is collected, anonymized, and formatted, you can upload it and ask your AI to begin analyzing it based on a dimension such as customer sentiment.

Look at these reviews and identify the customers who have commented on customer service.

When the AI has segmented that pool of customers, you can prompt: 

Based on this segment of comments, infer customer sentiment on a scale of 1 (highly dissatisfied) to 5 (extremely satisfied).

How to Establish Your Defensibility Dimension

The defensibility dimension assesses how difficult it would be for competitors to replicate your competitive advantages. Think of these competitive advantages as a moat protecting your business.

The defensibility scale includes three levels:

• Easy to Copy: Features that competitors could replicate in their next release

• Moderate Difficulty: Features that competitors could replicate with significant investment

• Hard to Copy: Features that would require competitors to invest in extraordinary resources or potential acquisition of your company

To find a genuinely sustainable competitive position, you'll need to look beyond technological advantages and consider details such as:

• Product ingredients or specs

• Partner ecosystems

• Deep vertical industry expertise

• Unique customer knowledge

• Brand strength

• Distribution channels

• Location advantages

• Proprietary recipes, data, or processes

You'll need a weighted scoring system to evaluate your defensive advantages and prioritize investments in strengthening your competitive position. For example, a food business might weight its defensive moats as:

• Ingredients: 50%

• Recipe: 40%

• Location: 10%

The Competitive Defensibility Analyzer: A Custom GPT Solution

Liza Adams has developed a free custom GPT called the Competitive Defensibility Analyzer to guide you through a systematic competitive defensibility evaluation process.

In the initial assessment phase, the tool:

• Identifies potential defensive moats

• Evaluates the strength of current positions

• Compares against competitor capabilities

• Suggests improvement opportunities

In the weighted analysis phase, the tool helps organizations:

• Weight the importance of different defensive elements

• Calculate overall defensibility scores

• Compare positions across market segments

• Identify strategic priorities

Once the data is prepared, the analysis typically takes about thirty minutes. The resulting analysis provides a starting point for deeper strategic discussions with leadership teams.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Liza Adams, a featured guest on the AI Explored podcast.

Stay Ahead of Social Media Changes

Social media marketing is constantly changing. What works today may not work next week. Fortunately, the Social Media Marketing Talk Show has you covered.

Each week, host Jerry Potter covers the latest news across social platforms. Tune in and find out what’s happening now in social marketing. 

You'll gain insights you can put to work right away to give your social media marketing an extra boost. 

I’m ready for the latest social media news.

Instagram Inbox Filters: A test feature allows you to filter notifications or messages by people you follow, followers, businesses, verified accounts, creators, and subscribers. Source: @Mosseri via Threads

Instagram Recommendations: Instagram has announced they are working on a new feature that allows all users to reset their content recommendations across multiple features, including Explore, Reels, and Feed, with just a few taps. After resetting, recommendations will gradually become personalized based on users' interactions with content and accounts. During the reset process, users can review and unfollow accounts that share unwanted content. Source: Facebook

More Meta AI Tools: Meta confirmed it is establishing a new product unit focused on developing AI tools specifically for the 200 million businesses using their applications. This strategic move supports Meta's core advertising business by investing in tools that help businesses better interact with their customers on Meta's platforms. One example of these tools is Meta's business AI chatbot, which enables a business to create its own AI chatbots for customer communication and transactions through WhatsApp and Messenger. Source: Axios

Shopping on Perplexity: Perplexity has launched a new AI-powered shopping experience that enables users to research and purchase products directly through their platform. Perplexity Pro users in the United States can use the Buy with Pro feature for one-click checkout on select products from participating merchants, with free shipping included. The Snap to Shop visual search tool lets users find products by taking photos of items they're interested in. Perplexity also provides unbiased product recommendations through easy-to-read product cards powered by integrations, including Shopify for U.S. shipping merchants. Finally, the company has launched a Merchant Program that allows large retailers to share product specifications, offering benefits such as increased product visibility, payment integrations, free API access, and a custom dashboard for tracking search trends. The new shopping experience will expand to additional markets following the U.S. launch, with participating merchants receiving access to one-click checkout integration and tools to build Perplexity-powered search experiences. Interested retailers can join the free Merchant Program by completing a signup form for more information. Source: Perplexity

X Video Experience: iOS users can now zoom into videos on the platform. Source: @XDaily via X

Did You Know?

Sugar cubes were invented in 1843 by Jakub Kryštof Rad, the director of a sugar refinery in Dačice, Czech Republic. His wife had injured herself while cutting sugarloaf and asked him to find a safer alternative.