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It’s Argyle Day, Reader... Here’s to Clan Campbell of Argyll!

In today’s edition:

• 📧 Today's Tip of the Day is for email messaging

• ✅ Optimize your content with AI analysis

• Meta moderation changes

• More Reddit tools

• 🗞️ Additional industry news from YouTube and more

Do you need to raise your email messaging performance? Are you relying on generic best practices to guide your delivery?

Finding the right send time can be a struggle if your subscribers are located in multiple time zones.

Use Send Time Optimization

Most email marketing platforms offer this feature, which learns each subscriber's engagement patterns. 

It considers the days they open, the time of day, and how frequently they open to identify the optimal time to deliver your messages to each inbox based on their unique habits.

This optimization is a simple path to better email KPIs, especially for global audiences.

Today's tip was inspired by Jay Schwedelson, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.

Your Opinion Means a Lot!

We know you love this newsletter. But sometimes, you may wish that we covered something different, or in a little more detail. This is your chance to help shape the topics that we focus on in 2025. 

How? Each year we survey our subscribers and customers. And we use the data to plan out our content for the year. As a newsletter subscriber, your opinion means a lot to us. 

Would you please take a few minutes to participate in our annual survey?

But don’t wait. The survey closes VERY soon!  

I’m ready to share my feedback.

How to Perform Content Optimization Analysis with AI

According to Andy Crestodina's annual content marketing and blogging survey, now in its 11th year, AI adoption among bloggers has doubled in the past year alone. Only 20% of bloggers reported not using AI, down from 40% the previous year.

Did you know you can use AI to help you analyze and optimize any public-facing content, such as an ad, a social post, an email subject line, an article, your homepage, etc.?

First, you need a validated customer persona.

How to Create a Valid Customer Persona to Aid in AI Analysis

These personas become the basis for all subsequent AI analyses, ensuring consistency and relevance.

Drawing from the insights of Ardith Albee, Andy says a well-crafted persona should focus on making your audience intelligence actionable. While ChatGPT or Claude can quickly generate a basic profile using specific prompts, the first iteration won't be accurate and should only be used as a starting point.

To create an effective persona, provide your AI with specific details about:

• Job title

• Industry

• Company size

• Geography

• Responsibilities and goals

• Challenges

Demographic information is often less crucial in B2B marketing than many assume. Who cares whether this person is 42 years old and drives a Volvo if you're trying to sell them some enterprise software?

Please build me a persona for a coder in the app development industry at a company of 50 people in North America. This person is tasked with learning how to write code. List their hopes, dreams, fears, concerns, emotional triggers, and decision criteria.

Once the initial persona is generated, review the AI's output to identify inaccuracies or omissions. To refine it, have a back-and-forth conversation with the AI, instructing it to remove irrelevant details or add missing elements. For instance, you might say,

Replace [this concern] with a more relevant one.

Or,

Prioritize these [emotional triggers] over the others.

Repeat this iterative process until the persona aligns closely with your understanding of the target audience, then save and share it with your team to ensure consistency in future AI interactions.

Pro Tip: If you're using an open LLM, remove your brand name from your training data. 

How to Analyze and Optimize Your Content

Now, you can analyze your content for gaps and opportunities. This process works for various content types, including sales pages, blog posts, social media content, email campaigns, landing pages, video scripts, marketing presentations, and more.

Our example focuses on sales page analysis.

First, take a full-page screenshot of the sales page rather than just copying text. Providing this visual allows the AI to analyze visual hierarchy and conversion elements like logos and awards. You can use tools like Go Full Page, Awesome Screenshot, or Snagit to capture these full-page screenshots.

Next, upload your persona with your screenshot and a prompt that positions the AI as a conversion optimization expert that will analyze and assess the landing page's use of your best practices for high-converting pages, including:

• The header clearly indicating the topic

• Copy answering visitor questions and addressing objections 

• Message order aligning with prioritized information needs 

• Supportive evidence backing marketing claims 

• Personal connection through human elements 

• Appropriate use of cognitive biases 

• Compelling calls to action

The goal isn't just to find deficiencies. You want the AI to find weaknesses you can correct to make a more impactful, stronger landing page.

For example, implementing cognitive biases to incorporate psychological triggers can improve conversion rates ethically. Because people tend to expend more energy avoiding losses than seeking gains, highlighting registration deadlines or limited-time opportunities should be subtly incorporated into marketing messages when appropriate.

You are an expert in content optimization. Based on this persona and the content provided, identify the most important unanswered questions and any key objections or concerns this content fails to address. Provide actionable suggestions to resolve these gaps.

One of Andy's clients wanted to improve its landing page conversion rates. By prompting the AI to evaluate the page against conversion optimization best practices, he identified key deficiencies:

• Lack of urgency and scarcity triggers, such as enrollment deadlines.

• Failure to address common objections, like the cost of the program or placement rates.

• Missing emotional appeals, such as testimonials or success stories.

The AI's recommendations helped the client redesign the page to include these elements, improving engagement and conversions.

Today's advice provided with insights from Andy Crestodina, a featured guest on the AI Explored podcast.

An Extra Day of Training for Reader?

Many attendees tell us the workshops are the most valuable part of Social Media Marketing World.

Here’s what’s waiting for you with your All-Access ticket:

🔥 Steve Wright: Mastering Mobile Video

🔥 Nancy Harhut: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Your Results 

🔥 Rory Vaden: Content Marketing Strategy for Personal Brands 

🔥 Tamsen Webster: Fundamentals of Message Design

🔥 Zack Duncan: Google Analytics 4 Simplified

YES… I want the extra training!

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Meta Content Moderation Changes: The company's platforms are replacing third-party fact-checking with a Community Notes program similar to X's model, allowing users across different perspectives to provide context on potentially misleading posts. Content restrictions will be reduced by removing certain rules around topics like immigration and gender identity and limiting automated enforcement to serious violations like terrorism and child exploitation. Meta

Reddit Features Announced: The company introduced Reddit Pro Trends, an enhanced Reddit Pro suite that allows businesses to track keywords and analyze conversation patterns in real-time. The tool visualizes conversation volume, community mapping, and conversation feeds for over 100,000 pre-programmed keywords. Early testing showed a 12% increase in business posting activity. Reddit also launched AMA (Ask Me Anything) ads, a new advertising format that helps businesses promote and track engagement with AMA sessions directly through the Reddit Ads Manager. Sephora successfully tested this format, receiving over 1,000 RSVPs for their Beauty Directors' AMA session. On the brand safety front, Reddit integrated IAS into their limited inventory safety tier and now offers brand safety measurements from both IAS and DoubleVerify. Source: Reddit

Reddit Customer Journey Research: Key findings include the platform's growing influence in consumer decision-making and product discovery. The platform demonstrates particular strength in redirecting consumers to new brands, with 23% of recommendation posts leading to consideration of previously unconsidered options. Source: Reddit

YouTube's Video Highlights Feature Experiment: The tool allows creators to extract portions of their existing long-form videos and publish them as stand-alone 16:9 format videos. Creators selected for the experiment will see a "Create a video highlight" option within the YouTube Studio Desktop video editor. The test is limited to a small group of creators producing English-language content. Source: YouTube

Did You Know?

Walla Walla onions are exceptionally sweet due to their low sulfur content and high sugar levels, which are up to 50% more than typical onions. Grown exclusively in the Walla Walla Valley to maintain their unique flavor profile, they are often hand-planted and harvested.