MarketingDojo #13: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. 🌎💫🚀
All things marketing in the quarter that flew by.
Hello,
How's your week going so far?
Just like that, a quarter of the year has flown by. Not an easy quarter this, with so many things happening. Ironically, the Oscar-winning movie aptly explains the state of marketing in Q1,2023.
I mixed things up and step back to look at the bigger picture. Let's explore some themes that emerged in the first three months.
This was a bit of an experiment for me, and I struggled to put it all together. But I'm excited to hear your thoughts.
Here’s what we will cover in this issue:
🌟 Search takes centre stage
🆓The end of free social media
💀Generative AI: The new frenemy of marketers
🥊 Google-Meta’s digital ads duopoly challenged
🌱Decentralized social media is sprouting up
Must-read reports and more in this issue.
Theme 1: Search takes centre stage
68% Of all website traffic comes from Search (social & email make up the rest).
Google is synonymous with Search, but it has its limitations. According to SEMRush's study, 25% of searches don't lead to a satisfying result and require a change in the keyword.
In its 25th year of existence, Google seems to have a quarter-life crisis. Everyone is out to grab it’s lunch.
Microsoft’s Bing is breaking down the usual search+browser experience into a search+chat+browser product. This article lays out the inner workings of Bing & the search-chat spectrum.
Google’s Bard opened up for Beta in the US & UK and is playing the catching-up game.
A Google-commissioned study found that nearly 40% of U.S. users ages 18 to 24 use TikTok or Instagram to search online. Adding “Reddit” at the end of a search query is common user behaviour.
No surprise that TikTok, Instagram & Reddit are seeking ways to develop and monetize Search.
Reddit added the functionality to search within comments.
Both TikTok & Instagram are launching their search ad products. Perfect for brands targeting Gen Z.
Chat is a catalyst for zero-click searches, i.e. users’ queries get answered within the chat leading to no external clicks. Organic traffic will start dropping soon, and most marketers must recalibrate their website traffic benchmarks.
New social media kids on the block.
Artifact : TikTok for news created by Instagram co-founders.
Lemon8: Instagram of Ads by ByteDance
BlueSky: Jack Dorsey backed distributed Twitter alternative
Towns: Crypto-backed decentralized social media app
Theme 2: End of Free Social Media
If something is free, then you are the product.
This quote has aged like milk! It’s a double whammy; social media users are the product and have to pay for it too.
Snap and Twitter started charging their subscriber base for special features in Q4,2023.
In February, the largest social media network, Meta joined the gang with Meta verified.
TikTok developed a paywalled product for long-form content.
The new entrants in the subscription race, Twitter and Snap, have much room for subscription growth.
YouTube Premium & Music have 80 Mn subscribers accounting for a 3.125% of the total user base.
5.46% Of LinkedIn's user base pays for LinkedIn premium every month, contributing to an estimated 18% of the total revenue for the platform.
As per a Bank of America analyst report, Meta will reach 12 million paying subscribers by early 2024.
Must-read reports from Q1,2023.
Pinterest Predicts: 80% of its predictions have come true.
Meta’s Culture Rising Trend Report: 20 Trends for 2023 and beyond.
RivalIQ: Organic social media engagement benchmarks across industries.
Digital 2023: Densely packed with facts and figures covering all things digital.
Theme 3: GenerativeAI - New frenemy arrives on the scene.
Text-to-image models like Dall-E & Stability diffusion looked like a great party trick the previous year, but things got serious quickly this year.
Based on large learning models like ChatGPT, marketers' tools are growing exponentially. A few that I can account for
Adobe's AI art generator and editor, Firefly
Canva's suite of Generative AI tools for creating images & presentations
Notion's AI tools for automation, summaries & writing
Hubspot's content assistant & chatbot
Highly realistic pictures generated by Midjourney v5
Every day a new text-to-text, text-to-image & text-to-video software pops up. The effort needed to create blogs, videos, images & ads will decrease drastically.
GenerativeAI also threatens many creative jobs.
What’s Up Q1,2023
⬆️ Up: Snapchat now has 750 million monthly active users, up from 600 million in April last year.
In balance: Social commerce: Instagram removed the “shop” tab from its homepage and discontinued live streaming, while TikTok is reportedly developing a check-out feature for specific brands.
⬇️ Down: The buzz around live audio products are dying. Reddit shut down its Clubhouse clone.
Theme 4: Meta-Google Digital Ads Duopoly is under threat.
For the first time since 2014, Meta and Alphabet no longer hold more than 50% market share of digital ad sales in the US markets.
As per a study by Insider Intelligence, their market share fell to 48.4% in 2023, the fifth annual decline for the duopoly.
Given the budget cuts, reducing digital ads market share is a zero-sum game. Walmart, TikTok & Amazon are growing at Meta-Google’s cost.
Theme 5: Decentralized social media is almost here.
The Platformer reported that Meta is working on a Twitter competitor: a decentralized social platform for sharing text messages.
In a decentralized network, multiple distributed networks can exist, and each instance can create its own rules, making content moderation a shared responsibility.
Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky & multiple instances of Mastodon are also experiments in the distributed social media space.
Meme time: Microsoft Bing is all powered up.
That’s a wrap! I hope you enjoyed the birds-eye view of the year's first three months. It’s April Fool’s day in a couple of days from now. The time seems to be running way too fast for me.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Ciao,
Garima
P.S: This week’s been a blur, but I attended a couple of events. This not-such-great photo is from this engaging lunch event where a few of us got together to discuss the whys and hows of having a “Personal Board of Directors”.
Do you have a personal board of directors?
