MarketingDojo#56: 🚷 Scrapers At The Gate 🚷
Gated B2B content is a good idea again, B2B fundamentals refresher, Google has a formidable competitor & recipe for creative success.
Hello,
I hope you are thriving on this Whirlwind Wednesday. If you're seeking a little oasis of calm from the mid-week madness, this issue of MarketingDojo has you covered.
Recently, I've delved into a fascinating psychology book brimming with practical tips for tackling daily stressors. Stay tuned for more on that in the PS section.
In this issue, we're unpacking some interesting topics:
🔒 The case for gating your content
📊 B2B marketing fundamentals
🚀 Google Search's most formidable competitor is here
💡 Lessons on creativity from SuperBowl ad performance
And more.
Before we jump into this week's insights, I have a small favour to ask. Marketing Dojo is more than just a newsletter to me; it is my passion project. I work hard to demystify marketing to help fellow marketers remain at the top of everything happening in our dynamic field.
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Many thanks!
The Case For Gatekeeping: Navigating the New Era of B2B Content
I've championed the idea of keeping B2B content accessible without gating. An ungated content removes the need to fill out a form, as shown in the example below.
Ungating content enhances customer experience and often saves resources. After all, only a fraction of website visitors convert into customers, and requiring them to navigate a form with over ten fields for generic content can lead to significant trust erosion.
But this is 2024, and a couple of things have changed, which now makes me a strong advocate of strategically gating content:
Google's Cookie Deprecation: Retargeting website visitors will become more challenging with Google's phase-wise end to cookies. Building a list or collecting first-party data is crucial for marketing teams in 2024. The simplest method? Exchange valuable content for visitors' email addresses.
AI Scraping Threat: Generative AI models scour the web for data without crediting the sources. Gating content is one of the easiest ways to prevent your original content from being scraped, remixed, and reused by the AI transformer models.
Asking your website visitors to fill out a form to access content will allow you to capture valuable first-party data, avoid AI scraping your content, and manage customer/prospect journeys via subsequent drip email or other campaigns.
If you do intend to rethink your website content strategy, three helpful tips from the article by Annuitas will be good to consider:
Focus on Meaningful Data: Avoid deterring visitors with excessive or irrelevant queries. Aim to collect genuinely useful data.
Incremental Data Collection: Respect the buyer's journey by gradually requesting information, ensuring you never ask for more than what's reasonable at each interaction stage.
Deliver Exceptional Value: Ensure the content you offer in exchange for data is extraordinarily valuable and appropriately tailored to the customer's lifecycle stage.
Embracing these practices can transform your content strategy from a potential hurdle into a robust engagement and data-collection tool.
Fake It Till You Make It: X’s Version.
Despite all the chaos, X/Twitter is still where most users go for real-time conversations. The 10.5 Bn impressions generated on X during the recently concluded Super Bowl look phenomenal.
CHEQ, a cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users, reported that 75.85% of traffic generated from ads on X was fake.
That means if your brand advertised on X during the Superbowl, 3 out of every four visitors on your website would be bots!
Highly sophisticated bots that inflate impressions & visit numbers are a reality of digital marketing. Most marketers are used to that reality, but 75% - that's another level of magnitude of fake traffic.
This article should cause significant alarm bells ringing with advertisers who still dare to advertise on the platform. It is improbable that X will respond to the concerns raised by CHEQ & Mashable. For advertisers, it is yet another reason to steer clear of X/Twitter till it invests in building accountability.
The Essential B2BMarketing Fundamentals.
B2B Marketing comes with a unique & evolving rule book. Mark Pollard's insightful post compacts the core tenets of B2B marketing into an easily digestible format. Whether you save the slides for later or listen to the podcast during a leisurely walk, this resource is perfect for quickly brushing up on B2B marketing fundamentals.
Here's a quick summary of all the rules in short:
Brand recall: The role of B2B Marketing is to cement your brand in the customer's memory. Brands that are top-of-mind are more likely to be chosen.
Mental availability: The ability for a customer to remember your brand for a specific buying situation. e.g. thinking of Canva for quickly designing social media posts
Physical availability: Customers should find it easy to discover and purchase your brand when needed.
95-5 rule: At any point, only 5% of potential customers actively seek a solution, leaving 95% as prospects. Performance marketing targets 5%, while branding efforts nurture the future 95%.
Funnel delusion: Marketers don't move people through the funnel. Out-of-market customers aren't progressing through the funnel.
Messaging deluge: A common pitfall for B2B marketers is flooding the market with too many messages. Thinly spread, small bets that will never lead to sizeable returns.
Time in the market> timing the market: Continuously active campaigns outperform those launched in sporadic bursts.
Category entry points: In what situations should your customer think about your product/solution? Identify category entry points and reinforce them in every communication.
Reach maximization: Maximizing reach within a target account is one of the most effective ways to grow B2B businesses.
ABLE framework: Attention * Branding * Linkage = Equity. This formula emphasizes capturing attention, effective branding, and linking customer memory with category entry points to build brand equity.
Innovation vs. Dominance: OpenAI’s New Search Engine.
Google's dominance in the search industry is unrivalled, boasting over a 90% market share across mobile and desktop platforms. Significantly, search-related advertising products account for 60% of Google's revenue, underscoring its dependency on search as a significant revenue stream.
The recent buzz around OpenAI venturing into the search domain could potentially unsettle Google. Rumours suggest that OpenAI's forthcoming search engine aims to leverage its robust training data alongside Bing's search capabilities, marking a notable entry into the search market.
Some things will still need to be tweaked. The biggest one is how OpenAI's search engine will differ from Bing's and how the two will co-exist without cannibalization.
This development could have been last week's biggest headline if not for the unveiling of OpenAI's text-to-video transformer, Sora, highlighting the swift advancements OpenAI is achieving. Such progress comes at a steep price; co-founder Sam Altman is reportedly seeking an eye-watering $7 trillion to sustain the burgeoning costs of innovation.
With the global search engine market valued at USD 167.02 billion in 2021 and projected to hit USD 477.03 billion by 2031, search monetization remains a lucrative avenue. OpenAI, bolstered by its technological prowess and partnership with Microsoft, is well-positioned to tap into this "low-hanging fruit" of search revenue.
Increased competition in the search sector spells positive news for consumers and marketers alike. While expectations for OpenAI's search product are sky-high, any shift in market share from Google to OpenAI and Microsoft could represent a significant financial and strategic victory.
MemeComic-Time: Goodbye, Ads.
I've taken the leap! After much deliberation, I opted for a paid family subscription to YouTube. What motivated me to embrace this significant, ongoing expense? Simply put, the desire to bypass those pesky advertisements.
YouTube is on a mission to discover just how much ad saturation its viewers can withstand, with reports of up to 10 back-to-back, non-skippable ads popping up.
Instead of a meme this week, I wanted to share this Peanuts comic strip about how 60-second ads feel two minutes too long. Damn!
Crafting Winners: The Anatomy of Memorable Super Bowl Ads.
The Super Bowl, America's most-watched annual sporting event, is a prime platform for brands to showcase their most creative advertising efforts, aiming to forge meaningful connections with vast audiences.
But not all ads pay off; some do better with recall and impact than others. UK-based ad effectiveness company System 1 scrutinized 308 ads for long-term brand impact to develop a recipe for successful creatives.
So, what makes up an effective advertisement?
Tell an upbeat story: Stories that include unexpected developments or triumphant returns resonate deeply with viewers, evoking a strong emotional response.
Prominent Brand Presence: The last thing you want to do is to leave audiences guessing which product the advertisement was for. Emotional engagement is heightened when audiences are not left guessing about the ad's sponsor.
Harnessing Nostalgia: Ads that evoke fond memories or forgotten moments can trigger a dopamine surge, enhancing memorability and emotional connection.
Celebrity-Brand Synergy: Working with celebrities is a common trope in Super Bowl ads. While celebrity endorsements are a staple in Super Bowl commercials, their effectiveness is magnified when there's a genuine connection to the brand. Ads featuring celebrities who embody the brand's values or have a history of collaboration with the brand tend to leave a lasting impression. In contrast, ads where a celebrity could easily be substituted with another face risk being forgettable.
Short Stuff:
Instagram experiments with limiting hashtags to five (Tweaks for spam control).
28 Organisations urged the EU privacy watchdog to oppose Meta’s subscription for an ad-free experience plan (Is it ok to pay with personal data?).
Mastodon vs. Bluesky - An intellectual battle for domination of distributed social media has begun (The next wave of social media is rising).
That’s a wrap on this week. Thank you for your time and attention. If you liked this week’s newsletter or found something interesting - please give me a like ❤️ or drop a comment🗨️. Your support helps drive the discoverability of the newsletter.
Once again, thank you for your time. See you in your inbox next Wednesday.
Regards,
Garima Mamgain
P.S: The Tools by Barry Michels & Phil Stutz.
I have often struggled with seeking professional mental health help. Most psychologists assume the answer to my questions or troubles is within me. The prevailing method, where therapists encourage self-discovery through a barrage of questions, has left me feeling more exhausted than enlightened.
Tired and disillusioned by how unhelpful traditional psychology is, Barry Michels teamed up with Phil Stutz to come up with tools to deal with anxiety, fear, pain and other stressors.
Their methodology resonates with me deeply, echoing my longing for tangible actions that offer direct relief in the face of life's tumultuous challenges. I will start incorporating them into my daily life in the coming days.
I came across Phil Stutz in his documentary on Netflix and, since then, have been keen to understand his broader work. I have to say that some parts of the book made the rationalist in me squirm - especially bits about "touching the higher powers". However, the pragmatic core of Stutz's philosophy aligns so well with my understanding of mental health that I'm prepared to approach these tools with an open mind, setting aside scepticism for a chance at genuine progress.
Some useful links:
The technologies that marketing relies on are in such a constant state of change, it feels like whip lash! Thanks for consolidating all the must-reads.