Edition #5 - Don’t get lost in the metrics, let your primary KPI guide you

If you’re feeling your performance dip in 2024 compared to 2023, you are not alone. 

I’m reading through Mixpanel’s latest 2024 report on marketing benchmarks and what I’m unpacking is an important lesson in performance and growth (Hint: we’re all taking a hit). 

Amid layoffs, the AI hype, various platform changes and tightening budgets, we marketers have a duty. A duty to start acting more as a business adviser and to become leaner with our approach to spending… I meant growth and forecasting.

Making decisions blindly is a costly risk that won’t work well in 2024. The value of having the right marketing strategy, justified media budgets and accurate forecasting is paramount.

Here are my main takeaways heading into Q2 of 2024:

• Challenging Environment: The year 2023 was marked by layoffs, fragmented tech stacks, scarce investor funding, and AI disruption, impacting digital product growth across industries.

• Decline in Retention Rates: All industries witnessed significant drops in week one retention rates from the previous year.

• Mixed User Growth: Some industries saw an increase in active user growth compared to 2022, while others struggled or experienced negative growth.

• Value of Data: Data provides essential context and guidance in slow-growth markets, helping to adjust targets or stay the course.

• Benchmarking for Improvement: Find your industry benchmarks to drive improvement by analysing digital product metrics over two years.

• Excellence Among Top Performers: The top 10% of analysed products achieved 2-3x better results than their counterparts, indicating growth is achievable despite challenges.

• Mobile-Driven Growth: Mobile usage surpassed desktop across almost all industries, emphasising the importance of a mobile-first strategy.

• Marketing Performance Insights: Insights reveal that paid ads have higher conversion rates to product actions compared to unpaid channels, stressing the effectiveness of paid marketing.

• Opportunity in Retention: With double-digit decreases in retention across all industries, there’s a significant opportunity to innovate in user engagement and retention strategies.

Source: Mixpanel

Text into full-blown movies (OpenAI’s Sora)

We’re just starting to get accustomed to Open AI’s chatGPT, and now, the same company are starting to release a beta version of a new AI model that turns texts into high-quality video. Damn good photorealistic videos at that.

Introducing Sora.

If you haven’t seen Sora’s video samples, watch them HERE.

Open AI’s pitch on Sora:

“We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.”

I’m honestly shocked by the speed of progress in the area of AI, but it is designed that way. AI can learn from itself, and that compounding effect is only limited by the LLMs usage of CPU and GPU. As technology evolves, so will AI and they both rapidly increase the rate of each other's improvement.

While Sora is a great tool for creative outputs, my worry is what will it do for actual creative professionals? That is a bleak future we’ll have to eventually face.

Onto positives, while AI will replace skills that took us years to acquire and master, our personal perspective and imperfections through creativity, is an angle AI will have friction in replacing.

Source: Open AI

Google and Customer Service

As Google battles it out with Microsoft in the AI department and is in fierce competition with Meta on the advertising front, we see the company start to focus on customer service for their users.

Google Search Labs is testing a “Talk to a Live Representative” feature where it will “help you place the call, wait on hold, and then give you a call once a live representative is available.”

Nothing will beat the service of a person-to-person interaction, the nuance of what can be discussed and solved is a lot more dynamic and has more of an emotional response from us, the customers. Whether Google’s move is a scalable change or not is another topic, but is a change most of us will appreciate (who likes dealing with disapproved ads anyway).

This feature is only available in parts of the US.

Source: 9to5Google

Is your business ready for AI implementation?

With all this commotion regarding AI, one fundamental question we marketers should ask is if we are ready to fully utilise it. And to what extent?

Here are questions to ponder before utilising it:

1. Do I know how my data (or the company’s data) is being used with this AI?

2. Have I mind-mapped all the possible ways I can use AI (data analysis, strategy planning, content creation)?

3. What areas of AI can I learn more about (prompt engineering, tools, referencing)?

4. Have I built processes so that me and my team can utilise them in a complimentary way that is approved by compliance?

5. If I save XX hours a week with AI, how can I better use that extra time? And on what?

How I Approach Omnichannel Growth Marketing (Free Advanced Masterclass)

LinkedIn’s Algorithm Change

LinkedIn is starting to focus its algorithm, so that you’ll see a post that it thinks will resonate with you and you will find useful, even if the post isn’t from a network or someone you follow - introducing Suggested Posts. Yikes, this could be a good or bad thing.

Suggested posts tend to be very hit-and-miss, just because you are searching for ‘how to cook Thai green curry’, doesn’t mean we constantly want to see content on it a day after. LinkedIn will need to make sure its algorithm has finely tuned logic that may predict what a person finds useful.

Other relevant points:

• LinkedIn introduces "suggested posts" to enhance content reach.

• Aimed at surfacing valuable content to relevant users over time.

• Shift from emphasizing virality to rewarding knowledgeable content.

• New features include custom profile buttons, a verification badge, and thought leadership ads.

• Changes aim to foster meaningful interactions and user growth on the platform.

Source: Entrepreneur

Exploring What Digital Marketing is and What it isn't

Worthy Reads

• 6 reasons why influencer marketing will never be the same (Source: Marketing Dive)

• Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO (Source: Bloomberg)

• The State of Generative AI in Marketing (Source: Marketing Dive)

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