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What I Learned as a Product Designer at Apple

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By Andrea Pacheco

In 2021 I landed my dream job. Working at Apple, the holy grail of minimalistic design, innovation, and creativity. A place where misfits have a seat on the table and where bold, crazy ideas are highly encouraged. As a Product Designer, working at Apple was a life-changing experience, and all I can say is that I’ll keep carrying some of its principles with me wherever I go. In the one year that I worked at Apple, here are the top 10 lessons I learned:

TL;DR

  • Apple is a unique company and I believe that the way they do product design can only be successful due to their business model, which allows for innovation, failure, risks, and a strong focus on design craft excellence, even if it takes a long time to get there.
  • Build a great product, not an MVP.
  • Storytelling is the best skill we need to develop as product designers.
  • A top-down culture is not as bad as we think.

Disclaimer: The opinions presented here are all based on my experience and don’t necessarily reflect how Apple operates.

Great design will take you far, great communication will take you even further: influence people and move things forward.

Projects get built when enough people believe in them. From small talks to elaborating decisions to VP presentations. The way we speak, project ourselves, and elaborate our thoughts is fundamental for getting consensus, influencing people, and moving things forward.

My biggest learning was to put passion into my speech. Not only when presenting work, but especially when talking in meetings. Be truly excited about your work and show this excitement to everyone working around you.

Jobs had an amazing ability to make his ideas understandable and memorable because he spoke with passion. People may not remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel: confident, interested, optimistic, bored, reluctant, etc.

At the end of the day, we’re not only selling products to customers externally, but also selling our ideas to teams and stakeholders internally, and the key to any successful sale is communication.

Storytelling is your superpower: are we deck designers after all?

One of the things that surprised me the most was to see that for any piece of work being shared, designers would put together a keynote deck for it. It could be the smallest thing, like a quick look at the latest work progression, or big presentations, of course. At Apple, designers use the power of storytelling to influence others, instead of just showing what they are doing.

A few tips I learned when presenting work on decks are:

  • Tell a story instead of explaining the process.
  • Only focus on one idea per slide. Don’t confuse what you’re saying by having busy slides. Use one bold sentence per slide. Instead of paragraphs of text.
  • Use presenter notes as a script for your speech. Let the image/mockups paint the picture of what you’re saying in the background.
  • Rehearse your presentations. Even if it’s just a small design critique for a few designers, take one hour or less before the meeting to go through your narrative and know exactly what you need to say to get straight to the point.
  • Have fun! It goes back to how you want people to feel and how helping people feel optimistic during your presentation will help you gain their trust and move things forward (even if the work needs some iteration).

Big ideas are more important than usability fixes: the art of balancing long-term vs. short-term goals.

One thing I noticed is that most of the product teams won’t spend their bandwidth working on small wins and fixes. Instead, teams are focused on long-term impact and building the next big thing. This might explain why every year we see at WWDC Apple releasing a new great feature that will blow our minds, but that small minor usability issue is still there.

It comes down to the company culture. Apple is known for being an innovative brand, so there’s a natural expectation that the company will be working towards releasing innovative products and experiences and this affects how the company prioritizes its efforts.

So I guess the learning is if you want to be innovative, focus on the big wins instead of the small ones. Even if it takes more time to get there.

Trust your instinct, you’re an expert: in making decisions without user testing.

In the ideal world, whenever we’re designing, we user test to spot any red flags on usability or accessibility.

At Apple, you can’t just go out there and use usertesting.com to test your new designs. Imagine if word gets on the street and everyone knows what exciting new feature Apple is working on. You need to find new ways to test your designs, without compromising their secrecy of it.

One of the ways to do that is by running internal user tests with selected employees. Another way is to rely on expert reviews. Expert reviews are design critiques with highly knowledgeable people, usually design directors, VP of products, and managers. The stakes are high and you have to elaborate on the intentionality behind every single design choice. You might think this is a biased way of making decisions, but I’ve found those sessions way more valuable than any user testing I’ve been in. The amount of detail that gets challenged is unbelievable and you can see that the brightest people are looking after the user experience so these products are easy and simple to use.

Being a highly-output generator over a strategic thinker.

People say that Apple is a dream company for any designer and I believe most of it is since as a designer at Apple, you focus most of your time on one thing: the craft. The execution. How the product will behave (interaction design), look (visual design), and make people feel and scale on the ecosystem (system design).

And to have time to focus on craft and execution — and master the details — there’s an amazing smart product team (PMs, PMMs, etc) that will focus on product thinking and strategy.

I do have to say that I missed being more involved in product decisions. I was in charge of interaction and system design decisions, but I often missed having a seat at the table to think through the product strategy.

“One more thing”: going beyond the problem you’re solving.

You probably remember the One More Thing practice initiated by Steve. Well, that applies to the work inside Apple as well. This is not a mandatory thing, but I saw it quite a lot, and to be honest, I loved it.

It’s the bonus culture. As I said, everything is a presentation and all presentations are on the keynote. Bonus is a deck section that will go last on your presentation and it shows how you went above and beyond to explore other opportunities related to your project, some stretch goal, or new ways of winning.

In summary, it’s a chance to push the team to think bigger and look at other opportunities that are not being considered (or can’t at the moment). What I love about this culture is it gives designers a safe space to share their creative ideas while getting visibility from stakeholders, without the pressure and judgment of “having” to build it. If it gets buy-in, great, if not, it’s always good to have food for thought!

Simplicity is hard. Very hard. But when you get it, it’s beautiful.

Build a great product, not an MVP: maintaining a reputation of excellence.

When you buy an Apple product you don’t expect it to be in a testing phase. You expect a product of its highest quality and performance. This hardware development culture is also reflected in the software and service development culture at Apple.

I’ll never forget this one time when I was at a meeting with a product team from Apple TV, and someone said that we could do a release on the web and mobile platform, but we didn’t have the experience ready for TV. So the PM said “If we can’t launch the best experience across all our platforms now, we’re not launching it at all. If we need to wait another year to deliver the best experience for our customers, we’ll wait.”

I even got the chills! Never in my entire career have I heard a PM saying that we would delay the release to launch the best experience that people deserve to get.

I guess this story says a lot about the culture of excellence at Apple. Lots of people complain about how Apple takes a long time to launch features or products that the competition already has, but I truly believe this is due to the culture of just launching a product when we think it will be an amazing experience for people. And I know that this software development culture is only possible at Apple since the company is in a unique position of having a business model that allows for that.

Learn to say “no”.

This is one of the best things I’ve learned in my career. Learning to say no it’s all about learning how to prioritize impact. There’s only so much our brain can take and we can get done in a week. It’s important to put your energy into projects, meetings, and activities that will bring the most impact. And because at big tech companies, there are always exciting projects and opportunities all around, it’s quite easy to get involved in everything at once. But the best way to leave your mark is to deliver in great quality, what you promised. So, don’t eat more than what you can take.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” Steve Jobs

A top-down culture is not as bad as we think.

Last but not least, one of the most distinctive traits of Apple is the top-down company. This means there’s a culture of presenting work to Directors, Managers, etc and getting their approval to move forward.

Every time I had a director or design lead disagreeing with my point of view, they were damn right. And that’s because, at Apple, there’s not much ego involved. I found that people are truly looking for the best user experience possible. So if someone disagrees with your point of view, they probably have a pretty good reason for that. There’s a safe space for a healthy debate and again, all-around intentionality.

The reason why I loved the top-down culture at Apple is that important decisions are taken faster. Having an expert give you the green light or not keeps the momentum. How many times in a bottom-up culture, do we spend weeks and weeks, sometimes even months, trying to get alignment with +10 people, because every single person needs to agree with the point of view? It is exhausting.

So again, my experience is that having that one leader to look up to help guide decisions is time-saving, it helps us focus on the design craft, instead of project managing.

By Andrea Pacheco

Sourced from UX Magazine

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The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

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By Simone Stolzoff

Simone Stolzoff is a writer, designer, and work expert whose work can be found in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among others. He is also a former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO.

Below, Simone shares five key insights from his new book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Listen to the audio version—read by Simone himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work By Simone Stolzoff Next Big Idea Club
1. Intrinsic motivation tends to be more fulfilling than extrinsic motivation.

In one of the most famous psychological experiments on motivation, researchers observed how students at a local preschool spent their free time. After identifying which kids chose drawing as their activity, they divided the young artists into three groups. One group was shown a good player award and was told that if they drew, they would receive an award. Group two wasn’t shown an award, but if the students chose to draw, they were given an award at the end of the session. Group three was not shown or given any awards.

Two weeks after the experiment, the researchers returned to the classroom to observe the students again. The students in groups two and three drew just as much after the experiment as they did before. But students in the first group, those who expected to receive an award, now spent less time drawing. It wasn’t the presence of the award, but the expectation of receiving it that dampened the student’s interest in drawing. The researchers concluded that internal satisfaction from an activity may decrease with the promise of an external reward. The experiment has been replicated many times to other students and adults, yielding similar results.

Working for intrinsic validation alone like a high salary, fancy title, or an award is less sustainable than pursuing work you enjoy. The experiment proves something we all intuitively know. Working exclusively for external rewards rarely brings lasting fulfilment. As the old saying goes, How much money is enough, Mr. Rockefeller? Just a little bit more.

2. Valuing time tends to be more fulfilling than valuing money.

In the mid-1970s, the average American, German, and French worker all worked roughly the same number of hours per year. In the developed world, average working hours had fallen for most of the 20th century, thanks to technological advancements, labour organizing, and increases in wealth. Historically, the richer a person or a country becomes, the less they work because they can afford not to. But in the mid-1970s, a strange trend occurred in the US. While the average workers’ hours in our peer nations continued to decline, the average American working hours flatlined, and some American workers (namely college-educated men) started to work more than ever.

“Historically, the richer a person or a country becomes, the less they work because they can afford not to.”

Rather than trade wealth for more free time, as was customary for most of history, American elites started trading their free time for more work. It’s well documented that increasing your wealth can increase happiness to a point, but once our basic needs are accounted for, prioritizing time outweighs prioritizing wealth. Thinking about work’s role in your life, especially if you’re relatively well off, it’s worth considering that valuing more free time over more money tends to be more fulfilling and lead to higher overall well-being.

3. Satisficing tends to be more fulfilling than maximizing.

Imagine you’re buying a sweater and you find one that fits well and looks good for a fair price. If you’re what social scientists call a maximiser, you might ask the clerk to put the sweater on hold so you can spend the rest of the day checking other stores to see if there is a better sweater out there. If you’re a so-called satisfier, which is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, you’ll likely feel content buying the first sweater and moving on with your day.

A satisfier determines their criteria and stops searching once they find something that meets their standards. Whereas maximisers want to be sure that every decision is the best decision possible. In the words of psychologist Lori Gottlieb, the satisfier is the one who wants what she has, and the maximiser is the one always chasing what she wants.

“Many of us have internalized the message that there’s one dream job for us and we shouldn’t stop until we find it.”

While there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach, the research suggests that satisfiers tend to be happier. Even if the maximiser exhausts all the options and returns to the store to buy the original sweater, they tend to be less fulfilled than the satisfier who bought the sweater right away.

From a work perspective, many of us have internalized the message that there’s one dream job for us and we shouldn’t stop until we find it. We tweak our resumes and browse LinkedIn in the hopes of finding a role that helps us self-actualize. But perhaps a satisfier approach, where we first determine what matters and then recognize when we have it, is a better recipe for happiness.

4. Define what good enough means to you.

I named my book The Good Enough Job as a nod to the satisfier approach to job seeking. Compared to the perfect dream job, good enough is a more forgiving ideal. It doesn’t idealize what a job can offer, nor accept that work must be endless toil. Fundamentally, good enough is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means to you. Perhaps it’s a job that pays a certain wage, gets off at a certain hour, or gives you the time and energy to do what you love when you’re not working.

The title is also an allusion to a theory by a British psychologist and paediatrician named Donald Winnicott. In the mid-20th century, Winnicott was observing growing idolization of parenting in which parents wanted to be perfect and shield their kids from experiencing any negative emotions. When the kid inevitably felt angry or sad, the parents took it personally. As an alternative, Winnicott proposed the idea of the good enough parent and believed that sufficiency would be better for both the child and parent. The child would learn how to self-soothe and the parent wouldn’t get lost in their children’s emotions.

“Fundamentally, good enough is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means to you.”

The Good Enough Job takes Winnicott’s approach and applies it to our working lives. I’ve observed a growing idolization of work in which people keep searching endlessly for their vocational soulmate, a dream job that will never be frustrating or make them sad. An approach that thinks about what good enough means and then thinks about a job as a part of, not the entirety, of who we are is bound to lead to a more well-rounded and fulfilling life.

5. Diversify your identity beyond work.

If you treat work as your primary source of meaning, identity, community, and purpose, it’s a perilous game. It’s as if you’re balancing on a narrow platform prone to be blown over from a strong gust of wind. We’ve particularly seen this recently in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and layoffs and furloughs across many different industries and sectors. If you treat your job as your primary source of identity and you lose your job, what’s left? This mindset also creates massive expectations about what a job can deliver.

When we live a work-centric existence, we can neglect other parts of who we are. When we are working all the time, it doesn’t just take our best hours, but often our best energy too. Carve out time to do things other than work and fill that time with active forms of leisure. It may sound obvious, but creating meaning in your life requires time and energy. You must do things other than work. Active forms of leisure can take many forms, such as investing in relationships by, for example, setting up a weekly breakfast date with your best friend. It can be finding a hobby that you don’t have to monetize or become an expert at, but it’s simply brings you joy. Or it can be finding a community where an identity beyond who you are in the office is reinforced.

To listen to the audio version read by author Simone Stolzoff, download the Next Big Idea App today:

Listen to key insights in the next big idea app

 

By Simone Stolzoff

Sourced from The Next Big Idea Club

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Unpacking consumer research: Identifying trends, emerging topics, and key insights

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Sourced from PHYS ORG

Researchers from Newcastle Business School, The University of Newcastle, and UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales, have published a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology that provides a comprehensive review of consumer research journals from both marketing and non-marketing disciplines.

By identifying gaps in the literature, the paper offers guidance for those seeking to further progress consumer research.

The article is authored by Edwin Camilleri, Nitika Garg, and Shah Jahan Miah.

A thriving field of study, consumer research provides relevant source material on vast range of issues studied across multiple disciplines, including choice and decision processes, lifestyle and culture, health and wellness, and existing and new technologies. Previous reviews of consumer research focused exclusively on journals, articles, and authors in the marketing field—but not on the impact or citation frequency of specific topics from both “inside” and “outside” the marketing field.

The authors identified emerging, declining and the most impactful topics in both between 1999 and 2019. Based on a review of literature during that period, the authors found that non-marketing journals focusing on consumer research has continually increased, particularly since 2055, while the number of marketing journals publishing has remained relatively consistent.

Through a five-step process of data collection, topic modelling and analysis, the team discovered that several topics from non-marketing disciplines have grown significantly in terms of coverage and citations. For example, topics such as food waste, technology, and sustainability reflect emerging contemporary issues pertinent to consumers. Marketing scholars have taken interest and are applying various marketing concepts and theories to these subjects, adding fresh scholarship to the field.

The authors propose topics for future research based on subjects common “inside” consumer psychology literature that haven’t yet been explored in relation to the topics of emerging interest in other fields. These “gaps” include self-regulation, consumption experience and giving behaviour.

The authors also identified the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research as two of the marketing journals at the forefront of cutting-edge consumer research.

Given that the study concluded in 2019, the authors note that marketing scholars are also now considering a range of consumer relevant issues in the wake of the pandemic, which will add additional breadth and stimulate new perspectives to the field.

More information: Edwin Camilleri et al, “Inside” versus “outside” trends in consumer research, Journal of Consumer Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1349

Journal information: Journal of Consumer Psychology , Journal of Consumer Research

Provided by Society for Consumer Psychology

Feature Image Credit: Sourced from PHYS ORG

Sourced from PHYS ORG

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Simple Social Media Post Templates for Adobe InDesign

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By Dirk Petzold

Simplify your social media game with ready-to-use templates.

In today’s digital era, social media has become an integral part of our lives. Whether you’re a business owner, a content creator, or an influencer, it’s essential to have a visually appealing and engaging social media presence. However, not everyone has the time or design skills to create stunning graphics from scratch. That’s where Adobe Stock comes to the rescue! With Adobe Stock contributor @orangeberry‘s set of simple social media post templates in Adobe InDesign, you can effortlessly elevate your online presence.

Download at Adobe Stock
Simple Social Media Post Templates for Adobe InDesign
Simple Social Media Post Templates for Adobe InDesign
Download at Adobe Stock
  1. Efficient and Customizable Designs: @orangeberry‘s set of social media post templates offers a convenient solution for those seeking professionally designed graphics. Each template comes in a standard size of 1080 x 1080 pixels, optimized for various social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. These pre-made designs provide a solid foundation, ensuring your content stands out in a sea of endless feeds.
  2. Versatile Design Options: With 12 unique templates to choose from, you’ll find a wide range of options to suit your brand’s aesthetic and communication needs. From bold and vibrant layouts to minimalist and elegant designs, @orangeberry‘s collection caters to diverse styles and content themes. Whether you’re promoting a product, sharing a quote, or announcing an event, there’s a template for every occasion.
  3. Seamless Customization in Adobe InDesign: The templates are created using Adobe InDesign, a powerful graphic design software known for its versatility and user-friendly interface. With InDesign’s intuitive editing features, you can easily customize the templates to match your brand’s colours, typography, and imagery. Make your social media posts truly unique by adding your own photos, logos, or other visual elements that resonate with your audience.
  4. Time-Saving Convenience: One of the biggest advantages of using @orangeberry‘s social media post templates is the time saved. By starting with a pre-designed template, you eliminate the need to start from scratch, significantly reducing the time and effort required to create eye-catching graphics. Spend more time crafting compelling captions or engaging with your audience while still maintaining a consistent and professional visual identity.
  5. Endless Possibilities: While the templates provide a great starting point, don’t limit yourself to their original design. Use them as a springboard for inspiration and let your creativity shine. Customize the layout, experiment with different fonts, or rearrange the elements to create a design that truly represents your brand’s personality.

Having visually appealing and engaging social media content is crucial. Thanks to Adobe Stock and @orangeberry‘s set of social media post templates in Adobe InDesign, creating stunning graphics has never been easier. With customizable designs and a range of options, you can streamline your social media game and present your brand in a professional and captivating manner. Don’t let design constraints hold you back; unleash your creativity with these ready-to-use templates and make a lasting impression on your audience.

Download at Adobe Stock

 

Check out more graphic design templates on WE AND THE COLOR.

By Dirk Petzold

Sourced from WATC

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Here’s What I Learned Testing Photoshop’s New Generative AI Tool

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By Stephen Shankland

Adobe’s Firefly AI feature brings new fun and fakery to photos. It’s a profound change for image editing, though far from perfect.

Adobe has built generative AI abilities into its flagship image-editing software, releasing a Photoshop beta version Tuesday that dramatically expands what artists and photo editors can do. The move promises to release a new torrent of creativity even as it gives us all a new reason to pause and wonder if that sensational, scary or inspirational photo you see on the internet is actually real.

In my tests, detailed below, I found the tool impressive but imperfect. Adding it directly to Photoshop is a big deal, letting creators experiment within the software tool they’re likely already using without excursions to Midjourney, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion or other outside generative AI tools.

With Adobe’s Firefly family of generative AI technologies arriving in Photoshop, you’ll be able to let the AI fill a selected part of the image with whatever it thinks most fitting – for example, replacing road cracks with smooth pavement. You can also specify the imagery you’d like with a text prompt, such as adding a double yellow line to the road.

Firefly in Photoshop also can also expand an image, adding new scenery beyond the frame based on what’s already in the frame or what you suggest with text. Want more sky and mountains in your landscape photo? A bigger crowd at the rock concert? Photoshop will oblige, without today’s difficulties of finding source material and splicing it in.

The feature, called generative fill and scheduled to emerge from beta testing in the second half of 2023, can be powerful. In Adobe’s live demo, the tool was often able to match a photo’s tones, blend in AI-generated imagery seamlessly, infer the geometric details of perspective even in reflections and extrapolate the position of the sun from shadows and sky haze.

Such technologies have been emerging over the last year as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dall-E captured the imaginations of artists and creative pros. Now it’s built directly into the software they’re most likely to already be using, streamlining what can be a cumbersome editing process.

“It really puts the power and control of generative AI into the hands of the creator,” said Maria Yap, Adobe’s vice president of digital imaging. “You can just really have some fun. You can explore some ideas. You can ideate. You can create without ever necessarily getting into the deep tools of the product, very quickly.”

But you can’t sell anything yet. With Firefly technology, including what’s produced by Photoshop’s generative fill, “you may not use the output for any commercial purpose,” Adobe’s generative AI beta rules state.

Photoshop’s Firefly AI imperfect but useful

In my testing, I frequently ran into problems, many of them likely stemming from the limited range of the training imagery. When I tried to insert a fish on a bicycle to an image, Firefly only added the bicycle. I couldn’t get Firefly to add a kraken to emerge from San Francisco Bay. A musk ox looked like a panda-moose hybrid.

Less fanciful material also presents problems. Text looks like an alien race’s script. Shadows, lighting, perspective and geometry weren’t always right.

People are hard, too. On close inspection, their faces were distorted in weird ways. Humans added into shots could be positioned too high in the frame or in otherwise unconvincingly blended in.

Still, Firefly is remarkable for what it can accomplish, particularly with landscape shots. I could add mountains, oceans, skies and hills to landscapes. A white delivery van in a night scene was appropriately yellowish to match the sodium vapor streetlights in the scene. If you don’t like the trio of results Firefly presents, you can click the “generate” button to get another batch.

Given the pace of AI developments, I expect Firefly in Photoshop will improve.

It’s hard and expensive to retrain big AI models, requiring a data centre packed with expensive hardware to churn through data, sometimes taking weeks for the largest models. But Adobe plans relatively frequent updates to Firefly. “Expect [about] monthly updates for general improvements and retraining every few months in all likelihood,” Adobe product chief Scott Belsky tweeted Tuesday.

Automating image manipulation

For years, “Photoshop” hasn’t just referred to Adobe’s software. It’s also used as a verb signifying photo manipulations like slimming supermodels’ waists or hiding missile launch failures. AI tools automate not just fun and flights of fancy, but also fake images like an alleged explosion at the Pentagon or a convincingly real photo of the pope in a puffy jacket, to pick two recent examples.

With AI, expect editing techniques far more subtle than the extra smoke easily recognized as digitally added to photos of an Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006.

It’s a reflection of the double-edged sword that is generative AI. The technology is undeniably useful in many situations but also blurs the line between what is true and what is merely plausible.

For its part, Adobe tries to curtail problems. It doesn’t permit prompts to create images of many political figures and blocks you for “safety issues” if you try to create an image of black smoke in front of the White House. And its AI usage guidelines prohibit imagery involving violence, pornography and “misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive content that could lead to real-world harm,” among other categories. “We disable accounts that engage in behaviour that is deceptive or harmful.”

Firefly also is designed to skip over styling prompts like that have provoked serious complaints from artists displeased to see their type of art reproduced by a data centre. And it supports the Content Authenticity Initiative‘s content credentials technology that can be used to label an image as having been generated by AI.

Today, generative AI imagery made with Adobe’s Firefly website add content credentials by default along with a visual watermark. When the Photoshop feature exists beta testing and ships later this year, imagery will include content credentials automatically, Adobe said.

People trying to fake images can sidestep that technology. But in the long run, it’ll become part of how we all evaluate images, Adobe believes.

“Content credentials give people who want to be trusted a way to be trusted. This is an open-source technology that lets everyone attach metadata to their images to show that they created an image, when and where it was created, and what changes were made to it along the way,” Adobe said. “Once it becomes the norm that important news comes with content credentials, people will then be sceptical when they see images that don’t.”

Generative AI for photos

Adobe’s Firefly family of generative AI tools began with a website that turns a text prompt like “modern chair made up of old tires” into an image. It’s added a couple other options since, and Creative Cloud subscribers will also be able to try a lightweight version of the Photoshop interface on the Firefly site.

When OpenAI’s Dall-E brought that technology to anyone who signed up for it in 2022, it helped push generative artificial intelligence from a technological curiosity toward mainstream awareness. Now there’s plenty of worry along with the excitement as even AI creators fret about what the technology will bring now and in the more distant future.

Generative AI is a relatively new form of artificial intelligence technology. AI models can be trained to recognize patterns in vast amounts of data – in this case labelled images from Adobe’s stock art business and other licensed sources – and then to create new imagery based on that source data.

Generative AI has surged to mainstream awareness with language models used in tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, Google’s Gmail and Google Docs, and Microsoft’s Bing search engine. When it comes to generating images, Adobe employs an AI image generation technique called diffusion that’s also behind Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Google’s Imagen.

Adobe calls Firefly for Photoshop a “co-pilot” technology, positioning it as a creative aid, not a replacement for humans. Yap acknowledges that some creators are nervous about being replaced by AI. Adobe prefers to see it as a technology that can amplify and speed up the creative process, spreading creative tools to a broader population.

“I think the democratization we’ve been going through, and having more creativity, is a positive thing for all of us,” Yap said. “This is the future of Photoshop.”

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

Feature Image Credit: Adobe Photoshop’s Firefly AI tool generated this hippo on a Marin County overlook above the Golden Gate Bridge. In the original photo, the dirt patch was unoccupied. Stephen Shankland/CNET

By Stephen Shankland

Sourced from CNET

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Ryan Reynolds Has Now Become One of the Best Marketers and Investors on the Planet. Here’s How

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By Jeff Haden

The formula? Purchase a stake in a business with potential, then deploy your considerable content marketing skills.

If you know about Mint Mobile, it’s probably because of Ryan Reynolds. The upstart wireless brand, for which Reynolds serves as the personality in the company’s TV and social media ads (and whose advertising agency, Maximum Effort, created those ads), was just sold to T-Mobile in a deal valued at up to $1.35 billion.

T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert touted the benefits of Mint’s “marketing formula,” saying, “Over the long-term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile.”

If you’re keeping score, according to The Wall Street Journal Reynolds owns approximately 25 percent of Mint Mobile, which makes his share worth a cool $300 million.

That’s not the first time Reynolds has cashed in on his marketing skills. In 2018, he purchased a stake and used a similar marketing strategy to promote Aviation Gin, a company purchased two years later by beverage giant Diageo for over $600 million.

While Reynolds’s share of Aviation Gin isn’t public knowledge, even if Reynolds “only” took a 10 percent stake, that’s $60 million for a couple of years’ worth of developing and delivering extremely creative — and clearly effective — ad campaigns.

And then there’s Wrexham AFC. In late 2020, Reynolds and Rob McElhenney paid two million pounds to purchase a fifth-division Welsh soccer team that for 15 years had failed to earn promotion. Their marketing chops, best exemplified by the Hulu documentary Welcome to Wrexham, brought global attention, increased the club’s social presence by nearly 1,000 percent, boosted merchandise sales (a major percentage of which come from overseas), and caused the team to average the highest home match attendance in its division.

Add it all up, and Reynolds isn’t just a gifted marketer. He’s clearly also a savvy investor.

Or maybe the two go hand in hand. As Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of HubSpot, says:

Although it is still possible to blast the world with your message and offering, and try to interrupt your way into people’s lives with your marketing, that’s the most expensive way to do it. The cheaper and better way is to tell a story or share something helpful and useful: that’s the power of content marketing.

For Reynolds, that means replacing spectacle — big budgets, lots of special effects, etc. — with character. Small budgets, tight timelines, simple sets, timely premises.

Something like this:

Or like this (note Wrexham and Aviation Gin make brief appearances):

The marketing budget for the first Deadpool was relatively bare bones, so Reynolds focused on creating content that audiences would not only consume but would also be eager to share. Inside jokes, offbeat humor, clever trailers — the marketing for Deadpool substituted personality for spectacle, and creativity for massive spending.

Unsurprisingly, since HubSpot is now a $19 billion-plus company, Reynolds’s marketing approach dovetails nicely with Dharmesh’s perspective on inbound marketing.

And so should yours.

1. You absolutely must market.

You may be tempted to ignore marketing, especially when you’re consumed with developing a product people will love. Still: Without marketing, who will ever know your product exists? Great marketing helps you find people to love what you do.

If you don’t plan to invest in marketing, don’t invest in building a business.

2. Your marketing should service a need. 

No one wakes up thinking, “Gee, I hope I get spammed today.” As Shah says, 95 percent of people don’t like being interrupted, and the other 5 percent hate being interrupted.

The best marketing is based on doing what you do best: helping customers. The best marketing is based on creating content that is useful for potential customers. That’s the essence of inbound marketing: helpful, informative, etc. content that draws people to you.

Even if “helpful” just means “entertaining,” since we could all use a little more fun in our lives. (Think the people who share Aviation Gin or Mint Mobile ads do so because they think their connections are seeking a new gin brand or wireless provider? Yeah, no.)

3. But don’t try to spend your way to customer awareness. 

You won’t win by shouting louder, placing bigger ads, or buying a bigger booth at the trade show. You can’t buy attention; you can only rent it. Advertising is always temporary — when you stop paying the “rent,” you stop getting any attention.

Besides, well-heeled competitors have more money and can spend money way more stupidly. So let them.

As a startup, your goal is to use marketing tools and strategies that create leverage. You need to receive disproportionate, long-term return on your marketing investments.

That’s the only way you will survive, and later thrive.

4. Don’t think of yourself as an owner or a marketer. You’re both. 

In the early years, everyone in the company should be selling. Everyone in the company should also be marketing.

Especially you.

No one cares more passionately about your brand. No one wants to help, and inform, and teach other people — while creating content that builds your brand and reach — more than you.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Jeff Haden

Sourced from Inc.

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Product-Led Growth Is in the Past – Community-Led Growth Is the Future

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By Deepika Pundora

Communities have been all around us for a very long time. They’ve psychologically impacted how we look at things and make decisions.

Whether it’s family, friends, or a community based on shared hobbies, they all have one thing in ’s common — they’re either based on a shared interest or a pain point.

Internet communities replicate the same values found in real-world communities.

There Is No “I” in Success, Only “We” — The Rise of Brand Communities.

Since the global pandemic, more and more people are turning to online communities to connect, network, and exchange information. And this includes brand communities as well.

58% of the top B2B SaaS companies in the world — yes, the world — have a widely active community around their product. That’s 58 out of the 100 companies surveyed by PeerSignal. Do you know why? Because these communities work on one principle — Invite, Include, Inspire.

But, What Even is a Brand Community? According to PeerSignal, a brand community is

“a place where helpful interactions happen between people united by common interests and administered by a business with a stake in those interests.”

Powered by Users, Fuelled by Fans — Why Brand Communities Matter

The essence of what a brand creates is affiliation and identity. And as we all know, marketing is all about attracting an engaged audience interested in what you have to say and what you’re selling.

A more advanced and improved approach to doing the same is creating a community around your business.

But why?

Community-led growth has been a long time coming. Users in the fragmented SaaS market feel overwhelmed by their options and turn to influencers for help selecting tools. At the same time, the number of platforms for communication and sharing has grown.

There are more channels than ever to connect with your audience. And for your audience to connect with you.

In such a scenario, a brand community provides a familiar environment for your product users and potential customers to come together, share experiences, ask questions, and solve queries.

You could start a community on your website, Slack, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Reddit, or any other channel your audience frequents.

When moderated well, a brand community will also gift you your biggest supporters and advocates, apart from your brilliant product, of course. Notion, Slack, Zapier, Ahrefs, etc., are some of the best examples of community-led business growth in the last 20 years or so.

If you’re scaling and aiming to hit a sustainable growth rate, investing in a brand community can pay off big time.

From Users to Fans to Advocates — The Compounding Returns of Building a Community

Here are 5 reasons to consider community-led marketing if you haven’t already.

  1. Drive organic leads and shape product-market fit.
  2. 27.3% of customers rely on online communities in making purchase decisions. With a community-led marketing approach, you tap into this market. This way, not only do you increase brand engagement, but you also establish yourself as a market leader with sound industry knowledge.
  3. You can educate and give guidance about product use. This helps you focus and customize information on relevant features and details for improved product understanding.
  4. Initiate ‘word-of-mouth’ advocacy by letting your customers talk about you candidly.
  5. Get a solid market share and top-of-mind brand recall. As people begin to talk about you and like your brand, you get more organic leads and brand visibility.

And Here’s What Not to Do:

Don’t rush the process. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

How Hubspot Unlocked Growth With a Community — A Visionary Tale

Let’s take the example of HubSpot — A cloud-based CRM platform for people in marketing, sales, and customer services. And how it grew its user base solely with inbound marketing and a community of advocates.

They host a community on their website, where audiences can connect with peers and access a library of educational resources. From online courses to webinars about inbound marketing, customer services, and sales, they covered it all.

These community groups are global, and they also have study groups for members to have conversations and clarify doubts. But their main strength is the Community Champions and Leaderboards.

They pick a member who has contributed quality solutions to queries posted on the community and give them a special feature. It encourages other members to participate in the community actively and know that their efforts won’t go unnoticed.

The HubSpot Academy was a resounding success as well. And supported the business in quickly broadening its user base. If you’ve come across their very popular course on Content Marketing, you know what I’m talking about.

Community-led growth gives customers a platform to thoroughly explore the product, whereas product-led growth may be what smoothly leads users through the product journey. If anything, the two growth tactics work best when combined.

I love how Pramod Rao, Co-founder of Threado, tackled the question of product-led vs community-led marketing strategy,

“When done properly, community and product-led growth together have the potential for becoming the bible for the next generation of startups. There’s too much emphasis on “one or the other” but not enough on how well they complement each other.”

As we’ve established above, there is no “I” in success. Only “us” and “we.”

By Deepika Pundora

@deepikapundora.Founder @Ukti // Sharing actionable tips on content, conversions, and SaaS marketing.

Sourced from HACKERNOON

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What is Google Privacy Sandbox and how will it replace cookies?

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Google Privacy Sandbox will change web browsing in the future by replacing cookies. Here’s a timeline for this initiative and what it all means.

Google generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year selling ads across the internet. It’s able to do so against information about you and me that’s been collected from a variety of sources – including tracking technologies like cookies. But, through its Privacy Sandbox initiative, the company wants to find new ways of collecting users’ interests without tapping into their personal information. We detail how the program has made strides while struggling with controversy all along the way.

What are cookies and why should you care?

Marketers want web surfers to click on their ads and buy what they promote. To ensure a higher likelihood of success, they gather as much information on any given user as possible through tracking technologies such as cookies.

When you visit a website, it may ask you to accept cookies that track your activity on the domain to provide continuity in your experience. If you have an account with the site and have ticked that “Remember me” box, a cookie helps it do that. These tracking cookies can also come from third parties such as affiliated marketers. By being present across millions of sites, ad networks are able to collect data about your browsing habits and even your demographic information in order to present ads you might be inclined to click on.

Privacy advocates have had longstanding concerns about cookies and other tracking technologies like tracking pixels. They note that the amounts of data these trackers generate can be used to build profiles of users, a practice called “fingerprinting”.

Enter the GDPR

Those concerns were just some of the motivations that led the European Union to update its policies about the movement of online data, eventually resulting in the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2016. The GDPR mandated that website owners be transparent about how they use trackers and allow visitors the option to turn off non-essential ones like those for marketing. The EU began enforcing the regulation in 2018.

What is Google Privacy Sandbox?

While simultaneously navigating the GDPR, Google has been battling antitrust rulings and has likely figured that disruption to its lucrative ads business. It, therefore, needs to shape the conversation moving forward and play a role – if not the leading one – in creating new standards not just for how much tracking happens but also what types of data gets netted.

In August 2019, the company debuted Privacy Sandbox with a subdued pair of corporate blog posts outlining its goals for limiting tracking activities in two major parts of the business: The ad selection process and the delivery of conversion metrics to the client. It also wanted to cut down on fraudulent behaviours from bad-faith ad buyers and redesign the separate but just-as-complex advertising regime with Android apps.

Google already had APIs in the works to address these issues and was looking for industry stakeholders to give input as well as proposals. From the outset, advocate groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation were cool to some of the solutions the ads giant had to offer, saying that its measures didn’t go far enough or were just outright flawed.

So, how does Google plan to replace cookies?

Old plan: FLoC

The most controversial of Google’s solutions was Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

FLoC was meant to replace cookies as a way for marketers to gather intelligence about the users’ interests. With FLoC, the idea is that a user, signified through a token stored locally with the web browser, would be cycled through various “cohorts” of several thousand people featuring roughly similar browsing histories. Websites log visits from the user via their cohort token. When marketers want to sell an ad to a site visitor, they ask for the cohort number the user is in and receive interests reflected by the cohort as a whole – theoretically removing fine-level details a requesting party can pick up about any given user.

The EFF called out FLoC for having the potential to brand thousands of people at a time with a profile of behaviours and have that tied to personal information via an account login. As Google tried to adapt its way through doubts on FLoC’s efficacy, regulators in Europe were already signalling their worry about the program’s compliance with the GDPR (via Android Police).

The British government was so concerned about Google’s plans to replace cookies with FLoC that the Competition and Markets Authority compelled it to allow oversight and make other commitments regarding its plans for Privacy Sandbox. Ironically enough, the company had already pushed the timeline for integrating FLoC into Chrome multiple times before it ended up killing that idea in January 2022.

privacy-sandbox-timeline
Google

New plan: Topics

As part of its suite of APIs for addressing Privacy Sandbox’s goals, it seems that Google’s replacement for FLoC (which was supposed to replace cookies) is Topics, and it’s undergoing testing on Chrome for desktop and laptop devices and Android devices as of press time.

Critics haven’t been as loud of late – though that isn’t to say they’ve been quiet – about Topics nor the other APIs in Privacy Sandbox. In addition, Google has been reporting quarterly to the CMA about changes to its various APIs. You can see the company’s pledges as well as how the regulator is gauging them in the report for Q1 2023 here.

When does Google plan to deprecate cookies?

Google currently plans to implement the Privacy Sandbox APIs with all Chrome users starting in July 2023. In the first quarter of 2024, the company will deprecate third-party cookies for one percent of Chrome’s user base. The wider population will then experience a phase-out beginning in the third quarter of that year.

privacy-sandbox-screen

Want to try the Privacy Sandbox APIs?

If you want to try the Privacy Sandbox APIs for yourself, follow these steps:

  • On the desktop version of Chrome, enter chrome://settings/privacySandbox into the address and switch the toggle on the page to participate in the beta trial.
  • On Android, hop into Chrome, enter the app’s settings, select “Privacy and security,” and then find the toggle in the “Privacy Sandbox” item.

We should note the APIs being rolled out only concern online ad processes via Chrome. Changes to advertising within Android app environments – which are a can of worms in and of themselves (and Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica argues they are pretty much ineffective) – do not have a timeline for release.

Feature Image Credit: Google

By Jules Wang

Sourced from Pocket-lint

 

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How To Improve Your B2B Customer Acquisition Strategy

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By Samuel Thimothy,

Acquiring new customers is the cornerstone of business growth, and crafting the right acquisition strategy plays an important role in achieving that goal. However, there are several reasons why these strategies may fail, from poor communication between sales and marketing teams to poor positioning and messaging.

With the right approach, you can win more customers and drive sustainable growth for your business. Below are the most common mistakes businesses make when developing their acquisition strategy and steps you can take to improve your organization’s approach.

Siloed Sales And Marketing Teams

One of the most common reasons why customer acquisition initiatives fail is because there’s a disconnect between sales and marketing. If they aren’t sharing data, it’s difficult to create an effective strategy. I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say your marketing team spends months creating targeted content for a specific persona. They invest time and money in ads, promote content on social media and drive lots of traffic to the company’s website. But when those leads convert, your sales team immediately disqualifies them.

It can be a huge problem, but the solution is very simple. Make sure these departments communicate and agree on what a “qualified” lead means so there are no unmet expectations. Also, implement a system where leads are automatically sent from marketing to sales so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Sales’ Focus On Existing Clients

Another reason why customer acquisition strategies fail is that sales teams are too focused on existing clients. It makes sense because existing clients are low-hanging fruit. They already know who you are, they already trust you, and they’re more likely to buy from you again. So why bother trying to acquire new customers?

The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores the fact that many clients will eventually leave. It’s just a matter of time. That’s why it’s important to have a constant stream of new customers coming in the door: so that you’re never left high and dry.

How can you fix this problem? Set quotas for your sales team and create incentives for bringing in new business. Be sure to give them all the resources they need to succeed, such as access to a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or lead generation software.

Poor Positioning And Mixed Messages

If your company has expanded its products or services over time, it’s possible that your positioning and messaging are now confusing. This can make it hard for potential customers to understand what you do and why they should buy from you.

Imagine you’re a digital marketing agency that started out by offering SEO. You’ve since expanded into content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, social media management, web design and video production—essentially, anything that fits into the “digital marketing” category.

Now when potential customers come to your website, they have no idea what you specialize in. Unclear positioning makes a company look like a jack-of-all-trades. Someone looking for SEO services will now go and hire another SEO agency that has one specific offer.

Fixing this problem is all about getting back to basics and making sure your positioning and messaging are clear and concise. Define who your ideal customer is and what problem you’re solving for them. Everything else should fall into place around that core message.

How To Improve Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

Not feeling particularly optimistic about your company’s acquisition strategy? You’re not alone. Most businesses struggle to keep up with customers’ ever-changing needs. Fortunately, there are some simple ways to improve your approach. Take the following steps:

Step 1: Make It Flexible

Your customer acquisition strategy has to be flexible, especially if you are accounting for future growth. Without the ability to adapt and change with your business, acquisition strategies just won’t cut it. Make sure that there’s enough flexibility built into your plan so that you can adapt as needed—whether it’s due to big successes or major industry disruption.

Step 2: Make It Sustainable

Good acquisition strategy can be sustained in the long term—and all too often this isn’t taken into account when businesses are making decisions. Before picking any particular path forward, ask yourself if you’ll be able to do it in five or even 10 years. Lasting success boils down to finding something that works now and keeps working in the future.

Step 3: Make It Targeted

A lot of businesses make the mistake of trying to appeal to everyone with their acquisition strategy, but this is rarely effective. Instead, it’s much better to focus on a specific target audience and tailor your plans accordingly. When you know who you’re trying to reach, you can create an acquisition strategy that’s much more likely to be successful.

Step 4: Make It Diversified

Another common mistake businesses make is putting all their eggs in one basket. This can be very risky because if something happens to that one channel, your entire acquisition strategy could come crashing down. To protect yourself against this, make sure your efforts are diversified and include multiple channels.

Improving your customer acquisition strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right amount of research and effort, you can build effective strategies that will help you reach your goals and grow your business into something bigger.

Feature Image Credit: Hinterhaus Productions 2016

By Samuel Thimothy,

VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, the digital marketing intelligence platform.

Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 45 and younger. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year and have created tens of thousands of jobs. Learn more at yec.co. Questions about an article? Email [email protected].

Sourced from Forbes

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7 Ways to Use Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Small Business

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By Thaddeus Collins

Are you a small business owner looking for ways to use inbound marketing to stand out from the competition and grow your small business? Inbound marketing or organic marketing is a great way to build brand recognition and grow your small business. It is also a more cost-effective and time-efficient approach than traditional marketing methods.

In this blog post, we will discuss 7 ways to use inbound marketing to grow your small business.

Inbound marketing is all about creating content that draws people in. It involves creating content that is relevant to your target audience and providing them with valuable information. It is also important to be creative and think outside the box.

You need to create content that will grab people’s attention and make them want to learn more about your business. With the right strategy, you can use inbound marketing to reach more people and grow your small business.

What is inbound marketing?

As a small business owner, you may be wondering what inbound or organic marketing is and how it can help your business. Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on attracting customers organically through digital channels such as search engines, social media, and blogs.

What Is Inbound MarketingUnlike outbound marketing, which involves interrupting potential customers with ads, inbound marketing uses content to draw customers in and build trust.

Once you have a customer’s attention, you can then slowly nurture them through the sales funnel until they become a paying customer.

Inbound marketing is an extremely effective way to market your small business, and it’s a great way to build long-term relationships with your customers. Keep reading to learn more about inbound marketing and how you can use it to grow your small business!

Are you a small business owner who wants to learn more about inbound marketing? If so, you’re in the right place! In this blog post, we’ll share seven ways you can use inbound marketing to grow your small business.

1. Create SEO-Friendly Content
2. Create Targeted Landing Pages
3. Use Email Marketing
4. Use Social Media
5. Use Lead Magnets
6. Use Retargeting
7. Use Analytical Tools

Create SEO-Friendly Content

SEO-friendly content is content that is optimized to reach and rank high in search engine results. In order to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results, you need to create SEO-friendly content. This means creating content that is optimized for search engine algorithms and contains relevant keywords.

This type of content can help you improve your website’s ranking and drive more organic traffic to your website. When you create content, you should always aim to use keywords strategically and create content that is easy to read and understand.

Try to create content that answers questions potential customers may be searching for and focus on providing useful information. On top of optimizing content for search engines, you should also focus on creating content that resonates with your target audience.

Don’t just focus on the technical aspects of SEO; focus on creating content that your customers will actually want to read and engage with. This type of content will not only help you reach customers, but it will also help you build trust with them.

Bonus Tip 1:

When you create a valuable piece of content, it’s always possible to reuse that information for additional purposes. You can turn a white paper into a series of articles and then turn those articles into short videos.

The possibilities for what you can do with your content are limited only by your own creativity and imagination.

Create Targeted Landing Pages

A landing page is a page on your website created specifically for a marketing campaign or offer. Landing pages should be used strategically to capture customer information and to convert visitors into leads.

When creating a landing page, you should be sure to include a form where customers can provide their contact information. You should also consider personalizing the page with the customer’s name or other relevant information.

Doing this can help increase conversions by making the customer feel like they’re receiving a personalized experience. You should also focus on ensuring your landing page is well designed and easy to navigate.

Make sure your form is prominently displayed and your call-to-action (CTA) is clear and concise. With a good landing page, you can effectively capture leads and convert them into paying customers.

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to communicate with potential customers and keep them informed about your products and services. You can send out regular emails to your subscribers to keep them up-to-date on your latest offers and promotions.

This type of marketing can help you build relationships with your customers and generate leads for your business. By building an email list, you can send targeted emails to customers and provide them with useful information.

When it comes to email marketing, you should always make sure to provide value. Don’t just send out emails for the sake of sending them; focus on creating content that your customers will actually find useful and engaging.

You should also focus on segmenting your list and creating content that caters to the specific needs and interests of each segment. This will help you create emails that customers actually want to read.

Use Social Media

Social media is an extremely effective way to reach potential customers and build relationships with them and is a powerful tool for inbound marketing. With social media you can share content, engage with your customers, and build relationships with them.

You can also use social media to promote your products and services and increase your brand awareness. You should create profiles on all the major social media platforms and post content regularly.

When creating content for social media, you should focus on providing a mix of entertaining and informative content. Creating entertaining content can help you engage with customers, while creating informative content can help you educate them about your brand and build trust.

You should also consider using advertising to reach potential customers on social media. Utilizing the targeting features of social media ads can help you reach the right people and garner more engagement.

Use Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are pieces of content that you use to attract potential customers and convert them into leads. These pieces of content could be ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, or webinars.

Lead magnets should be used strategically to target potential customers who are at different stages of the sales funnel. For example, you could use an ebook to target potential customers who are still in the awareness stage, and a webinar to target potential customers who are already in the consideration stage.

Providing potential customers with useful content that they can use will not only help you capture their information, but it will also help you build trust with them.

Use Retargeting

Retargeting is an effective way to re-engage with potential customers who haven’t yet converted into leads. When a potential customer visits your website, a retargeting pixel is placed on their browser so you can serve them with targeted ads.

Retargeting ads can help you stay top of mind with potential customers and encourage them to convert. When creating retargeting ads, you should consider the particular actions the customer has taken on your website and then create ads that are tailored to their interests.

Doing this will help you personalize the customer’s experience and increase the chances of conversion.

Use Analytical Tools

Analytics is an important part of inbound marketing. You can use analytics to track your website’s performance and see which content is performing well and which content needs improvement.

This type of data can help you make more informed decisions about your inbound marketing strategy. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot can help you measure the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaigns.

These tools can track how many visitors are coming to your website, where they’re coming from, what pages they’re visiting, and more. Having access to these analytical tools can help you identify which campaigns are working and which aren’t so you can make adjustments accordingly.

On top of this, these tools can also provide insight into how customers are interacting with your website and where they’re dropping off in the sales funnel. This can help you figure out where adjustments need to be made in order to improve conversion rates.

A Few Ideas to Get Started

The Results of Organic MarketingSocial media has in the recent past become one of the most significant platforms for promoting businesses. This is because of the high traffic on social media sites at a given time. You should never run out of ideas to use on social media that can take your business to the next level.

1. Use humorous, famous and inspirational quotes while posting on social media platforms.

Social media users are highly attracted to quotes by famous personalities. Users are highly likely to be attracted to social media posts that contain famous or hilarious quotes.

Therefore, in the process of reading such quotes, social media users get to read the promotional information attached to the quotes and hence goods or services are promoted in the process.

2. Use creative fill-in-the-blanks posts for promotional purposes.

Naturally, people like to have their anxiety provoked and social media users are not left out. fill-in-the-blanks posts are posts that leave readers wondering what would happen if they got involved with whatever promotional idea is passed across in a social media post.

If I had one million dollars I would……… This is a good example of fill-in-the-blanks.

3. Offer your friends and followers bonus rewards for sharing your content.

On a number of cases, marketers and promoters on social media have devised incredible measures of encouraging users to share their content on their own timelines and pages.

This includes offering rewards for every share. Rewards act like incentives and motivational tools for social media users to share your content on their social media pages and timelines.

Bonus Tip 2

Share useful resources generated by others on your social networks.

In order to show your passion for sharing useful information with your audience, do not hesitate to share other people’s information that you might find useful.

Such information is useful at all times despite its origin. This is an implication that social media users will not mind the origin of a given post so long as they find it useful in one way or another.

Inbound marketing strategies offers us numerous tools to ease our approach to marketing

From the simple approach of creating low-cost polls to the engaging videos for potential customers or even in-depth interviews with industry leaders., the social media has been a buzz of activity when it comes to methods of marketing through the platform(s).

Suffice it to say, social media has provided limitless avenues that can be effectively used by small businesses to market themselves and their services.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing is a powerful tool for small business owners. By following these seven steps, you can build brand awareness, generate leads, and grow your business.

Inbound marketing is a great way for small business owners to reach their target audience and generate leads. By using organic marketing, building brand awareness, creating content, posting SEO-friendly content, using email marketing, and using social media and analytics, you can increase your visibility and generate more leads for your business.

Today, social media sites are no longer just an ingenious way for people to meet, connect and share. It is now also one of the most powerful advertising tools which businesses can use to connect to their targeted market niche.

However, it is noteworthy that social media marketing is like a double-edged sword it is something that needs to be wielded correctly. In the hands of a skilled marketer like Inker Street Digital Marketing, it is an effective sales tool. But in the hands of an amateur, it can turn success into demise.

If you’re looking to grow your business, let us get your organic inbound marketing started to reach more customers and increase your sales. We will start implementing the strategies above today to increase brand awareness and generate more leads for your business.

Inbound marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach potential customers and convert them into leads and paying customers. By following the tips outlined in this blog post, you can begin utilizing inbound marketing to grow your small business. Good luck!

Here are some Questions to gauge your Inbound Marketing readiness.

  • What are the most effective inbound marketing strategies that you have used in your business?
  • What challenges have you faced when it comes to leveraging organic marketing?
  • Do you think this type of marketing is a more cost-effective way of engaging with customers than traditional marketing methods?
  • How have you seen inbound or organic marketing change the way customers interact with your business?
  • What tips or advice would you give to other small business owners looking to leverage inbound marketing?
  • If you had to choose one inbound or organic marketing strategy to focus on, what would it be?
  • In what ways do you think inbound marketing could be improved?
  • What do you think is the biggest benefit to using inbound or organic marketing?
  • What do you think is the biggest challenge to using inbound or organic marketing?
  • What advice would you give to companies that are just starting out with this type of marketing?

By Thaddeus Collins

Sourced from Inker Street

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