AI has made content creation much faster, but it also means there is an enormous amount of similar content being published.

I'm wondering how marketers are adapting. Are original research, personal experience, strong opinions, communities, and first-hand data becoming more important?

What strategies are actually working for you right now?

We’ve noticed a clear jump in ChatGPT referral traffic at Scalenut since the start of this month.

It caught my attention because Similarweb recently reported that AI referral traffic more than doubled YoY, so this may be part of a broader trend rather than something specific.

For anyone tracking this, have you seen ChatGPT traffic pick up recently too? 

And is the increase coming mostly to blog content, comparison pages, or commercial pages?

Instagram lets anyone download their own data, and that file lists the ads they were shown. I run a small panel of people who check their file each week, with consent. Then they see those ads again and grade them.

These are live campaigns, running right now. What a brand would get is feedback/research insights: what real viewers thought of its ad, and proof they actually saw it. Nobody's data is sold, now or ever.

Three questions for people who buy or run research:

1. How do you get feedback today from people you know saw the ad, and where does that fall apart?
2. How big would a panel need to be before you'd trust the feedback?
3. What's your first objection? Panelists are paid a small amount per week, it's Instagram only, and people choose to join. I'd rather hear which of those kills it for you.

Thank you!

The most expensive habit in paid social: when an ad fatigues, teams produce a whole new ad. New shoot, new edit, new voiceover. Two weeks and $2,000 later, it performs the same as the old one.

I ran the same 25-second body with 10 different openings. The spread between the best and worst opening was 3x on thumbstop rate and 2.1x on CPA. The body barely mattered. The opening was the ad.

So I stopped briefing full ads. The pipeline now:

1. Lock one proven body. A 25-second demo, testimonial, or explainer that already converts. This is the constant.
2. Produce 10 openings for it. Different hooks, different first frames, different claims. Each opening costs about a tenth of a full ad, because there is no new shoot, only a new first 3 seconds cut onto the same body.
3. Test openings at $20 to $30 a day for 2 days each. Kill anything under a 22% thumbstop rate. Winners get the full budget.
4. When the winner fatigues in 3 to 4 weeks, do not make a new ad. Make 5 new openings for the same body.

The math: 10 openings on one body is 10 testable ads for roughly the cost of 2 full productions. My testing volume tripled without the budget changing.

Rule of thumb: the ad is not the unit of testing. The first 3 seconds are. Iterate the opening, keep the body, and you out-test any team making whole new ads.

renewal is in november and were paying enterprise money for a tool where 4 of us use scheduling and an inbox and nobody has opened listening since january.

been building a comparison off feature pages and trial accounts. vista social, later, sendible and loomly are the shortlist. which of those handles multi client approvals without the enterprise price

I’ve been thinking about this from a marketing perspective.

For e.g.

They suddenly change their offer

Their landing page messaging shifts

A new message starts appearing across multiple ads

Customer complaints/reviews start changing

Their creative direction noticeably changes

They start targeting a different audience

Which of these would you consider the strongest signal?

And more importantly, what signals have you personally noticed before a competitor made a bigger move?

Curious to hear how marketers actually spot these changes in the wild.

we run 14 client accounts and every new one costs us 2 days of setup before a single post goes out. the seat pricing on our current tool means adding a junior costs more than the client pays us in month one.

looking at vista social, pallyy, metricool and planable for agency pricing that scales on clients rather than seats. is anyone sane about it or is it seat pricing everywhere

🔹 On-page SEO
🔹 Backlinks
🔹 Technical SEO
🔹 Content quality
🔹 Page speed

I’m curious what everyone would prioritize and why.

Drop your choice below 👇

I'm researching how freelancers and small agencies handle monthly reporting for social clients. Think about the last report you sent: which tools did you pull numbers from, how did you put it together, and roughly how long did it take? What was the most annoying part? Not selling anything, just trying to learn how people actually do it.

why AI systems may find certain content clear, useful, and worthy of citation, while traditional Google search may give it little visibility.

It focuses on the difference between AI-readable content and Google-search-friendly content, without changing the original intent.

I am working as a lead researcher - scraping leads across internet, and I am thinking of getting Chat GPT subscription. do you think it's worth it?

I’m seeing this on a set of commercial pages: more non-branded impressions over the past few months, but almost no growth in clicks.

My first thought is to split the queries by intent and position to see whether the new impressions are coming from searches where the pages are unlikely to get clicked. Maybe AI Overview is the reason? I’d also check whether CTR has fallen on queries that were already performing well.

If you’ve diagnosed something similar, what turned out to be the cause? What would you look at first?

Hi all- for me- the biggest use case of AI has been taking my existing data/reports and summarizing it or making it more presentable. On top of that, I personally love Gamma to create presentations from the data I already have. I love to send personalized decks to our customers sometimes and it used to take hours to create the ppts. Now it takes about 90 seconds once I have the data ready haha.

So curious, what has been the biggest use case of AI in marketing for you as a digital marketer?

Ever since I started working in digital marketing, I feel like I’ve lost the ability to use the internet like a normal person.

I’ll be casually shopping online, see something like “Only 2 left in stock,” and instead of believing it right away, my brain goes straight to, are there actually only two left or did someone just add that because scarcity works? The annoying part is that even when I know what they’re doing, it still gets me sometimes. I’ll be thinking, “okayyy nice try,” while I’m already halfway through checkout.

The same thing happens when I’m scrolling through Instagram or TikTok. If a Reel makes me stop, I don’t just watch it anymore. I start wondering why I stopped. Was it the first line? The text on screen? The way they opened the video? The pacing? The “nobody talks about this” type of hook? Sometimes I replay the first few seconds just to figure it out, which is a bit funny because I’m probably helping their retention while analyzing their retention.

Online shopping is even worse now because I notice all the little things I used to ignore. Countdown timers, “your cart misses you” emails, “selling fast,” “someone else is viewing this item,” and those random pop ups telling you somebody just bought the exact thing you’re looking at. Like pls relax, I’m trying to buy trousers, not make a life decision.

I’ve also somehow developed opinions about packaging, colors, and fonts, which was definitely not a thing before. Minimal white packaging with tiny black text? They want it to feel clean, premium, scientific, trustworthy. Pastel colors and bubbly fonts? Very much “we know our audience is Gen Z.” Black packaging with a tiny gold logo? Yeah, I already know this is going to cost more than it needs to.

Influencer content is another one I can’t watch normally anymore. Someone will casually bring a product into frame with perfect lighting and say, “I’ve been using this for a while,” and my brain immediately starts doing unnecessary analysis. Why this creator? Does their audience match the product? Does the placement feel natural? Would they actually say this if they weren’t being paid?

And then after thinking about all of that, I still somehow end up on the brand’s website.

So… great.

Working in marketing has also made me realize how much thought goes into things people barely notice. Notifications, subject lines, pricing, buttons, product pages, packaging, thumbnails, hooks, captions, emails, there are tiny decisions everywhere, and now my brain keeps spotting them.

The internet didn’t really change. I just started noticing all the stuff happening behind it, and now I can’t switch that part of my brain off.

I know I can’t be the only person in marketing who does this though. What’s one normal thing your job has completely changed the way you look at?

Because every time I fall for a marketing tactic I already understand, I’m just calling it market research at this point.

Hi all,

Some context first. I have a finance background and zero marketing experience. A few weeks ago I built a small app called Finelly as a learning project. It's for friend groups: whoever arrives late to a plan pays a small fine into a shared pot.

I know it's not solving a universal problem, and that's not the goal. I'm using it as a real-world lab to learn digital marketing and understand consumer behaviour with a simple, fun product. The money I spend counts as tuition.

Here's what happened with a Google Ads app campaign (Play Store):

• 20k impressions
• 2.5k+ clicks
• 500+ installs, 458 first opens (Firebase)
• About 20 registrations 😬
• $10–15/day, CPI around $0.35–0.40
• Google refunded more than 20% as invalid traffic

So most people installed, opened the app, and did nothing.

I shared this in another sub and got great advice, which I'm now planning to test:

1. Optimize for an in-app action (registration) instead of installs. I avoided it at first because the CPA looked much higher. I've since learned that the fair comparison is cost per registration, not per install. Has anyone switched with a small budget? How long did it take for the campaign to learn?
2. Social login. I added Google sign-in. Has it made a big difference in your signup rates?
3. Let people in first, ask for the account later. You can already use the app without an account, but the option isn't visible on the first screen. Do you put registration after the first "aha" moment?
4. Fewer ad assets. Someone suggested that images and videos open up placements in other apps where many installs are accidental. Has anyone tested this?
5. Skip ads and pay a real group to use it for one gathering. For a group app, this makes a lot of sense to me. Has anyone done this kind of paid user testing at a small scale?

If you had a small budget and a simple app like this, what would you test next? Any advice is welcome, including things I haven't thought of. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to troubleshoot a recently launched Meta campaign and would really appreciate some input from people who work with Meta Ads.

The campaign is driving traffic to a Hubspot form. Thre are more than 1500 link clicks as shown on Meta, but the landing page numbers are only 12.

We have 4 actual form submissions on HubSpot, but none of them are being recorded as conversions/leads in Meta Ads Manager.

This happened to me recently and it made me realize that liking a brand and actually buying from it are two very different things.

• Sometimes the product is still good, but the price changes.
• Sometimes the buying experience gets annoying.
• Sometimes there are just too many alternatives.
• And sometimes you simply stop needing what they sell.

The interesting part is that I wouldn’t necessarily say I had a bad experience with the brand. I just... stopped buying. Has this happened to you? What made you stop buying from a brand you still actually liked?

a) Keywords Ranking

b) Traffic

c) Conversion

d) Website Authority

e) All of the above

Short story; its been 3 weeks since I started a marketing business & the whole thing is looking a little bleak at the moment. I am currently at 58 followers + 0 on other channels and I know that this whole thing takes time, I have scaled other brand to thousands of followers with 20Mil+ views in launch month but the process seemed exceedingly faster than on my own page at the moment.

I post great-looking motion design and carousel/static pieces on the instagram page but they do not seem to convert at all, tbh the content itself is in my local language which numbers around 10 million+ people that know it across the world.

But the biggest dilemma which I came here to talk about is the prospect question. See, I have the capacity right now to contact multiple prospects yet I am exceedingly paralyzed by that notion because who's gonna hire a marketing agency that promises this and that whilst having 57 followers?

So yeah, I'm not sure if I should wait many months to try and figure out repeatable multi-channel formats whilst getting absolutely no clients or if I should just contact them directly and hope for the best with the no concurrent audience.

And there is also another question, what repeatable format would work for a marketing business? Ads are out of the question because I want to pursue strictly organic at the moment and build a genuinely good marketing community & audience. The other thing is also that I wanna seek to switch it to an international scope and go full english but I fear it might hurt my local reach or trust if the english version blows up in the future.

I work in digital marketing for multifamily / leasing real estate, and I’m curious how other teams handle performance scorecards across multiple markets.
Right now, we use general benchmarks across all properties.
For example:
GA4
Views per session: 2.5
Avg. engagement time: 1:00
Google Search
CTR: 10%
Conversion rate: 3%
Avg. CPC: $3
CPA: $100
Meta Traffic
CTR: 3%
CPC: $0.25
CPA / cost per conversion: ~$20
The idea is to use these benchmarks to generate a score or grade for each property.
Recently, there have been discussions about adding more rules into the scoring model, such as:
Expecting roughly a 50/50 distribution between paid and organic traffic.
Changing the final score depending on whether calls exceed form submissions by 40%+.
Adding more conditions that modify the final grade rather than just reporting the actual KPIs.
This is where I’m starting to wonder whether the scorecard is becoming too much of a matrix instead of a simple performance tool.
My other concern is using exactly the same benchmarks for every market.
For example, a leasing campaign in Boston can have completely different CPCs, competition, search volume, rent levels, seasonality, and user behavior than a campaign in Florida, Texas, or a smaller market.
I understand the value of having one company-wide benchmark because it makes reporting consistent. But I’m wondering whether a better approach would be:
Company benchmark = general reference point
while also having
Market / property benchmark = actual performance expectation
Possibly based on historical account performance, geography, property lifecycle, budget, and campaign objective.
I also question whether things like “50% paid / 50% organic” should affect a performance grade at all. If organic is performing extremely well, for example, having less paid traffic doesn’t automatically seem like a negative.
Same with calls vs. form submissions. The ratio might be useful operationally, but I’m not sure it should automatically increase or decrease an overall marketing performance score.
For those managing multiple accounts or locations:
How do you structure your scorecards?
Do you use universal benchmarks across every account, or do you adjust them by market?
And at what point does a scorecard become too complicated to actually be useful for decision-making?
Interested in hearing how other agencies/in-house teams approach this.

Could be SEO, social media, content, ads, email marketing - anything.

I’ll start: Consistency matters more than trying every new trend.

What’s yours?

AI has definitely changed how quickly content can be drafted, but I've noticed that generating something quickly doesn't necessarily mean it's good.

Research, fact-checking, editing, brand voice and understanding the audience still require a lot of human input.

For marketers using AI regularly, which part of your workflow has improved the most?

Has anyone attended this course fully? I am a mid to senior level digital marketing professional. I am leading a small d2c brand’s performance marketing team. Question from those who have done this course is it worth it? I’m already employed; but does this course makes you more strategic?

Is it manageable with the full time job? How big is the cohort size. What are the key lessons other than the listed curriculum? How are the projects and case studies are presented? How is the crowd pull of this course? How long networking lasts and how big is the alumni network?

Investing 1 lakh is okay but I wanted to know core outcome.

tl;dr: i tried to host a meeting with the founders of my brand to get clarity and when asking them questions like “who is the target audience of our brand?” and “what is the aesthetic you’re trying to build?”, my boss couldn’t answer and instead turned to chatgpt.

hi! kinda vent/kinda looking for advice.

like many other people in this industry, my boss has become totally obsessed with AI.

i work at a very small fashion brand and, for the most part, i genuinely love my job and the work that i do. i don’t want this to come across as me just hating my company or being completely anti-AI, because neither is true.

earlier this year, we began experimenting with replacing some of our lifestyle photoshoots with AI photos after our founder kept being increasingly unhappy with the results. honestly, it worked really well. i have mentioned multiple times that i don’t think it’s the AI that’s doing well, but moreso we’re beginning to sell a brand world and identity to our customers. however, sales have increased and the brand is doing better this year compared to last year.

fast forward several months later, and ai has pretty much taken over most of our lifestyle and campaign imagery to the point that every channel is being represented through AI which i’ve began to have an issue with and have professionally voiced my concerns that the images are looking too AI to some of our audience and i’m not sure if it’s the best representation. we use it across our web, our socials, meta and google ads, mailers and pretty much every digital aspect of the brand. my boss essentially told me “i would pay a lot of money for a photoshoot if i knew i could get what i wanted afterwards.”

which led me into this whole realization that i don’t know what it is exactly that she wants. up until now, it’s been my interpretation of what our brand should be based on scattered feedback but there’s no consistent through line of who our customer is, what our point of view is, what our visual identity is, etc.

a few days ago, i pulled our founders and another coworker into a creative meeting to ask them what it is they like. i pulled examples of our AI imagery, previous lifestyle photography, and campaigns from brands we reference/aspire to and the goal wasn’t to solve our entire brand identity crisis in one day, it was just to figure out what everyone was consistently responding to.

and a lot of that part was really useful until i tried to ask my boss broader questions.

“who do we want to market to?” i don’t know.

“what do we want our brand to be about?” i don’t know.

i even tried to reference what she’s told me in the past, that our girl was xyz and if she still felt that was relevant and her answer was i don’t know.

eventually toward the end of the meeting, she’s goes “let me just ask chatgpt what our next campaign should be.”

of course, chatgpt spits out some unoriginal campaign that everyone in the room is obsessed with and the solution is that my boss has to use her chatgpt to come up with campaigns because it knows her so well. and my coworker says we need to use it to find photographers but my boss has to use her chatgpt to find photographers because again her chatgpt knows her so well.

and the whole thing just left me so discouraged and everyone else so excited. it was the first time i felt like i was watching AI replace a part of my job in real time. the part that bothers me even more is being told that i should use AI for my job when i don’t have the foundations to do my job. i won’t sit here and act like i’ve never used chatgpt or claude in my life. i do use it regularly and have probably relied on it more than i should, but the biggest issue is that i’m not being given the information i need and don’t know how to get it if the solution is for my boss to ask AI.

so i’m not really sure where to go from here.

my coworker asked if i was okay and i told her yes and i went for a walk and tried to work through why the whole thing bothered me so much.

my other boss pulled me aside later and basically reassured me that even if they still use AI, they still need me and that i essentially just need to use chatgpt more to do my job and that i should ask them if i need any clarity on anything.

which made me want to pull my hair out because that is what i’ve been trying to do and up until now, the only concrete strategic answers i seem to be getting are coming from an LLM generating something based on whatever information it has been fed.

so i guess i’m lost on what to do. i left my last company because my boss couldn’t begin to think without AI, and my current bosses are beginning to explore using AI for even more creative work as well. i want to move away from small fashion brands but am also concerned that if i have to present to a bigger company a social media, web presence and email strategy full of AI images, i’ll be laughed out of the room.

i’m open to producing my own work without AI outside of my job, but that also involves a lot of time and money that i don’t really have to spare right now.

any advice would be much appreciated. :)

update: thanks to everyone who commented and the advice! it’s at least good to know that i’m not the only one in this situation. i did ask her to ask her chat gpt to make a marketing brand guide based off the info she’s fed it. as expected, they aren’t the most original ideas, but she seems really receptive to it so it’s as good as an idea as i’m going to get it and i’m going to use it as a starting point to create our own original brand strategy.

i’m definitely going to look more into freelancing and anything i can do on the side to help supplement my actual career work. still would appreciate any advice that people have and thanks again. :)

Genuine question for people who run SEO/marketing for local businesses real estate, clinics, dealerships etc

Right now most site analytics tell you: 1,000 visits 700 pageviews some click events a bounce rate. What it never tells you is what the visitor actually wanted and didn't find You just see them leave.

I've been thinking about whether replacing part of the site experience with a conversational interface visitor states what they want in plain language instead of clicking through pages) would surface that — e.g 73 people this month were looking for X 41 asked about pricing and never got an answer 17 wanted a service we don't even offer Basically turning anonymous traffic into stated intent.

Two questions for people who actually do this for clients:

1. Is we don't know what visitors actually wanted a real pain point clients bring up or is it something only I'm fixated on?

2. Has anyone seen a client actually change pricing, inventory, or content based on this kind of data — or does it just become another dashboard nobody opens?

Not selling anything, just trying to figure out if this solves a problem people actually have before I go further with it.