A Twitter reply from Liam Snodden last night on a Forbes piece of mine hides a lot of unspoken truths:
“The global macro challenges and business direction this year are like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded – challenging, unpredictable, and occasionally resulting in colorful language.”
While predicting the future resembles horoscopes or Tarot cards, history tends to repeat itself. And trendsetters are a good indicator of future success.
Ray Dalio authored “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order”, covering the rise and fall of major empires, including the Dutch and the British ones prior to the US. There are measurable actions in consumer behavior, monetary policy, importing talent, producing expensive goods, paving the way to other strong economies moving upstream.
This newsletter covers the weekly macro trends lining up in a timeline. Reading into recurring patterns can outline what’s about to come in 6, 12, 24 months from now (approximately).
And in the meantime, I also launched the startup and management newsletter I mentioned in my previous email. It’s been ranking over 1,900 subscribers now delving into building products, networking, leadership, startup principles, and more to come.
I’m bringing up startups because innovation is also driven by them. However, the same goes for direct to consumer (D2C) commerce, influencers, thought leaders, and powerful individuals.
Large corporations and enterprises are slow to adapt because the stakes are high. Mistakes cost billions and retention is safer than experimentation. Startups and D2C are groundbreaking – which is why products like Shopify and other D2C specialized solutions actually inform and even instill decisions in the B2B world.
- Creative ads, including video ads, launched in TikTok and most DTC produts
- Influencer marketing brought up brand ambassadors and KOL (key opinion leaders) in B2B
- Product description pages instilled landing page principles for B2B
- Conversion rate optimization for B2B came through optimizing ecommerce pages
- Checkout processes
- Buy Now, Pay Later
Disruption comes from mass adoption products, often outside of the purview of large corporations. Because hundreds of millions of ecommerce consumers get used to UX patterns, visual elements, design styles, shopping experience – and these get ported over to B2B several years later.
When influencers work, corporations hire their own advocates, ambassadors, evangelists. That’s how the world works.
This is how Meta became populated by B2B brands after using Google Ads and LinkedIn for years. Even TikTok is seeing more and more corporate and B2B business tuning in – especially for employer branding.
Speaking of social, one painful truth I’ve been avoiding for over a decade:
Digital channels are 100% advertising.
No matter if you run SEO content, organic social, or email marketing. Ogilvy said that 80 cents on the dollar go to the headline – and this truth isn’t going anywhere (anytime soon).
Email readability is contingent on subject lines. Everyone hates clickbait… But it works 100% of the time. fear, scarcity, intrigue, doubt, exclusivity, time-bound offers just work.
Every single organic feed is based on engagements. Within the first 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 24 hours. You either get a certain engagement-to-views ratio or your content is buried forever.
PPC is more obvious in that sense – customer acquisition cost and even CPCs and taking a campaign out of learning is dependent on clicks. You can’t escape the algorithm if you don’t bring attention to your campaign. Period.
YouTube is a spectacular network with educational and high-quality content. But every single one of the best creators is heavily trained and works with a team breaking down every single video into a VERY strong opener, radical headline, high contrast featured image, a powerful summary in the first 10 seconds, and maintaining attention at all times to avoid an algorithm slump.
Twitter is the same. LinkedIn too. Instagram.
Same goes for coaching programs, courses, webinars, events. There’s a playbook for how often you share, how many emails, how soon prior to the event, how many thought leaders you need reviewing the event, trigger lines, discount options, recommended pricing tiers like $97 or $297 or $997. Yes, you can A/B test that once you get enough traction, but you’re always safe with the proven models.
Unless you’re a Fortune 500 CEO, a Hollywood celebrity, or have gained an audience over the years that pushes you through the slump, you don’t exist.
Advertising frameworks are the only way out of that. And tons of communities build engagement pods and line-by-line copy frameworks to the T – the length of your first line, % of controversy, topic relevancy, including the posting time.
Make a simple experiment: go to LinkedIn and hit the notification bell to 30 reputable creators (this sends a notification when they post). You’ll notice that 25 of them post within a 5 minutes interval in the morning, like clockwork.
If you want to be in digital communications – content marketing, SEO, PPC, social, you start with advertising principles first and foremost.
Once you let that sink in, your efforts will see a 10X return in a matter of weeks.
Yours,
Mario
My Take
The Create & Grow Show – Join me and Georgi in his latest podcast episode, where we discuss selling services in 2024, WordPress SEO, and websites acquisition.
Agile Isn’t Enough For Sustainable Business Growth – The internet, already a place where trends, products and platforms come and go with incredible speed and velocity, is changing faster than ever before. In this article we’ll talk about EaaS – a systematic approach to assessing the efficacy of marketing tools and techniques, isn’t a new concept. It is newly relevant, as AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms are making it more efficient, effective and impactful.
Omnichannel Brand Play – 6.6M impressions and 5,668 clicks for $822.08 in February – the underdog Twitter for paid ads. Over a dozen projects in our portfolio run Google and LinkedIn ads for CPCs ranging from $30 to over $70. My own X pilot account averages $0.145 per click consistently. I’ve been running variations of this playbook for 18 months now across several accounts as an omnichannel brand play.
Newsletter Recommendations
Stacked Marketer – One of my go-to newsletters and a business that we’ve worked with a while ago on the DevriX front. It is loved by marketers who get hands-on with campaigns, who need to stay up-to-date with frequently changing platforms., who need to get an edge, and who need to achieve outsized results with limited resources, aka performance-focused marketers.
Boldpush – А special newsletter for those interested in marketing intelligence and strategy to the most ambitious brands. Props to Julius Solaris for creating one of my top newsletter reads for GTM strategies and actionable content.
Business Strategy
Oracle shares soaring 13% – Oracle reported an earnings beat in its quarterly results. However, revenue came in a bit light of expectations. The company’s cloud services and license support segment, its largest business, saw a 12% increase in revenue.
Copilot for advertisers – Microsoft Ads expanded its Copilot trial to a larger set of advertisers. The company confirmed to Search Engine Land that it is giving more advertises access to Copilot as it continues to collect data, test, optimize, and work towards a general availability.
TikTok ban to be passed – The House is steaming ahead with a bill that could ban TikTok despite vocal opposition from former President Trump, who once led the charge against the popular app.
OpenAI’s response to Musk – OpenAI lambasted Elon Musk’s allegations against it, saying in a in a court filing that the Tesla Inc. billionaire’s claims “rest on convoluted — often incoherent — factual premises.”
New Startup from Postgres creator – Mike Stonebraker, an MIT professor and pioneering figure in database technology with over 50 years of experience, including inventing Ingres and Postgres, has launched DBOS with an $8.5 million seed investment, aiming to revolutionize the software stack by placing the database at its core and minimizing the operating system’s role. This approach, developed from a three-year research project between Stanford and MIT, seeks to address the modern challenges of processing large amounts of data in the cloud, proposing a system where databases operate closer to the hardware and traditional OS functions are executed via SQL queries.
Global News
Prior to the pandemic, the range of sustainable employment growth that would not cause inflation was between 60,000 and 140,000 per month, and projected to fall to between 60,000 and 100,000 due to the aging of the population. But Edelberg and Watson say with the additional pool of labor the economy could’ve absorbed between 160,000 and 230,000 new jobs a month last year without triggering additional inflation, and now can absorb between 160,000 and 200,000 new jobs each month. Granted, last month the economy added 275,000 new jobs, which means the current rate of job growth is still too hot, just by less than it otherwise have been.
- S&P 500: $5,175(+1.12%)
Average mortgage rates fell on all loan terms compared to a week ago, according to rate data collected by Bankrate. Rates for 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, 5/1 ARMs and jumbo loans all declined.
- 30-year mortgage rate: 6.95%(-0.17)
- 15-year mortgage rate: 6.47%(-0.13)
At the three-year range, expectations rose 0.3 percentage point to 2.7%, while the five-year outlook jumped even more, up 0.4 percentage point to 2.9%. The indications are well ahead of the Fed’s 2% goal for 12-month inflation, indicating that the central bank may need to keep policy tighter for longer.
Here are some of the most prominent headlines this week:
- The Senate passed a package of six funding bills, sending it to President Biden’s desk to avoid a government shutdown that would have begun at midnight.
- A bill intended to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app passed a House committee unanimously, setting up a floor vote.
- Rep. Dean Phillips, Democratic challenger to President Biden, suspends his 2024 presidential campaign.
Investing Updates
- MindAhead – raising €1M to scale its digital therapy solutions that slow the progression of dementia.
- Atmos UAV – raising €800,000 to scale its land surveying drone solution.
- Reflaunt – raising €13,5M to scale up its sustainable fashion resale platform for high-end brands.
Note: Got a round going that you want to feature – your own business or a portfolio company? Get in touch.
Now let’s have a look at the latest top Flippa offers
Full-Service Amazon Sales Agency – This business helps Amazon FBA sellers increase sales by providing strategy, PPC campaign management, and branding services.
- Monthly profit: $53.5K
- Average contract duration: 3+ years
- Business age: 6 years
SaaS Writing Tool – This platform features multiple writing-based tools including a plagiarism checker, a grammar checker, and a paraphrasing tool.
- Monthly profit: $10.7K
- Monthly page views: 1.8M
- Business age: 2 years
WordPress Web Design Firm – This firm focuses on custom WordPress design and has worked with major businesses including ESPN, Spotify, VEVO, TNT, Cisco, and IBM.
- Monthly profit: $4.4K
- Domain authority: 21
- Business age: 21 years
Need my Help?
I’m involved with a number of initiatives – here’s what I can do to help you:
Scalable and secure WordPress? DevriX provides WordPress retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo for anything from support through engineering, CRO, performance, security, to fractional CXO services and managing the data stacks of large corps.
Want to scale and optimize your business? Growth Shuttle offers personalized advisory plans starting at $600/hr. Tap into my personal pool of business know-how and my data warehouse of industry data.
Want access to my blueprints/books and a weekly Slack planning session? Join my Community and grab my Entrepreneurship book.
Looking to start a US company? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.
Have you tried buying and selling digital property? Have a look at Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interests. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides you with the necessary tools to list your business and close the deal.
Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink and use Nimity to manage it.
Eager to incorporate my recommended solutions? Track my angel investments. Sharing, applying for open roles, or writing reviews helps a ton. And anything else I try to publish on my blog and my courses here!