Let's Not Forget About Snapchat, Measure Success with KPIs, 3 Things to Know About Coffee, and More Twitter Headlines from The SUM
The SUM: Marketing News and Industry Insights by Zach Burger

Let's Not Forget About Snapchat, Measure Success with KPIs, 3 Things to Know About Coffee, and More Twitter Headlines from The SUM

First, this edition is not full of Super Bowl ?? advertising highlights. Sorry. You can go watch all the fun commercials here.

Second, Snapchat is not a social media platform you should ignore, especially if you're interested in or focusing on capturing Gen Z. It's easy to get lost in TikTok algorithms and Insta Reels—but think about Snap once in a while.

Third, habits don't have to be "waking up early" ? or "being on time" ?? to meetings. This prerogative is floating around LinkedIn, it's a personal preference for success, but personally, it's stress-inducing and unnecessary. Just do the work and the rest will fall into place.

Binding yourself to time-based systems created in 1883 by the railroads is nonsense. ?? Railroads were rendered obsolete for the more profitable option, the personalized automobile, so its time conventions are baseless and outdated.

A positive habit is NOT synonymous with timeliness—just so we're clear.

Be self-aware, self-educate, and practice habits that work for you. You're an individual in a society where individualism is heavily promoted—so be individualistic but share those reflections and insights with your peers. Learning together makes us better as creators and innovators.



Let's leave on this thought:

When is Elon Musk going to announce Twitter is leveraging conversational chat AI on the platform? Interested in placing some bets. ??

Stay educated and make change happen.

Leave a comment at the bottom if you learned something, hated 
something, or just want to say what's up.        



A Summation of the Newsletter ???

  • Snapchat: the Forgotten King of Augmented Reality on Social Platforms
  • Measuring Your Marketing Goals: 10 Common KPIs for B2B Marketers
  • "Join Your College" on Snapchat: a Page Out of Facebook's Playbook
  • User Experience is a Powerful Thing, So Don't Overlook Your UX/UI Design
  • Headlines Coming Out of the Twittersphere
  • Coffee Facts: 3 Need-To-Know Caffeinated Tidbits to Ponder



Snapchat: the Forgotten King of Augmented Reality (AR) on Social Platforms

Augmented reality is so integrated into social platforms in 2023 that the technology's emergence is taken for granted. ??

In 2015-16, Snapchat leveraged AR as an emerging technology to capture new daily active users (DAUs). This drove investors into the company as the "AR vs. VR" battle raged. Pokémon GO was also released in 2016—only adding to the craze.

"Spectacles" are Released in 2016

The engineers at Snapchat even created bulky sunglasses called "Spectacles", imitating wayfarers that had come back into style. You can still purchase the shades, but now, they resemble the less trendy but more iconic solar shields. ???

The hype for AR was quickly overtaken by VR, permutating into the blockchain and the metaverse, and now, the hot-button term "AI" has caught fire in every corner of the technology world. Yet,?Snap Inc.?keeps chugging away at augmented reality, and the improvements from five years ago should not be understated or overlooked—even as new shiny objects come into existence.

"Virtually every AR trend—from?anime filters?to?baby faces, from?crying faces?to?vomiting rainbows—all of these have originated from Snapchat," points out Social Media Today, LLC in a recent article.

Don't forget that Snapchat was a trailblazer for the likes of?TikTok?and?Instagram?Reels millions upon millions of users use every day.



Measuring Your Marketing Goals: 10 Common KPIs for B2B Marketers

How do you gauge your performance as a marketer?

It’s often a hard question to answer for senior management, directors, and VPs in the B2B space—or a deer in the headlights moment—but it’s critical to prove the efforts of your marketing team. If you never define a goal, you’ll never have a concrete path to measuring success.

Marketing KPIs are a slippery thing (and an annoying acronym), but LinkedIn’s got you covered. Improve your marketing and advertising campaigns by creating some simple measurements with KPIs.

10 Most Common Key Performance Indicators in B2B

  1. Website Traffic
  2. Organic Traffic
  3. Paid Traffic
  4. Cost Per Click (CPC)
  5. Click Through Rate (CTR)
  6. Conversion Rate
  7. Cost Per Lead (CPL)
  8. MQL to SQL Conversion Rate
  9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CPA)
  10. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

After the campaign wraps, you can begin to look at your return on investment, but the ROI is not a KPI. In some cases, the ROI will not be immediately realized as leads generated from the campaign move through the sales cycle and eventually close.

It’s suggested to use the SMART method to discover your goals (i.e. create Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound KPIs), but if you’re working on defining what’s important to your company, you’ll whittle your goals down into something resembling SMART.

Someone wise once said: “Don’t get lost in the sauce.” ???


If you’re not subscribed to?LinkedIn’s Ads Blog and you’re trying to carve out a space on the platform, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Do yourself a favor and go subscribe now.



"Join Your College" on Snapchat: a Page Out of Facebook's Playbook

If you're not actively engaging on Snapchat, you may have missed a new-ish feature where Gen Z can add their college and graduating class to their profile. This cannot be backdated.

Way back when—before high schoolers, parents, relatives, and teens invaded Facebook—you needed a college email address to sign-up for Facebook—Snap has integrated the exact same functionality of the original Facebook.

One thing to note is exclusive communities can be a powerful tool to wield for social media platforms.

Here's a step-by-step of the "Join Your College" functionality.

Snapchat "Join Your College"? Infographic | zwb
Snapchat "Join Your College" Infographic | zwb



User Experience is a Powerful Thing, So Don't Overlook Your UX/UI Design

Your website shouldn’t be a source of confusion, it should be a source of information and knowledge. ???

If you’re noticing high bounce rates, seconds spent on pages—not minutes, or a lack of conversions, despite amazing ad traffic, jump headfirst into the world of UX/UI to improve your user journey.

Things to consider when auditing your website and running a Core Web Vitals report on?Google:

  • Organizing information in an easy-to-follow manner and navigation.
  • Considering how users interact with your CTAs on buttons, menus, etc.
  • Maintaining coherent branding across your site — i.e. user interface (UI).

“User experience can provide a positive experience with your website – or it can lead to frustration among users.” —?Ludwig Makhyan, Co-Founder of?Mazeless - Enterprise SEO

The overlap of UX and UI can be hard to differentiate, but it’s necessary to understand the difference at a high level and see how good user experience directly correlates to improved SEO.



Headlines Coming Out of the Twittersphere

The perks of being a Twitter Blue subscriber.

  • The luxury of the 4,000-character long-form tweet.
  • You are prioritized in Twitter conversations.
  • The coveted blue (or golden) checkmark.


Will You Pay $12,000 Per Year for the Golden Checkmark?

Can you squeeze an extra $1000 per month out of your marketing budget? For many small to medium-sized businesses, it's a very loud and resounding no.

But how important is Twitter to your brand or marketing strategy? Do your due diligence and consider how this gold stamp of approval could affect your ability to build trust among your customers and clients.



Coffee Facts ?? 3 Need-To-Know Caffeinated Tidbits to Ponder

“The debt you owe the caffeine always eventually needs to be repaid, and the only real way to repay it is to sleep.”

This isn't something you want to think about on Monday morning when you're up before the sun.

3 Coffee Facts for Trivia or General Use

  1. Skip the sugar. You'll crash harder because of the sweetness.
  2. The "half life" of caffeine is about 5 hours for the average person.
  3. You receive a natural rise of cortisol when you wake up. If the coffee buzz doesn't hit for you, try waiting a half hour before you drink a cup of Joe. That'll give you time for the cortisol in your body to taper off.

Some of us rely heavily on this warm, comforting beverage to kick off the workday. Is it an addiction? Yes, so it's good to know the facts.



The SUM is derived from industry news and insights related to marketing, copywriting, advertising, branding, web best practices, and more. If you enjoyed The SUM, subscribe for biweekly updates or follow?Zach Burger?for content that doesn't miss a beat.

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