Turing's Tofu #13

📰 This Week in AI & SaaS 📰

• Adobe has announced a new content creation platform, called GenStudio, which uses generative AI to create on-brand assets for email, social media, and display ads, allowing marketers to manage campaigns and measure performance, while remaining on-brand. Read more.

• You can trust us with your data… pinky promise 👻 Facebook (now Meta) found itself at the center of controversy for secretly monitoring Snapchat's encrypted data through "Project Ghostbusters." This covert initiative was designed to dissect Snapchat's user activity, providing Meta with insights to potentially outmaneuver its competitors. Read more.

• OpenAI has released the first reviews of its text-to-video model, Sora, after allowing a handful of artists, designers, and filmmakers to test it. Read more.

• Reddit’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange saw–at its peak–shares selling for $57.80, marking a 70% increase from its original IPO price, thanks to the data that AI companies are desperate to get their hands on. Read more.

• Catch one of Sora’s official videos, ‘the airhead’. Watch it

🌟Turing’s Top Picks 🌟

FEATURED TOOLS 

• IMAI: IMAI (Influencer Marketing AI) is an end-to-end influencer marketing platform that allows brands, agencies, and online stores to discover, analyze, activate, and measure influencers. Try it. 

• Odeist: Odeist is an AI-powered social media discovery and engagement tool designed to establish and manage your brand's social media presence. Try it. 

• PrometAI: PrometAI is an AI tool that guides you through the process of creating a solid business plan, enabling you to generate a business plan and valuation seamlessly, setting a solid foundation for your startup. Try it.

• Lede: Lede uses AI to summarize Reddit posts and comments which allows you to create content for your blog, newsletter, or social media channels, in seconds. Try it. 

• Swipe Insight: Swipe uses AI to summarize insights based on your marketing objectives, allowing you to stay on top of top trends, and the latest industry news, and strategies.  Try it.

Read of the Week: 

AI Willy Vs The Who’s Tommy: A Leadership Lesson On Implementing Fancy New Tech

This is an interesting take on two companies that used AI to market and execute two different events: One was a disaster, and one was a triumph. What was the difference?  One used AI to accentuate their existing experience, therefore over delivering. The other used AI as a strategy in itself, with nothing concrete to back it up, therefore un-delivering on experience.

Read it.

🎙️ AI Unboxed Podcast 🤖 

In this week's edition of AI Unboxed, I am excited to release Episode 107: "Mastering the Art and Science of AI-Powered Marketing," where I had the pleasure of chatting with Adriana Gil Miner, the visionary CMO at Iterable. Adriana brings to the table a wealth of knowledge on integrating AI into marketing strategies to enhance customer engagement and drive impactful narratives

Highlights include:

• Adriana's journey from art to tech, emphasizing the synergy between data analysis and creative storytelling.

• The pivotal role of AI in enhancing marketing productivity and unlocking new strategies through predictive models.

• Ethical considerations in AI, stressing transparency, data integrity, and the balance between automation and human creativity.

Adriana's insights shed light on the evolving landscape of modern marketing, offering a blend of strategy, ethics, and future-forward thinking. For a deep dive into leveraging AI for enriched marketing practices and ethical frameworks, watch the full episode. It's a goldmine for marketers aiming to harness AI's potential responsibly and creatively.

👾 TOFU Quick Bytes: SendOwl Teardown 👾

SendOwl teardown

SendOwl is an all-in-one digital sales platform that, once integrated into their website, allows businesses of any size to market and sell digital products–like downloads, subscriptions, e-books, video, audio, PDFs, designs, and online courses–and report on delivery and income analytics. They have features that take care of end-to-end sales processes, from payment gateways and checkout to customized emails and delivery.

Strategy overview: 

Founded in 2010, SendOwl targets entrepreneurs and solo businesses and faces stiff competition from other digital product delivery platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix. Its marketing strategy is focused on differentiating itself from its competitors, attracting new customers, and growing its user base. 

Performance Analysis:

• SendOwl's estimated annual revenue is currently $130.5k per year
  

• In total, they’ve raised $13.5million in funding, with their most recent funding round in February, where they successfully raised $9M 

• They have nine employees and have grown by 29% compared to last year 

• SendOwl gets 1.55 million website visits per month, with each visitor spending, on average, 5.34 minutes on their site 

• Their largest source of traffic is direct (which we can assume are current customers and employees), they get 8.29k of traffic from (mainly branded) organic search engines, they have 3.98 million backlinks and 17.65k referring domains 

How have they achieved this? 

Critical Teardown:

What does SendOwl do well?

Create valuable content: Sendowl creates valuable content such as blogs, ebooks, webinars, and case studies that show and teach entrepreneurs and small businesses how to sell digital products online. This content increases website visits, leads, and conversions. 

Good SEO strategy: They are laying the foundation for a good SEO strategy that allows their content to rank for the keywords that are most important to their target audience, such as ‘digital delivery’, ‘sell downloads’ and ‘PDF stamping’. Most of their search terms are low volume (around 500 searches per month) but highly targeted which allows them to get high-quality traffic and build a strong following. They also changed their URL structure (eg. from home.sendowl.com to sendowl.com/home) to improve rankings.

Strong brand identity: They use taglines and straplines that reference the ‘owl’ (which is associated with wisdom) to clearly and effectively sum up the nature of their business, helping them create a strong brand identity which sticks in people’s minds. 

PR/press coverage: SendOwl has largely relied on word-of-mouth publicity for its growth, but they also invite journalists, bloggers, and social media influencers to talk about the company, even providing them with a press pack, containing all key branding elements and messaging to make sure their brand identity remains strong and to make it as easy as possible for third parties to talk about them, positively. 

 What doesn’t SendOwl do well? 

Site structure: The biggest issue is that all the amazing content they are creating and building on their blog is housed on a subdomain (https://blog.sendowl.com/) instead of sendowl.com/blog. Subdomains are considered separate entities from your root domain, it may not inherit any of the link authority you’ve already built to your core website content. Which is why their domain authority is only 38 (slightly below average).

Subdomains can be beneficial if you have a large corporation and the subdomains serve a different purpose and essentially function as a separate business. Boosting the authority of your root domain should be a universal goal of any organization.

The subdirectory strategy concentrates your keywords onto a single domain while the subdomain strategy spreads your keywords across multiple distinct domains. In a word, the subdirectory strategy results in better root domain authority.

AI integration:

It’s not clear whether SendOwl uses AI to help them maintain their SEO strategy, but AI-powered tools like Camarkup can automatically validate if their HTML code is well-structured, helping them to strengthen their domain authority.

Key takeaways: 

• Create valuable content that helps users to increase website visits, leads, and conversions.

• Choose lower volume keywords that are most important to your target audience.
  

• Develop a strong brand identity that’s relatable to keep yourself in people’s minds.
  

• Provide journalists, influencers and PR outlets with brand press kits to make it as easy as possible for them to write about you.
  

• Use a subdirectory structure for any content creation efforts not a subdomain.

• To increase your domain authority, make sure your site structure is clear and easy to navigate around and don’t forget to utilize AI tools to optimize your site HTML structure.

What campaign or content marketing strategy would you like to see torn apart, next? Let me know! 

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