Links of Interest: Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Tech, and More!
How to Write Convincing Sales Landing Pages Even if You’re Not a Copywriter
The best copywriters write with two things in mind: their audience and the action they want their audience to take.
That means great writers adjust their copy for each marketing channel. While many of the writing techniques and strategies are similar, writing a landing page that converts visitors into subscribers is not the same as writing an email, social copy, or a blog post.
To help you write high-performing content for your landing pages, we asked professional copywriters to share their best writing tips.
Check out what they had to say.
The Winning Social Media Content Strategy TV Networks Use
From a marketing perspective, there is no such thing as “social media.” It’s nearly pointless to think of social media as one thing, because the audiences, use cases, technology, algorithms, optimal cadences and other characteristics of each social platform continue to diverge.
For example, a study by CoSchedule found that the “optimal” number of daily posts on Twitter (your mileage may vary) is 15, but just one to two posts per day on Instagram and Facebook are the sweet spot.
Posting the same social media content, in multiple channels, at the same time and hoping to achieve spectacular results hasn’t worked in years—the variances are just too great among what works in each venue.
Read more here.
PS: Features great social media strategy chart!
Facebook finally makes it way easier to trash your old posts
Facebook is introducing a new tool to help users batch-delete old posts and shrink their digital footprint on the aging social network.
Called “Manage Activity,” the new feature lets users prune their posts in bulk, making it less of a headache to delete content aging badly or anything else unnecessary that’s built up from years of using the platform. The feature will be available to some users on the Facebook app today and will roll out more broadly in the next few weeks.
“Whether you’re entering the job market after college or moving on from an old relationship, we know things change in people’s lives, and we want to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today,” Facebook wrote in the tool’s announcement.
Anyone who’d like to batch-delete or archive old content will be able search their entire trove of Facebook posts using filters for dates, people tagged and content type (photo, video, text updates, et cetera). In a preview of the tool, it looked like a vastly more useful way to control aging content without having to manually scroll through years of old posts.
Read more here.
You May Need to Get Creator Permission for Instagram Embeds, According to Instagram
This could get complicated very quickly.
Back in April, The New York District Court ruled against photographer Stephanie Sinclair who had sought to sue Mashable over an embed of one of her Instagram posts within a Mashable story, essentially re-publishing her work without permission.
The court deemed that because the image was embedded, the license for such remained with Instagram, and was therefore bound by Instagram's Terms of Service, meaning that Mashable was essentially not liable for copyright violation because the image was still hosted on Instagram.
That makes sense, and aligns with the general understanding around embedding. But a new ruling this week could put that into question yet again.
Read more here.
What Big Tech Wants Out of the Pandemic
Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the tech industry yearned to prove its indispensability to the world. Its executives liked to describe their companies as “utilities.” They came by their self-aggrandizement honestly: The founding fathers of Big Tech really did view their creations as essential, and essentially good.
In recent years, however, our infatuation with these creations has begun to curdle. Many Americans have come to view them as wellsprings of disinformation, outrage, and manipulation—and have noticed that the most profitable companies in human history haven’t always lived by the idealism of their slogans.
Now an opportunity for the tech companies to affirm their old sense of purpose has arisen. In the midst of the pandemic, Google Meet has become a delivery mechanism for school. AmazonFresh has made it possible to shop for groceries without braving the supermarket.
The government has flailed in its response to the pandemic, and Big Tech has presented itself as a beneficent friend, willing to lend a competent hand. As Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, wrote in April, “The challenges we face demand an unprecedented alliance between business and government.”
Read more here.
CEOs made 287 times more money last year than their workers did
After years of kicking and screaming, corporate executives have finally released pay data on what their CEO makes versus their median worker.
Unsurprisingly, the gap is obscene. The average chief executive of an S&P 500 company earned 287 times more than their median employee last year, according to an analysis of the new federal data released Tuesday by the AFL-CIO labor federation. America’s CEOs earned a staggering $14.5 million in 2018, on average, compared to the average $39,888 that rank-and-file workers made. And CEOs got a $500,000 bump compared to the previous year, while the average US worker barely got more than $1,000.
This is the first year in which all public companies were required to disclose CEO-to-workers pay ratios in filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Before, companies only needed to report compensation for their top executives.
The new disclosures — largely opposed by corporate America — are part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The purpose is to provide shareholders with more information to judge corporate behavior — and to shame executives for their excessive pay.
Chief executives at America’s largest companies don’t get paid the way the average worker does. Beyond aset salary, CEOs’ compensation packages include other forms of income, such as bonuses, company stock options, and long-term incentive payouts, which can vary based on performance and the status of the stock market.
The new analysis relies on the most conservative measure of CEO pay, based on the value of stock options when they were awarded to executives, not when they were cashed out.
Read more here.
A bill in Congress could get to the bottom of how coronavirus links air pollution and racism
It’s becoming clear that black and Latino communities in the U.S. suffer disproportionately from the novel coronavirus. The COVID-19 mortality rate for black New York City residents, for example, is twice that of white residents, and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report has suggested that black Americans in general are hospitalized for COVID-19 at much higher rates. Research is also emerging showing that exposure to air pollution likely makes COVID-19 deadlier. In other words, when it comes to COVID-19 outcomes, it’s clear that race matters and that pollution matters. What is not yet clear is how, exactly, these two troubling trends are related.
In hopes of finding concrete connections between air pollution in communities of color and COVID-19 outcomes, last month Democrats in Congress introduced the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act, which would allocate an additional $50 million to existing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant programs and prioritize that funding for projects that “investigate or address the disproportionate impacts of the COVID–19 pandemic in environmental justice communities.”
The measure was included in the HEROES Act, the $3 trillion pandemic relief legislation that passed the House of Representatives last month with mostly Democratic support. The legislation’s future in a Republican-controlled Senate is shaky, but at a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on Tuesday, lawmakers and advocates continued to push for the bill funding the study of the relationship between pollution and racial disparities in COVID-19 outcomes.
Read more here.
Curated links from Debbi Mack.
Image by Colleen O'Dell from Pixabay.