You know how marketers sometime create ads or emails with “due to popular demand, we’re extending...”, or “some of you have been asking me about…”, or “we’ve opened up x more spots...” or other copy that tries to make you think they are drowning in responses?

I have a marketing secret to share. They probably aren’t. They usually aren’t.

In marketing, we know it’s great to create a sense of social proof, tap into that FOMO, and create a spirit of “everyone else is doing it”.

But sometimes the truth is better.

So, I’m here to say, we did not have enough responses to our survey last week.

We had a few (thank you!), but not many. In surveys, many = good data and a few = we’d still be guessing.

All of marketing is a test, and it was, well, a good test. We learned that it is (likely) far better to add in an incentive of sorts.

So that’s what we’re doing this week.

Here is the survey link again. It should take just a couple of minutes!

Next week, we’ll select two entries and send each a $50 USD Amazon gift card. We’ll make sure it’s usable where you are - don’t worry! You can still complete the survey anonymously, but if you’d like to be considered, just add your email in the last question.

We’ll do a summary of the results in an upcoming 2025 State of Marketing Department webinar. Stay tuned for the update on that once scheduled!

Tools we tested this week:

We tested ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity side by side for an interesting content plan using a show spreadsheet as a base: ChatGPT needed more prompts for analysis but offered insights into the general audiences of the shows; Claude excelled at content suggestions based on the industry but didn’t seem to use the sheet for much of the responses; and Perplexity stood out for uncovering actionable information from the sheet and crafting detailed, impactful summaries we could use to find our three table topics for the year and build out a better plan. We share this mostly to say - use the different tools for different scenarios and find out what works best for you!

We also tested Jasper using their 7 day free trail. This tool is particularly good for marketing teams that are outputting content for different brands, want access to best practice templates, and will take the time to set up helpful templates for tone, knowledge bases, and case studies. We’ll continue to test within our trail, especially to see more about the workflows capability. If you are managing an Enterprise- team or a team that outputs a lot of content and want more power behind your creation, give it a try or book a demo.

We hope you have a great weekend!

Until next week,

Rebecca and the Advisory 9 team