The top marketing challenges and AI ain’t one [Monthly Scripts]

Substack has made quite a name for itself. The thing that interests me most is subscriber growth. That’s why I plan to move this newsletter to Substack starting with next month’s edition. 

If you are an email subscriber now, you won’t have to do anything, I’ll do all the heavy lifting. I just wanted to let you know the plan before I started the move. 

And now for the plug: there's a solid blog post by Mark Schaefer in the featured story this month. He describes the top marketing challenges and notes they have nothing to do with AI.

That leads us to the featured story in this edition of the Monthly Scripts (see archive).    

This monthly email newsletter is different from the weekly blog. Sign up to get weekly blog posts here or catch the audio version on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Featured

• The 10 biggest marketing challenges have nothing to do with AI 

Leadership, CMOs and CCOs

• 6 moves only CEOs can make to improve an organization 
• Average tenure for CMOs at Fortune 500 companies is 4.3 years 

Marketing

• So maybe every brand doesn't need to be funny 
• Common sense has been drowned out by an obsession with metrics
• AI bots are corrupting survey data
• Why marketing success requires failure (and how to handle it) 
• Tips for brand positioning research
• YouTube has 1 billion podcast listeners now

B2B Marketing

• This report on sales messaging might turn B2B marketing upside down 
• How can B2B marketing closes the space between brand and demand 
• 5 ways to get your B2B buyers to care in 2025 
• Marketers focus on demand generation increasingly seek to build trust 
• SaaS: free trial conversion rates are falling

Customer marketing

• 53% of B2B event organizers expecting bigger event budgets

Sales & Business Development

• Cold calling: "Robots can’t connect with the room" 

Public Relations

• It’s not the success that makes for a good business story, it’s the setback 
• Good read: WIRED’s ‘on background’ policy 
• The impact LLMs are having on PR [podcast]
• Corpcomm leader on the top genAI use cases

Content Marketing

• A subscribed audience is what differentiates content marketing
• Content marketing budgets are going up for ~46%  

This monthly email newsletter is different from the weekly blog. Sign up to get weekly blog posts here or catch the audio version on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Email Marketing 

• Repeated promotions for the same product causes unsubs 

Experience: UX & CX

• Using sentiment analysis to improve CX

Advertising

• "Global podcast ad spend is expected to top $5 billion in 2025”

SEO & SEM

• 59% of Americans click on brands they know in Google results 
• Yahoo is 31 years old
• "AI Overviews now appear in 42.5% of search results." 

Social Media

• Average social media engagement rates for 12 industries 
• How to be Twitterific, 10 years later 
• Social bookmarking site Digg is back for another redux 

Marcom technology & AI

• How well do LLMs writing? Letter grades for these 8
• Humans, not AI, build relationships
• Generative AI is providing a lot of wrong answers with confidence 

Measurement  & Analytics

• How to understand sessions in GA4 

This monthly email newsletter is different from the weekly blog. Sign up to get weekly blog posts here or catch the audio version on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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Sword and the Script Media, LLC is a boutique B2B tech PR and marketing consultancy. About Us | Services | Speaking 

Do you have questions, comments or suggestions? Reply to this message. 

Yours in marketing and communications, Frank 

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Frank Strong, MA, MBA

Founder & President

Sword and the Script Media, LLC

PR | Marketing | Social Media

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* Sword and the Script Media, LLC is a verified veteran-owned business.

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