Ever wonder how much the big SaaS brands are spending on marketing as a % of revenue? The data is in...


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TOP BRANDS ARE SPENDING A LOT ON MARKETING

Ever wonder how much the big SaaS brands are spending on marketing as a % of revenue? Well, thanks to Meritech Capital, the data is in, and it's staggering. According to Meritech, brands like Monday.com are spending as much as 69% of their revenue marketing. That's... yeah, wow. Check out the data below to see where 100+ brands sit!

How Much Do SaaS Companies Spend On Their Sales and Marketing Budgets As A Percent Of Revenue | Martech Zone
You may have seen our recent post on How To Create A Marketing Budget where we break down some methodologies and average budgets for companies. Most research

GOOGLE CALENDAR APPOINTMENT SETTING

Here's a cool life hack I happened upon this weekend that I wanted to share. Did you know that Google Calendar has its own version of Calendly, where you can choose blocks of time to send as availability? Turns out this functionality exists and is nested under the rarely used 'Create' button on your calendar.

For a detailed outline of how to set this up, check out this article by Martech Zone.

How to Set Up Appointment Scheduling With Your Google Workspace Account | Martech Zone
One of the slippery slopes of running a business is periodically reviewing all of your software to ensure you’re not paying for duplicate services. Google

A 'DARK SOCIAL' ANALYSIS

If you haven't heard of 'dark social', that's because it seems to be a relatively new term (as far as I can tell) that is meant to describe traffic coming from social sources that pass no source data along with the click. The idea came from breaking down seemingly high 'direct' traffic and doing a hold-out study across multiple platforms. In the post below, Rand Fishkin does a great job of breaking down a recent study showing the magnitude of this occurrence, with some platforms such as TikTok profile links passing back zero data 100% of the time... pretty wild.

New Research: Dark Social Falsely Attributes Significant Percentages of Web Traffic as “Direct” - SparkToro
When site owners and marketers log into their analytics tools to determine how visitors discover and reach their properties, they expect accurate

I recently published this article outlining my thoughts on why removing options for marketers in ad platforms is a bad thing, using examples from Google to illustrate how this is being done. Well, this didn't end there — Google has recently announced that they are going to be sunsetting four attribution models: First Click, Linear, Time Decay, and Position-Based. While these models are only being used by 3% of advertisers in favour of the cooler, younger brother Data-Driven, it doesn't change the fact that, in some cases, less is not more. Regardless, you can check out the article below for info:

Google to Sunset Four Attribution Models in Ads and Analytics: Here’s What You Need to Know | Martech Zone
Attribution models are frameworks used to analyze and assign credit to different marketing touchpoints throughout a customer’s journey, from awareness through

AI-POWERED REELS ARE CRUSHING

Have you been feeling more captivated by Reels lately, being drawn in similarly to TikTok as time goes by? Well, you're not alone. In a recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg announced that people on Instagram spent 24% more time on-platform after the introduction of AI-powered Reels. In addition, Meta announced that their MAUs rose by 5% YoY to over 3.8B users. That's nearly half of the entire world. Pretty incredible. Check out the article below for more info on the earnings call.

Mark Zuckerberg says people spent 24% more time on Instagram after Meta launched AI-powered Reels
People are “resharing Reels more than 2 billion times every day, doubling over the last six months,” Zuckerberg said.

AI-DRIVEN CONTENT IS THE NEW BLACK

AI is quite the hot topic lately, but it's not just a new fad — AI really is changing the content generation game. In this article, 65% of marketers who use AI said that they believe AI will only supplement, not replace, human jobs, and I tend to agree. As we can see in the article from Ross Simmonds on Moz below, AI has simply changed the way we are producing content. In a fantastic infographic, Ross illustrates how we used to produce content vs how it's being done now using AI. Personally, I love that the ideation phase of content generation is being sped up. This has been a historically hugely time-consuming task that has been expedited with AI, though not entirely replaced, and I think that's how it's best.

How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI — Whiteboard Friday
There’s no question that AI has already started to have a meaningful impact on organizations that create content every single day. In this video, Ross shares how our workflows, processes, and content creation will positively evolve thanks to AI.
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