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11 Hype-worthy Features Revealed at Google Marketing Live 2023

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11 Hype-worthy Features Revealed at Google Marketing Live 2023

After the conclusion of Google I/O 2023, the stage was set for Google Marketing Live 2023, which brought a global hybrid experience to brands and advertisers. In-person viewing events were organized across different locations worldwide, allowing participants to convene locally, while virtual attendees from all corners of the globe tuned in to watch the livestream.

The immersive event serves as a catalyst for empowering marketers with the latest tools, strategies, and best practices – covering a wide range of topics from generative AI to new campaign goals. Attendees (including Tinuiti’s own expert team) scored a front row seat to valuable marketing insights across Google’s expansive advertising ecosystem.
 

AI Takes Center Stage at #GML2023

 
It goes without saying that AI capabilities took the center stage at Google Marketing Live 2023 with a variety of notable product announcements including:
 

  • Conversational AI Campaign Creation: Exciting developments are taking place in the realm of campaign creation, with a shift towards leveraging conversational AI. This advancement offers advertisers a potent tool to enhance their audience engagement and foster more effective communication.

 

  • AI-Powered Asset Targeting: Google Ads introduces AI-powered assets, supported by the existing AI-powered campaigns, that precisely target search queries, empowering advertisers to deliver more relevant and personalized content to their target audience.

 

  • AI-Generated Images with Google Product Studio: Through Google Product Studio, advertisers gain access to AI-generated images, revolutionizing the way they visually represent their products and drive engagement.

 
These advancements highlight Google’s commitment to harnessing the potential of AI and delivering innovative solutions to enhance advertisers’ marketing efforts.

However, aside from AI, what are some of the other announcements that stood out?

This week, we spoke with our internal experts at Tinuiti to find out what they deemed as the most valuable takeaways at #GML2023. Let’s dive in!

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Credit: www.googlemarketinglive.com

 

Google Performance Max: 6 Standout Upgrades for Marketers

 
Google Performance Max campaigns are goal-based, automated campaigns that enable advertisers to promote across all Google networks from the same campaign. Google announced Performance Max campaigns in October 2020 as “a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.” 

Performance Max—or PMax, for short—is designed as a complement to your existing keyword-based Search, Shopping and fully-automated campaigns, building on learnings from the latter “to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives.”

Per the updates shared during GML 2023, the latest features within Performance Max that we are most excited about include:

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  • New customer acquisition with high value optimization goal in Google Ads
  • Access to re-engagement goal for improved retention
  • Test and learn opportunities with custom experiments
  • Improved insights to better understand performance
  • New features within the Ads Creative Studio
  • Generative AI to create text assets and images

 

“These changes create additional ways to leverage Performance Max and make it an even more flexible marketing tool, capable of optimizing towards impactful business objectives. These updates also further solidify the need for advertisers to have robust first-party data / Customer Match infrastructure and execution capabilities.”

Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti

 

1. New Customer Acquisition with High Value Optimization Goals in Google Ads

 
What is it? The existing New Customer Acquisition (NCA) works by using first-party data lists to analyze users’ characteristics and then implements the power of AI to predict and find new high value users. This new iteration will allow advertisers to specifically target users who are predicted to have high lifetime values.

How will it benefit marketers? NCA allows marketers to optimize for the highest value new customers, in addition to maximizing their bottom line sales. Overall, this feature (along with many others released at GML 2023) provide marketers with new ways to leverage Performance Max to execute specific business outcomes.

According to Google, NCA leverages data from a variety of sources include customer lists, global site tags and auto detection to:

  • Grow overall revenue but optimize for conversions from new customers because new customers bring long term revenue to the business.
  • Grow market share with a dedicated budget for customer acquisition either maximizing the number of new customer conversions with a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or maximizing the revenue from new customers to also meet near term return of investment (ROI).

 

“As we look to leverage an audience-first approach to Performance Max, advanced functionality as it relates to NCA is an exciting addition. This will allow us to not only focus on new customers, but focus on new customers who can drive the highest value”.

Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

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2. Access to Re-Engagement Goal for Improved Retention

 
What is it? Google’s re-engagement goal allows marketers to optimize their campaigns to reach customers at every decision-making point in their lifecycle journey. In addition to new customer acquisition, marketers can use re-engagement goals to optimize for other lifecycle stages, like retention and re-engagement of churned customers.

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s re-engagement goal allows marketers to bid more effectively to re-engage lapsed customers, report conversions from lapsed customers directly in the Google Ads UI.

“I’m most excited about the potential for customer reactivation and lifetime extension. Our job as marketers is not over when the customer comes in the door. As the saying goes, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one.”

Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti

 

3. Test and Learn Opportunities With Custom Experiments

 
What is it? Performance Max Custom Experiments will let you test changes within your Performance Max campaign. This feature helps you A/B test different features, settings, and campaigns to drive improvement. For example, you can test if using a value based bidding strategy for your campaign drives more results for your business.

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How will it benefit marketers? When you test different campaign settings, you reach more customers and drive better results quickly and efficiently for your business. You can also use experiments to help you measure the incremental lift of using Performance Max campaigns.

“This will provide an improved way to measure the efficacy of your current Performance Max structures as well as potential improved strategies overall.”

Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti

 

4. Improved Insights to Better Understand Performance

 
What is it? According to Google, new insights will highlight additional data on your assets to help marketers better understand their campaign performance. You’ll also get easy-to-apply recommendations on how to improve your assets. 

Additionally, search term insights will now include historic insights and insights for custom date ranges. You’ll also be able to download your Search term insights and access them in the Google Ads API. You’ll be able to see all your Search term categories now, instead of having some listed as uncategorized.

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s improved insights will provide information on which assets are or are not resonating with a given audience, provide potential suggestions on better creative, and will call out any missing asset types.

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“The more data we can get from the black box, the better. These changes should help inform advertisers how optimize their PMax campaigns for maximum effect” – Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti

“We’re cautiously excited about this one. Performance Max has a ton of potential as a research testing ground. Ultimately, the more insights we can get access to, the more we can use that data to amplify additional marketing efforts.” Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti
 

5. New Features Within the Ads Creative Studio

 
What is it? Ads Creative Studio is a creative management platform designed for creative teams to build ads, manage creative assets, and share them with media teams. Ads Creative Studio can improve collaboration and transparency between your creative and media teams and help you create effective ads with more efficiency and scale.

How will it benefit marketers? Thanks to the preview and export feature, marketers will be able to see best practices and specifications to ensure that creative is set up for success ahead of deployment. New insights in Ads Creative Studio will also provide information about trends within Search. This supplementary tool will give marketers exploratory access to the latest and greatest Search data to help plan and develop future creative.
 

6. Generative AI To Create Compelling Text Assets and Images

 
What is it? With the revamped asset creation flow in Performance Max campaigns, marketers can harness the power of Google AI to curate and generate high-quality text and image assets.

According to Google, this Generative AI feature can easily create compelling creative assets to be implemented in Performance Max campaigns. 

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Here’s a closer look on how it works:

Credit: Google

 

How will it benefit marketers? Setting up Performance Max campaigns can feel overwhelming due to the necessary content and imagery. The inclusion of a helpful feature that provides assistance and even generates new creative is a valuable addition, guaranteed to save advertisers precious time and resources. Adding a diverse range of assets and keeping them fresh over time can help improve results by maximizing the eligibility to serve on a full range of ad inventory.

“AI Generating Performance Max is an exciting new feature that can boost our creativity and give us new opportunities to develop effective PMax campaigns. Based on our findings, brands that include the suggested 20 image ads and 5 videos per asset category see a +10% boost in conversions. So this functionality can be useful for brands that are having trouble reaching the recommended levels.”

Courtney O’Donnell, Senior Director, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

“Visual creative has long been a neglected part of the SEM ecosystem; this new tool will enable advertisers to test far more iterations of creative while greatly reducing the burden on creative teams.”

Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti

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Google Ads Campaign Types: Introducing Video Views and Demand Generation

 

7. Video View Campaigns

 
What is it? Video View Campaigns are designed to maximize views. According to Google, a study revealed that advertisers using Video View Campaigns experienced an average of 40% more views at comparable costs compared to in-stream skippable CPV campaigns.

How will it benefit marketers? These campaigns leverage a range of formats, including skippable in-stream ads, in-feed ads, and Shorts ads, to optimize budget allocation and achieve optimal results. Video Views can also combine 3 formats in a single campaign for a single goal.
 

8. Demand Generation Campaigns

 
What is it? Demand Generation campaigns leverage AI to engage and drive action with consumers. These campaigns work across a variety of placements including YouTube in-feed, YouTube Shorts, YouTube in-stream, Discovery Feed and Gmail. 

How will it benefit marketers? At Tinuiti, we are eagerly awaiting more info on Demand Generation campaigns, but it seems like this feature has great potential to help advertisers more readily access the mid and upper funnel inventory that Google has to offer.

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“We’re interested to see if this will be similar to Performance Max in that it will be used in addition to existing campaign types not instead of. Or, will it replace much of how we buy YouTube today?”

Courtney O’Donnell, Senior Director, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

We expect more details will be shared on this specific campaign type at Cannes 2023. 

“As we continue to see the evolution of AI driven campaigns across various inventory types, having an audience-first approach and strong creative to match are going to be keys for success in driving action from the consumers.”

Brian Binder, Senior Director, Programmatic at Tinuiti


 

Additional Noteworthy GML 2023 Announcements

 

9. Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) Integration With Search, Shopping

 
What is it? Google is currently conducting experiments to seamlessly integrate Search and Shopping ads directly into the AI snapshot and conversational mode. SGE has the opportunity to create customized ad experiences (across Search and Shopping) that align with the user journey.

While Google has not disclosed specific metrics like CTR for these SGE (Search, Shopping, and Google Express) ads due to their experimental nature, they offer immense potential. It’s important to note that since this feature is still in its early stages, there is currently no option to opt in or out of ads appearing in SGE.

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How will it benefit marketers? Google’s AI integration with Search and Shopping provides marketers with an opportunity to drive more engagement and visibility of their ads. The new Search Generative Experience (SGE) can be found in Search Labs, a new program to access early experiments in Search. Ads that show up as a part of this experiment will be from existing Google Ads campaigns.

Want to give generative AI in Search a try? Tap the “Labs” icon in the Google app or Chrome desktop to express your interest, and visit labs.google.com/search to learn more.

“SGE represents the long awaited manifestation of conversational search and ads on Google’s results page. It will be interesting to see the ways in which this impact how we buy Google Ads”

Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti


 

10. Product Studio Leverages AI To Create High-Quality Images

 
What is it? Product Studio is a new suite of free, AI-powered tools available within Merchant Center Next and the Google & YouTube app on Shopify that helps save marketers time and resources  – while helping enhance and create high-quality product images.

How will it benefit marketers? According to Google, these tools can help marketers generate scenes, increase image resolution, and edit backgrounds. Recent data indicates, fresh images may attract more customers when you scale them across various marketing channels. 

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“This was one of the more eye-catching updates of the day and speaks to the importance of leveraging new creative within Google’s suite of ad types. It will be interesting to see how this solution works at scale but it definitely has the potential to open the door to far more creative testing, especially around seasonal campaigns, promotions, and new releases”.

Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti


 

11. Google Merchant Center Next Streamlines User Experience

 
What is it? The Merchant Center Next platform gives Google advertisers an opportunity to manage how their products appear across Google, and provides valuable insights about the business, products, and market.

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s latest iteration of Merchant Center offers a more streamlined and user-friendly experience, particularly for newcomers to the channel. 

Notably, the update enables direct product imports from a client’s website, simplifying the process for marketers. Google is also doubling down on Product Merchandising, enhancing the visibility of crucial information such as product pricing, competitiveness, and other relevant data. This update promises to empower advertisers with improved functionality and valuable insights.

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“Similar to other feature announcements over the past couple of years – as it pertains to Merchant Center, this change will make it easier for smaller advertisers to get up and running on Shopping. Allowing products to be automatically populated from a merchant’s website is the most notable change, but one that is unlikely to move the needle for larger advertisers. Sophisticated merchants will want to ensure they are still leveraging product feeds to optimize and improve the data for their program, rather than simply relying on the data from the website.”

Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

Have questions about any of the announcements you read above? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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