📈Smart Growth in a Shifting Landscape: Automation, Attention, & Brand Power
Weekly briefing for AI-first marketers. News, tactics, and tools that move the whole funnel.
Rohit Maheswaran
June 18, 2025
Hey Funnel friends- Happy Wednesday!🤗
Welcome back to Full Funnel! This week, we're diving into some massive shifts that are reshaping how we connect with customers and protect our youngest audiences online. From AI-powered marketing automation to critical new privacy tools for families, the landscape is evolving fast. Let’s dig in⛏️.
On the Menu🎯
🎮 Salesforce's game-changing AI marketing platform.
🚀 MiniMax Speech 02 is a new era of AI speech generation.
🧭 Navigating performance marketing in a cookieless world.
💪 Building your brand as a powerful growth engine.
🎙️ Podcast: Beyond Last-Click: A CMO's Guide to Full-Funnel ROI with ft. Tom Gregory
🚨 Tool Spotlight: Surfer AI, a content intelligence tool.
🛠️ Weekly AI tools that will save you hours every week
Salesforce Unveils Agentic Marketing Cloud Next 📈
Salesforce has revealed its new Agentic Marketing Cloud Next, a platform designed to automate and optimize marketing operations with generative AI at its core.
This isn't just about better analytics; it's about intelligent agents handling complex, multi-step customer journeys, from personalized content creation to campaign orchestration.
Think less manual fiddling, more strategic oversight.
Why it matters:
Efficiency and hyper-personalization are crucial in competitive landscapes.
Promises to free up marketing teams for high-level strategy and creative innovation.
Autonomously managing campaigns across channels, adapting in real-time, is a significant leap for profitable marketing.
Unified measurement platforms like Lifesight can help validate the ROI of these agentic campaigns.
Try this: Identify a high-volume, low-efficiency task in your customer journey; research how agentic AI could handle it.
Takeaway: Agentic AI is transforming marketing automation, boosting efficiency and personalization.
MiniMax Speech 02: Pioneering a New Era of AI Speech Generation 🗣️
The latest advancements in AI speech generation, such as those seen with MiniMax Speech 02, are revolutionizing how brands can create audio content.
These tools offer highly natural-sounding voices, emotional range, and the ability to generate speech from text with unprecedented accuracy and speed.
Think about scaling personalized audio messages, creating dynamic voiceovers for video ads, or even developing engaging podcast content without needing human voice actors.
Why it matters:
Unlocks new possibilities for audio marketing and content creation.
Significantly reduces the time and cost associated with producing high-quality voice content.
Allows for rapid iteration and A/B testing of audio messaging.
Enables greater personalization and localization of audio experiences for diverse audiences.
Try this: Experiment with an AI speech generation tool to create a voiceover for a short social media video or a personalized audio message for a segment of your email list.
Takeaway: AI speech generation offers a powerful, cost-effective way to create compelling audio content at scale.
Smarter Performance Marketing in a Privacy Era💡
Prepare for the Cookieless Future: With third-party cookies phasing out by 2025, marketers must shift to first-party data and contextual targeting.
Explore Emerging Channels: Don't limit budget to traditional ads; explore LinkedIn's Connected TV and "First Impression" video ads, podcast sponsorships, niche newsletters, and programmatic ads on industry websites for lower costs and higher attention.
Balance Brand and Demand: Optimal B2B results come from balancing long-term brand building (46% of budget) with short-term sales activation (54% of budget) for sustainable growth.
Measure What Matters: Focus on business-health KPIs like opportunity creation, cost per SQL, CAC-to-LTV ratio, and revenue from campaigns. Unified measurement platforms can help clarify causality when navigating these shifting spends.
Why it matters:
Adapting to privacy changes is essential for continued performance.
New channels offer cost-effective ways to capture attention.
Balancing brand and demand drives sustainable, measurable growth.
Focusing on business-health KPIs ensures efforts contribute to real revenue.
Try this: Audit recent ad campaigns for third-party vs. first-party targeting; test a contextual targeting campaign.
Takeaway: Adapt to privacy-friendly tactics, explore new channels, and tie efforts to real business outcomes.
Brand Building as a Growth Engine 💹
Trust is Key: In business-to-business transactions, brand trust is crucial because it reduces sales cycles and aids in obtaining premium pricing.
🏃 Consistency Pays Off: Revenue can rise by up to 23% when a brand is presented consistently across all channels.
🎯 Attend the 95%: Because you have "pre-sold" them through thought leadership, a strong brand guarantees that your name is at the forefront of the minds of prospective B2B clients who are not yet making a purchase.
🙋♂️ Humanize Your Brand: In B2B, relatable, genuine brands are more noticeable than jargon and formal corporate speak.
Why it matters:
Builds credibility and allows for premium pricing.
Drives higher engagement and conversions across all marketing efforts.
Prepares future customers, making sales cycles more efficient.
Fosters emotional connections and helps brands stand out.
Try this: Audit brand touchpoints for consistency; brainstorm ways to infuse personality.
Takeaway: Branding is a long game that pays dividends, enhancing all marketing efforts.
🎙️ Listen to our latest podcast episode ft. Tom Gregory:
Ever stared at five different dashboards telling you five different stories about your campaign performance? You're not alone. Getting a clear, trustworthy answer on what's actually working in marketing has become the ultimate challenge. This "paralysis by analysis" doesn't just waste time—it wastes budget. In our latest Full Funnel episode, we sat down with Tom Gregory, an expert in marketing measurement from Lifesight, to demystify this complex topic. He provides a clear roadmap for moving beyond flawed metrics and building a measurement framework you can actually trust.
Check out the full episode below 👇
🧰 Framework of the Week: The "AI-Powered Content Flywheel"🔄
AI-Generated Ideas & Research: AI for brainstorming and initial research to accelerate content ideation.
AI-Assisted Content Creation: AI drafts initial content, human-edited for voice and nuance, saving time.
AI-Powered Repurposing & Distribution: AI transforms long-form content into short clips or varied ad creatives.
AI-Driven Performance Analysis: AI analytics identify top content, predict trends, and optimize distribution.
Try this: Take one piece of long-form content you've recently produced (e.g., a whitepaper or webinar) and use an AI tool (like Vizard AI mentioned in previous newsletters, or other similar tools) to generate at least three distinct social media snippets from it.
Takeaway: Branding is a long game that pays dividends, enhancing all marketing efforts.
🚨 AI Tool Spotlight: Surfer AI📝
Surfer AI is a content intelligence tool that leverages AI to help you create well-optimized, high-ranking content quickly by analyzing top-performing search results.
What it is: Surfer AI is a content intelligence tool that leverages AI to help you create well-optimized, high-ranking content quickly by analyzing top-performing search results.
Why it's hot: It takes the guesswork out of SEO content creation, providing data-driven recommendations for structure, keywords, and length, allowing you to generate content that's highly likely to rank and drive organic traffic.
Try this: Feed Surfer AI a target keyword and analyze its recommendations for your next blog post. Use its content editor to draft an SEO-optimized article based on its guidelines.
🛠️ Featured AI Toolkit for the week
What it does: A platform for creating video content at scale using AI, allowing users to generate professional-looking videos with AI avatars and voiceovers.
Fast payoff: Generate studio-quality videos without expensive shoots or actors, cutting production time and costs dramatically.
What it does: An AI social listening tool that uses machine learning to monitor and analyze conversations about your brand across social media platforms.
Fast payoff: Quickly gain insights into brand sentiment, track campaigns, and identify potential crises or opportunities in real-time, improving reputation management.
What it does: An AI writing tool that generates marketing copy for ads, social media, emails, and websites, helping overcome writer's block and scale content creation.
Fast payoff: Accelerate content production by generating diverse copy variants in minutes, freeing up creative teams to focus on strategy and refinement.
Giveaway of the Week 🎁
It’s about time e-commerce brands and retailers start planning their budgets for BFCM 2026. With US e-commerce sales projected to grow by 8.8% in 2026 and digital ad spend expected to increase by around 7.8% that year, strategic budget allocation is crucial for profitability amidst hyper-personalization and mobile-first trends.
Get a head start with our exclusive BFCM ROI Calculator – Try now to ensure a profitable BFCM in 2026!
See y’all next week 👋
The future of marketing is about data-driven creativity and ruthlessly accurate measurement. Let's build that future together.
— Full Funnel Team 📨