In partnership with

Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Variation for Trial Reels

A while back, I put together a formal playbook on trial reels for a client who was getting great results with them, and I want to walk you through it here because the ROI on this is low enough that there's no good excuse not to be doing it.

Here's why trial reels work: Instagram sends them to non-followers it thinks will like your content. That's the whole value proposition. You're reaching a qualified new audience without running ads, and the effort required is minimal — we're talking small variations of content you already made. Swapping out a caption keyword. Trimming the hook from 16 bars to eight. That's it.

One thing that trips people up: trial reels need keywords. If you're not using them on screen or in the description, Instagram has no idea who to send you to. Keywords are how you tell the algorithm which audience to test you on, so don't skip them.

If you're consistently getting under 250 views on trial reels, it means one of two things — either your creative isn't connecting, or your keywords are routing you to the wrong audience. Either way, that's actionable information. Change the keywords or change the creative and run it again.

WHAT TO VARY

Song

The most obvious thing to test is the song itself. Put the same creative against different tracks and see what moves. Once you've landed on a song, test the length of the hook — try 2, 4, 8, and 16 bars and see which cuts through. If you're not sure which section of the song to use, trial reels are the exact right tool for figuring that out. Run each version at least four times before concluding — results from a single run aren't clean enough to act on. (For more on song testing methodology, watch my video here .)

Keywords

Try different genre names, including ridiculous ones. Some of the most unexpected keyword wins come from names you wouldn't have thought to use — that's the point. Try different artist comparisons too. Put your two best guesses up, then throw in a wild card that feels like a stretch. If the wild card wins, that tells you something important about where your audience actually lives.

For emotion-based keywords — mood descriptors, POV hooks, feeling-based language — just drop a word into any chatbot and ask for synonyms. You'll have ten options in ten seconds.

Treatments

Color grades, outfits, how close you are to the camera, how much eye contact you make — all of these affect performance more than people expect. If you have different visual options to test, throw them in the rotation.

Subscribe to Premium Subscription to read the rest.