Category: Marketing

Can ChatGPT Boost Your Marketing? It Depends What You Mean by “Marketing”

ChatGPT, Marketing, MarketingTech

Last week, I used ChatGPT to interrogate whether it could be used to help your marketing efforts. Of course, this was slightly disingenuous, but I was interested to see what it might suggest.

For small and medium sized business owners, content marketing has been a revolution. It has provided a strategic and tactical opportunity to build brands, generate leads and provide options for growth. But content marketing requires content – and a not insignificant amount of it.

As you will see from the article generated, there was precious little in terms of insight or direction offered. The article felt like a report on the topic of marketing rather than an investigation of marketing and its potential for business. The article also focused more on the customer support side of marketing rather than brand or demand generation side.

There are ways to address these – including developing more precise prompts or iterating and refining the generated content by responding to content.

But what is clear is that ChatGPT’s understanding of “marketing” as a discipline or profession is limited. This means that to get value out of ChatGPT, we need to be not only more specific, we need to create context for the ChatGPT engine to respond to. And this already starts to feel like something akin to work. 

What we have at the tips of our fingers is a new tool that can help us get our work done. But at this stage it is far from a silver bullet. We’ve got work to do to understand where and how ChatGPT and other AI tools fit within our martech stack.

How Visual is Your Marketing?

B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Customer Experience, Marketing

I have always been a fan of images and visuals, but I like the thinking here from Orbit Media Studios. When working on customer journeys and marketing funnels, we can spend a lot of time thinking about the messaging, the calls to action and the pre-emptive activities that we can put in place to reduce funnel leakage. But how often do we incorporate imagery into our messaging in such a way that it helps drive action?

This seems like an interesting series of experiments to run across your customer journeys!

Is it time to double down on influencer marketing?

B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Influence, Marketing

There is no doubt that the global pandemic has impacted our marketing and growth plans. Indeed, it has forced a step-change in everything – from the way and how we work, to the where we work … so it is little wonder that marketers are feeling the strain.

Add to this the massive shifts around business accountability, increasing expectations of brand authenticity and respect for social license, and 2020-21 can easily be seen as a turning point for the often fraught relationship between brands and their audiences.

So what is the role of influencer marketing in the distinctly modern marketing mix? Ryan Skinner from Forrester offers some suggestions:

  • Social advertising: There appears to be a downward trend in social advertising – with spend dropping off by 10-20%
  • Influencer marketing as a growth opportunity: While social advertising is trending down, marketers are seeing the opportunity to expand their influencer-oriented activities, citing share of attention (more time on social – 63%), growing awareness and positive perception (of influencers)
  • Influencer content sentiment trends upwards: Only 20% of people indicated a negative attitude towards influencers. This receptivity creates an opportunity to communicate in a more one-to-one vs one-to-many scale to build awareness and reinforce brand-to-consumer relationship building.

What then, might be the way forward?

  • For those brands comfortable working with influencers:
    • Treat your approach to influencers as an opportunity to double down on long term brand messaging – built relationships and position for the future
    • Develop a growth plan connected to your influencers and your brand position
    • Experiment with influencers-as-a-channel – work closely with your influencers to build a content plan rather than just push content into a particular platform (eg TikTok or Instagram)
    • Move an additional 5% of your media spend towards influencers and double down on your experiments.
  • For those brands new to influencer marketing:
    • Shift 5-10% of your marketing budget to influencers. Understand that it will take time to learn how it can impact your activities and use the time and budget to build your expertise
    • Seek category and domain expertise alignment in your influencers and use your traditional marketing efforts to amplify the work of your influencers
    • Be creative – don’t just focus on transactional or bottom of the funnel marketing with your influencers. Find or create opportunities to communicate your brand values with and through your influencers.

16 Tips for Your Next Trade Show

Events, Marketing

I have long been a fan of checklists. I have them for a whole range of marketing and project activities – from events to workshops, website and product launches to employee onboarding.

And while I often remember most of what needs to be done, there are some best practices – or nuances – that make a big difference to the outcome. More importantly, when something goes wrong (and we all know THAT never happens, right?), a checklist helps ensure that you cover all your bases while still dealing with any changes that occur on the fly.

Event driven marketing like trade shows bring a special kind of focus and pressure to your marketing team. There are logistics, design, coordination, briefings, customer experience flow, sign-ups, promo items and activations, construction, data collection, branding, sales process handoff and staffing considerations to balance – and that’s just in the leadup to the event!

This great infographic setups out 16 tips that you can easily follow to make your next trade show event a success. But what is it missing? What works for you that changes a good trade show to a great one? For me, it is cool team t-shirts. There really is something powerful about a t-shirt, logo or tag line that sets you apart (plus you can give some away as merchandise to the best leads).

trade show best practices infographic

The Marketing Therapist

Influence, Infographics, Marketing

It’s interesting when I think back on it.

Years before I became an all-in marketer I worked in publishing. I honed my craft (and it felt very much like a craft), learned about as many aspects of the industry as possible and revelled in the thought that I was part of a profession that reached back centuries. Of course, one of the things that I did was to actively disrupt the very publishing tradition that I loved. But that is another story.

One of the first books that was given to me by my boss was Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It had been around for years, but I was assured it would play an important role in my professional life. And sure enough, my boss, the eagle-eyed publisher, Eve Ross, was right.

I started learning a different perspective immediately. I could read “influence” into many aspects of my work – from design and layout to the way I worked with authors. It changed small things about my ways of working and it changed my mindset in quite profound ways. And I still encourage my new team members to read it. I just ask them to read it with a creative mindset and thoughts on a future horizon (and how we will get there).

The infographic below captures some key insights that we can use to connect our work in marketing with the customer’s mindset. Some of the tactics are a little clunky, but with some creativity (and some A/B testing) you’ll find a happy medium.

What I have learned over the years is that psychology plays a major role in our lives – but also in our work. And if we think of ourselves as marketing therapists, you’ll go a long way to solving your customers and your clients challenges.

Now, just take a seat and tell me about your mother …

Marketing Dividends – Is it Time to Re-evaluate Digital?

Digital Strategy, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Strategy

The promise of digital targeting has had marketers salivating for years. We would be able to identify, reach, engage and convert consumers one-to-one at scale thanks to technology. Better yet, with mobile devices, we could bring an offer to a consumer who was physically close to our retail outlet thanks to big data, mapping and location services.

Accordingly, substantial investments have been made in a wide variety of technologies from CRM and data mining, to automation, analysis and beyond. In fact, Scott Brinker’s infographic on the landscape of marketing technology (2016) suggests that there were almost 4000 marketing technology solutions vying for your attention and purchase. With so many choices, it’s hardly surprising that marketers wonder where to start with the MarTech stack.

But Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia says that the promise of digital marketing is unfulfilled. Or perhaps, we have over stated the role of digital at the expense of brand. This video segment by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) touches on these topics, raising interesting challenges for us all.

Now, there is plenty that I could argue with. There is a huge assumption that analogue marketing metrics are/were valid, and also that marketers are not following through on data, analytics and measurement of business value. But these are quibbles – because the most interesting aspect of this interview is the refocusing of marketing towards strategy.

In many ways, the pursuit of digital marketing and technology has seen us become reliant on tactics masquerading as strategy. We put some technology in place and think that the strategy will magically be enabled.

But this is never the case. As Byron reminds us, “We are in a battle for attention – for physical and mental availability … people [consumers] just don’t think of you enough”. Segmentation, data and technology alone won’t solve that problem – only a tightly threaded strategy and approach to execution will. And that means doubling down on your marketing skills. So don’t just re-evaluate digital – re-evaluate your team and yourself.

Why Serious Marketers Aren’t Taking Snapchat Seriously, Yet

Marketing, Social Media

In my first “official” marketing job, I dealt a lot with branding. And print. We did brochures and collateral. There were events to host, conferences to attend and exhibition booths to use for conversion. And there was this largely irrelevant thing called “the website”.

But I had an inkling that there might be something to this internet lark, so I kept at it. I created campaigns that would start with an envelope delivered to a desk, would follow it up with an email message, exclusive code, some marketing information and an invitation to an exclusive event. Then the event itself was pure “money can’t buy” access to the best talent at our firm, thought leadership and good food and drink. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was designing omni-channel experiences. And they were extraordinarily successful.

In fact, they blew everything else out of the water.

One of the reasons these program worked was because we could track marketing activation. We knew when invitations were delivered in person and via email. We knew when something was ignored. We followed up religiously. And we adjusted the program as we went. It was agile before “agile”. There was no name for this kind of marketing, because it was simply about paying attention. I was doing my job.

These days, marketers have forgotten what their job is. They seem to think it’s about content. Or about technology.

It’s neither of these things.

It is about paying attention – to your customers and to your business. You have to balance doing what’s right for your customers and doing what’s right for your business. Sometimes it is a fine line. Sometimes it’s obvious. And walking this fine line will help you make decisions about everything else – about the content you develop or amplify and the technology you use. After all, it’s no use having the best YouTube channel if your audience all live on Facebook. And you won’t have a job long if you spend all your budget on Snapchat ads when your buyers are all middle aged men in suits.

It’s the balance that’s importance – one eye on your boss, one eye on your customer. Respect for the company that pays you and respect for the person who pays your company.

And is with this simple focus that I can confidently look to Snapchat and know that there’s not much value there for most marketers, right now. As this infographic (via MarketingProfs) shows, there are some astounding “engagement” figures and certainly plenty of stickiness. But a decade of social media use has made us wary of the big numbers that sound as hollow as “reach and frequency”. And there is no reliable analytics platform that can provide anything more detailed than a “like” here or a message there.

That doesn’t mean that Snap won’t improve. But it’s a long way away from being a sophisticated digital platform for marketers. And while that one glad eye might be turned towards your audience, marketers will need to keep that serious eye on the stormy CEO who holds the marketing budget.

 

Data vs Insight: The Albatross Around the Marketer’s Neck

B2B Marketing, Big Data, Facts & Figures, Marketing

We have so much data at our fingertips. Every touch, interaction, click, email, webpage view. It all results in data. Even when we walk from one room to the next our phones are counting the steps, movement, changes in latitude and longitude. We are measured to within an inch of our lives.

Some of this data is captured and reported back to cloud based servers scattered across the globe. Some of it isn’t. But do we know? Do we care?

I was speaking with John Dobbin yesterday about the Data Paradox. We have more data than ever before, but less understanding of what to use it for. We spend our time analysing dashboards and combing through spreadsheets in search of that elusive insight. Sometimes as a marketer I feel like Coleridge’s ancient mariner:

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Data visualisation goes a long way towards solving this challenge. Done well, it can bring your data to life – tell a story – and foreground important details. But with almost every visualisation I see, I am always asking myself, “why”. Why is this important? Why did a change occur? Why didn’t a change occur?

Take a look at my recent TwitterCounter graph below. It shows follower/ following counts over the last month. You can see there are a couple of spikes in terms of follower numbers. But you can also see that “following” numbers remain on an even trajectory. Just the simple act of looking at this graph reminded me of the actions that I had and had not taken over the last month. It made me check back to see what I was doing on March 7.

And on March 11, clearly I did something to arrest that growth. But the following week I was growing again. Not as steeply, but strongly.

twittercounter

Correlation vs Causation

Again the question of “why” raises its head. What I am interested in is not the correlation but the causation. At the book launch of Martin Lindstrom’s new book, Small Data, he suggested that it is the small data that drives causation and that big data shows the correlation. So with this in mind, I looked to the small things.

  • Ahead of the first spike in follower growth I started using Meet Edgar to more consistently tweet. Prior to that it was randomised and scheduled or ad hoc. It was not a function of what I was saying, but the fact that I was saying it.
  • The second spike built on the earlier week but benefited from my appearance on DisrupTV with GE’s Ganesh Bell and Constellation Research’s Guy Courtin.

While the big data revealed the trend and the results, it was the small data. The personal data. The insight, that actually revealed the causation. As Martin Lindstrom suggested, and as I have written previously, small data – the known unknowns of the marketing world – tell the story we are waiting to hear. The question is whether we are listening for a story or searching for data.

The Top 5 Marketing Technology Categories in 2016

Marketing, Marketing Skills, Trends, Web/Tech

Each year, Scott Brinker goes through the laborious process of identifying and categorising thousands of technologies for his Marketing Technology Landscape supergraphic. As in past years, there are hundreds of new entrants – this year there are 3874 solutions identified on a single page. This means, for the marketing technologist (and that really means everyone in marketing these days), that we would need to review 75 of these each week for a year in order to “be across” this burgeoning technology field.

For those of us who are time poor, however, let’s just take a look at the most populous categories of marketing technology:

  1. Sales Automation, Enablement & Intelligence (220)
  2. Social Media Marketing & Monitoring (186)
  3. Display & Programmatic Advertising (180)
  4. Marketing Automation & Campaign/Lead Management (161)
  5. Content Marketing (160).

marketing_technology_landscape_2016_600px

Marketing Tech Priority 1: Cover the bases

There’s no surprise that sales automation, enablement and intelligence is at the top of the list in terms of sheer number of vendors. Not only is this a multi-billion market – with Gartner predicting the market for CRM to reach over $23 billion in 2017, there is still significant upside on market opportunity. While Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft lay claim to around 50% of the market for CRM alone, Gartner predicts that we won’t reach 80% saturation until 2025. This is still some years away, meaning that fast moving marketing technology companies (especially SaaS oriented) can lay claim to a significant market.

In the sales enablement and intelligence/analytics space, there is even more opportunity. These areas have been slower to mature and the technology has taken time to prove its power. This is all coming together now with increases in big data computing power and availability of enterprise grade cloud services. We should expect to see more movement in this area next year as growth and capability ramp up.

While I have never been a fan of allowing technology to drive our marketing strategy, the shift to digital has now become almost total. Marketing technology now has the power to track, measure and report on almost every touchpoint (whether there is ROI in the collection/use of that data/information is another thing). If we are not using these technologies to our advantage, you can bet that your competitors are.

This means, as marketers, we need to ensure we are covering the bases in at least two or three of the top five category areas. We need to double down on our sales automation, enablement and intelligence in a couple of areas:

  • Implement out-of-the-box capability: Even a basic CRM is better than no CRM. Seriously, it’s time to ditch the spreadsheets.
  • Use the functionality available: Almost every technology investment is underutilised. We need to get serious about our use of technology and move beyond the basic functionality.
  • Invest in skills: Fundamentally, this means training our marketing teams. Don’t assume that they know how to “do social” because they have a Twitter following. Make sure that your marketing skilling programs has a “business” not “consumption” focus.

Marketing Tech Priority 2: Double down on social and content marketing

While social media has been around for some years now, and most marketers have significant experience in running and integrating campaigns, we are still in the earliest stages in terms of business value and outcomes. We have seen that traditional media channels are collapsing, but we thought that the “digital doppelganger” replacements like banner ads and search engine marketing were going to serve as a valid replacement. This is not the case – just think about 0.06% CTRs that we are seeing for display advertising.

The reality is, that we need to innovate our approaches. We need to double down on social (category 2) and content marketing (category 5). We have had significant exposure to these areas in the last couple of years, and the technology companies are starting to better understand the needs of brands and marketers. Expect to see innovation in this space. More vendors. More cool technologies.

Marketing Tech Priority 3: Marketing automation is a no-brainer

We all want better quality leads, happier customers and more revenue, right? As we reach scale – with CRM in place and a good understanding of our customer journeys, we can start to bring technology to bear. This doesn’t mean that we are automating our marketing teams out of existence. It means that we are doubling down on customer experience – using our creative teams, agencies and strategists to deliver compelling experience that surprise and delight our customers (remember when we liked to do that?).

For those marketing teams who have not yet invested in marketing automation, perhaps 2016 is the year that you did. But beware, there are 161 vendors in that space. You’ll need to get started now, or 2017 will be with you before you’ve scratched the surface.

Download the supergraphic PDF here.

The Industrial Internet, Accelerator in a Box and Retail Disruption on #DisrupTV

Digital Strategy, Disruptive Technology, Future of Work, Innovation, Marketing, Startups, Strategy, Videos

Each week, Vala Afshar and R “Ray” Wang host a web series DisrupTV. It’s a 30 minute deep dive into the world of digital transformation featuring the people and organizations that are leading that change.

This week’s episode featured GE’s Chief Digital Officer, Ganesh Bell, Constellation Research Principal Analyst, Guy Courtin and myself.

Setting a cracking pace, GE have become the poster child for the world of digital transformation, coining the term “industrial internet”, establishing startups in Silicon Valley and setting a vision to be a top 10 software company by 2020. In the episode, Ganesh talks about the challenges of transformation – of moving from an industrial company to a digital company and what it takes. It’s well worth watching the replay to learn more about the tangible impact of digital transformation that GE is making not just within their business but well beyond it.

Joining Ray and Vala, about 25 minutes in, I shared some insight into the world of enterprise innovation in Australia:

Guy Courtin joined around 45 minutes in and brought amazing insight into the changing world of retail. From showrooming to the internet of things, he covered a vast terrain of disruption and opportunity, suggesting that bricks and mortar stores still have plenty of advantages over their digital only counterparts, and explaining that to be truly transformative, we need to stop thinking about “e” commerce and connect the dots around the customer’s commercial experience.

While the show ran for just over an hour, it’s jam packed with insight and energy. And DisrupTV is fast becoming an authoritative, must watch series for all those who are serious about the business of disruption and transformation in business. Check out recordings of past episodes here. And watch this week’s episode replay from Blab below.