Digital Marketing Is Changing Fast

Each year for the past six years, our team has attended?Social Media Marketing World. We attend the conference for three reasons:

1. Lifelong Learning

We go to learn what is new in digital marketing today. Social media marketing changes at the speed of light, and if we are going to serve our clients best, then we need to be at the forefront of change.?

2. Developing A Network

We attend this conference and others in order to make connections with other agency owners, software developers, and high-level marketing experts. Building our community makes our agency stronger. When our clients need something, whether that is a solution to a problem or a service that we don’t provide, we have a deep network that can provide for them.

3. Validation

One thing that continues to amaze me about business owners is how often we feel like imposters. I am no exception. Although I speak publicly about digital marketing on a regular basis, I attend Social Media Marketing World as a way to validate what I already know. It’s comforting to know that our team really is on the cutting edge in our industry.?

What Did We Learn

Anastassia and I have two notebooks’ worth of material from this year’s event, but we have narrowed it down to some of our favorites. Jump ahead to the final one if you want to know what we are most excited about, but the truth is, each and every one of the things we learned will be put to use for our clients and can be put to use in your business as well.??

Use Social Media To Learn About Your Clients

We have talked about this for years. It is why we have always preached the importance of responding to comments on social media, leaving comments on other people’s posts, and responding to every review whether it is good or bad.?

This week, I attended a session with?Brooke Sella?titled?Conversations?That Convert: How to Use Social Media For More Leads And Sales. In this session, Brooke discussed how people buy based on emotions, not on facts. We all know this to be true. We buy based on how things will make us feel. People hire ASMM Digital because we offer them relief. We do the tasks they know they need to do but they don’t understand and they don’t have time for. During our branding meetings with our clients, we watch their shoulders relax and we often hear an audible sigh of relief that they can trust us with their brand image.?

Social media can help your clients have an emotional response before they buy. It can help them build trust in you and feel a real connection to your brand. By responding, answering, and commenting on your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Business Profile, you are offering your customers conversation and connection. Studies show people crave connection even more than they crave content.?

In addition to giving your customers something they want through connection, you have the ability to learn about your customers. Connecting with your customers on social media will allow you to learn who is already interested in your brand, what problems they are facing, and exactly how they want you to solve that problem for them. Are you using social media to connect with your clients today?

Artificial Intelligence Adds Insights Into Your Customer

You are going to notice a theme in this email. Artificial intelligence ran through this year’s conference because it is changing marketing in a thousand ways even as I write this. You have heard about ChatGPT for weeks now. It’s been one of the highest trending topics on every platform. But how are you using it? Are you using it as a means to create blogs or rewrite sales letters? Those are definitely a good start if you are adding the human touch to the work as well.?

But have you considered using it for your marketing strategy as well? In?John Jantsch’s session,?Strategy Before Tactics: A Holistic Approach To Marketing, he suggested asking ChatGPT to create a list of 20 concerns a homeowner might express when considering hiring a remodeling contractor to remodel their home, and to make it emotional and use first person.??

There is an art to prompting ChatGPT. You need to know what you are looking for in order to find it. The good news is that as with any skill, the more you practice it, the better you will get.?

You Can’t Do Your Marketing On Your Own Anymore

I have always told people they can do big portions of their marketing on their own if they have a good strategy to begin with. But this week, I realized that may no longer be true. Even with the power of AI, or perhaps because of the advent of AI, you can no longer do your marketing on your own. There are simply too many tactics, tools, and strategies to manage and still manage your business.?

For example, in?Chris Mercer’s?Google Analytics 4: The New Approach To Measuring Your Marketing, he discussed how much analytics are changing. Not just how fast but how much. He said measurement is no longer a project, it is a department. In order to truly track what is happening in your organic marketing, your Google or social media ads, your newsletters, and your video marketing efforts, you are now forced to dig so deep and learn so much that there is no way for a small business owner to handle these efforts on their own.?

The good news for you is that ASMM Digital has been preparing for this. We spent the better part of three years creating a super agency. We now work with eight local agencies to bring our clients the experts they need for all of their marketing needs. Why did we do this instead of doing all of the work ourselves? Because quite honestly there is no way for one small agency to specialize in every new area that is developing in digital marketing. We needed a team we could rely on.?

Facebook Still Rules

In Michael Stelzner’s opening keynote, he discussed the results revealed in?The 14th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report. This report shows that Facebook and Meta companies are still first for delivering the most leads and the most sales to small businesses today.

Yes, I am cringing as I write this. Facebook has not treated businesses well. They have made marketers’ lives hell for years. And most of us believe that they are basically the devil. But when it comes to digital marketing for your small business, they still lead the way. Don’t believe me? Take a deep dive into your Facebook analytics. Stop looking at likes and followers and look instead at reach and impressions. Look to see how many people are seeing your posts on Facebook and Instagram as opposed to LinkedIn and Twitter. This is true even for B2B companies. Why? Because we are not creating a relationship with a business. You are creating a relationship with a person in that business and most people are still active on Facebook.?

Unconnected - This Is Where I Pat My Own Back

Remember above when I said that one of the reasons we go to Social Media Marketing World each year was validation? Here’s a good example. For the past few months, I have been giving presentations on how AI is changing Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has spent the past few years acting like they were not threatened by TikTok. But in the past few months, we have noticed something new on Facebook and Instagram. We have noticed a new category—unconnected. What is this, you ask? It’s the people who are not following your page or being introduced to your page by people who are following your page. It’s people who are being fed your content because the AI says they are interested in your content. And that number is getting bigger, and we expect it to keep getting bigger for years to come.?

Stop Pushing Links

We have been preaching this for years. Everybody wants to talk about the call to action (“click here to…”) but what we know—what we have known for years and what was reaffirmed at Social Media Marketing World—is that links are the surest way to send your content into eternal damnation. Social media platforms are built to keep people on their sites, so stop trying to send people off the site with links.?

So what do you do? Use organic social media to amplify your brand, make connections and build community. Use email marketing and paid ads to get people to take that next step. But don’t skip the brand amplification. You need people to know, like, and trust you before they are ready for that next step.?

Your Best New Customer Is Your Existing Customer

We recently met with one of our clients because he wanted to know how he might recession-proof his business. He wants to know about adding a new ad program, creating funnels, and working on lead-generating efforts. He was gobsmacked when I asked him what he is doing to nurture his relationship with his current clients.??

It’s an important question.?

Your new clients already know you. They already like you. And they hopefully still trust you. Stop ignoring them. Start working on campaigns that reach out to your top 20%. Start reaching out to people who have not used your service for a little while. Start nurturing your community.

Right Video At The Right Time For The Right Person

Tim Schmoyer’s session,?Decoding The YouTube Algorithm: How To Get Views On The Largest Video Platform,?can be summed up in four words:?It’s about the viewer.

Stop trying to trick the algorithms on YouTube. YouTube is now and has always been committed to delivering the right video at the right time to the right person, and thanks to AI (there’s that term again), they are getting better at it. So, now you need to stop trying to trick the algorithm and start trying to create the right video for the people you want to reach. What do they need? What can you deliver that will meet that need? Start thinking like that and working toward creating quality videos that deliver on those goals, and you will start having more success with your video marketing campaigns.?

But what does AI have to do with it? In the simplest terms, the AI is working for you. It reads your videos and knows exactly what’s in them. You no longer have to worry about stacking the title or the backend with keywords. The AI is doing that part for you and it’s getting smarter every day.?

It’s sort of funny that we keep talking about AI, and at the same time, we keep talking about that human connection. Are you seeing the thread yet?

AI Might Just Save Small Businesses

Four years ago, ASMM Digital bought its first piece of AI software. We bought LatelyAI as a tool to help us repurpose our content. Last year, we started using JasperAI to help us make the content we were creating even better. We are absolutely thrilled with the results we have been able to deliver for our clients. We are equally thrilled that these tools have made our business more efficient. They save us time and money.?

On the last day of the conference, we attended?Paul Roetzer’s?How To Use AI Tools To Transform Your Marketing & Career. This was by far the most important session we attended during the three-day event and the one we are most excited about digging into. Here are three key takeaways:

1. You have been using AI even if you didn’t realize it.

Think about the predictive text on your phone or within Gmail, or the suggestions from YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon. Consider the answers Siri or Alexa gives you. How about how Waze or Google Maps get you to your destinations even when there are accidents or road closures ahead??

2. AI will not take your job.

AI can only do so much. Yes, it is getting smarter, but it needs prompting from humans and it needs a human touch. Go back to the section above, where I talked about people buying based on emotions, not facts. AI works best when there is a human in the mix. Don’t hand your work over to the AI. Instead, let the AI be a tool you use to get the results you need.?

One of my favorite quotes from the weekend was that AI will not replace marketers. But marketers who use AI will replace the marketers who don’t. But this holds for almost every other profession as well.?

3. AI can solve some of your biggest problems.

AI is going to help you with some of your biggest problems. It is going to make you more efficient and effective at what you do. Now is the time to start looking for AI solutions that do just that for your business. To start, consider problems that are data-driven, repetitive, predictive, or generative.?

There are already hundreds of AI solutions available to you. Consider the fact that radiologists are using AI to help read mammograms more efficiently and effectively. Attorneys are using it for due diligence. Graphic designers are using it to create designs faster and more accurately. Now, go back and read that again. In each of the examples, there is a human in the mix. The project doesn’t happen without the human. The AI is simply a tool.

Every year that we attend Social Media Marketing World, we come back excited about the year to come. Never has there been a year when we felt this excited about the future. As AI grows, ASMM Digital is committed to finding solutions not only for our business but for yours as well. I will be attending the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference in July with these two goals in mind.?

If you are interested in learning more about AI and marketing, be sure to visit our?blog. Over the next several months we will document our journey into the new world of business.?

At ASMM Digital, we’re feeling excited about the future of AI and marketing. Want to see how we can use it to benefit your business? Reach out to the?ASMM Digital?team today at?443-679-4916.