Marketing 'new' in an era of #AI

Artificial Intelligence has just shifted the ground your marketing strategy was built on

Within 2-years, if anyone wants to find anything, they will probably have the good sense to ask an AI-powered chatbot for its top five recommendations and start from there. When that happens, do you really think your prospective buyer is going to want to read the many pages of your website content--or download a White Paper? And what if you are not in the top-5 list of suppliers for your discipline in the local market?

Within the last 6 months, the world of digital marketing has been rocked by ChatGPT and it won't stop there. Two decades ago, I wrote about Web 3.0 and a web ecosystem that learned to 'know you.' We are so accustomed to googling for things, we assume perhaps that it will always be so. ChatGPT is already changing habits.

In the future, you can bet your website will be more like a single responsive interactive web page that serves and answers clients like a digital sales assistant. It will navigate visitors to the things they want to see, what they want to know. It will personalise its experience to serve them better. And it will answer questions. Voicebots powered by tools like ChatGPT will overtake tools like Google as the prime reference source to find 'stuff.'

What does all this mean to digital marketers?

If you are a small company, you need to get better (and fast) at sharing your customer value and personality

I may be an experienced marketer, but no, I don't think, if you are a smaller and lesser-known brand, that it makes any sense to focus your time and money on web SEO. Let's face facts, your bigger rivals are spending a fortune on online ad spend and they suffer the great joy of inheriting millions of backlinks for free from armies of enthusiastic followers that boost their authority and the SEO worthiness of their website, while your brand seemingly needs to graft and pay for every backlink it gets. Why fight a battle you can't win?

As time moves on, and the weight of commercial advantage flows heavily towards mature--already known brands--I'm increasingly persuaded that smaller companies must play to their strengths and be their authentic selves.

If you are a small company, you have more character, more personality, more willingness to serve. All these things you need to convey to your audience. And you need to be forensic in your audience targeting, so you can focus the maximum effort on the smallest of market footprints.

The way to share your personality is to offer a free gift of (some of) your customer value to online web surfers and social followers; to gift them some of your value to prove you are useful to them. Then, you need to reward visitors for getting in touch with you. This GIFT REWARD tactic, I will describe next month in my follow-on article.

You will also need to supply lots of proof that you are good at delivering your value. You will need to covet every positive buyer experience, review, recommendation, testimonial, and good news story -- all to shine a light on your personality and purpose. Share with the world what makes you different.

Marketing anything 'new' is tricky these days

In a world where people only want to buy what they know, from brands they know, selling anything new is damnably hard work. You cannot educate an audience that doesn't understand what you offer and why it's better than what has come before.

In a digital age, you have to start your selling journey from where your buyers' buying journey begins. What I mean by that, is you need to understand the event that is happening in the life of your buyer that makes them go looking for a solution that you can supply them better than the next guy.

Where will your buy go to find solutions to their needs? Where do they hang out? What will they go searching for? How will they search for it? What terms will they use to find it?

Get your head into the mind of the buyer and put a marker along the path you expect them to take that says 'Hey, look here! I can help you!' And explain, why. Then, PROVE it!

Don't wait to change your marketing strategy--or team

If you have a backroom filled with content writers and web designers, it's time to brush out your closet because the value of content is going to inevitably fall through the floor in the next few months. Every other business will jump on the AI-authored content bandwagon to reap the productivity economies ... and why would they not because the ability of ChatGPT to write content is stunningly impressive.

You need to act now to re-focus your lens on the marketing activities that WILL result in moving the dial on sales outcomes. That means investing more money and time projecting your customer value, personality and proof to forensically targeted online prospects while saving your cash on resourcing the development of meaningless me-too content.

in summary, there's no point running with your 2022 marketing plan, it's now dead in the water. All that prolonging the inevitable will do is starve your marketing of the investment it needs to promote customer value, personality, and proof.

Remember, the new online responsive engagement treatments coming onstream are complex and expensive to get right, so you will need to save every penny of your old marketing budget towards these new elements of your plan if you are going to have any hope of seeing positive results.