What's new?

I cover 3 things that may help you as you grow your business.

Online Advertising

Most fail or at best don't known if their advertising is effective and there is a simple reason why. The reason to advertise is not to sell something.

Nor is the reason to advertise is not because others do.

The only reason to advertise is that you have something interesting to say that will engage and prompt your target customer to take an action.

Too many advertise when they need sales. This is a terrible time to advertise as desperation is not attractive and does not attract clients. I tend to view advertising as a way to scale. It not will make a bad business good and if the business is not working without advertising there is a good chance it will not work with it. This is one of the topics we looked at last week in an Online Advertising session.

The best advise I can give is to focus on your market message fit. Make sure you have something interesting to say and a reason for clients to engage. I do understand this is not easy and this is why we spend so much time on the engagement mechanism and the reason for clients to engage. It means the difference between a good online advertising campaign and a poor one.

AI

We also had a session dedicated to AI. As you probably know it is the source of the greatest opportunities but also risks. Individual business opportunities but great risks if not acted upon. A simple guide:

Move beyond content. AI generated text blends and that is not a good thing, you want to be edgy and stick out as you. Too many use it for content and you are better off doing something different. Video creation and editing is a different matter. AI is a great tool to help here, but it is helping you not replacing you.

Use AI for tasks, this is where you can save a few hours per day. It is also where you can reimagine aspects of your business.

As I do the analysis of the recent study of the use of digital tools in Sweden I fully expect this is the last time I will do a full manual analysis of a dataset. GPT is not fully ready yet but it is so much better than it was only 3 months ago. By next year it will mean we need to do little python and data formulation.

Build a bot. Everyone needs at least one bot. Build one and you can see what is imvolved and how you can start to rethink how you work and where you spend time. It is not easy to build in terms of it making any sense. But the sooner you start the sooner you will have a good idea how it all works and how your business can be enabled by AI.

The Study

I am in the final days of the analysis of the survey of Swedish businesses and their use of digital tools. It has been fascinating to see the results and which MarTech tools were most popular and highly rated.

While there are many aspects that standard out in the report of close to 200 pages, I want to mention two things here:

1. Tech tool providers (SaaS) are not great at understanding their clients and helping them to find new tools or opportunities.
2. While small and micro companies account for the majority of companies in an economy they are not that well served. And they struggle with many aspects of managing a business in a digital world.

There is space and opportunity for a proper eco-system with both sides present but right now at least not really talking or understanding each other. This is something I will return to as it can be addressed to the benefit of all.

Why not join me and attend a seminar with the summary findings, you can signup here. We will have 2 seminars about the survey results (27th June & 4th July) and also announce the winners of the Swedish Ecom Association Awards for 2024.