nz-digital

Digital Marketing Trends with AI in 2023

glen@clickthrough.co.nz (Glen Maguire) — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 03:25:56 GMT

How can AI boost your digital marketing strategy?

Marketers are under increasing pressure to do more, quicker and with less time, budget, and resources. Thankfully, AI is already showing how it can turbocharge digital marketing to deliver more with less and at a way faster pace.

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing field in which computers simulate human behaviour in ways that are difficult or impossible for humans to do. AI allows machines to make decisions, communicate, act independently and learn from their mistakes.

Technology has been prevalent across various industries, such as healthcare, transportation and finance. But now, it's rapidly making its way into digital marketing.

Digital Marketing AI

Digital marketing promotes products and services to a target audience through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, and mobile apps.

How can AI help digital marketing?

AI can help businesses produce more accurate data and insights to target their customers better, create engaging content faster, and optimise campaigns for maximum ROI. AI can also automate tedious tasks such as data analysis and customer service, allowing marketers to focus on higher-value activities such as strategising and innovating.

For example, AI can identify customers' interests, target relevant audiences, and adjust ad spending to maximise ROI.

Chatbots

Chatbots are AI-powered software programs that simulate human conversations. Chatbots are often used as customer service agents, virtual assistants or digital sales representatives.

For example, a chatbot could provide shoppers with product information or help them find the correct item.

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in digital for the following key reasons:

they are 24/7
they replace the cost of managing and employing humans
they respond quickly
they are affordable and relatively easy to setup
they can be multilingual

What is ChatGBT?

ChatGBT is a powerful AI-powered chatbot solution that can help digital marketers automate customer service inquiries, communicate with customers in real-time, and generate leads.

ChatGBT's AI-based algorithms and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology allow it to understand user conversations, interpret requests accurately and respond accordingly.

Artificial Intelligence and Content Creation

Artificial Intelligence can help you create high-quality content faster, better and more efficiently. AI-based software such as Grammarly can detect spelling and grammar mistakes in real-time, saving you time and effort.

AI solutions like Frase can also generate captivating blog posts and video titles by analysing user trends and existing digital content.

Additionally, AI-powered tools can help you optimise content for search engine optimisation (SEO) by analysing keywords and topics.

Google AI

Google has invested heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, with projects like Google Brain focusing on machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition.

Google has incorporated AI technology into many of its products, such as Google Ads, which uses AI to serve ads to target customers and adjust bids in real time.

Microsoft AI

Microsoft has also been investing heavily in artificial intelligence research and development. The company offers a wide range of AI-driven tools, such as Cortana, Skype Translator, and the Microsoft Bot Framework – all of which aim to provide more intelligent business solutions.

AI improves customer targeting

AI is used to create more personalised customer experiences, which leads to higher engagement and loyalty. Automation software can help marketers identify key customer segments and tailor campaigns to match the individual needs of each segment.

For example, AI technology can track customers' behaviour across their channels (web, app, email) and use that data to create targeted content that resonates with them. This can lead to better engagement with customers and improved customer loyalty.

AI can also automate specific marketing processes, such as sending automated emails or scheduling social media posts. This saves time and allows marketers to focus on more creative tasks that require a human touch.

Finally, digital marketers can use AI to help with CRM. AI-based software can process customer data quickly and accurately, providing insights that improve the customer experience.

Conclusion

AI is revolutionising digital marketing and providing marketers powerful tools to create more effective campaigns. With AI-powered software, marketers can implement personalised experiences, automate routine tasks, and gain insights into customer behaviour, which will help them boost engagement and loyalty faster, with more accuracy and at a lower cost. It will be fascinating to see how AI changes the digital marketing landscape in the coming years.

Contact one of our Digital Marketing Strategists to find out how your business can use the power of Artificial Intelligence to deliver compelling digital marketing campaigns that give your business an edge whilst providing more profit.

Future casting Social Media Trends

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:12:55 GMT

Futurecasting Social Media Trends.

Sometimes it seems as though social media trends move so quickly that people can hardly keep up with them. With that said, it is fairly easy to make some predictions, based on the current trends.

While social media stalwarts like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even SnapChat aren’t going anywhere, the ways in which people use them may change. This, as well as some adjustments in the world of influencers, as well as the rise of an entirely new generation, will showcase just how much social media matters in 2019. Read on to learn more about these predicted trends.

Video Will Rise To the Top of the Content Charts

YouTube has been a popular social media platform for years. Now Facebook allows people to upload videos, as well as Instagram stories and highlights. It’s clear that the public wants to see videos on their social media feeds. This makes sense since videos allow them to learn more about the people that they follow, making things even more personal. With that said, even businesses are getting in on this trend, having their marketing departments create videos that work in a similar manner to commercials.

In 2022, you’ll see more videos getting shared on these networks, and the advances in posting them (including video sizes and lengths) will move forward as well. You might even see some new forms of social media pop up, especially if a company can find a way to beat YouTube at their own game.

Those “Perfect” Influencers May Be Less Popular

It all started with bloggers. Brands paired with them in order to promote their wares. As blogs slowly began to fall out of favor (although the blogging “trend” is far from over), influencers took over. Now, consumers are becoming more and more aware of the “personas” that influencers push, and their depictions of that perfect Instagram-led life are seen as false. This tarnishes their brands, as well as the ones that they are paid to promote. Look to see more organic and natural influencers take their places. These people won’t be afraid to show their flaws, and their fans and sponsors will reward them. However, this change won’t take place overnight.

Generation Z Is the New Target

Millennials (also known as Generation Y) have been pushed aside in favor of the next up and coming batch of adults – Generation Z. Those born between the years of 1995 and 2005 are either just entering the workforce, going to college, or starting their teenage years. Like the Millennials before them, this group of kids has plenty of disposable income, as well as an attachment to social media. They grew up with smartphones, understand how to use this technology, and aren’t afraid to showcase their purchases to their friends, family, and thousands of social media followers. They’ll be the group that many young-skewing brands target through social media, and you can expect some of them to figure out how to professional influencers (as long as they are “real” and don’t try to depict an idealized perfect life.)

A New Form of Social Media Will Emerge

It’s been a few years since a new hot social media site has launched, so the world is due. The last big, popular site, SnapChat, launched their IPO in 2017, but the company actually started in 2011. It’s been over seven years since something new and hot has launched in the social media world, which, when you think about it, is centuries as far as technology is concerned. At some point in the next year, expect to see a new form of social media pop up. It might be something that allows users to create and share videos, but it might be something else altogether. In fact, when you consider the fact that technology and trends seem to be cyclical, this new form of social media might just be text based. Maybe something based off of the roots of Twitter?

There Will Be an Increase in User-Generated Content

Essentially, social media is user-generated content. This is nothing new. The main difference between it and the overall user-generated content trend is the ways in which this information is used. For example, you’ll see more national ad campaigns created by global companies that ask their fans to send in pictures and videos to be used in their commercials. While some of these campaigns might be competitions, it might be something as simple as “use this hashtag” and we might use your post. Since everyone wants their moment in the sun – even if that “moment” is more along the lines of a few seconds – there will be thousands of submissions. This is something that will definitely gain more of a foothold in 2022. Brands are realizing that they can utilize the content produced by their fans for their own gain, in a way.

Why do you need a digital marketing strategy?

glen@clickthrough.co.nz (Glen Maguire) — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:09:11 GMT

A digital marketing strategy helps you choose what NOT to do.

You simply don’t have the resources to do everything well, trade offs have to happen. A digital marketing strategy helps you make the best possible choices, things you must do and, more importantly, things you should not do.

So how do you develop a digital marketing strategy?

Ultimately, we recommend you employ a specialist digital marketing strategist to facilitate this process, as they will help you see the wood for the trees. However, if you decide to create a plan yourself then we recommend you follow the following four step framework.

Step 1: set SMaRT goals

The purpose of the goal-setting phase is establish the three year, annual and quarterly digital marketing goals for your business. Your goals ultimately guide decisions going forward, such as which resources and tactics are required, in priority order, to achieve your goals.

Your digital marketing goals need to be SMaRT. By SMaRT, we mean goals that are:

specific
measurable
realistic
time stamped

Handy Tip: Ensure your digital marketing goals connect with the overall goals of your business or your digital strategy will become directionless.

Step 2: strategic planning

Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to design a strategic plan that, once implemented, will enable your digital marketing goals. As mentioned, ensure at all times your goals and digital marketing plan connects with the overall strategy of your business.

We typically divide the strategic planning phase into three parts: evaluation, creation and implementation. Let’s look briefly at these two parts.

a) Evaluation

Start by conducting a situation analysis of your market, an analysis of the internal and external factors that may impact or enable your goals. Then feed the key findings into a SWOT analysis, that lists the inherent Strengths and Weaknesses of your business and external Opportunities and Threats that may impact your digital marketing strategy.

Your SWOT analysis can take between a few hours and hundreds of hours to formulate. Either way, it’s vital and needs to be done. You can do it yourself, or hire an expert digital marketing strategist to facilitate this process.

b) Creation

It’s now time to create a strategy that plays to your strengths and identifies external resources that need to be acquired to achieve your goals. Your strategic plan needs to present factors such as the following:

how your digital strategy positions your business in the market
what activities, in priority order you need to undertake to achieve your digital marketing goals e.g. social media marketing, SEO
how you will measure the progress of your digital plan
contingencies

c) Implementation

The successful implementation of your strategic plan is critical – getting it wrong is very wasteful. Ensure all your activities have goals that directly connect with the overall strategic goals of your plan and that each activity is ranked in priority order. Ranking your activities helps you understand where to prioritize your time – as a general rule of thumb, priority activities should get the most focus.

Focus on the rocks, not the sand

Watch the video below. We like to use the rocks, pebbles and sand analogy to highlight the importance of focusing your resources on the activities that will have the biggest impact on your goals (the rocks), rather than getting distracted by less important matters (the pebbles and sand).

Also bear in mind the implementation of a digital marketing plan is dynamic – digital marketing changes constantly! So be ready to adjust your plan and re-prioritize your activities if something is not working or if a new opportunity is presented.

Finally, put in place user friendly processes and the right organisation structure to enable your strategy.

Handy Tip

Mechanistic structures tend to struggle most with digital, whereas flatter structures that enable information flow, tend to work better.

Step 3: evaluation

As mentioned, your digital marketing strategy needs SMaRT goals that can be measured regularly.

You also need to setup an analytics tracking system that monitors the performance of your digital strategy against it’s goals. This allows you to review what is working and not working and make adjustments. You also need to be monitoring internal and external issues that may impact your plan e.g. new market entrants, changes in government policy, economic conditions, staff churn.

If you discover your digital marketing strategy is under performing, then take immediate action.

Handy Tip: Spend time understanding what is working as it may well help you improve the performance across other activities.

Step 4: training and coaching

Digital marketing is a fast moving discipline that is constantly changing e.g. Facebook and Google often change their offering. The successful implementing of your digital marketing strategy, even when outsourced, requires constant focus and expertise.

We strongly recommend you hire a specialist company to train and coach you in digital marketing best practices. They can also provide you with objective advice and keep you up to speed with the latest changes.

Handy Tip: Your digital marketing strategy needs to identify which skills you want to have in-house and those skills you want to outsource.

Strategy pitfalls to avoid

glen@clickthrough.co.nz (Glen Maguire) — Thu, 05 May 2022 01:04:06 GMT

Pitfalls to avoid when creating your digital strategy

Over the past 20 years I have been involved in thousands of amazing online and digital marketing strategies, spanning many countries, companies and budgets of all sizes. These experiences allowed me to observe first hand what works and, more importantly, what not to do when developing and implementing an online or digital marketing strategy.

Here are my top pitfalls to avoid when designing and implementing your digital marketing strategy.

Pitfall 1: lack of strategic connection

Clients tend to be quite good at setting their online or digital marketing (DM) goals. Though less good at ensuring their DM goals connect with their overall company strategy.

For example, if a key goal of your company is to “grow sales revenue for X shoes in the Australian market by 25% in 2020” then your digital goals should compliment this objective, rather than go off on a tangent.

Too often we find digital marketing strategies are set in isolation, rather than cascading off the overall strategy of a company. Why does this happen?

digital gets treated as a low impact / low priority tactic, so lacks a senior internal sponsor

digital marketing is perceived as different to other strategic activities

digital is regarded as too complex to comprehend, so ignored

digital has no clear goals, do lacks direction

internal cynicism towards digital derails the program

Unfortunately, a digital marketing strategy that lacks strategic purpose within the organisation will ultimately run out of oxygen.

Pitfall 2: too much focus on execution

Linked to pitfall #1, most clients we work with have an array of digital marketing (DM) activities being executed at any given time. However, whilst these activities are essentially a plan of action, they tend to be random, seldom connecting back to a clear DM strategy. The strategy gets quickly designed annually, then the energy for the remainder of the year goes into execution with a few quarterly meetings to adjust budgets.

In my experience, the problems with implementation tend to stem from rushing the strategy, not doing it properly. And if the strategy is not done properly then the activities will lack purpose and not deliver their promised return on investment (ROI).

The secret to success is to get your DM strategy designed properly whilst not letting it monopolize all your time – there has to be a healthy balance between strategy and implementation. As they say, implementation without a strategy is the noise before defeat and strategy without execution is hallucination! We recommend you outsource the facilitation of your DM strategy to an expert strategist that also hosts regular review performance review and recommendation sessions.

Having an expert facilitate your strategic planning process has many benefits such as:

helping you focus on business as usual (BAU) tasks whilst he gets on with designing the strategy

providing an objective framework and approach

keeping you focused on the strategy, not just execution

providing expert advice

Pitfall 3: lack of digital marketing expertise

There is a critical shortage of good digital marketing talent in New Zealand and globally. This means that inexperienced staff are often left to manage activities when they do not have the required experience. This creates problems such as:

staff churn, when employees become too stretched and feel out of their depth
outsourced digital activity not being managed properly
inefficient execution
junior managers being promoted too early
Ultimately, your digital marketing plan needs to highlight what resources will be required to enable the plan. However, we suggest putting in place contingency plans that take into account factors such as:
the growing cost of recruitment
churn
outsourcing vs doing it in-house
the cost of training

Pitfall 4: analysis-paralysis

Almost everything in digital can be tracked and measured. This is mostly true though be sure to include the cost of setting up a tracking system in your planning budget, as some activities cost a fair amount to track properly so may not be worth the effort.

Also, try and have one system that tracks the entire DM strategy, as managing multiple analytics systems can become too complex.

Finally, be careful of ‘analysis-paralysis’ – set SMART digital marketing goals, then setup a customized tracking system that clearly highlights how each activity directly contributes to your DM goals. Then educate your team how to read, analyse and interpret reports or get an analytics trainer to show you the ropes.

Pitfall 5: return on investment (ROI)

Demonstrating ROI is critical to guiding your decisions, such as where to invest your resources.

Linked to pitfall 4, we are often approached by clients that want us to help them develop a better return on investment (ROI) from their digital marketing strategy. We start by assessing these two questions:

Has a proper strategic planning and implementation framework been followed?

How is ROI being tracked?

You can read more about point 1 above in our strategic planning blog.

Here are a few pitfalls to avoid in order to track your DM return on investment more effectively:

Don’t track your digital marketing activity in isolation (e.g. enquiries from Google Ads). Rather track the performance of your digital marketing activity as an integral part of all your marketing activity. Understand that your customers don’t live in a digital world only, they may hear your ad on the radio, then search via Google on their phone before contacting your sales centre, then receive a follow up email that ultimately prompts them to go to your store and buy something.

Don’t just look at generic goals like “number of enquiries” or “size of email database”. Rather narrow your goals to focus on quality, not just quantity e.g. “number of enquiries generated by x segment”. This may take a bit more effort to determine though is a very worthwhile habit to get into.
Ensure your digital marketing KPIs connect directly to your goals and the overall strategy of your business (see pitfall 1). There’s no point celebrating the success of your digital activity if it does not contribute directly to the overarching goals of your business.

We hope you enjoyed this article and that you got some benefit from the five pitfalls we outlined. Don’t hesitate to email me on Hello@nz.digital for further information on how we can help your business develop and implement a digital marketing strategy that drive effective ROI.