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Are GenAI and content marketing compatible? Adobe organised a round table discussion on that subject during their Experience Makers conference in Paris in early November 2023. The debate brought together a few digital experts. During this discussion, I mentioned that there were limitations to GenAI images and that they weren’t technical. Others contended that it was just a matter of prompt engineering. Writing a good prompt may be recommended, but the limitations of GenAI image generation tools extend far beyond that. Such is my point, which I substantiate in this piece with insights derived from a one-year practice of such software within the administration of this very website.
GenAI and Content Marketing Lessons From ExperienceThis debate on GenAI and content marketing was an opportunity to take hindsight about images and their power to illustrate and differentiate our brands. Here we look at how generative AI was used to illustrate the Visionary Marketing news website.This debate was organised by Adobe at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. It was about generative AI and content marketing. This discussion turned out to be an opportunity for me to take stock of a year’s experience of using generative AI to generate images for Visionary Marketing.
GenAI and Content: Excitement and Second ThoughtsAt first, as we discovered Midjourney and its clones, we were all very excited. And we did have fun producing images for all intents and purposes. Then came a moment when hindsight was required. It was high time to take a step back from it all to ponder over the use of GenAI. As I explained during the debate, it reminded me of the HDR filters when I started using Adobe Lightroom 12 years ago. At first, one used them every day. Five years later, in hindsight, one removed them all.
Our roundtable on GenAI and content marketing: From left to right: Caroline Mignaux, Yann Gourvennec, Frédéric Cavazza, Adobe’s Lionel Lemoine and Fabrice Frossard.Here are a few thoughts on the use of these tools which, in my view, are more than ever worth investigating. Yet, one should look at them in the context of the widespread use of GenAI tools by both Web users and the Media.
- On the one hand, what was initially pleasurable, at a time we felt like trailblazers, ends up being repetitive and bland. We come across too many of these pictures in the Media and on the Internet. Some of my readers pointed this out to me. My co-author even says he can’t understand why I don’t make more use of my own photos, whereas I am a photographer. He’s both right and wrong, and I’ll come back to that later. In the meantime, I insist that the featured image of this post is an original (and deliberately cryptic) photo by yours truly.
- On the other hand, these images, often produced in haste, end up looking the same. They are also often rather garish, with saturated colours that are very characteristic of virtual images. They’re also rather banal and sometimes vulgar. I realise that this is a personal and biased statement. After all, though, when it comes to images, there is no such thing as objectivity.
- There’s also a general trend towards ‘heroic fantasy’ type images, a genre I have nothing against, even though it’s not to my liking. But this does seem to add fuel to the fire about the trivialisation of images. We can add to this sci-fi-like illustrations, which are sometimes quite successful, but also confer a déjà vu aspect to your content.
- Lastly, a feeling of unease about images that are very realistic but at the same time are not. It’s a phenomenon known in the digital world as the Uncanny Valley. We’ll deal with this topic on this site in more detail at a later date.
Using GenAI: Three Main StagesIn fact, at Visionary Marketing, we went through several stages. In the beginning, we only used images from my personal stock. All the Visionary Marketing content writers had to go through this limited stock of images. These photos are personal, and therefore unique. Yet a feeling of déjà vu soon set in. And above all, we were often unable to describe certain concepts using those images. It makes sense since this stock doesn’t include all the possible metaphors one would require.
Fishing for the right picture amongst 12,000 of them isn’t always a piece of cake. Not to mention the crafting of the right captions, a real challenge that was!A second step was to add stock photos to these images. This made it possible for us to get away from the limitation syndrome. However, it also made our illustrations look more commonplace. This could have been damaging in some cases. Fortunately, we were using Jumpstory and this image data bank was rather unusual. Thus, we avoided this pitfall to some extent. It was good while it lasted, for Jumpstory went under this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if GenAI killed it there and then.
Jumpstory images were sometimes quite good. But you had to look hard to find the right one. Anyway, it sadly went under in 2024.Over the Past Year, Generative AIAnd since last year, this is the third stage, we’ve been making more intensive use of generative AI to produce illustrations for our articles. In all cases, whether it be the first, second or third stage, we’ve come to the same conclusion: using the same image source all the time leads to a feeling of repetition, fatigue and trivialisation.
So you have to mix the different types of images and above all, as I explained during the Adobe debate, you have to be able to master the prompt so as to produce illustrations that are different from what we usually see on the Net.
The more abstract the prompt, the more eye-catching and different the image produced. That’s what makes you stand out from the crowd. This is rather counter-intuitive. Indeed, most self-proclaimed AI pundits on LinkedIn and elsewhere will be adamant that such prompts should be banned. What life has taught me, though, is that when the crowd produces A, producing non-A will make your work — and yourself — more distinctive.
Besides, advanced mastery of all the tools, generative AI, Photoshop, Illustrator, or all of them combined, means that you can retain total control over your images. Thus, you should be able to produce less commonplace pictures or illustrations for your content.
Last but not least, don’t hesitate to revisit your content to change illustrations that, with hindsight, seem too trivial, too stereotyped or too garish. Unless, of course, you like it that way.
More than ever, marketing is not about getting things done. It’s about getting things done differently. Whether you resort to GenAI or not, you should always bear that in mind. The post GENAI and Content Marketing: Learning from experience appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.
Whether it’s music and AI, or AI and what have you, or even technology altogether, at Visionary Marketing we like to look back in time. A few days ago, while doing the housekeeping of some of our 3,000 articles, we rediscovered this post by Mia Tawile written in July 2016. Eight years is the equivalent of 8 dog years on the Internet, to use that hackneyed motto from the early days of the Internet. That is to say, 64 years and 3 months. And at a time when Suno is sending shivers down the spines of every musician on the planet wondering what will become of them, there are two lessons to be learned from this post that demonstrate that we don’t understand the history of innovation as Scott Berkin would have it.
Music and AI: Back to the FutureWhat better than an image, reminiscent of the 1970s for this evocation of the first attempts to compose music with computers – music and AI nonetheless take us down a much more tortuous path. A real philosophical, artistic and economic challenge for creators – image produced with Midjourney and retouched and enhanced with Photoshop and Firefly Beta.“Hello dear human friends” is the introduction to this striking video by Laurent Couson, a French composer who analysed the capabilities of Suno, a popular application that lets you compose music of almost any style in 30 seconds. “Before, you had to learn music theory, orchestration and instrumentation – at the very least, ten years of practice – to become an accomplished composer,” he continues. He could have added, “Provided you’re gifted.”
900,000 Pieces of Music per DayThis piece of software,” he went on, “generates 900,000 pieces of music a day, while no well-known composer, not even the most prolific, has 1,000 in his catalogue”. And it’s true that the results are amazing.
900 000 pieces of music being produced every day. Imagine that! Midjourney dit it for you (with our help)We went there too, and as rumours of the death of cyberspace grow louder, we decided to launch Suno on this theme with a song entitled: The Dying Cyberspace.
[Verse]
In a world of bytes and tangled wires
The cyberspace that once glowed with fire (with fire)
Now fades away, its brilliance lost
As darkness falls, at such a cost[Verse 2]
Once a realm of endless possibility
Now echoes silence and fragility
The Internet, a dying art
Fading now, tearing us apart[Chorus]
Oh, the dying cyberspace (cyberspace)
Once so full of life and grace (life and grace)
Now it withers, slowly dies (slowly dies)
Leaving us with empty skies (empty skies)
https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/the-dying-cyberspace.mp3A very basic promptAdmittedly, the lyrics are a bit cheesy, but considering the time spent (less than a minute), the result is more than satisfactory. All the more so as the prompt used was really minimal.
A song on the death of the cyberspace, neoclassical
The possibilities are endless with this tool, you can even invent Russian songs in Post-Punk mode. And if you ask Deepl to translate the lyrics, you’ll realise that they’re pretty creative. Maybe not on par with Pushkin, but certainly well above the average of what you hear on Spotify (well I can only surmise because I subscribe to Qobuz).
An enamelled vessel
A window, a bedside table, a bed
It is difficult and uncomfortable to live
But it’s more comfortable to dieЭмалированное судно
Окошко, тумбочка, кровать, –
Жить тяжело и неуютно
Зато уютно умирать
(I can’t guarantee the translation from Russian into English, so I’ll take deepl’s word for it).
According to popular belief, music is linked to mathematics, even if this interconnection is not completely proven. As a result, it’s not totally astounding that a computer manages to do this. In fact, computers have been making music since PopCorn (1969). Note that the dancers are slightly out of sync, no doubt baffled by the technological prowess of the end of that decade.
The First Computer-Generated songI remember well, when I was 7, the announcement of this song on the radio: the first song produced by a computer. It was extraordinary, and way ahead of its time.
But AI in music also raises a whole range of questions:
- First of all, the machine has virtually every style at its disposal. You can ask it to imitate one without having to master it and especially not by working for 10 years. This raises the question of the value of creation. How much could we pay Mr Couson to produce a song like this? We could even go further, and get Suno – or its clones – to compose a symphony or an opera. It might have to go through a few steps, but it’s a lot less tiring than inventing Einstein on the Beach or Die Zauberflöte from scratch.
- And the associated question: if there is no longer any value in creating music, how many musicians will still have a go at it?
- There also arises, and this is the third point, the question of creation itself. If it’s so easy to create music that isn’t all that bad, aren’t we in danger of going round in circles? Also, can we innovate, in content and form, if the basis is a collection of existing music data? Won’t the novelty wear off? Some would say that this is already the case to some extent, I suppose, but this will just finish the job.
- The training data for these programmes is based on the work of hundreds of thousands of musicians over hundreds of years. It is – as with Midjourney – the plunder of our cultural heritage that raises the question of the protection of intellectual property. Or rather, it might make such IP redundant, unless legal proceedings are successful (but justice is slow, and AIs are fast).
- It also raises the bar for tomorrow’s content creators who will want to show their creativity and beat the machines. This will really demand a lot of imagination.
Democratisation or the end of creation?When everyone becomes a creator, does that mean that creation no longer exists or, on the contrary, that everyone has become a true creator, even without talent? And is pressing a button and waiting for a program to produce a result a creative act? Is “prompting” sufficient? Tomorrow, will humans become the blue collars of artistic creation whereas machines produce all the thinking?
There are many questions raised. And the undeniable fun that one can have when dealing with this type of programme should not allow us to forget about them. What’s more, it’s a guilty pleasure. If we are endowed with a conscience, it’s hard not to feel, as with tools like Midjourney, one feels as if one were faking artistry.
IA and music: a long-standing innovationFrom Gershon Kingsley to Wally Badarou (who was composing on the Mac in the early 90s) to Klaus Schultze (and his fabulous Ludwig Zwei von Bayern with his fully synthesised string orchestra in 1978) or Zoe Keating, who records and plays her sound loops thanks to a pedal connected to a MacBook Pro, artists’ experiments with computer music have been numerous.
But producing music with AI goes a step further. However, here too, these attempts are not recent. Digging around on this site, we found an old article by Mia Tawile written in 2016 about a Google project named Magenta and of which there are still a few scattered traces on the Internet.
Interesting ExamplesThere’s also some pretty interesting music here, provided by artificial intelligence, the fruit of Google’s early work in this area. The results are promising but without a future, like so many aborted attempts by this Internet giant, which seems so focused on its business model. So much so that it may be suffering from the innovator’s dilemma.
https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/mix.wavExample of chamber music produced by Magenta. Not quite Haydn, but it sounds a bit like it (Midi style).
My optimism leads me to believe that we will still need Mr Couson and his colleagues. If only to host concerts. Of course, in these artistic performances, it would not be surprising to find a few computers and loops invented by AI. In this respect, these artists will no doubt be the worthy heirs of the pioneers I mentioned earlier. After all, didn’t musicians like Wim Mertens and Philip Glass imitate repetitive computer music with real instruments? And more recently, haven’t Nils Frahm, Nicklas Paschburg or Grandbrothers included these technologies in their music to the point we end up forgetting about them?
Creators always find a way of circumventing issues like these.
The 2016 original post on AI and MusicBelow is Mia’s post from 2016. My two cents about this with nearly 10 years of hindsight.
- Innovation tales time. And no, it won’t happen overnight (lesson number one);
- Google missed the boat (again I daresay), even though the transformer researches were working for Alphabet at the time.
Enjoy the AI Time Machine.
We have all heard of Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven, but not all of us know Google’s artificial intelligence and its ability to generate music with AI. Yes, a robot has joined the club. And yes, it plays music. (If the song We are the robots by Kraftwerk is playing in your head right now, it is completely normal, don’t worry.) This new robot/artist that creates a lot of debate is called Magenta. You might have seen in my previous article about Facebook’s artificial intelligence how machine learning works on images and videos. This article will describe a concept that is similar yet different. The main question here is: Can you use machine learning to create a music piece? That’s exactly what I will touch on in this article.
Google’s Magenta and its music bandAI music is on Google’s agendaMagenta is Google’s Brain Team project that answers the question mentioned above: Can we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to play music?
Two goalsGoogle developed this project with two goals. The first is to explore machine learning even deeper and take this concept further. Indeed, this type of artificial intelligence has been used to recognise pictures, speech, and translate content. Facebook too has a similar algorithm that has been used to help blind people hear their newsfeed. This feature is called Facebook Read.
No plans yet for Facebook on the AI music front but they are using AI so that blindAI music according to Mia TawileFor Artificial Intelligence researchers, the sky is the limit. They always look for new features to develop, and new ways of developing machines.
So why not create algorithms and teach machines how to play the piano, for example? Robots are good students. Indeed, blind tests have shown that people have been fooled by machines: Peter Russel, who is a musicologist, listened to a music piece played by Iamus, a classical music robot.
Surprisingly enough, he did not know it was created by a machine.
The second objective of this Magenta project is to build a community with people interested in music and technology such as artists, coders and researchers.
Google is inviting people who are interested in this project to join the community, follow the progress. Actually, a part of the project is accessible to the general public, and is waiting for people’s input.
AI Music: Beyond LimitsA lot of people are scared of such technological growth. Well, they might be right. When machines start recognising pictures, and videos, and describe them to us, it means that technology is taking these robots beyond their limits.
The good news is that there is a use to this technology. It is not only developed to win a challenge, or defy the limits of research and technology. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook uses artificial intelligence it to expand its community, without excluding anyone.
When it comes to artificial music, some applications identified this new trend and working around it. There’s a mobile app called @life that plays music according to your state of mind and your mood. You might ask yourself, how does a machine know what one is feeling in real time? The machine gathers information about the person’s behaviour or their location and analyses their mood. Some data analysts use Instagram filters for example, to identify the user’s mood: dark colours reflect sadness, whereas bright colours represent happiness. This music mobile application is said to help people in pain by distracting them and using the popular benefits and virtues of music.
Maybe machines will help us create new music genres, by combining different algorithms. Or maybe this new invention will help people manage their stress or heal their pain, music being the cure to everything! We can see the bud of that technology today with Spotify that can detect your running speed and adapt the music type and tempo.
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In recent years, Shopify has been leading the e-commerce game with a market share of 10.32% as of 2024. Consequently, they have embraced the ever-evolving technological landscape. From automated product descriptions to chatbot customer support, Shopify has undergone an AI integration. As AI begins to merge itself into all aspects of our shopping, one can’t help but wonder… who really is in charge?
Shopify and AI: Who’s Really in Control of Your Cart?Shopify and AI: who is in control of your cart?Shopify, the Ecommerce World Leader Goes All in on AIE-commerce is on the rise and it is no wonder that Shopify constantly lands at the forefront of the industry. As one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world, Shopify has grown a loyal customer base of nearly 4.8 million live sites and has websites in over 175 different countries. Additionally, as of 2024, 26% of all e-commerce stores are Shopify sites. Shopify makes it incredibly easy to run an e-commerce business. Its customizable themes, built-in and third-party payment systems, and its support of individual store SEO are a few of the reasons customers continually stick with the company.
AI in ShopifyNot only is Shopify leading in the world of e-commerce, but with the integration of AI, Shopify has an unstoppable and unique competitive advantage. As most people know, Shopify’s platform has everything a merchant would need to start a store. However, the company did not develop everything themselves. Instead, it has created a large developer marketplace within the site. This is great news for AI software developers who want to get their skin in the game on one of the worlds largest platforms. In the summer of 2023, Shopify introduced over 100 new AI powered features into its site, including Shopify Magic and Sidekick. Shopify Magic writes product descriptions, chats with customers, optimizes product images, and generates emails that turn into FAQ pages. With Sidekick, merchants can better understand their sales, as AI explains any trends and extracts insights and data from sales and website traffic.
The Implication of AI IntegrationAI is integrating itself into every aspect of our lives. At this point, I don’t know up from down and most of us can’t decipher between the real or the fake. It’s frankly exhausting. In fact, most of the sites I used to research this topic were generated by AI! It’s not surprising to me that one of largest e-commerce platform in the world is using AI in any way it can. What’s hard to grasp is the lack of authenticity that is taking place.
Think about it; Merchants are using Shopify to sell their goods, then generative AI is writing the product descriptions and enhancing the product photos. Then with AI programs like Shopify Magic, you are being fed advertisements based on data and sales trends. We are being sold something from an AI generated program. Let’s assume you have an issue with the product you were sold. Chances are you will be greeted by an AI chatbot, to solve all of your problems. Not only could this jeopardise customer service quality, but this could also entail a severe lack of empathy or human understanding.
On a totally different level, Generative AI is also being used to create fraudulent e-commerce websites. This is something I will discuss in a future blog post.
Are We Really In Control?So that begs the question, are we really in control of our cart? I venture to say that we aren’t anymore. The AI programs within Shopify are generating the content and targeting us based on data. This is not a revolutionary idea, but where does it stop? All sense of control is essentially gone when it comes to the online shopping experience.
I do acknowledge that AI is a great tool. Tool being the key word. But here, we are entering the fourth dimension. The entire online shopping process is being taken over by AI. And with e-commerce growing at the current pace, there is no escape.
Yet, the relevant role for AI would be to assist and enhance human efforts, not replace them entirely.
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So, what are the emerging employment trends in Europe? This week we got to talk back and forth with Jooble’s Talent Enablement Director, Anastasiia Khyzhniak. We were able to gain … Read on
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With technology moving forward, more and more jobs are changing. Along with changing jobs, we as marketers need to change as well. With generative AI on the rise, being able … Read on
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With our recent piece on Roblox, I thought it would be a good idea to take a step back and discuss marketing and the video game industry. With technology constantly … Read on
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Phishing is a common practice, and businesses are not the last victims. It’s common to receive fraudulent messages in our mailboxes. These invite you to settle a non-existent unpaid bill, … Read on
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Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? We met with Jamie Brighton, Adobe’s Product Marketing Director at the Adobe Summit 2023*, and his answer is a blatant No! Jamie sees AI … Read on
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With the release of Apple’s new Vision Pro AR-VR headset on the horizon, many companies are starting to take note. Roblox, The online gaming platform and game creation system, stands … Read on
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Marketing is going through a major evolution, our jobs are changing, and marketing professionals will have to seriously ramp up their skills. After a 4-year hiatus, we had the pleasure … Read on
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The IT crisis is having serious consequences, and not just in Silicon Valley. But is it an IT crisis or a lack of innovation? For Alain Lefebvre, author of “La … Read on
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Photoshop Beta now includes Adobe Firefly AI art functions. These enable image manipulation by using artificial intelligence. Image-generating AIs have been at the center of discussions for quite some time, … Read on
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Ever heard of cookie pop-ups? It’s true that it’s hard to escape them. Following the 2011 Cookie Directive, all European sites have finally complied. But rather than deleting cookies, they … Read on
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It’s this time of year, Adobe summit 2023 is taking place on June, 8–9 in London and Visionary Marketing will be there as #adobepartner (disclosure). After a few years where the event only took place online (check our coverage here). It’s now a hybrid event, which is taking place both online and offline. As we are packing our bags for the event, complete with gimbal, digital camera, iPad, iPhone and personal computer, we are thrilled to be sharing some of the things we are most excited about this event.*
Making Preparations for Adobe Summit 2023Adobe Summit 2023 – online* Disclosure, Adobe is a client of Visionary Marketing
Live reporting from London on the Adobe Summit 2023This year, we will be reporting live from the event in London with social media and video snippets. They will be posted online on Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms. And, of course, this very blog. You should therefore expect some live reports from us online on the summit at our dedicated Adobe page at vismktg.info/adobe23.
The Adobe Summit 2023 Event PageWe are very excited at Visionary Marketing. This is one of these moments when we are going to be able to talk and exchange with some of the most brilliant people in the industry. There’s no way one can avoid it. This year is going to be the year of generative AI. And Adobe is also a major player in this arena. A lot more cautious than others, but the headway shown in the past few weeks have been amazing.
Content Production in Businesses, a New PerspectiveHere, I’m talking about the use of these new technologies with regards to contact production. Tomorrow, I will be publishing a demonstration of Adobe firefly and the firefly integration within Photoshop/These are the most stunning things that I have ever seen in the past 10 years.
These tools aren’t mere features within the existing Adobe suite. They give more creative powers to marketers who want to spruce up their content with relevant, impactful images.
The use of generative AI to produce images has already impacted content production too, in a big way. And businesses aren’t immune to it. If we look at it positively, we believe that generative AI for image production, when used positively, responsively and creatively, can be a means for marketers to create more impactful and exciting experiences for their customers.
At Visionary Marketing, we have already resorted to various AI generated image tools to populate our blogs in the past few months. There are limitations to this, though. Copyright Issues to start with.
A Few Issues and the Way ForwardGenerative AI is using pre-training (hence the PT in chatG”PT’) and such training takes place from a given database (and very soon the database which is the current copy of the web retained by search engines). Even though those images are not exactly copied from the original, they are indeed inspired by them. This has triggered many issues from a legal point of view, and a couple of lawsuits as well.
Mes points — a priori — les plus intéressantsAdobe has followed a different route. The company released a new application within its creative suite which is now currently available as a beta version. It’s called firefly and those who want to try it can go to firefly.adobe.com.
The Adobe Summit 2023 will be a great way for us to rub shoulders with those who shape our industry and the future of our marketing teams and the overall profession. Content creation will be challenged in an incredible way now and in the years to come. If we embrace these technologies and use them responsibly, there will be huge opportunities for us, for creativity, for reinventing content marketing.
This event is a great opportunity for us to understand what trends are in the works in the marketing industry.
We will namely be talking with Luc Damann, President of EMEA and Jamie Brighton, Director of product marketing digital experience and we will be attending many live sessions.
We will attend press meetings as well regarding the ‘immersive retail experience’. Last but not least, the Adobe sneaks is a very exciting part of the Adobe Summit. Stay tuned and register now for this amazing event.
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Are digital experiences getting in the way of customers’ experiences? We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joseph Pine, author of the article titled ‘Are Your Digital Tools Wasting Your Customers’ Time?” Having previously interviewed him, we knew he had an interesting perspective on the matter. He takes a close look at the way in which the economy is working with technology in order to change the way people interact with businesses. In his mind, digital experiences go way beyond the interaction of humans and screens. He also debunks myths regarding customer experience and how it is not always better to go digital. In fact, companies often try to eradicate human interaction thinking it will be beneficial when it actually does the opposite.
Is digital wasting your customer’s time?
Joe Pine is the author of ‘Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want’ as well as multiple other books and he talked to us here at Visionary Marketing about digital experiences.
No one wants digital tools that waste their time. What everyone wants are digital experiences that offer time well spent
One of the key things to understanding the nature of life is that the most precious resource on the planet is the time of individual human beings.
As a consequence, the worst thing companies can do is waste their customers’ time. Yet, that’s what companies do all the time by asking for things that they already know. Businesses make customers go through procedures that they have defined as important, but that aren’t really to the end user.
‘We increasingly want our time to be saved around any type of service, digital or not, so that we can spend that time on experiences that we value,’ Joe said.
Digital experiences don’t always equate to good experiences: people are frustrated when their digital experience is not up to their standards. Image generated by MidjourneyDigital Experiences Don’t Always Mean Good ExperiencesPeople usually assume that going digital is going to improve customer experience. However, that is not always the case. A lot of great experiences come from interactions with other people. Indeed, many companies try to eliminate such exchanges by going fully digital without realising that people want to interact and connect with companies and vice versa. Some of these reasons are valid, but more often than not, it’s wasted time because when we try to artificially create these moments they get in the way of daily communication.
Why are companies doing this? What are they doing wrong?A key impetus for it is that it’s going to save companies a lot of money so that we don’t need customer-facing people. Instead of recognising again, that’s where much of the value comes in. When consumers go digital, it doesn’t mean they want less human interaction. In fact, it is the other way around, they want faster and better human interactions.
Moreover, such businesses are very product-centric instead of customer-centric. Instead of understanding the customer and what it is that they’re trying to accomplish right now, they want the customer to follow the journey that they’ve laid out in advance. Then again, that’s not the journey that the customer wants to follow. ‘Perhaps this is happening because businesses have too few people who care about gaining customer insight,’ Joe assumed.
Myth: Building frictionless digital experiences will increase engagement
People engage when smart tools understand them, but what is a smart tool?A smart tool is one that is using data. The data that it learns from you individually to be able to address your needs. So it’s a matter of sensing and responding. Then such a smart tool can understand what it is that customers want at this moment and it can act accordingly. For instance, think of smart thermostats that learn when you get up, or what kind of temperature the home owner likes in the winter.
Myth: Creating more ‘moments’ for customers will lead to more value. In fact, ‘moments’ are fairly product-centric. They’re what we want our customers to do and how we want them to engage with us. Whereas ‘modes’, are what the individual customer wants to accomplish.
What is digital context?
Digital context is just a great term that my co-author of the HBR article, Dave Naughton, came up with. The digital context is really about understanding, ‘What it is that I’m trying to accomplish right now, and it requires access to all of the digital data that is out there that will explain what mode a business can use to enhance its experience in banking or e-shopping, for instance’. The problem with most businesses is that they have no data. And they can’t provide any experience without digital context.
A good example is my client Carnival Corporation. They make good use of digital contexts. The cruise company created a digital tool called the Ocean Medallion. A device that allows them to understand the digital context that you are in while on the cruise ship. They can recognise every individual. Every employee has a tablet with them that when you get close, your device pops your picture and information up so they can greet you by name. It also has past interactions, your itinerary, what you’re trying to do, where you’re going and so forth.
Smart Digital Experiences vs Genius Digital ExperiencesGenius experiences are the ones that understand everything that’s going on. They understand the ecosystem and grab all that digital context to anticipate what mode you’re in and then vastly multiply the number of jobs that it can do for you. That means they customise and individualise to you as well as being responsive.
For example, Alexa or Google Home. They have access to all your information. The genius level is, for instance, when you say ‘Alexa play some music’ they will play music based on what mood you’re in, who you’re with, what time of day it is, what you’re doing and trying to accomplish because it understands all of that.
‘Alexa or Google Home can reach genius level because they have access to all our information’ [Image Google Chrome dinosaur by Jumpstory]Although, when we reach these genius experiences, there is always the possibility that people will start to find it as too much and even a little ‘creepy’. For this reason, it is important to resort to genius experiences only when the person wants and how the person wants it done. As opposed to bringing in things that maybe it should not know about the customer until you opt in. At one point it will be necessary to stop and ask yourself whether you still want to continue or make changes. Machines are taking over and it is evident more and more each day, which is why is important to work with them and craft better digital experiences for ourselves as well as our customers.More on Joe Pine with Visionary Marketing: Experience Economy: Great Experiences Begin with Great Service
Amazon’s Author Joe Pine’s Page here
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Could one reduce the carbon footprint of digital advertising? When it comes to carbon emissions, digital is often criticised, and programmatic advertising in particular. How big is that footprint? And how could one minimise it? How are advertisers reacting? A recent Scope3 study sheds light on this subject. It shows that the digital marketing industry can also contribute to the common effort. This is what Fabien Omont, a representative of Adform, a Danish provider of solutions for digital advertising, told me when I interviewed him.
Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Digital Advertising Isn’t Mission ImpossibleScope3 has just released a 2023 brief that makes the case for a more responsible digital advertising industry. The link to the study is at the end of the post.
Disclosure: This podcast was produced in partnership with Ecran mobile on behalf of Adform, an Adtech provider. We have written this post with our usual objective of independence and authenticity.
Fabien Omont is Product Marketing Director at Adform. The Adtech company works with Scope3. The latter has just published its report on the State of Sustainable Advertising. By their own admission, Scope3 is ‘the only company to measure end-to-end emissions from across the media and advertising supply chain’.
The Carbon Footprint of Digital AdvertisingScope3 has estimated the CO2 emissions from programmatic advertising at 215,000 metric tonnes of CO2 per month in 5 countries alone. These are Australia, France, Great Britain, Germany and the USA.
The US Alone Accounts for Nearly Half of These Emissions
Scope3’s measurement of the carbon footprint of digital advertising shows that it emits 215,000 tonnes of CO2 every month in 5 countries (Australia, France, the UK, Germany and the US). This would correspond to the consumption of nearly 24 million gallons of gasoline (91 million litres of petrol) each month. Click the picture to enlarge
In the UK only, each month programmatic advertising emits 30.6k metric tonnes of CO2
‘Digital advertising has become widespread,’ explains Fabien. The Internet amounts to 65.15% of the overall advertising expenditure for a worldwide total of over US$550 billion. This is indeed considerable.
Click to view slideshow.‘But beyond these figures, it is important to understand the main factors behind the carbon footprint of digital advertising,’ Fabien went on.
4 top drivers of digital advertising’s carbon footprint1. Driver number one is the consumption of the terminals that Internet users are resorting to. 2. The second driver is how publishers will distribute content around the world. When a person reads an article, questions arise: where and how was it loaded? How was it distributed through the networks up to the user’s terminal? 3. The third driver is the creative distribution. Has it been optimised and what is its impact on bandwidth usage? Over the years, as bandwidth has improved, the visuals have become bulkier. This has an undeniable ecological knock-on effect. 4. The fourth and final driver is ad selection. This is the process that is put in place for the Internet user to receive an ad.
Advertising Selection Is Singled OutThe ad selection criterion is the number one driver in the carbon footprint of digital ads. This is what the Scope3 report says. Click to enlarge the picture.‘Ad selection definitely is the main driver behind carbon emissions of digital advertising. It weighs a lot more than terminal usage of even media distribution,’ Fabien explained.
60% of the carbon footprint of programmatic advertising is due to ad selection
Programmatic advertising is not only complex, it is also resource intensive. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce this carbon footprint.‘The reality of digital advertising,’ explains Fabien, ‘is that the practice of header bidding has become almost universal amongst publishers.
Header-bidding infographic by SortableMultiplying advertising calls“This is a practice which, to put it simply, consists in increasing the amount of advertising calls to optimise monetisation, i.e. generating double or triple bids, which will inflate the price of the winning bid and therefore make more money in the end.”
This approach is quite commendable from the point of view of monetisation and optimisation of the publisher’s income, Fabien explained, but its impact on carbon footprint is huge.
Advertisers are paying attentionHowever, advertisers are aware of the problem. This is a good sign Fabien Omont said.
Advertisers’ attitudes are changing and that’s good news
“Advertisers are very curious about what’s going on and the initiatives taken by start-ups like Scope3 and other tech players like Adform,” explains Fabien.
“Above all, advertising associations and media agencies have done a fantastic job of raising awareness amongst advertisers.”
In addition, legislation shall be enforced in the near future. The publication of carbon footprint numbers for digital advertising is indeed likely to become a regulatory requirement.
Getting Results Isn’t That Hard“We have developed a solution for optimising the reduction of the carbon footprint of digital advertising,” Fabien Omont went on. “And the good news is that getting some good results is quite easy.”
Carbon emissions from digital advertising can very easily be cut in half
“The range of the impact of advertisers’ carbon footprint is very broad. The most virtuous advertisers will emit 55 grams of CO2 per thousand impressions,” explains Fabien, “the highest threshold, goes up to 4,782 grams.
However, Adform has noticed that the vast majority of publishers are well below these extremes, Fabien said.
Decarbonising programmatic advertising‘If we tackle the top 10% of CO2 emitters, we will soon see a total reduction of 40–50% of carbon emissions due to digital advertising.’
In conclusion, the problem isn’t hopeless. Just by improving practices on the ground, one could achieve satisfactory results.
Important Notice on the Weight of Digital within the World’s Carbon EmissionsIt’s worthy of note that, according to the World Economic Forum, “Studies estimate that digital technologies already contribute between 1.4% to 5.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions”.
Digital technology isn’t therefore responsible for the majority of our carbon footprint, far from that.
It is far less to blame than the usual suspects, namely transportation, the manufacturing industry and agriculture, as well as central heating.
It should also be noted that carbon emissions are the most significant cause of the pollution we are witnessing but its far from being the only one.
In any case, every effort counts. And those made by the digital industry are to be welcomed and encouraged.
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Platform business models facilitate the exchange of goods and services between two or more interdependent groups, often producers and consumers. They are responsible for totally new ways of doing business. In our interview with Benoît Reillier from Launchworks.co, we discuss his book entitled Platform Strategy, from which he derived a cartoon version. In this book he delivers his predictions on the future of platform business. To him, platform business models will not replace all kinds of traditional business. They should inspire rather than scare, as they offer boundless opportunities for mixed business models in the future.
Platform Business Models Today and in the FuturePlatform Business Models, beautifully illustrated by Louise Plantin is also available as a full-fledged book.Understanding Platform Business ModelsAccording to Benoît, some examples of companies that follow the Platform Business model are Airbnb, Uber, Google, and online marketplaces such as eBay, and Amazon. However, as the age of social media progresses, content from companies such as YouTube, TikTok, and other social platforms is now making up a sizeable part of the platform business.
Uber is the epitome of platform business models but there are many more of that ilk.Looking at consumer behaviour, there are different ways platform businesses can be deemed successful. Depending on how they fulfil the different needs and wants of a customer. This includes travel websites like Expedia which make it easier to book an entire trip on one website or others like Tinder when one is looking for a romantic partner.
Benoît explained that platform business might not be seen as a straightforward concept, as it may have multiple definitions.
What makes that kind of business different from other types of businesses is that their organisations are entirely built around a business model that attracts participants, matches them, connects them, and enables them to transact.
Benoît Reillier added, ‘Marketplaces create value by allowing people to be connected.’
Now thanks to Benoît we have a much clearer definition of what Platform business is.
Platform business model means no Value ChainAs depicted in Benoît’s Platform Strategy cartoon opus, platform businesses do not derive their competitive advantage from the quality of their value chain like traditional business ventures.
The business model of platforms is definitely different from that of value chainsThis is because traditional firm dynamics starts with buying material things and adding value to them. An example he gave, is that of a car manufacturer that builds and creates a car out of raw materials or semi-finished goods.
Traditional business models are based on linear processes that are resulting from their internal abilities to turn these manufacturing processes into value for the benefit of their customers.
Platform businesses are entirely different, Benoît Reillier stressed, since they, ‘are merely orchestrating their ecosystems’.
We’ve asked Midjourney to/imagine the difference between traditional and Plaftorm-based shopping and it came up with that…Platform businesses do not have to worry about inventories. They aren’t buying anything from anyone. All they do is connecting people who own something with people who want to buy it.
Platform Business models are underpinned by principles that are not applicable to traditional businesses, Benoît Reillier found out.
There are two main rules, the network effect and price elasticity.
The Network Effect‘Networks are characterised by positive externalities. All the members of the network benefit from it. The more there are new members joining that network, the bigger its value for all its members.’
That’s what Benoît calls the network effect. A major underlying principle that confers value on the platform.
‘At the outset, it’s very hard to convince new people to join a new network,’ he added. If there is a network with just the two of us, it won’t fare very well. We’ll then have to recruit new members, relentlessly.
‘Yet, once you’ve reached a certain critical mass, maybe thousands of members, what happens is that people will start to spot that network and its value, and it will then start to grow organically.’
Price ElasticityIt may appear to some that setting prices may be easier for platforms than traditional businesses. This is because they are masters of their own ecosystem, or so it seems.
However, Benoît warns us that appearances may be deceptive.
‘Even though they seem to have full control over their pricing structures,’ Benoît added, ‘platforms are walking on eggs when they decide to change them. Because these network ecosystems are complex systems, changing the way you charge one of your members may have a serious impact on all the others.’
In other words, if a platform business is a tad too inconsiderate when changing its pricing structure, it can start losing members.
‘If your platform business creates too much friction, it might become less attractive to newcomers,’ Benoît emphasised. ‘Traditional firms do not give too much thought to price elasticity. But platforms need to be more circumspect in that regard.’
The Future of Platform BusinessAs platforms gain ever more popularity, there have been concerns about platform business models taking over traditional business models and disrupting the economy.
Thus, Airbnb has attracted much criticism about its disturbance of the hospitality business in many places. It happened in New York, London or Paris for instance.
There are many other examples such as Amazon. The Seattle Internet company has raised fears of disruption of retail business by ecommerce. And more recently, the foray of the retail behemoth (now employing over 1.2 million staffers worldwide) into food retailing has triggered even more concerns.
However, Benoît doesn’t believe that platforms will be the terminators of traditional shopping.
Platform strategy by Laure Claire and Benoît Reillier – Routledge – 2017‘In the future, many organisations will mix different types of business models. Value chains will still be around in 30 years’ time, and platform business models too. Businesses will undoubtedly combine several business models. Depending on the industry and the product, platforms will be the preferred business model, and for other industries or products, value chains will still be instrumental in organising the business.’
Maybe some companies will conduct part of their business in the Metaverse, but other more traditional business models will persist
‘Considering all the technologies that are cropping up now,’ Benoît concluded, ‘including Web3 and the immersive Web, this mix of different business models will enable us to manage distributed organisations in a much better way, through the combination of all these business models.’
Fears that Uber and other platforms will do away with any other types of businesses, as we thought barely 10 years ago, were probably exaggerated. Platform business models could on the contrary be one more string to the bows of traditional businesses who had better think how they could reinvent themselves. Major platform business best practices should inspire rather than scare you.
You may download the illustrated version of the book from the Launchworks.co website.
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Social media requires proper and effective visuals for your posts to be more impactful. Any first-grade student knows that. Seasoned marketers do too. That said, a recent study by Vistacreate and the Content Marketing Institute showed that there is room for improvement in that area. In this report, CMI’s Robert Rose, founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for Content Marketing, urged marketers to better test their assumptions. The report also provides in-depth insights regarding social media visuals and how to use them effectively.
How to Use Social Media Visuals More EffectivelySocial Media Visuals are important CMI and Vista create conclude in a 2023 study. Nonetheless, marketers should be spending a little more time testing rather than creating visuals for themselves – This is a Midjourney-generated image of a painter crafting a social media visual for Twitter.The Current State of Social Media VisualsWe all know, at least intuitively that social media visuals are important. A recent survey by CMI and Vista Create is bringing evidence that our gut feeling is true. It also points out that marketers should test their visuals more carefully.
A 2023 Social Media Visuals study by CMI and Vistacreate.The survey results in a nutshellCMI selected a sample of marketers for this survey. 167 respondents were qualified for analysis and they answered the institute’s questions in June 2022. Here is a visual representation of the sample with a slide taken from the report.
Worthy of note is the fact that B2B and B2B+B2C add up to 69% of the total sample. The survey is mostly geared towards business-to-business. B2C, other and not-for-profit make up the remaining 31% of the survey respondents. The survey was essentially carried out in the US (68% of respondents).
The survey results in a nutshellCMI have derived five major insights from their surveyInsight number one: test your assumptionsThe authors of the report insist that too many marketers are behaving according to their own tastes rather than testing how effective their visuals are. This is the main finding of the report. Whereas marketing is about measuring customer response and the effectiveness of one’s messages and campaigns, it seems that most marketers are instead relying on their own tastes.
Social media visuals designed by Leonardo da Vinci? Anything is possible with Midjourney, but not sure it’s a good thing, though.It might be a good idea if your brand is a trendsetter like Apple or Gucci. When Android released its new flat design look and feel with its 4.0 Icecream sandwich version, it set a new trend for all to follow. Apple followed in their footsteps in 2013. At the time, most of us found flat design awful and too minimalistic. After a little while our tastes changed and we became used to it.
Marketers have this tendency to craft beautiful images that they like rather than pictures that are either effective or appeal to their audiences. Whereas this might be a good idea if you are Apple or Gucci, it may not if your brand is not a luxury or a beloved brand. The above picture is a Midjourney-generated image. A painter is creating a huge social media visual for Twitter with a paintbrush.This happened because every one of us had an Android or Apple iPhone in our pockets. In fact, we didn’t have a choice. For visual social ads, audiences do have a choice to click or not to click.
The perspective is very different. Hence the testing.
Insight number 2: look at visual social media as a platformThe authors are claiming that visual content creation for social media is moving in-house.
Nearly 50% of brands don’t have a separate budget for social media visual content. Yet, creating social media-friendly visuals is a job in its own right and a budget should be allocated to this.
60% of marketers said they create visual content themselves, 56% have in-house professional designers, and only 28% use freelance designers (the overlap is because some respondents indicated all three options)
What is strange though is that the authors of the report found out that ‘counter-intuitively, small businesses are more likely to have a separate budget for visual social content, as compared to larger companies (47% vs. 22%)’.
The authors claim that this is a good thing, but that brands need to have a least a small budget for content creation. After all, content creation is a job, not a hobby.
Insight number 3: build repeatable processesWhen looking at what kinds of visuals are more successful than others, CMI’s survey consistently highlighted 3 main content types:
- Video content
- Custom photos (as opposed to stock images)
- Infographics
Instagram’s top three are a bit different with ‘stories’ coming third. Reels on Facebook didn’t seem to catch up, though.
Videos are often quoted as being the top performers. That said, very few marketers manage to make their videos viral without paid social media ads. We definitely recommend brands to work on their word-of-mouth strategies before moving to ad-driven social activation.
Insight number 4: match those processes with a documented and formal budgetAs to effectiveness, LinkedIn is definitely most brands’ pet social platform.
LinkedIn scored the highest at 56% (rating it as extremely or very effective), followed by Facebook (38%), and Instagram (31%)
These results are most probably due to the strong B2B bias in the survey sample.
Insight number 5: empower visual content creators to tell storiesThe fifth insight is probably the most interesting one. CMI tested 5 different social media visuals with marketers and non-marketers. The results were completely different according to the audience.
Social media visuals should be tested with your audiences. CMI showed that the green visual was ranked highest by marketers and one of the least effective by non-marketers. QED.Content creators know that by heart. As the name goes, they bet on creativity and inventiveness and come up with great concepts. But here comes the Corporate Marketing Officer who starts shouting at you by stating you’re ‘not on brand’.
Next thing you know, the content creator in question is so crestfallen that she or he – reluctantly – opens the boring brand guidelines once more and produces a clone of all other social media visuals. So much so that all the brand’s social media posts and ads look the same.
Marketers are too self-obsessed and they value their brand guidelines too much. Whereas brand guidelines are, in general, a good thing, they also tend to make all your content uniform and bland.
Try and work with third-party content creators and external media partners to generate more diverse and more social media-friendly visuals that appeal to your audiences. This is a trick we have often implemented while working as a social media director as well as with our customers.
About the authors of the reportThe authors of the social media visuals study report
Important notice: our most observant readers will have noticed that we like to produce our own creative visuals without testing them. This is because we have been trendsetters for nearly thirty years 😉
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Forget about phishing, enter LinkedIn hackers! cybercriminals are upping their game and are now using LinkedIn to plant viruses on your machines. As they are sending their messages through LinkedIn navigator, they are catching professional users unawares. Indeed, the latter are less prone to expect cyber attacks to originate from that channel. This is a strong reminder that multi-factor authentication is now a must-have for all platforms, amongst other protective measures like strong passwords, which must be changed regularly.
LinkedIn Hackers are targeting pro usersMidjourney’s interpretation of hackers using LinkedIn to install viruses on their personal computers. Quite scary but LinkedIn hackers’ attacks are even more worrying.Hackers are getting smarter every day. They are now using Sales Navigator to send you targeted messages in plain Italian or French and possibly in English.
We aren’t sure about this but generative AI may have played a role in correcting the cybercriminals’ grammar.
Readers should be on their toesVisionary Marketing received one of these messages this very morning, hence this breaking news post, as we are keen on warning our readers who should be on their toes while they are using Microsoft’s professional social network.
Despite what Midjourney believes, hackers don’t look like pirates. They may even be wearing three-piece suits and they are using LinkedIn.Here is the exchange which took place as we were lecturing and our attention span was not what it should have been.
TUESDAY
Contact name – 11:26 a.m.
Hi, I have a project on advertising on social networks but I am too busy to receive it, would you like to receive this project? I will share it with you
Visionary Marketing (He/Him) – 1:33 PM
Hello, how can I help you? I’m busy until 6p.m., we can have a call after that if you want.
Contact name -1:39 PM
I will send you their project to see, if you accept the project, I will hand them your contact details.
Visionary Marketing (He/Him) – 3:22 PM
OK
Contact name -4:13 PM
https://drive.google.com/XXXX
password:2023
WEDNESDAY
Visionary Marketing (He/Him) – 12:06 PM
Thanks
I should point out that this is a known contact. The person in question teaches in the same school as we do, in the same class, we had seen each other a few weeks before and a lunch date was on its way. Obviously, the LinkedIn hackers didn’t know that because it had happened IRL.
Clicking on the Google Drive link (one could have thought it must have been secure because of the password…) takes you to a .zip file that contains a.exe.
.EXE is a fishy file extensionThe .exe file extension was a warning that something fishy was happening. Even though I had my doubts since the message was very well crafted. Besides, the file was over 700 MB. Way above the size granted by online virus scanners.
I don’t have a PC, so I had to find one and scanned the file without opening it and, of course, it’s a virus (I didn’t investigate further, it looked nasty!)
The original message in French. Many attacks took place in Italy as well.It must be said that many LinkedIn accounts have been stolen and resold.
The attack was very subtle and well targeted. People familiar with the matter told Visionary Marketing that similar attacks took place in France in Italy.
Our recommendation is to protect your accounts systematically, generate automatic passwords (such as the ones proposed by Safari on macOS) and be wary of suspicious messages offering jewellery or anything else for that matter.
Above all, implement multi-factor authentication at all times.
Special note for macOS users: don’t even think that Macs are immune even though they apparently safer.
People from our network reported that attacks did occur in the past, most likely triggered from Russia. Yet, these were based on fake accounts. In today’s case, the LinkedIn hackers probably took advantage of a major data leak from LinkedIn to impersonate real people. That’s what makes this cyberattack so credible. Knowing the person who writes you tends to catch you off guard and that’s when you are at risk.
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How do consumers form their perceived value of a product or service? This is the question that Bain & Company has attempted to answer in a very noteworthy brief published by Harvard Business Review. It opens up a new perspective on perceived customer value, beyond the hackneyed Maslow pyramid. This is the subject of today’s news flash.
Perceived Value: How Customers Rate a Product or ServiceWhat makes customer value? Bain offers a dossier on this subject – image made with Midjourney.Going beyond Maslow’s pyramidAccording to the Harvard Business Review in which this unique article was published:
“Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led the authors—all with Bain & Company—to identify 30, ‘elements of value’.”
Maslow’s pyramid reviewed“Their model traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers: describing their behaviour around products and services.”
Too much is made of the idea that a consumer’s relationship with his or her product is limited to the price. It is true that it depends on the product – image made with Midjourney.The beginning of the article points out that companies often focus on price, omitting other factors. This seems like an easy way out, as “raising prices directly increases profits”. That being said, price management involves many different tactics, as the authors emphasise.
Price is not the only element of customer valueA few years ago, Byron Sharp pointed out the propensity of brands to focus on lowering prices through a never-ending chain of promotions, a harmful strategy in his view, as it leads to margin loss.
However, there are many more things on Heaven and Earth than price, to be accounted for behind this notion of product or service value.
What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)?
To that end, Bains’s consultants and authors propose a useful infographic. A clearer, dynamic version can be found on their own website.
Bain & Company’s Elements of Perceived Value PyramidPerceived customer value is not just about price, the authors argue. Their proposed elements of value hierarchy from 2015 and 2016 were published in HBR in the same period. A more elaborate interactive version of this pyramid is available on the Bain websiteThe interactive version of the perceived customer value pyramidClick on the thumbnail to see the interactive version of this customer value pyramidWe can summarise the different components of value as follows:
- The elements of perceived customer value that are related to the product’s features. These are the most obvious benefits (a product, a washing machine for instance, relieves you from a chore or another allows you to earn money…). Let’s take the purchase of a folding bike as an example. It has an obvious functional value. In the city, it is the fastest way to get around. Count approximately 12 mph on average for a bike, and 7 mph for a motor car.
- The emotional part of perceived customer value. A product will remind you of your childhood or reduce your stress. Or make you feel better or healthier. Buying a bike to stretch the old legs after work will make you feel great and eliminate unnecessary fat;
Changing Your Life - Yet, your bike purchase could also be a life-changing experience. As it did for me. I ride 3,200 miles per annum and this bike positively changed the way I experience the city. I no longer hesitate to ride across the whole of Paris to go on an errand, if only for the pleasure of getting a bit of exercise. I no longer forbid myself a long detour to go to my favourite shops. Many subcategories exist within this category.
- Finally, a pinch of social impact on perceived customer value. While I’m pedalling away on my Brommie, I also feel that I’m working for future generations and helping to provide them with a more pleasant, less noisy and above all less polluted environment. Well, there’s still work to be done in that department! With my folding bike, I can also travel anywhere in the region and even further afield by putting my bike on the train.
The Influence of Context and IndustriesThrough this wee example, we better understand what the perceived value of a product or service is. We can also relate it to the transformative value described by Joe Pine, he who coined the phrase ‘customer experience’, in our video interview.
And Now, the Ball’s in Your CourtElements of perceived customer value vary according to the product or service or the industry concerned. Buying a financial product has an impact not just on you but on your whole family. When you pass over, someone will inherit your savings, hopefully.
This impact is far greater than that of buying a folding bike. Even though I’m sure your faithful Brompton will be handed to someone else in the family, eventually.
And now, the ball’s in your court. All that’s left to do is to use this canvas to build a proper strategy for your products and services. One that is based on perceived customer value rather than sand.
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Digital marketing is going through a shift, and it’s app-driven product-led marketing more than digital advertising and sales as a 2022 Amplitude report shows. In our interview with Adam Greco, who a product evangelist at Amplitude, we discussed this new groundbreaking trend and the reallocation of marketing dollars towards apps to generate more growth.
App-driven product-led marketing is the new coolProduct-led marketing is the new cool, Amplitude report states — image generated with Midjourney.The Amplitude report of August 2022During the COVID pandemic, there was tremendous growth in the usage of apps. Amplitude published its first report right after that. The August 2022 report is their second one.
“We were curious to see what the growth pattern would look like as the pandemic tapered down. We analysed industry trends across our 2000 customers,” Adam Greco said.
In the past, SaaS businesses invested a lot in sales and marketing. Nowadays, instead of hiring hundreds of salespeople, they favour product-led marketing growth
“The methodology of our study entailed looking at a bunch of industries over a year. The apps that we studied had to have at least 10,000 monthly active users in order to get rid of the outliers. We also interviewed over 200 business leaders from marketing and product to get their insights of what’s happening.” For the different industries, we analysed key countries across APAC, North America and Europe.
Product-led growth with apps is for all countries, not just the US — click picture to enlarge.The study covered different kinds of web applications, both social and transactional, with a focus on B2B, eCommerce, consumer tech, FinTech, wellness, etc. We saw a lot of situations where new, small businesses are getting started because of the fears of a recession or some of the impacts of a potential recession. So, a lot of things we are curious about is how does the potential economic downturn or coming out of the pandemic impact app usage.
Global product usage grew by a massive 16% year-over-yearOur previous report showed an amazing amount of growth in hundreds of percent. We went into this one expecting that there would be almost like negative product growth, but we were surprised that product growth increased year-over-year, with some ups and downs, from August 21 to August 22.
There was 16% growth showing that even during tumultuous economic times, there’s still massive investment in product-led marketing and apps as its key driver
Growth across different countries and geographiesSingapore witnessed the highest growth out of all, 43%, and their economy seems to be doing really well. Germany was at 38%, and then France at 32% growth.
These are significantly high numbers. I just spent a month in Europe, and it’s interesting to witness that it has started to become a powerhouse of start-ups.
A lot of these start-ups are using some kind of product teams and product methodology to differentiate themselves in the market. It is said that whenever you have potential economic downturns, it’s actually the best time to start new companies. We’re definitely seeing that.
What’s interesting is the largest product-led marketing growth that we saw was a social media app called BeReal. Their numbers were just through the roof. Interestingly, the CEO told us they use Amplitude to track growth.
He mentioned when he meets his investors, instead of showing them a pitch deck, he’s just showing them the growth data in Amplitude because it’s more impactful and it lets them see what’s happening.
French app Bereal was created by Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau and it’s one of the best examples of product-led marketing Greco explainsWe saw some massive growth in the travel sector in Europe since the restrictions have been lifted. One company based in the Netherlands was up 324%, another in Spain was up by 253%, and a UK-based firm scaled by 164%. It’s great to see how much the travel sector has kicked back after the pandemic.
Different Geographies Showed Growth in Different IndustriesAdam Greco talked to us about product led marketingIn Europe, we saw maximum growth in the travel sector, while in North America a large growth could be observed in SaaS, and health and wellness apps. I think a lot of people want to get back in shape after sitting around for a couple of years in the pandemic. FinTech has been huge as well.
In France, two companies stood out. One is Qonto, a Paris-based financial company that helps with payments, expense management, and accounting solutions. They registered 75% year-over-year growth.
Then there is Luko, which is an insurance tech company focusing on transparency and an open model to let its users understand where their money is going. They had 119% growth. So, it’s all over the board, different companies in different regions with a lot of them being pandemic upstarts.
Growth Across Staffing & Job Search and FinTech IndustriesThis one was really fascinating because everyone had talked about the great resignation. People worried about losing their jobs because of recession. But during the pandemic, people felt empowered as they could find another job any time they want.
Overall, we saw that this industry had 118% year-over-year growth. What we’re seeing is people flocking to job-related apps and products and trying to use them to figure out multiple job options that exist out there. Also, a lot of that has to do with networking with peers about finding jobs.
When it comes to staffing, especially as you’re thinking about a downturn and recession, you thought maybe that would be an area that would go down, but it actually increased pretty significantly.
Crypto has been in the news lately and the whole crypto market has definitely lost a lot of steam. What’s interesting, though, and this may just be timing of when our product report ended in August, we saw about a 26% year-over-year growth in crypto apps.
So I think there may be a little bit of a news story hype that makes it seem like crypto is going down a lot more than it actually is. We definitely see it in the news and the whole debacle, but we’re seeing still a lot of usage in crypto apps and it’ll be interesting to see in our next year’s report if all the news actually does have an impact on app usage.
SaaS market: valuations versus product usageOur stats showed that growth in SaaS was up on average about 25%. It seems like nowadays many B2B apps are SaaS apps. Talking about the valuation of SaaS companies, definitely, the stock prices have gone down, but it has not impacted product usage.
So we look at product usage as a fascinating indicator. It may be that the market valuation of companies versus the actual usage of these products is kind of misaligned.
Our assumption is that if SaaS app usage continues to stay strong, once the economy turns around, the valuations will probably go back up. You’d think that if the stock prices were down, the usage of these apps would be way down. But that hasn’t been the case as per our data.
Product-Led Marketing Is the New CoolI believe firmly in product-led marketing growth. For those who aren’t familiar with product-led growth, the idea is that companies have to decide where they want to spend their money. In the past, a lot of money was spent in sales and marketing. If you’re a SaaS company, you might hire hundreds of salespeople. At the moment, product-led growth has really taken off owing to a couple of reasons.
Companies are deciding to spend more money on their digital products instead of buying advertisements or hiring salespeople. It’s backed by the fact that if you have a really good digital app, the word will spread and people will tell their friends, family, and more people will come onboard.
Hence, the way you could best differentiate yourself in the market is to have the best product and invest in it.
In a lot of companies like ours, we have an offering where people can try the product for free. Once they like it, it becomes a habit for them. Then they hit certain limits and have to pay. You’ll see that across the board. Products like calendar, where people use it to schedule meetings and then later they have to pay for it. This whole concept of product-led growth has really gained steam because in marketing it’s becoming increasingly difficult to show your return on investment these days as privacy policies are becoming strict and cookies are starting to be deleted.
Thus, a lot of the ways in which people would show their ROI or return on ad spend are becoming more difficult. Companies are realising that one of the best ways they could spend their money is to invest in the product where they can make sure that people are having really good product experiences.
Marketing Based on Product, Recommendations and Word of MouthThere is a shift to a different type of marketing. It could be that ten years from now, people decide to move the other way and do a lot more of advertising. But right now, we just happen to see a massive change of where the dollars are going.
Suddenly, we’re also witnessing that the CTO, which is the chief product officer at many organisations and a role that didn’t even exist many years ago, is starting to become very prevalent. On the other hand, the Chief Marketing Officer role is somewhat ceding a little bit of budget and power over to the Chief Product Officer.
But it doesn’t have to be confrontational. Some of the leading companies are starting to realise that marketing and product should start to work together and almost join forces because the customer doesn’t care whether they’re interacting with the marketing or the product department. They just want to come to a website or an app and have a good experience. They want to have a good product that they can use and get value from.
How they get to the product isn’t as critical as they continue to use it week over week, month over month. The smartest companies are getting the marketing and product departments to acknowledge the need to work together because it’s the customer who is important, not their internal departmental hierarchy.
The Future May Come With Reduced Digital Advertising SpendsThat’s what we believe and are starting to see. A lot of organisations are questioning the value they’re getting out of spending in digital advertising. If you spend €50,000 a month on digital advertising, you’re definitely going to get some impact. But you’re going to have to keep spending €50,000 every month to realise similar results. It doesn’t really have a compounding effect.
Companies are telling us that the investments they’re making in the product is actually having a multiplier effect because it does get more people to join, to use the product and become loyal customers.
They feel like they almost get two, three or €4 per euro spent when they invest in the product, but it’s a 1 to 1 when they spend it in marketing.
It is certainly going to be interesting to discover how focusing more on product instead of advertisements will unlock value for B2B marketers.
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Customer communities aren’t for every brand. Yet, facilitating communities with your customers could supercharge your marketing. This is, in essence, what Sanjay d’Humières explained to us in this interview. Sanjay is the founder of RTCX (Real-Time Community Experience), a consultancy supporting businesses with their community marketing. He reminded us, lest we forget, we should always work with our customers to drive a successful marketing strategy. In doing so, Sanjay rightly reminds us, like Jonah Berger (Contagious), that social media makes up only a small portion of word of mouth.
Supercharge Your Marketing With Customer Communities“Brands fear unhappy customers,” Sanjay d’Humières tells us, and they are wrong. I asked Midjourney to show me a crowd of smiling customers raising their hands, but it seems that for AI, customers are necessarily grumpy. Yet it is possible to bring a community of customers together and turn it into something positive.
Brands Must Focus Their Attention on Their Loyal Consumers
Like it or not, the process of creating a new marketing strategy necessarily involves customers, Sanjay reminds us. Often, we interview them, which is a very important part of the process of creating new offers and new services.
Marketing to customer communities means bringing together engaged consumers around a brand or product, Sanjay d’Humières explains. Sanjay is the founder of RTCX, a “startup specialising in stakeholder listening dedicated to companies and communities”.“Brands shouldn’t make assumptions on behalf of their customers, they should value their opinion, then make strategic decisions based on hard facts. That’s how a significant ROI for the brand is obtained,” explains Sanjay d’Humières.
Involving consumers in the marketing process“Consumers must be involved in the whole marketing process,” says Sanjay.
Seeking your customers’ opinions allows them to take ownership of the brand
It is crucial to establish contact between customers and the human beings behind the logos. This is how customers take ownership of the discussion. Often, they do express pride in having contributed to the creation of a product or service.
With a little time and effort – as we spent with Midjourney – you’ll manage to make your customers smile too. So work with your customer communities and thank them for their commitment to your brand!“Involving customers in our marketing approach is the basis of our discipline, but a lot of brands are afraid of hearing what they have to say,” Sanjay points out.
However, unhappy customers also have important opinions that must be taken into account.
Customer feedback is often focusing on heated discussions on social networks. They only represent 20% of the iceberg, though.
Eighty per cent of customer reviews remain hidden. These people would like to give their opinion but do not know how to do it.
Social media does not represent the entirety of word of mouth
“Many companies rely solely on semantic analysis of social interactions and forget that there are many people who don’t know how to use social networks,” Sanjay points out.
Marketers thus form an idea from what a minority of customers have written or said. It is crucial marketers did away with this approach.
If you don’t communicate properly with your customers, they then vent their anger on social networks, sometimes for no valid reason.
[Jonah Berger, like Sanjay, is convinced that word of mouth doesn’t stop with social media and he gives evidence of that in his book].
How to build Customer communities“Step one is to define what you want to do with this community,” says Sanjay.
The methodology for creating an online community is to recruit people through social networks, using specific keywords related to your brand and service.
Then, the facilitation of this community can be performed in Facebook groups, closed or open depending on the needs. This makes it possible to collect and analyse comments and quotes.
For face-to-face communities and clubs, recruitment is also carried out on social networks, and then brands can gather the participants and explain what they are trying to achieve.
Subsequently, participants make observations, negative, positive or neutral. Proposals are built. Lastly, the brand will decide whether to implement the suggestions from its customers.
If a brand does not implement suggestions from its customers, it should explain why
If it does implement a customer’s suggestion, it must give a deadline and communicate with the participants afterwards. This is how a brand can create a bond with its customers.
Is working with customer communities risky?“Companies that do without these communities will miss out on vibrant and valuable consumer insights,” insists Sanjay.
Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding of the brands they trust.
Disregarding customer communities is a strategic pitfall
There is more and more talk about purpose and sustainability. Consumers are aware of this and all stakeholders need to be involved in the brand’s marketing process.
Does community marketing pay off?Developing brand awareness and images can be very expensive and time-consuming. Communities allow you to develop your reputation at a lower cost.
A pool of ambassadors will speak positively about your brand without you having to invest huge marketing budgets
Word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. This also makes it possible to onboard new members.
Committed participants who enjoy coming to co-creation workshops will spread the word to others. This will allow new participants to join in.
Why aren’t more companies developing customer communities?The main reason is that instant ROI doesn’t exist with word-of-mouth marketing.
What really matters is the quality of exchanges and insights.
Do less, but do better
“Covid has made things happen,” Sanjay says. 2023 has a lot of surprises in store for us with regard to marketing and mass markets.
The energy crisis and inflation will also have an impact on the way consumers buy, and the way they express themselves. We need to capture all this.
Marketers must understand that they need to do perhaps a little less but to do it better.
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A study proves that “digital natives” do not exist: digital natives, generations X, Y, Z and now alpha, are a recurring theme on the Web and in the media. OK, boomer! I know. Yet, facts are stronger than fiction.
Study Shows ‘Digital Natives’ Do Not ExistStudy shows digital natives don’t exist – Midjourney has a rather dystopian view of digital natives that is far from reality. Fortunately…Digital natives have been a recurring theme at Visionary Marketing for years on end. A study by the ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) foundation sheds more light on this.
As I’m sick and tired of hearing that young people at good at IT and older ones are computer illiterates, I’m sharing this study with my readers and I hope it will be useful to you.
Prejudice against generations is ageismSuffice it to point out that, having been a lecturer in digital marketing for more than 20 years, I am a strong advocate of the collaboration between generations. I see any prejudice against any generation as ageism, which is a form of racism.
Coming back to digital natives, facts and figures contradict this myth. Digital natives do not exist.
An ECDL study debunks the myth.
While we’re Young is a 2014 films which show two generations at the opposite end of the stereotype. Old people obsessed with youth and techno. Young people attracted by anything vintage (bikes, HI-FI and vinyl records, old TV sets, handmade furniture, etc.) A bit of a caricature, with a touch of truth and irony.Generation Y? Digital natives do not exist, ECDL says.Whatever the generation, with varying degrees of precision, the premises are the same. Digital natives (generation Y, Z, Alpha, etc.) are computer literate.
The rest of us are “digital immigrants”.
Prensky coined the “digital natives” monikerMarc Prensky, himself a digital native, coined this wacky terminology.
I find the term “digital immigrant” particularly offensive. Mostly when you are an IT veteran and an Internet pioneer.
This is doubly insulting, both to all the dinosaurs over fifty (including Prensky himself), and to immigrants who are no less human than those who populate the countries they migrate to.
Infographics and clichés abound on the Web. Anecdotes too, but none of them passes the test of examination.
Twenty-year-olds are Internet wizards and all others are in the Stone Age and use wax tablets and styli to communicate. Smoke signals too – source.It is time to set the record straight, thanks to this study by ECDL, which stresses the urgent need for training young people in digital.
As a trainer in this field, my experience is that, even in digital marketing classes, there is a long way to go.
The study shows how computer illiterate some of the so-called digital natives are. In some countries, Austria for instance, more than others.
The impact on society and businessAs the ECDL study points out, misconceptions around generation Y/digital natives have serious consequences.
Impact of society, education and business.
Besides, as I have already pointed out, ageism has a serious impact on people’s lives. In Europe, where senior citizens are asked to work until they are 67 years old (in Italy, for instance), ageism is making it hard for many of them to remain in business.
In France, no more than 30% of workers over 60 have a full-time job. And getting a job interview when your CV shows you are over 50 is mission impossible. Unless you possess certain skills.
Ageism is harmfulNot to mention the pressure between generations within businesses.
All this is very harmful and goes against the necessary and healthy cooperation between the various generations. And we all need people around us, some younger, some older, to challenge each other’s points of view and favour diversity.
Inter-generational exchanges spur harmony, personal and collective improvement, and above all business efficiency.
A study on the fallacy of the term “digital natives”I’ve noticed another thing. The more business managers are out of touch with digital, the more they will sing the praise of “digital natives”.
I’m wondering why. Is it to corner young ones as “geeks”? Does it mean that they do not qualify for management positions?
Regardless, the concept of “digital natives” does not stand the test of time.
ECDL The Fallacy of the ‘Digital Native’The ECDL study goes against the grain.
It concludes that the lack of training of young people in digital skills is a danger. Exposure to technology, even from an early age, does not at all mean that one can use it properly. Let alone, wisely.
Advanced Users Are a Minority in Australia, Austria and ElsewhereFor example, in Australia, according to the ECDL study, a minority of young people can make advanced use of information technology. No more than 15% of the student population. While only 45% of these students have rudimentary skills in this area.
This is a 2015 study. I have a hunch that things have gone worse since then rather than better.
An Educational DisasterIn Austria, the numbers are even worse. A meagre 7% of 15-29-year-olds are deemed to possess good computer skills. Thank God, I believe they must be good at issuing ChatGPT3 prompts, though.
In Italy the results are even more disastrous.
Yet another study on digital natives: ICLSAccording to a study by the International Centre for Language Studies (ICLS), carried out over a large cohort, only 2% of students possess critical thinking skills when searching for information online.
Anyone who teaches knows the plague of plagiarism and copy-pasting. The risk, the ECDL points out, is high.
ChatGPT3 and the likes are bound to bring all this to an even higher level.
The situation isn’t hopeless, however. Not all countries are as bad. In the Czech Republic and Denmark, computer literacy scores of young people are somewhat better.
Before you join the crowd of worshippers of the so-called digital native tribe, please do me a favour and read the rest of the ECDL study.
- Download the ECDL digital natives study
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Is Twitter still the right platform for advertisers? Twitter has been in the news lately for changes that have happened within the organisation as well as in its user policies. More recently, Musk even decided to ask Twitter users whether he should resign and it seems he didn’t quite like the answer. Journalists reporting on the whims of Mr Elon Musk are having good fun but what should advertisers do? Should they put Twitter on hold? To find out I interviewed Kelsey Chickering, Principal Analyst – CMO Practice at Forrester on how these changes are likely to impact brands and B2B marketers. Kelsey shed some light on where the platform is headed and what marketers should do. And her advice is clear: advertisers should put Twitter on the back-burner, both for ads and word of mouth. Let that sink in! Elon.
Forrester Advises Brands to Put Twitter on the Back-BurnerIs Twitter still the proper platform for advertisers? Forrester’s Chickering’s answer to that question is a resounding no. Let that sink in, Elon!Twitter for advertisers: should brands pay attention to Twitter’s new boss’s whims?Kelsey Chickering: From the advertiser’s perspective, you have to pay attention to Elon’s whims, because at this point these are directing the future of Twitter, the way moderation is happening, and the new tools that are popping up.
It’s a sound decision to pause your Twitter dollars for most advertisers as Elon Musks’s whims can change on a dime.
They should keep a pulse check on what Musk is tweeting and indicating about the future of Twitter, while taking a conservative approach to spending on it.
We don’t know the future, so let’s wait and see. I wouldn’t say take Twitter off your list forever. But it’s a sound idea to stop spending on it for the moment given the uncertainty associated with the platform. It’s proven in the last several weeks that it’s not really the safest place for brands to be.
The Future of Twitter for AdvertisersShould advertisers still dish out their advertising dollars for Twitter visibility? Our once favourite blue bird is crying its heart out.Consumers are worried about the future of Twitter and what it might become. Will it be a place where they want to spend time, or a place that gets overrun by misinformation and disinformation?
However, I think from an advertiser’s perspective, most brands don’t really need Twitter to meet their business goals in terms of advertising.
It’s not as big of a concern since you can put your ad dollars where you can get mid to upper funnel results. Many brands weren’t using Twitter for lower funnel direct response activities. I reckon there’s minimal impact to your bottom line to move your ad spend elsewhere. There are, of course, exceptions to it.
“Advertisers can find new avenues,” Forrester’s analyst warnsThus, for advertisers, they can find new avenues. For consumers, it’s a little different because Twitter is offering something that no one else is offering them right now.
It is a place where people go to find information, get real-time updates, and see the news as it’s happening. That’s something you can’t necessarily find anywhere else at this point.
Kelsey Chickering kindly answered our questions – photo by Valerie SarronTwitter for marketers is more of a use case than a must-have. There are certain use cases like customer service where Twitter becomes important and is a channel you manage. It might mean that you have to find new vehicles to handle customer service.
Influencers and TwitterTwitter has certainly been a platform for the media and news reporting side. It’s a place where you can get seen and heard. All that said, there are new platforms popping up. TikTok, for example, is creator-born and a lot of creators are flocking to it. You might see more people on the news side spend time on it as well.
Alternative Platforms for Twitter Advertisers and MarketersTwo channels I believe are viable places for both creators and friends: TikTok and Reddit. Reddit is similar to Twitter where you can find very niche audiences. There are conversations about different and specific topics, a provision which Twitter had bestowed upon many communities. Major difference though is that Twitter is more real time and events-based.
Then we have Bluesky by Jack Dorsey. It’s quite unclear though what Bluesky actually is, what it will be and whether it would be a replacement for Twitter. I haven’t yet seen anything that indicates if it would be a replacement. However, this landscape is ripe for a new platform that has similar functionality to Twitter with the safety and content moderation it offers.
Verified Status or Paid StatusWelcome or Goodbye to Twitter advertisers? Whoever understands the current status of his or her verified account wins a free Twitter bird.Having a verified account on Twitter could actually be a good thing. It would be helpful for people to understand whether content is coming from a real person or a fake account.
But unfortunately, the recent changes have made it easier for impersonators to get verified. So it had a bit of an inverse impact.
All of the information that I’ve seen, it seems to be a back and forth from Twitter trying to figure out the right balance, while realising that there’s a problem if it’s accessible for everybody.
Regrettably, verification meant impersonation instead of true verification, which implies it was hard to put more trust in information from such accounts.
Current landscape and future of social mediaWe are at a turning point for Meta. Suffice to say, social media advertising has struggled in the last year with Apple’s privacy changes.
If you look at any report from Meta or in the more recent Forrester’s Ad forecasts that were released this November, social media advertising will decelerate to its slowest pace, rising only 7.4% this year.
Hence, there is a slowdown in spending that we’re projecting over 2023.
However, agency executives and brands are still seeing social media maintained over a year. They’re deliberating on how to continue maintaining those budgets, as the budget deployment avenues are changing.
Meta is a channel that delivers on many different aspects of customer lifecycle, everything from discovering a new product all the way through to managing conversations with your current customers. It has certainly gained the lion’s share of media because on the lower funnel side, it’s actually proven very efficient for advertisers. It’s a way for them to get lower funnel media for a good price.
New platforms emerge and you see consumers shift into new places like TikTok, for instance. We are beginning to see brands figure out how to shift their dollars into new modern spaces that people are spending time on. It presents a whole new set of challenges, especially from content creation perspective. In the foreseeable future, you’re going to see shifts out of legacy platforms like Meta into emerging ones like TikTok, and integrators that help you create the content for those platforms.
Content Creation: Brands Versus InfluencersWe’re starting to see a trend toward brands and agencies hiring creators to make content for organic channels. That’s not just to gain influence from their followers, but also to make content for them to publish. I reckon they’re realising that when you enter a platform like TikTok, you can’t use the same old strategy. Their content teams probably don’t fully understand how to make compelling content for that platform. So they’re hiring creators and outside resources to either make their content or advise on it.
Brands going back to work on their own content and channelsYou need to have your house in order while you’re advertising.
Your owned properties are incredibly important because consumers are seamlessly moving from social media platforms to your website, back to something else, and on to the blog content you might create.
It is natural and seamless for consumers at this point. So every touch point that you expect a consumer to have with you should reflect your brand and values. It should reflect your look and feel, and the experience that you want people to have with you. Regardless of social media, it’s crucial for brands to get their house in order and ensure that their own presence is good for consumers.
What’s in Store for Twitter Advertisers and ConsumersThe Twitter verified account status saga was enough to get the entire planet completely confused over what should or shouldn’t be done. It sued to state that your verified account was worth bloody nothing and that it was just a legacy verified badge granted to someone who used to be known. It now points out that “this account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category”. Advertisers are now granted a yellow “This account is verified because it’s an official business on Twitter” badge. Heck! Isn’t all that utterly confusing. I will not make any comments on Musk’s management capabilities.Wait for a Few Months Forrester Analyst SaysIn the next several months, things will pave way for some clarity. You might see that consumers double down on Twitter and realise they can’t go anywhere else and this is where they love to spend time.
Or there might be an exodus from the platform if it becomes a place that has a lot of unsavoury content or content that you don’t want to keep. Any of those two scenarios may happen with consumers, but I don’t see brands going back to Twitter in the next two quarters.
This is based on the uncertainty with the platform combined with brands tightening their belts.
Right now, we’re in a period of economic uncertainty where brands aren’t flushed with cash to spend on advertising.
So they need to make hard choices about where to show up. The way the platform has manifested itself recently makes it a pretty easy choice for brands to decide where to cut or put money elsewhere.
Organic Content on TwitterIf you think the platform is not suitable for your ad dollars, it’s not suitable for your content at all. Removing your content from a platform because you feel it’s not safe, translates into your organic presence as well.
Here’s the result, cowboy. Let that sink in! https://t.co/H4Fq8xRLd6
— Yann Gourvennec (@ygourven) January 22, 2023
Forbes showed that the result of Musk’s new governance is pretty clear. It stressed a 50% drop in advertising volume in November 2022 alone. Kelsey’s advice must have been followed. For us on the B2B marketing side, it might be high time we start exploring other platforms. Not forgetting to spruce up our digital assets.
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The people from Buzzsumo have released its 2023 report on the future of content marketing and it’s a must-read. Among other advice: resort more often to content repurposing and alternative social platforms and stand out from the crowd to get more visibility. The report has a few harsh words for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and especially Google. A follow-up on our cornerstone article on the subject. The report was written with the help of three agency experts, two in the UK (Reboot Online and Hallam) and one in the US (Fractl). The co-authors did quote ChatGPT3, but merely recommend you use it to get rid of repetitive tasks.
Buzzsumo deems Google and SEO clinically dead in 2023 reportBuzzsumo shoots a straight right at Google in 2023, SEO gone to bite the dust.2023 will be a year of innovation. There will be more newsflashes in our columns… with our commentary on top, goes without saying.
Here is the first of our 2023 newsflashes.
For many years now, we have been fighting against a certain vision of SEO, which is nevertheless dominant in the Internet world. Many professionals in the sector, and even more amateurs, think that one must “write for Google”.
Read the Buzzsumo 2023 reportOn the contrary, we believe that the duty of content professionals is to create content for their audiences and not for search engines.
In short, rather than creating SEO copy based on your competitors’ key phrases, one must create content on one’s digital assets and social platforms for one’s readers. Moreover, you must build this content for the benefit of your readers and take them by surprise as much as possible.
The authors of the Buzzsumo 2023 reportThe 3 experts interviewed by Buzzsumo for their 2023 report not sparing GoogleA recent Buzzsumo report, which arrived in Visionary Marketing’s mailbox and was written by three experts from the US and the UK, confirms our impression.
Here are a few highlights.
1: Google indexes old hats and penalises quality content“Improving your content doesn’t necessarily mean improving your rankings – and we’re getting wise to that fact.
[…]
Despite this, we’re not afraid to rock the ranking boat if it means creating something that’s genuinely helpful to our audience [Editor’s note view this post].
There are ranking anomalies in Google, with top-tier content struggling to gain traction, and old, ill-informed content sailing along in position one – uninterrupted for many years.
Even after Google’s helpful content update, this still seems to be the case.”
Take that, Google!
2: Search of Find Engines?Eventually, one can now say that Nicholas Carr was wrong. It is not Google that has made us stupid (or lazy). It is Google itself that is a victim of its own success, as I explained here.
“Simply put, quality content is in limited supply right now. Google is full of copycat blogs with a dearth of actual useful advice or expertise.
Software Engineer Dmitri Brereton wrote about this, and many more of Google’s shortcomings, back in February 2022 in a piece titled: “Google Search Is Dying.”
Our take is that this is not going to get any better with ChatGPT3 et al.
3: Old is New (hence #1)“The majority of today’s most shared and linked content was first published four years ago in 2018.
In fact, only 8% of the “2022″ headlines were actually created in 2022.
Updating a single piece of content in this way can afford you the time to be smarter, and make your clients’ content work harder.”
Read the Buzzsumo 2023 report it’s well worth it.
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Social Selling is about strategy, it’s not about tools or tactics, let alone the infamous LinkedIn Social Selling Index. Social Media is one of the most important avenues for B2B marketers in the post-pandemic world. Let’s hear it from an expert on what it takes to be great at social and leverage this channel effectively. In this podcast Tim Hughes talks to us about the updated version of his book on social selling.
Social selling is about strategy it’s not about toolsSocial selling isn’t a tool, it’s about strategy and it’s a must-have in a post-pandemic world – Buy the book from Amazon now!TH In this new version of the book I have added more content and bolstered it after discussing with 15 practitioners – people that are doing social selling. For an organisation’s executive team, social selling ought to be part of the strategy.
When social media came out, many didn’t know what to do with it. The marketing department would leave it in a cupboard and then bring it out every week or two. They’d post something on a corporate page and ask everybody to like it, which more often than not doesn’t fetch good results.
Social now is a clear competitive advantage for an organisation. But it has to be run as a strategy, not as a tactic.
The key thing about the book is that I want to show there’s a clear connection between social media and leads and meetings. How are you going to use social to build a pipeline and get revenue?
Social Selling Is Not Communicating Online, It’s About DollarsWe have a definition as well as methodology for social. Social selling is using your presence and behaviour on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationships and trust, which lead to conversations and commercial interaction.
A proper Social Selling strategy isn’t about communicating online Tim Hughes says, it’s about dollars and cents!The key thing there is we’re driving commercial interaction. Organisations now at a leadership level should be able to say at board meetings that we’re spending ‘x’ on marketing and getting ‘y’ from social media. It’s not about getting likes and clicks and views, it’s about revenue. They should be able to say we’re getting $10 million from the use of social media. That’s about driving a strategy from the top down to actually understand why they’re on social.
Let’s talk social media in terms of a classic exhibition. You as a buyer know what supplier you want to talk to. So you go over there, sit down and have a conversation. Probably at that exhibition there would be somebody who would have seen you and would talk to you. Now, we would expect what happens on social media is I walk into it and a salesman comes up and smacks me in the face with a brochure. Nobody’s interested in that.
LinkedIn is your shop window!
We know from research that people come to social media to be social. We’re not coming to social media to be smacked on the face with a sales brochure.
One of our clients is Namos, an Oracle reseller, with whom we worked to transform their sales team. We now have buyers coming on to social media, walking up to their sales team, which is transformational. Normally when it’s about sales people, folks don’t like or trust them. Here, we have buyers coming up to their salespeople saying, I think you can help me – and that’s translating. One of them has recently signed a $2.6 million deal.
We have organisations that are doing multimillion-dollar deals purely because of their position on social and treating it as a strategy, while ensuring that everybody within the organisation is involved.
Creating a mission statementWe do a classic brainstorming session where we get the C-suite and probably one of their advisors into a room. Then we work through with them about the importance of strategy and using data to show how the world is changed. People quite often recognise that there’s been this change, but they don’t understand that now 60% of the world’s population is active on social media for two and a half hours a day. This is the data that comes from Simon Kemp.
Telstra Purple came up with a mission statement which says a social organisation sees social as a platform for closing the distance between clients, prospects, remote employees and potential recruits. Social gives them the ability to get traditional visibility that you would expect from marketing. They’re a cybersecurity company. So they are very keen to be trusted and to get the trusted advisor status, for people to say that company looks like they know what they’re talking about.
Humans are social animals, and social selling is well suited for social animals who need to converse and collaborate with one another.Tools for Social SellingWe as a business actually use very few tools because this is about you and being human centric. We use Slack internally. I have used internal social now for a number of years. When I was in corporate, we used it to attain an increased efficiency of the employees by 25%. That’s like getting 25% more employees at no cost and it saved so much time. It didn’t stop meetings, but it used to cut down their time. It works only when you have senior leadership using it. Leaders should say, as they did in my previous organisation, that if you want to get hold of me, I am on Slack. I might check email only at certain points in the day. So Slack is where we should connect.
What Matters Is Conversations and CollaborationsWe use Slack, LinkedIn and a number of social platforms purely because today we live in two worlds – physical and digital. As soon as we go online onto social media, we’re in digital.
What we need to be able to do as salespeople and leaders of organisations is to be able to walk digital corridors and have digital conversations.
The key is to make sure that if you’re going to start in sales as the point of actually transforming your organisation to digital, then what you need are people who have seen it, done it and whom the sales team respects.
Age doesn’t have an impact at all on understanding social
Mindset required for social sellingIt isn’t just about social selling, but transforming your organisation to digital. We have the physical world that we all know and love, and we have the digital world. Social media is a conduit to the digital world. Your LinkedIn profile is you – it’s your digital twin. So the way that your LinkedIn profile looks is how you want the digital world to recognise you.
For example, at Cambridge Display Technology, they’re not using any recruitment consultants or recruitment advertising anymore. They have gone digital and empowered their people to talk online that it is a great place to work for. They articulate how great their diversity program is, or how well their ESG program unfolds. Those who read this on social say that it looks like a place I want to work for.
It the world of digital, social gives us new efficiency and new ways of working.
It’s not about tools, a new ERP system or anything like that. It’s about using digital is the way that we work, and that empowerment across the organisation means that we can work in different ways. We can strip out cost and be more efficient. What we would recommend is having an open mind and understand that there is a new digital way of doing things.
Businesses Navigating Their Way in the New Digital WorldWhen Adam Gray and I started our company six years ago, we thought we had eight months, at which point everybody would get it and it would become the norm. Here we are in our seventh year and 99.99% of companies do not understand this. There are companies who have got big marketing budgets and don’t understand digital.
There’s this misalignment from a leadership perspective to understand what social and digital stand for and what it means for their business.
To break away from this, it’s about likes and clicks and things like that. I recently read about an organisation who have got 300,000 employees. They’ve got 8 million followers on LinkedIn, but get 15 likes per post, out of which seven are internal. This clearly means they aren’t influencing their prospects and customers.
It’s about understanding the world of digital, the way it works and not just an understanding about social, but having the business acumen about how to apply it.
Things have changed because of Covid-19 and we need to do things differently. Organisations are coming to us as they are completely redesigning their processes which are 30 years old.
Social Selling Doesn’t Take LongLook at the speed of things – LinkedIn allows you to have 200 connections a week. That’s 200 conversations with people you’re trying to influence. Social selling actually shortens the sales cycle because of not having to deal with a lot up front. People will see you as soon you are online and have a conversation with you instantly.
We saw a real tipping point in October 2020 when people in the UK went into the second lockdown. We had to relearn the way we worked. I don’t need to commute anywhere, I can sit in my office or at home and run a normal day’s work.
The impediment to success on social and digital is that there are still so many mental models out there that 30 years ago is the way that we do things.
LinkedIn and its impact on social sellingIn the physical world, when we meet a potential client for a meal or sports, we don’t immediately talk about work. We try to get close to the person, and this is what being social is about. We don’t talk about business posts and personal posts. This is life posts. This is about understanding each other. It pulls people towards you. I know social selling, but also the fact that my father has dementia and he’s in a home allows you to know the real Tim Hughes – the Tim Hughes that you would deal with if he delivers a service to you.
What you’ll find is that LinkedIn will become more like Facebook, because more people will actually recognise the fact that by doing this you’re getting people to understand you
When you come to my LinkedIn profile, you should better understand what it is that I stand for. Your LinkedIn profile is your shop window to the world. It’s about as soon as your ideal customer spots you, he thinks you are interesting. He is curious about that and walks towards you. Your LinkedIn profile explains who you are, and it cannot merely be the fact that you go to work, but that you’re going to spend the next weekend seeing your parents. That’s part of me and who I am. People respect that and I get people coming to me which punches out my network, punches into the people that I’m trying to influence.
Social Selling Strategy: Social Media, Not Spam MediaSocial is not about putting a brochure online – neither your ideal customer nor anybody wants it. People buy people. I’m looking for a relationship with somebody. Someone that can help me solve my business issues and that I can trust. Somebody that I know that if the project starts failing and I ring them up, they’re going to take that call. Even if it’s a Saturday, I can look upon them that they’re an organisation I want to do business with.
Now, when I do business in the physical world, I don’t walk into a meeting and immediately give people brochures. I sit there and say, I’ve been working here for 20 years. I’ve been selling accounting systems for 20 years across industries. I generally know about some things about accounting, but there’s bound to be something I have missed.
It’s about bringing that expertise and also bringing your personality as people buy people. This is social media. This is not spam media.
It’s about empowering the people, that’s when things actually start happening and the magic takes place.
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A worldwide survey of 7,000 people highlights the poor perception of customer service by consumers. In Europe and the rest of the world. Fortunately, technological solutions are available to marketers who want to improve their flailing customer service. This survey by CM.com is entitled “Customer Service: When Emotions Take Control”. It could serve as a roadmap for businesses that are keen to improve their customer experience in 2023. Visionary Marketing interviewed Pierre Garrigues, CM.com Country Manager for France, to dissect the survey and collect his recommendations.
CM.com survey shows customer service is a major source of frustration for consumersCM.com’s survey on customer service shows clearly that consumers aren’t really impressed with the quality of service they are getting from their favourite brands.
Disclosure: This podcast is produced in partnership with Ecranmobile.fr and CM.com.
Dutch company CM.com has interviewed 7,000 consumers worldwide. Looking at the numbers, barring a few exceptions, one finds that frustration is overwhelming with regard to consumers’ interactions with brands, regardless of the geography.
CM.com’s customer service survey shows that each interaction between a customer and a brand is a decisive moment in their relationship
A consumer braces for impact before contacting his customer serviceCustomer Service Interactions: Good and Not So Good Vibes“Consumers rarely contact the customer service department of a product or service provider to congratulate them. Consumers mostly contact support for questions about product quality, last mile delivery issues or product dissatisfaction,” Garrigues says.
This leads to rather negative emotions, as the study confirms.
41% of consumers are already irritated when they contact customer service
The study reveals that more than a quarter of respondents ask a relative to contact customer service on their behalf. This tells you how much of an ordeal that must be!
Contacting customer service? Not quite a picnic yet for most consumers. The good news is one third of them seem to be happy!“This survey shows how difficult it is to interact with a brand and get answers to the questions you have,” he says.
With this customer service survey, CM.com lays bare the emotions associated with each support contact channel. Live chat and point of sale (face to face) stand out in this panel. It is also worth noting that consumers view social media and messaging apps positively. Except for the French who don’t seem to use social for customer service. Some regional differences still exist apparently.Consumers’ love affair with omnichannel marketing
Brands need to do away with the old-fashioned ticketing approach
“If you contact a brand using the ticketing method, by email, phone and social networking, you will probably receive three different answers to the same question,” he points out.
The siloed approach to ticketing must be banned according to Pierre Garrigues of CM.comAbove all, one shouldn’t lose the human touch: “Tools are not designed to be natively connected to all available platforms and means of communication,” Pierre Garrigues went on. “Customers should never be likened to a number, they should be identified by their first and last names, purchase and relationship history with the brand.”
Different Channels in Different Geographical Areas“Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram for Asia-Pacific and WeChat allow omnichannel contact and exchange,” continues Pierre Garrigues. They are popular in most areas but some of these channels are unknown in some places. This is the case for Viber in France, Garrigues explains.
“The penetration rate of Viber in France is 4%, vs. almost 40% in Eastern European countries,” explains Pierre Garrigues.
International companies must therefore choose the most appropriate mix of channels. Depending on the geographical area, the age or idiosyncrasies of the customers they are dealing with.
Businesses need to adapt to their customers’ preferred channels, rather than impose theirs
What’s in store for customer service in the future?“The current period and the turbulent times we are going through will naturally force brands to better serve their existing and loyal customers,” predicts Pierre Garrigues.
CM.com’s customer service survey shows that almost half of the surveyed customers had rather change brands after a bad customer experience if the product or service they purchase is worth over €500.These customers are the primary source of revenue and results for the company. It has too often been neglected at the expense of customer acquisition marketing or awareness campaigns.
This will not last. Customer service used to be a low priority but it is bound to come to the forefront in the future
“Some brands have already taken steps towards this change. Omnichannel marketing allows for the collaboration between the customer service and customer acquisition departments. Brands should implement this change for the benefit and experience of their customers as well as their employees,” says Garrigues.
Community management can no longer make do with moderating comments on a social networking page
This survey is the living proof that customer service needs a major overhaul.
Download CM’s survey of 7,000 consumers in the UK, the US, China, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France.
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